How to Schedule Your Days Successfully (LA 1529)
How to Schedule Your Days Successfully (LA 1529)
Transcript:
S Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Hello.
S Jack 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.
S Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about how to schedule your days successfully.
Jill DeWit:
All right, brain, go for it.
S Jack Butala:
Full disclosure, this is one of my favorite topics, and here’s why. Not because I love to live in my calendar, but I love to make money. And this is the only way I know how to actually run a crew and make money and sleep at night, quite honestly.
Jill DeWit:
I thought you were going to say, I love to make fun of Jill.
S Jack Butala:
No, I don’t want to … Jill’s amazingly good at this. She doesn’t realize it, but we’ll make fun of her in a minute.
Jill DeWit:
I kind of am. I mean, I do, on the big stuff. Maybe the little stuff, I kind of slack on, but remember I have my reasons why. We’ve talked about that.
S 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. And if you’re already a member, please join us on Discord.
Jill DeWit:
Sandy wrote, “I just joined Land Academy a couple months ago. Honestly, I have stuck with my mailing procedure. Oh, I stuck with my mailing procedure instead of starting from scratch with Offers 2 Owners.” I’m curious what her old procedure was. I hope it wasn’t handwriting letters with the family at dining room.
S Jack Butala:
You’ll see. There’s a reason this made it into-
Jill DeWit:
Oh, it’s coming? Okay, good. I’m excited to see what this is. Okay, Sandy. Here we go. “Unfortunately, I received an email today that states I have to send my mailers first class.” Oh, that’s funny.
S Jack Butala:
But it’s hilarious.
Jill DeWit:
Here come the questions. “Number one, is it standard practice to send first class?”
S Jack Butala:
Not at all.
Jill DeWit:
“Number two, does O2O require that offers be sent first class?”
S Jack Butala:
Heck no.
Jill DeWit:
“Number three, how many people send first class versus standard?”
S Jack Butala:
Very, very few, if that.
Jill DeWit:
“Four, other than the obvious price difference, has anyone tested to see if there are any other differences, ie. performance, ease of mailing, et cetera? Thanks so much for any help you can give, Sandy.” Sorry.
S Jack Butala:
If you’re over 80, this matters.
Jill DeWit:
I don’t think it matters.
S Jack Butala:
If you’re over 80 and you’re receiving a letter. I don’t even look at how it’s stamped ever. I mean, none of us do.
Jill DeWit:
No. No, we don’t.
S Jack Butala:
First class is something that happened like in World War II and, I’m not exaggerating. No. And it goes on, everybody had some stuff to say about this, me included actually on … And if you want to see it all-
Jill DeWit:
Was she licking stamps?
S Jack Butala:
… it’s either he or she, we don’t know. And no, they were using click to mail. And so Click2Mail, it’s not even a competitor, but it’s another way you can send mail for twice as much money, and it’s very popular with non-members of Land Academy and everybody changes over. And even Sandy now goes on to say at the bottom of the string. It was too long for me to include in this.
Jill DeWit:
It said, so I get it? I hear ya?
S Jack Butala:
So Click2Mail went into this whole thing about, they sent it to all their people saying, “If you’re sending these, this and this, and here’s the regulations from the Post Office,” and they cited it all.
Jill DeWit:
How sneaky. That’s sneaky, making you think you have to do that.
S Jack Butala:
Our other members just jumped right in and took screenshots of how this is all fiction.
Jill DeWit:
Wow.
S Jack Butala:
So look, I don’t want to blow my own horn here, but I am for a second, our horn. O2O rocks. O2O is set up to do this. If you want a pizza place, use Click2Mail to send out a mailer.
Jill DeWit:
Like postcards or something.
S Jack Butala:
Or whatever, anything, colored stuff, all of that, colored mailers, four color bleed mailers. If you’re sending offers to owners, this is the place to do it. This is what we specialize in. This is all we do.
Jill DeWit:
Thank you.
S Jack Butala:
We’ll leave it at that. It’s ludicrous. There’s so many silly … Jill and I started Offers 2 Owners because of stuff like this, because we got sick of sending … We sent out millions of letters before O2O.
Jill DeWit:
And the expense.
S Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
The ease and the expense and setup fees and rigamarole. And that’s not cool.
S Jack Butala:
It’s you get fee’ed to death. There’s no fees with Offers 2 Owners. I’m not going to make this a commercial, but if you already send mail out, you know.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. So, well let me back up. The only difference I would think that someone would really consider sending first class mail is maybe they want to try to get it there faster. And you know what? I don’t think that matters.
S Jack Butala:
I don’t either.
Jill DeWit:
It’s really going to be days, not weeks, of a difference, number one. And number two, so what? Your first mail goes out, it takes two weeks to hit instead of one. Do I care? No.
S Jack Butala:
I agree, Jill.
Jill DeWit:
Because the cost saving is what’s important here. And that two weeks, if you do it right and you set up yourself in a system, you only have that two week waiting period one time, because now you’re in a system. So you know that every two weeks, this hits and then this hits, and you have it consistent. So you never have a lag. And that first two weeks, big flipping deal. That’s when you make sure your phone works, your spreadsheets are set up. You maybe start doing some recon about, well, if this comes back and it looks great, I’ve already got brokers that I’m to run this by. I’ve already pre asked some questions to the county. So I know how this goes. Whatever it is, you use that time wisely, and then you don’t think about it.
S Jack Butala:
Just about every mistake that a person can make sending mail out, offers to owners to buy real estate, I’ve made it.
Jill DeWit:
Yep. We’ve done that.
S Jack Butala:
And this is the 25 years of mistakes, results of how it works. And every single time or every let’s say monthly slot of people that join Land Academy, there’s two or three that say, “I don’t believe you, and I’m going to do it this way.” And they always come back.
Jill DeWit:
They spend more money.
S Jack Butala:
Come back and say, “Yeah, I guess that’s why they do it.”
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, oops.
S Jack Butala:
Mailer yield, like getting a couple more offers or a couple more signed purchase agreements out of a 3 or 4,000 unit mailer is an obsession with some people.
Jill DeWit:
I understand that.
S Jack Butala:
Which leads me into the topic today. Today’s topic, how to schedule your days successfully. This is the meat of the show. If you want to succeed at this, you’ve got to set goals and you have to set timeframe milestones, and you have to follow through on them. Man, I sound like your father.
Jill DeWit:
That’s true.
S Jack Butala:
And I know I do. And I know this is not the most favorite topic for a lot of people, but I can say this with confidence. All the people, with very, very, very few exceptions in the advanced group, live and die by their calendar. Not only with their land company, but in most cases with their engineering jobs or their other companies that they own. That’s the only way to get anything done. So this is how I do it. Picture a triangle on its nose, an equal triangle on its nose or a funnel like in the kitchen, where you’re funneling something, liquid into a smaller hole, or a motor oil, filling motor oil with a funnel.
S Jack Butala:
At the top is all these big picture goals that you have and what you want to accomplish. And as you move down the funnel, as the liquid moves down the funnel, you want to achieve that singular goal, which for new people should be getting that first deal purchased. That’s the first, the hardest part. Once you get that first deal purchased and then sold, you’re either going to love this or you’re going to hate it, or you’re going to see the light. It happened to me. I purchased and sold my first property quickly and it looked like a big, huge train wreck mess, but it was profitable. And then that was it. For some reason, I knew that I wanted to do that for the rest of my life. So you need to get a calendar. This is all in the education, by the way. But we don’t write these topics anymore. Our customer service people do, so people must be asking about it.
Jill DeWit:
I have some questions to ask you when you get your first point across. I have follow-up stuff.
S Jack Butala:
Okay, good. So, my first point is just about ending. Start with the end. If you really want to purchase a piece of property for less than half of its existing value in its existing condition, if that’s the bottom of your funnel, then work all the way back piece by piece by piece. And don’t rush through this. There’s nothing fast or easy about Land Academy. Our sales team, we have one sales person and he’s like, “Oh, you said stuff again that’s going to make my job harder.” This is not fast or easy. There’s a huge learning curve to it, and it’s very brainy. At least getting that first piece of property purchased is. So without going into all the details of do this, do this, do this, because that’s very personal. It ends with buying a piece of real estate for half, and it starts at the big top of the funnel with education and learning from other people, which if you’re listening to this show, you’re at the top of the funnel.
Jill DeWit:
Our team would like you to please speak on how you get your inbox to zero and then how you use your scheduling system with your emails.
S Jack Butala:
Right. So, this is self-taught. I don’t know why I started doing this. I started doing it about two or three years ago. I see a lot of people, maybe some people on the stage with me, use their inbox and it equals their to-do list. So something will come in or a phone call will come in, they stop what they’re doing, and then they deal with the phone call or they deal with the thing that popped into their inbox, and they do it. And that’s the fastest way to fail at anything.
Jill DeWit:
That’s very true. You can’t do that. We don’t do that. You have to schedule it out.
S Jack Butala:
You have to schedule your … You have to-
Jill DeWit:
Like have dedicated time.
S Jack Butala:
Yeah, exactly. Schedule all the tasks that you need, including hiring people. If you’re too bogged down and you can’t answer your own phone, which I understand, then schedule some time to hire PATLive or whoever you use to answer your phone. And any time that something comes in to that inbox, what I do is I either, in the morning I go through it all. Actually I do this two or three times a day when I have gaps of time.
Jill DeWit:
Perfect. I want to ask the questions about this. So it’s not like 9:00 AM, 1:00 PM, 3:00 PM.
S Jack Butala:
It’s like that.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. But it’s not in the calendar that way. It’s you do first thing in the morning, midday and whatever.
S Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, cool.
S Jack Butala:
It’s in the calendar.
Jill DeWit:
Okay. That’s why I’m asking. All right.
S Jack Butala:
Clear out your inbox is in my calendar three times a day.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, cool.
S Jack Butala:
Actually it’s rolled into, I do a bunch of stuff before 9:00. One of the things is clean out your inbox. It’s not scheduled in the middle of the day. I just naturally do it. And then at the end of the day, I have a bunch of day end activities that I do, which is clean out my mailbox. So unless something’s on fire, and even then, if something’s in there that I get … Right now, Jill and I are doing all of our estate planning. So if I get an email, for example, from the lawyers that are asking me questions or clarifying stuff, I don’t answer it. What I do is I schedule it to be answered the next day or whenever it’s appropriate.
Jill DeWit:
That’s the tip. I want to touch on that for just a second. And that’s a good tip and that’s how I do it too. You could in an email, schedule it in 365, or depending what email system you have, you could just copy and paste or highlight, whatever, put the meat of that into an invite on your calendar. And then you delete the email. That’s the whole point is get the email down, have it on your calendar, and you don’t stress about it. You don’t have to think about it. You know it’s going to get done. You know when it’s going to get done because it’s scheduled, and you have all the information that you need to do that.
S Jack Butala:
This part of what I was going to talk about today, and I’m glad you brought it up. This takes all the stress out of my life. I was a stressed out mess in college because I didn’t have a system like this. I didn’t know what to study for or when. I was always behind. I was always running around, a running around mess to get to classes or to get to the library or get textbooks or whatever.
Jill DeWit:
It sounds like a normal guy thing at that age.
S Jack Butala:
I failed at it.
Jill DeWit:
It’s a normal guy thing, right? You had to learn.
S Jack Butala:
I didn’t literally fail, I got out of there okay. So no, you learn stuff the hard way. And then when you get a job, here’s the thing that I really want to make this clear, because you get out of school and you get a job and then somebody else has a calendar for you. And if you work for a huge company like Jill did right out of the shoot, they’re telling you where to stand and what to say and how to do it. They’re training you. So, you get real lazy. As an entrepreneur, you need to make a schedule and you need to stick to it harder than you did when you were employed.
Jill DeWit:
You know what’s funny, I have something to share when you’re done.
S Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
So I started out that way and then I ended that way because before I had a job with a time clock basically, I had all the freedom to do what I wanted. And I used to care because my dad taught me the spiral daily calendar things, he carried one, so I started carrying one. I always had a calendar. And then I went to, it was before cell phones. It was a little, like a Sharp flip-up calendar thing. It was a little electronic thing. It wasn’t FranklinCovey.
S Jack Butala:
Oh, I remember that too.
Jill DeWit:
It was Sharp or something like that.
S Jack Butala:
It was called a daily planner or something.
Jill DeWit:
But it was a little thing that you could put in your purse. There was no color involved. It was the one color. It was a really cool thing. It didn’t interact with anything, but it was electronic.
S Jack Butala:
I remember that.
Jill DeWit:
And I could use it to put notes in there. So I started doing that. I’ve always been very minutely calendar focus detailed. I just have relaxed it over the years to a point that it makes you uncomfortable, but it still works for me.
S Jack Butala:
No, I think now you’re Johnny on the spot.
Jill DeWit:
Okay, good.
S Jack Butala:
I think that when Jill got let out of her cage from her W2 job and we joined forces-
Jill DeWit:
I got really comfortable a little bit. For the beginning, that’s true, because you know what, I needed a little downtime.
S Jack Butala:
No, I understand. I completely understand.
Jill DeWit:
It’s like someone, like the people that sell a company and they hole themselves up in Mexico in a hotel penthouse for a year. It was kind of like that, but not like that. Like Brockmire, I can afford to take a little break there and catch my breath.
S Jack Butala:
Well speaking of breaks, this is literally what Jill and I do. We schedule our breaks.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah, fun time.
S Jack Butala:
So sometimes we have whole days where we’re not going to do anything, and we, without guilt, go have a rip-roaring blast because I know everything’s going to be scheduled or is scheduled. I know exactly what I’m supposed to do on Monday morning, and I can take Monday afternoon off with no guilt. You have to schedule everything. And in the beginning, I would schedule every single tiny little thing. If you’re going to workout for 20 minutes in the morning, schedule it, and then do it and mark it off and give yourself a reward, some reward.
Jill DeWit:
I know Land Academy members, I love this, that are huge fishermen, for example, and they’re only doing like one deal a month, one big deal a month. And it’s like hunting week or fishing week or every Friday, every Thursday and Friday, whatever it is, they schedule it out.
S Jack Butala:
Drinking week.
Jill DeWit:
And I love it. Okay, that might be you. Do you do that?
S Jack Butala:
No.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
S Jack Butala:
If I do, it’s with you.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, okay. That’s true. That’s awesome.
S Jack Butala:
And this leads me to my final point. So great, Jack, how do you do it? I cannot say enough positive stuff about Microsoft 365. I think that if you’re in the beginning of your career or even in the middle and you’re not using it, I urge you to take a look at it, and here’s why. It will grow with you. There’s different levels and subscriptions. There’s no upfront cost. The initial subscription’s free.
Jill DeWit:
We get nothing, by the way. We’re not paid anything.
S Jack Butala:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
We’re not affiliates or anything. I wish we were.
S Jack Butala:
You can build an empire on Microsoft 365 with limitless employees and all the access levels. You can lock it down. You can launch websites from it. You can take it … I don’t even, we probably use 3% of what it’s capable of.
Jill DeWit:
It’s true.
S Jack Butala:
It ties to everything. So, every employee around the world. And it’s universal. You talk to somebody in the Philippines and ask them to use Microsoft 365, they’re going to say, “Oh yeah, I don’t need any training on that. I know exactly how to do it.” Google Drive is a go-to free tool for kindergartners, and Microsoft 365 is for people who want a career. For instance, I was the administrator and set it all up. At some point, I stopped being the administrator and we hired somebody, and then she became the administrator, Erin in her office. So I didn’t have to any longer, and then she managed it. And there’s nothing really to manage. It’s a file sharing system. It’s everything that you could want to run a land business. And its costs, you pay by employee, so you can completely control it. It’s totally affordable. Jill’s right. There’s no money for this that we get.
Jill DeWit:
It’s cool.
S Jack Butala:
And it loops you into Outlook, which we all have used at one point. People have tried to create a better product and not succeeded.
Jill DeWit:
So we not only talked about everything, our scheduling and our tips, but what we use. So if you’re not set up now, I don’t know what to say.
S Jack Butala:
I will not leave my desk at the end of the day, at the end of a work day with anything in my inbox, in my voicemail or any missed calls that aren’t rescheduled, those three things.
Jill DeWit:
Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.
S Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called Career Path: What We’ve Learned. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
That was awesome. You covered a lot. You covered way more than was asked of you. So I think that was really beneficial. I’m sure it was beneficial. So, thank you. 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 or ParcelFact.com, created by investors, that’s us, for investors like you. We are Steve and Jill.
S Jack Butala:
We are Steve and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
S Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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