We Make This Look Easy but its Not (LA 1283)

Transcript:

Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Hey.

Jack Butala:
Welcome to The Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California .

Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how to go from… oh, that’s the wrong title. Today Jill and I talk about how we make this look easy, but it’s not.

Jill DeWit:
And we’re not talking about the podcast.

Jack Butala:
Obviously, it’s not that easy.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Apparently. That’s really, really great.

Jack Butala:
Jill and I did a live event yesterday on Facebook. We got a very [crosstalk 00:00:32]

Jill DeWit:
Well, technically it was last week that it aired.

Jack Butala:
Oh yeah, sorry.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. It’s okay.

Jack Butala:
And we got a very, very good response. We got a lot of good responses from that. It’s very much geared toward people who are brand new.

Jill DeWit:
Right.

Jack Butala:
So there’s not a lot of how to do it. It’s more of what’s possible.

Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:
There are several people in there that said, “You know, you guys make this look so easy, but it can’t be this easy,” to which I say, “You know what? I agree with you.”

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. I want to talk about that.

Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
We don’t mean to.

Jack Butala:
Right.

Jill DeWit:
It took a long time to get here, and we can fill you in more.

Jack Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free.

Jill DeWit:
This is a funny question. Mary wrote, “Hi, everyone. I’m a longtime lurker.” There’s a lot of those. “I’ve tried other ‘geeky’ programs.” Yes. “And I have decided that Steven and Jill are the real deal.”

Jack Butala:
That’s the end of her comment, to which I say, “Thank you. I agree with you.” The vast majority… not the vast majority… every single other land program out there, with very, very few exceptions… Jack Bosch is the biggest exception, are former Land Academy members.

Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:
And so we’re seeing, with this COVID, a lot of entrepreneurial spirited products that are coming up in land education.

Jill DeWit:
Which is great and we applaud.

Jack Butala:
To which I say, and we do.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Yeah.

Jack Butala:
To which I say, please make sure, whoever you’re taking this advice from or whatever tool you’re using, whether it’s a pricing tool or mailer tool or anything, I want you to think about two things when you’re doing this. Does this person have any experience? And number two, what are they really doing? What are they really helping you with, and the answer to the second one is almost always this. They’re doing me a disservice to make this easier for me so I don’t learn.

Jill DeWit:
Instead of teaching me what [crosstalk 00:02:40]

Jack Butala:
This isn’t a rant. We’re seeing a lot of offshoot products come up. We’re seeing them on landinvestors.com. For some reason, people are real comfortable advertising their own products on the stuff we’ve created.

Jill DeWit:
I’m like, “Okay.”

Jack Butala:
Which is not really what that was intended for, but Jill and I had a long talk about it. We’re all entrepreneurs. It’s a free market. You’re free to choose. Just please just be aware. That’s it.

Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Jack Butala:
And thank you, Mary, because we are the real deal.

Jill DeWit:
I love when people come to me and go, “Wait a minute.” It took me a while to figure this out, but why would I learn from the student when I can learn from the master? I’m like, yeah, kind of.

Jack Butala:
Why would I use a pricing tool where I just push a button, it prices it all out, and I send it. I mean, if you’re that kind of person, I get it. But you’re not really in a long, long, long haul like we are and a lot of our members are, where this is a career and you’re making multimillion dollars a year. Trust me. They’re not using a pricing tool.

Jill DeWit:
What if you’re using somebody else, too, to price things? Then you’re never going to learn. What if they go dark one day?

Jack Butala:
That’s what I’m saying.

Jill DeWit:
There goes your business. Like, “Oh, oh, I don’t know how to do this.”

Jack Butala:
We’re saying the same thing, Jill.

Jill DeWit:
Okay, thanks.

Jack Butala:
Before we get into it… oh, I’m sorry. We already did that. Let me stop it. We make this look easy but, really, it’s not. This is the meat of the show.

Jill DeWit:
Like the show.

Jack Butala:
So yesterday, or I guess last week, when this airs, like I was saying, this Facebook scenario happened and a couple of people said, “Yeah, you guys are making this look really easy and talking about what’s possible, but it can’t be this easy, right?” So Jill and I decided to do a show. So what do you think, Jill? Is it easy?

Jill DeWit:
Well, I wrote down three things. There’s a couple of things that I really think… See what I’m putting? That people think it becomes very easy for us, and I’m here to tell you it’s not. Number one, the podcast. I know we know a lot of people are like, “Oh, I’m going to do a podcast.” I’m in all the podcast groups. I don’t know why I’m in these podcasts groups, but I like to watch and see what they’re talking about, different shows and different things that they’re learning. I don’t do any of the production. I don’t do any of the setup. I don’t deal with any of these cameras. I know how to turn on and off the lights. I know how to turn things on and off, but I don’t do this. We have people that do it, too, but it all started with Steven, and you even make that look easy. So that’s one example.

Jill DeWit:
I haven’t even got to Land Academy yet. Number two, I think it’s interesting that we make things look easy. Granted, if you could tell this week, we’re a little uptight with each other. We’ve got a lot going on. But I think, especially with our friends, that we make relationships look easy, like, “Oh, we want to be just like you guys.” I’m like, “You should have seen us this morning.” That’s hard.

Jill DeWit:
But I think we do make it look easy. It’s kind of funny. Do you think we’re on the same page all the time? Hell, no. We are not on the same page all the time, you know, but for the core stuff, we are on the same page. That’s why it works. And then the last I was going to get to is Land Academy, and that’s kind of where this came up.

Jack Butala:
It’s really what this talk’s about.

Jill DeWit:
We we’re doing that thing last week. It was last week when we aired and recorded a live Facebook event, and it hit me again. It’s come up before, but I was reminded on that. I’m like, “Gosh, we make Land Academy. We make buying and selling land. We make pricing so easy. Hey, just get them in the mail and just answer a call, and it’s going to sell in two minutes.” It’s not that easy.

Jill DeWit:
There is a lot that goes into it, so I wanted to talk about this today, also, just to make sure that you know what you’re getting into and if you’re struggling, whatever you’re struggling with, that’s normal. Whatever business, most of them, I’m a fan of there’s times that things fall into place, and I like to talk about the universe and things like that. Like, “Oh, it was meant to be,” but it doesn’t have to be that way. It doesn’t mean that if you have to work at it, it wasn’t meant to be. Just some things take work. Go ahead.

Jack Butala:
Here’s the real deal.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Jack Butala:
If you are not willing… You have to bring a lot to the table to buy and sell land effectively, and it all comes from you. All we are, all we’re doing is we’re giving you the information about what’s possible and most ways, if not all ways, telling you how to do it. That seems so simple when I say that. Oh, sure, okay. My college professor did that, showed us how to do it, and that’s it.

Jack Butala:
What it really takes is this, and this is what we make look easy, and for a lot of people it’s not. For some people it’s just natural. You have to get yourself on a schedule. You got to get up in the morning. If you don’t know how to operate Excel effectively, you got to learn that. And I mean, get good at it. You have to understand data and databased tables, understand pricing, have a cursory understanding of real estate, specifically land. Background, former ownership in a business would help.

Jill DeWit:
You’re just reading what I wrote down. This is good.

Jack Butala:
It’d be great if you failed at flipping a couple of pieces of real estate and you’re seeking out the right way to do it, which is what we provide. So there’s a lot of things that you can make this really easy on yourself. Now, every once in a while, a unicorn comes along. It’s usually a young kid who is not interested in working for anybody ever again, and he or she is that focused on that. They will do anything including staying up 36 hours straight to learn this stuff. Not from us. Learn Excel from Microsoft. Learn what a database is and why it’s important, and pricing, and how all these moving parts fit together, and they won’t stop until they’ve made a hundred grand.

Jack Butala:
That’s not as common. What’s really common is people come to us frustrated as heck with having, let’s say, an eCommerce company or some other couple of companies that they just can’t buy stuff cheap enough and sell it with enough margin online to make it work. So they’re already familiar with payroll, and outsourcing, and the disappointment of losing an employee and all this other stuff.

Jack Butala:
We don’t talk about that a lot. We talk about buying a piece of land for 30,000 bucks and selling it for 60. Very, very easy. You know why? Because it is easy for us because we’ve been doing this for two or three decades. I don’t want to send this message that, “Hey, sign up for Land Academy,” because, really, this is how that last week’s Facebook live event went, “Sign up for Land Academy, and your dreams will come true.” That’s just not who we are.

Jill DeWit:
No, and we’re not going to hold your hand like that too.

Jack Butala:
Yeah, exactly. That’s not the message we want to send now or ever. This is a lot of work. It’s incredibly profitable. It’s crazy profitable for us and for about 70% of the people that have stuck with Land Academy for longer than a year.

Jill DeWit:
You just hit the nail on the head. I was writing it down because there was a time when I hardcored screened our members, and I needed three things. They needed to have money. Let’s just call a spade a spade. You need to have some funds going into this. You’re going to be pulling data, sending out mail, buying property. You can’t do it on a thousand dollars. I wanted them to have experience owning or running their own business. And then the third thing was the tech skills, so yours was exactly the same thing. You need to have your head wrapped around data, and I can’t teach you Excel.

Jill DeWit:
So that was our criteria, and then when we hit our max, our 500, I didn’t have to do that any more. And now it’s been so much of our membership I think has come from word of mouth. You know who you are. You hang out with similar like-minded people. Our members deal with like-minded people, so investors working with other smart investors. It’s kind of organically worked itself out that I haven’t had to do that.

Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
It’s really, really good, and then, anyway, that’s it. That’s our group.

Jack Butala:
A few weeks ago, we did an interview with a member, Lori Phillips. If you haven’t heard that show, you should really go back and listen to that. I think it was… not last week… it was the week before. Was it last week? No, it was the week before. Lori’s been with us since October. Right now it’s June. So she’s into it seven months, I think?

Jill DeWit:
Since July.

Jack Butala:
Since July, so seven months and this just rung with her. She’s had a tremendous amount of positive and negative experience professionally in her life. She talks about it all throughout the interview. She’s made a million-six already. She’s slated to make five. Five million this year. It just makes sense to her. You really have to ask yourself if you were considering doing this, if it all makes sense to you. I don’t know how else to say it. I don’t want to sound like your father, and I probably am, but Jill used to say a lot of years ago, if this doesn’t come relatively easy for you, maybe you should just consider doing something else.

Jill DeWit:
Slash/however, I have learned to eat my words on that because, like you said, there are some people that come along and their drive and determination trumps that, and I believe it.

Jack Butala:
That’s right. I do, too. There’s that unicorn. It doesn’t happen often, and it’s just because that unicorn listened to us instead of some other show two weeks from now about selling used cars because that type of person would be the top used car seller in their state a month to a year from now.

Jill DeWit:
Maybe. Exactly.

Jack Butala:
So, yeah, we make this look easy. A lot of it’s because we’re trying to be entertaining at the same time. If you’ve listened to our shows this week, you know how Jill and I feel about that individually.

Jill DeWit:
I think we’ve got a lot of it out of the way, too. If you’ve been listening to us, we’ve been doing this show now going on five years. Some people have been listening to this show for five years, probably three of you. But anyway, you you’ve heard our changes and you know how hard we’ve worked and things that we’ve got figured out, how we moved on. And there are things that are easier now. You’ve heard us listening to mapping struggles. We don’t talk about that any more because there’s a lot of struggles that have changed over the years, too. So it’s good. Happy you could join us today. You can find us Monday through Friday right here on The Land Academy Show.

Jack Butala:
Next week on The Land Academy Show join us for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill DeWit:
Did we cover that?

Jack Butala:
Yeah. This whole week has been let’s set some stuff straight. That’s been the theme of the week. We are about to head into the worst real estate recession this country has ever seen. It already is the worst. 35% of the people in this country aren’t paying their mortgage, and the government’s saying, “Hey, banks, you can’t foreclose on them, so there’s this huge pent… When I talk about an intentional bubble, it’s pent up.

Jack Butala:
This is not the time to horse around on the show. It’s not the time to just joke around and be entertaining. And if our writing stuff [inaudible 00:14:15] so what? We don’t have any sponsors, anyway. I’m sure you’ve noticed. We don’t want any sponsors.

Jack Butala:
This is serious. This is a serious way for you to retire in the next 24 months. If you buy and sell real estate, this is the way that Jill and I have been doing it for a long time. Believe me, we are now able to effectively retire, probably now, but at the end of this next 24 months, that’ll seal it. There’s not a lot of laughing during the day. There might be a lot of laughing on the show and that’s fine, but this is serious. Now’s the time to get serious.

Jill DeWit:
The Land Academy Show remains commercial free.

Jack Butala:
She hates it. Do you see that?

Jill DeWit:
Our loyal listeners-

Jack Butala:
She can’t stand it.

Jill DeWit:
So wherever you’re watching or wherever you’re listening, please subscribe and rate us there. We are Steve and Jill.

Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill. Information.

Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.

Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.

Jill DeWit:
It’s not that I hate it.

Jack Butala:
What is it?

Jill DeWit:
I don’t know. It’s not that I hate it.

Jack Butala:
What is it? Everybody wants to know.