Who Should I Hire First in 2021? (LA 1516)
Who Should I Hire First in 2021? (LA 1516)
Transcript:
Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Howdy.
Steven 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 pretty Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about who should you hire first in 2021. This is a very popular question in our customer service Land Academy environment. How do I get that first employee?
Jill DeWit:
I’m excited. I have some ideas.
Steven Butala:
Me too.
Jill DeWit:
First, before we get into it. Let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the Land Investors online community. It is free, so I’m getting an account there. And then by the way, if you are a member, I know that we’re beating a dead horse here, but I want you guys to get in Discord. It rocks.
Steven Butala:
John asks, “Can anyone elaborate and help me understand the paragraph from V26 May investors newsletter?”
Steven Butala:
We have a newsletter, Land Academy does. I don’t know if it goes to everybody or if it goes just to our members. And so I write stuff in there, I’m a writer for the newsletter. And, this whole thing, I’m going to read this because this person was asking for clarification about what I said. A lot of years ago, I was with us listening to Larry King on this long drive. And he was interviewing William Shatner and of course, Star Trek came up and Larry King said, “Do you have these people that ever come up to you and ask you about Star Trek?” And he said, “Oh yeah, I have people on a daily basis.” And, so they’d take a question from a caller on that switchboard. And the caller says, “What did you mean by… When you said XYZ in episode 14 in the third season of star Trek?” And, William Shatner blew his top.
Jill DeWit:
That’s funny.
Steven Butala:
He said, “I don’t remember.”
Jill DeWit:
Why would they not have a better relationship with the Klingon community based on X?” Yeah.
Steven Butala:
He said, “Listen, asshole” I can’t say that. I’m going to ask our guys to… He just blew his top. He said, “Listen, I can’t remember even actually doing that show at all. Ever.”
Steven Butala:
Are you writing down the time?
Jill DeWit:
Yes I am.
Steven Butala:
“I don’t remember showing up for work for that entire part of my life, let alone episodes and what I said and the dialogue and all of that. And by the way, it wasn’t me who said that it was my character.” And, so he just went off and I don’t know, I stopped the car. I was laughing so hard.
Jill DeWit:
That’s good.
Steven Butala:
So, here I am saying and writing some stuff, then I’m going to try to translate that I don’t remember saying it, right?
Jill DeWit:
Go for it.
Steven Butala:
He asks,, “Can you elaborate or help me understand what you meant?” And, what I wrote is this, “Here is what it can do for property investors like us after reviewing the entire 150 million unit data set, there’s 150 million unit properties in this country, I would like to see properties with no improvement value, just land in zip codes, where the spread between the average completed sale value and the foresale values are the largest.”
Steven Butala:
So, you’ve got really large for sale values and really low completed sale values. “This tells me where to send out blind offers. Then I would like to see within those geographic parameters, what acreage range is the widest. This tells me which owners or to whom to send blind offers after scrubbing down to this dataset, I’d like to know what the actual spread prices are. This tells me for how much to send each offer out how to price the offers.”
Steven Butala:
That makes complete sense to me. Does it make sense to you? What he didn’t include, and it’s fine, is the context of what this was and what I said. And, this is my advice to everyone. Take four steps back and don’t get all in the deluge of the data. Take a look, open Google earth and look at that globe and that map of the United States. I addressed this in our first education program. There’s 150 million unit data set of properties in this country. Your very simple job is to look at and learn how to look at data, learn how and where to get the data, to figure out what the best place to buy land is.
Steven Butala:
And, that’s what I’m describing here. So, please go back and read the newsletter. I don’t think that this is complicated, but that’s why we have Land Academy. I guess that’s why we’re sitting here. But, it really does require a philosophical look first. And, a conceptual look before you actually dive into the data. Dream up the data set that you want.
Jill DeWit:
Can I translate?
Steven Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. So let me translate.
Steven Butala:
For sure.
Jill DeWit:
So, what he’s saying is you need to look at… So we want to see no improvement value. So we want to make sure that we’re looking at land, right? And the spread. I think we kind of understood that. For sale. Okay. I’m repeating you. It’s just… Nevermind. I can’t repeat… I can’t say it any better than you already said it and you wrote it. You know what? If it’s not clicking, you know what? Here’s what I think is going on.
Jill DeWit:
This happened the other day, where was, I? I don’t know where I was. I think we were out to dinner and it was dinner or brunch. One of those two, it was at the same establishment and I was overhearing someone’s conversation. And, they were talking obviously with other people in their industry. And it sounded to me like a bunch of gibberish, seriously.
Steven Butala:
Yeah?
Jill DeWit:
I had to take a step back and go, “Huh?” And, then I could finally connect and go, “Oh, that’s what they do. Oh, that’s what they’re talking about.” I had a really… And a lot of the terminology and things I didn’t know.
Steven Butala:
It’s just not clicking with you.
Jill DeWit:
No, it’s not what I do.
Steven Butala:
And you don’t care.
Jill DeWit:
No, that too. So, if you want to sit and talk about taking your car apart right now, I’m really not going to pay attention and I’m really not going to care. I will know what words like carburetor are, but I don’t really care about all the pistons and everything that you’re going to discuss and the timing on the belts and whatever. So anyway, I’m sure that this could be a version of it.
Steven Butala:
The timing on the belts?
Jill DeWit:
Did I say that wrong? I probably totally did.
Steven Butala:
There’s a timing belt, for sure. But, I don’t think the timing on the belts.
Jill DeWit:
Did you time the belts? Is it seconds? Is it minutes? I don’t know.
Steven Butala:
It’s minutes.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, I see. I don’t know.
Steven Butala:
This is an episode of Car Talk now. Can you imagine? A timing belt that’s in minutes?
Jill DeWit:
Anyway.
Steven Butala:
Like a freight train or something?
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
It’s millisecond stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Oh.
Steven Butala:
It’s pistons going up and down, that’s what RPMs are. Nevermind.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Butala:
It’s just cute. It makes you cute.
Jill DeWit:
See, see? Well, there’s my point. So John, you’re not nuts. It might be that for you now. It sounds like gibberish a little bit. So what Steven just explained, big picture. Give it six months. You’re going to go, “Now I understand.”
Steven Butala:
Or go back and really deconstruct the paragraph, the ridiculous run-on sentence that I wrote here.
Jill DeWit:
Oh gosh, yes. You clearly wrote that.
Steven Butala:
I know. Deconstruct the whole thing-
Jill DeWit:
In a hurry.
Steven Butala:
And, really just take it… I did actually. I always have deadlines.
Jill DeWit:
We need an article right now.
Steven Butala:
That’s what happened.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, I know that.
Steven Butala:
It happens every single week. Every single time we do it. “We need an article in an hour. We’re going to print on this.”
Jill DeWit:
“Yeah. You’re late.” He’s pretty much known for a week. But anyway, we won’t get into that.
Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, who should I hire first in 2021? This is the meat of the show. I know you have a lot to say. Rotations per minute, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
So, we’ve done a lot of talking about this. Even, we started one week on the Land Academy ladies call, it was all about hiring and we didn’t finish up on the first week. We did a hiring part B in the second week, because we had so many questions about this and knew a lot of you are at that point. You’re either at that point, or you’re thinking about it. The day you start your business you should be thinking about this.
Steven Butala:
That’s right.
Jill DeWit:
The day you start figuring out how you want things, run. How you like your file structure set up online. How your customers are handled. Even if you only have two properties. I want you to start thinking about this stuff and writing it down and thinking about getting help, because the better you get, the more you’re going to do it, you will need help.
Jill DeWit:
Or are you just going to be limited in the deals that you can do. And, I don’t want you to be limited. And, then the other thing is too, it’s sure nice when you can rise above it all and put yourself in a position where your team runs everything, but you just do the important parts like we talk a lot about. Where you’re doing the data, you’re doing the pricing. And then from there they do the rest. You approve the deals. That’s the perfect scenario, I think.
Jill DeWit:
But, so who should you hire first in 2021? You should be thinking about the job that you hate the most.
Steven Butala:
That’s true.
Jill DeWit:
And, the job that you are the slowest at, takes the most time. Like for Steven, his was talking on the phones. Mine is paperwork. Doing stupid deeds. I’m so sick of deeds, so I don’t do deeds anymore. Thank goodness. But, sitting down and making sure the verbiage was right. It’s not like it’s that big of a deal. It’s not like it’s hard. It just was painful for me. I’d rather be on the phone closing deals and that’s where I’m best at too. So, you need to think about what you’re best at. What you hate. And, that’s the first person that you hire is to fill that gap for you. So now you love what you do again, and you can do more deals.
Steven Butala:
There comes a point in everybody’s land career and you’re either before you’ve gotten to this line or after you’ve gotten this line, when you’re listening or watching this, where you say to yourself, you look at yourself in the mirror and you say, “This job that I have, this W2 job that I have, is standing in the way of making me money. It’s costing me money now. It’s not making me money.”
Steven Butala:
I’d go to work for eight hours, 10 hours a day. And then I’d start working on my land business. I make $80,000 a year in my land business, and I make $40,000 a year in my W2 job, I probably could be making 200,000 if I worked on this full-time.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Butala:
And, then you cross over that line and you do make that $200,000. And I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of people in our group that all agree on this, especially at the live event. And they say, “Wow, I should have done that two years earlier.”
Jill DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Butala:
That’s when you know you’ve made the right decision. And, so that feeling or that conversation that you had and then the outcome, is the exact same thing that should happen with that first employee. You need to look at your day, your typical day and say to yourself, “If I didn’t have to do this, this, this, and this and this, I could make three times as much money. I really need to hire somebody.”
Steven Butala:
And, so that’s the parameters or the criteria that you start to interview for to get that first employee, so they take you out of the stuff that stopping you from doubling how much money you make. And then, that’s the same thing with the second person and the third person and the fourth person. You need to have that conversation with yourself.
Jill DeWit:
We had a call the day, the other day, it was last week with the Land Academy ladies. And, it was a presentation by someone who’s just starting their land business. And you know who this person is, I’m not going to call them that right now. But anyway, they were sharing how they structure their business between it was them, their brother and their best friend and how the things that did worked well and things that didn’t work well. And, she’s working on her first… They’re all kind of partners, if you will. So, no one took any money. They kind of divide up the responsibilities and she shared. Some of it worked, some of it didn’t work.
Jill DeWit:
So, now she’s the head of it all. And she’s, “I’m taking charge again. And I gave these two jobs. They’re going to still be involved, but we’re going to take this a different direction.” And she’s working on hiring her first employee. And, her pain point is just staying on track and organized and a few phone calls. She’s, “I only need 10 hours a week. Someone to put everything in [inaudible 00:12:21] table. Someone to make sure everything’s noted. Someone to make calls now and then to the [inaudible 00:12:26] of companies that they’re all moving forward.” Just little things like that. So I it’s just ties in here. You just need to identify whatever that pain point is and that should be your first hire.
Steven Butala:
So for me, I don’t think this should be it. Everybody has a different point of view on this and I would love to hear your opinion. But, for me, that first employee that I had, and I’ve had to restart because of the economy and a lot of stuff. Three times in my life, I’ve had to restart the land business. And ,every single time with that first employee and this last most recent time it was Jill, not as an employer, we’re doing that as partners. We needed to sit in an office together.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
And that can be painful.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven Butala:
It was for us.
Jill DeWit:
A little bit.
Steven Butala:
But it worked out great, obviously. And, so the other two times before that it was the same thing. For me, they need to see how I do things and why. And, spend at least two weeks with sitting there with somebody so that you can say, “Look, this is how you do a deed.” You go, “Do this, this, this, and this. And I expect you to do it, all the next deeds.” Just as an example, I’ve got people now, one specific person doing mailers for us. And, I just look at it at the end and make sure it’s okay.
Jill DeWit:
It’s your exact checklist. Pull it this way, do this, do this, do this, do this. I’ll jump in here. Approve it. Then go on. It’s good.
Steven Butala:
It’s not the kind of person who has 10 VA’s reporting to me and then I’m happy.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Butala:
I’m happy having one person who works for me, full-time reporting to me and having 10 VA’s reports to them.
Jill DeWit:
I agree. That’s my favorite too.
Steven Butala:
So it’s that key person. That first employee, that just… They need to hang out with you and see that this works.
Jill DeWit:
That’s it.
Steven Butala:
And, that might not work for them or you.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, it’s good. You need to hire someone that’s a good last advice. Hire them, knowing they’re going to take over this stuff that might just be minutiae, poopy stuff, but with potential that hey, that they can grow with you and then take over even more. So you don’t want to hire someone that’s not that bright. They need to be really sharp. And, I would argue that in today’s climate and environment, you could find someone really bright and they don’t have to be in your same city. Although, I know you want them sitting next to you, you could do a version of that remotely.
Steven Butala:
Yeah, I mean we’re in post COVID time, so however you want to handle that. And that person wants to handle that. As long as it’s mutual and consensual, then handle it that way.
Jill DeWit:
Ending on mutual consensual. My goodness. All right, we need to call it now. Happy you could join us today, five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode of the Land Academy Show, well, it’s Jack Thursday and why our new product called Concierge Data could change your life. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
Mutual and consensual.
Steven Butala:
You like that?
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. My goodness.
Steven Butala:
You know what, Jill? I didn’t think of it-
Jill DeWit:
We’re staffing. You threw that in with staffing. I was, “How is that appropriate?”
Steven Butala:
We’re going to get in trouble, you know?
Jill DeWit:
I know. We got to go back and bleep that word. That’s all right. We got this. Hey, if you need access to any sort of ownership or property details, including owner phone numbers and FEMA flood map overlays, check out neighborscoop.com. Created by investors, that’s us. For investors like you.
Steven Butala:
We are Steve and Jill.
Jill DeWit:
We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala:
Consensual.
Jill DeWit:
And… What’s the other word?
Steven Butala:
Mutual.
Jill DeWit:
Oh my gosh. Not so much conforming, to buy undervalued property.
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