Jill Friday – How to Pick a Great Land Business Partner (LA 1752)
Jill Friday – How to Pick a Great Land Business Partner (LA 1752)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Jack and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land academy Show, entertaining land, investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today is Jill Friday. She’s going to talk about how to pick a great land business partner. I can’t wait to hear this show.
Jill K DeWit:
This comes up all the time. Everyone ask me, “How did you get so darn lucky?”
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, I thought you were going to say, “How do you put up with that?”
Jill K DeWit:
“Your life looks like a dream.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh my gosh. No one says that. 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.
Steven Jack Butala:
And I’ll tell, you back in the day, it was almost impossible to find land without our actual mailing address. So we developed a product called neighborscoop.com, where all you do is put in the state, county and APM, and up pops the parcel. You can complete what we call a [inaudible 00:01:02] due diligence in seconds, instead of weeks, like it used to. Check it out atneighborscoop.com, or give us a email at support@landacademy.com.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. This is the right question here, not this one. Okay, okay. So Martin wrote, this is hilarious. “You two are great. How can I get my wife interested in working with me?”
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, geez. Martin says this?
Jill K DeWit:
Yes.
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, Martin.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
The cards are stacked against you.
Jill K DeWit:
This-
Steven Jack Butala:
How do you get your wife interested in anything, is the real question.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh. You know what’s funny? I hear this often from men, “My wife kind of gets it.” Usually it’s just trying to get your wife on board. It’s people I’m talking to that are thinking about joining Career Path or thinking about joining Land Academy. And sometimes they get to me and I’m just answering questions, and one of it’s like, “Gosh.” And I will ask, “By the way, is your significant other on the same page?”
Jill K DeWit:
Because, look, men, you all know, or look men or women, doesn’t matter who you are, if your partner is not on the same page it’s probably not going to work. If they’re adamantly against you doing something like this, they’re not going to be supportive.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, don’t do it then.
Jill K DeWit:
And you shouldn’t.
Steven Jack Butala:
My favorite is, “I bought this from my wife,” meaning Land Academy. And she said, “What the hell is this?”
Jill K DeWit:
Right. “I’m not doing this.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. And the guy says, “Here I am 14 deals later and I quit my job.”
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. It’s funny. I do know that there are many couples that listen to our show, not even I think in the land space, but for the comic relief. I get that. I know what it is, it’s like, “Hey, we’re not that bad, babe.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, yeah. “Boy, they make me feel better about myself.”
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. “Do you imagine if we worked together? Woo, sheesh. Dodged that bullet.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Let me get this out of the way. Today’s Jill Friday, how to pick a great land business partner. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay, we’re going to dive in and cover it all at one time. All right. And I understand, you can’t push it. You really can’t. If they’re interested, they are. If not, at least I would share … To kind of answer Martin’s question, offer to get them involved, share with what you’re doing, show them the bank account when it’s growing. And if they weren’t involved initially and they see the bank account growing, they’ll probably be supportive after that.
Jill K DeWit:
That used to be a thing a long time ago. I remember a guy years ago said, “I did what you said. I spent $10,000. I bought 10 $1,000 properties. Next thing you knew, I was staring at $23,000. My wife immediately said, ‘Go for it, baby, would you like me to make you a sandwich,'” kind of thing when she watched it more than double. And said the test is over kind of thing. But that was one way to do it.
Jill K DeWit:
But today, I mean, it’s really talking about how to pick a great partner. And I’ve found that more people are successful when they’re not a one-man show and they are doing it with a partner.
Steven Jack Butala:
For sure.
Jill K DeWit:
Because face the facts, most of us are not great at every single part of this business. I’m good at my part, he’s great at his part. I’m the sales and the communication and that side of our business. And he’s the data and the analytical part, and just the paperwork part that I hate doing. He’s really, really good at it. So look at us.
Jill K DeWit:
You got to first take a step back and realize, what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? And so you know what you’re looking for. And the best place too, once you figured this out, to try to start finding a good partner, is put it out there. And within Land Academy, not to the planet. Don’t put it on LinkedIn. You have a closed, wonderful environment here of people …
Jill K DeWit:
What’s great is, we’re now able to do it within Discord. Back in the day, when we were just getting started and we started having these live in-person events, that’s where our connections were made. And I know many partnerships that were formed out of those live events, people walking away like, “I’m the data guy, he’s this guy. I always cued up the deals. He lined up the brokers and got the stuff sold. And they told me where to send out more mail and that’s what I did.”
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s how that’s it works. That’s a great situation.
Jill K DeWit:
I remember one trio in particular, it was really cool. These three guys connected from all different parts of the country and went off to just kill it. It’s amazing. So now we can do it within our community, it’s great.
Jill K DeWit:
And I want you to test it. I want you to know what your strengths are, properly share what you’re good at, what you’re not good at. Make sure who you’re talking to about this is … It sits together, the pieces fit together. And I want you to a test a deal or two. Don’t dive in. Don’t say, “Well, we’ve met on Discord,” or, “We met here. We’re going to make this work. We actually even met for coffee. I flew there. It’s going to work out great. Before I left town, we got a bank account. We each threw in $100,000, got an LLC and here we go.”
Jill K DeWit:
I want you to test it a little bit first, I don’t want you to … Do a couple of deals together. Even like we suggest with land funding and deal funding. Do a deal or two together with that person. See how it’s going to go before they’re your number one bank. And make sure you all can work together. You’re on the same page and …
Steven Jack Butala:
In this environment competition’s not your friend. Jill and I have not been in competition with each other, not even for a single moment that I can recall.
Jill K DeWit:
Good point.
Steven Jack Butala:
I’m not trying to find better deals than she’s trying to find. Jill and I have the same exact common goal.
Jill K DeWit:
Brilliant.
Steven Jack Butala:
So as far out as you can look, Jill and I want to go to that exact same place, and we don’t talk about this ever. That’s just how we are. I have a completely different way about how to get to that goal as Jill does. And we know that and accept it and it’s not a point of contention at all. We don’t compete with each other.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s good.
Steven Jack Butala:
And Jill, here’s my second and final point of advice, and I can’t say this more clearly. Find a business partner, and potentially a life partner, that wants to do the crap that you don’t want to do. If Jill was constantly trying to do a mailer because she thought she could do it better than I can, this would never work. It would’ve ended the first week.
Steven Jack Butala:
But what she wants to do is buy and sell property, and she wants to get on the phone and turn somebody … In her soul, turn somebody who’s like, “I’m never selling you this piece of property,” into somebody who’s going to sell her the piece of property for the price that she wants. She’s wired that way. She was born that way, and I was born a data person. And if this doesn’t work with three people, three people, there might be one Jill and two of me, or maybe two Jills.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s hard.
Steven Jack Butala:
And that’s tough. That’s way against the odds.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s harder.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s hard enough to find a business partner where you’ve got … Because people attract. If I went to some type of meeting to recover from a disorder, it would be Data’s Anonymous or whatever. And so, and then everybody gets along. “Oh yeah, sure. I did that too. That was silly that one time.” There’s no meetings where there’s mingling.
Steven Jack Butala:
So this is tough. It’s a tough thing to accomplish, and then it takes a lot of years to perfect. At least two years to perfect.
Jill K DeWit:
[crosstalk 00:08:46].
Steven Jack Butala:
I’m not saying it’s easy, but boy, when, when it clicks, it clicks.
Jill K DeWit:
You know what’s good? You just brought up a good point about not competing with each other. Yeah, you’ve done my job, obviously, when you were a one-man show. But you’ve learned to trust me and we both trust each other and we stay out of each other’s lane. That’s a huge one. When I talk to couples, we have several-
Steven Jack Butala:
Many couples in our group.
Jill K DeWit:
… successful couples in our group. I mean, I could rattle them off, there’s a lot of them. And we all agree, yes, we have our own offices. Yes, we have our own doors. Yes, we have meeting times. Yes, we know when to talk about it. You have to learn this stuff. What we’re talking about right now is 101. That’s Master’s level, not to kill each other and how to stay together.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
But then you learn as you go along how to stay out of each other’s lanes, trust them, not mess with their decisions. Don’t go back and redo their work. There’s all kinds of little things like that that you will learn.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. And thank you, and happy you could join us today. Five days a week you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next week for another interesting episode. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We’ve always threatened to do a couples-like thing.
Jill K DeWit:
I know. I love this topic.
Steven Jack Butala:
I do too because we’re so … I really think we have most of the answers, not all of them, because we’ve been through tough times.
Jill K DeWit:
And it’s universal. W really could teach a couples thing on how to be in business together, fill in the blank business. I don’t care if it’s making soap or what, because there are universal things about it-
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. It’s not natural.
Jill K DeWit:
… that we have learned and tested and got through and cried and yelled.
Steven Jack Butala:
I think to end it on this, I really think that there’s … Our gender, since the beginning of time, as humans has dictated our roles. And I think we live in a world right now where that’s not the case, where our gender theoretically should not have anything to do with our roles because the world we live in now. I think it’s easier now than ever to take on the Jack or the Jill role, easier it’s ever been.
Jill K DeWit:
I like that. Thank you for tuning in. Hey, great news, it’s come … I’m working on this right now too by the way, I’ll tell you after this show, after I give this little blip, I’ll give you more information, but I’m working on this. I’m working hard on a Land Academy way to online notarize your documents, world-wide from our offices here in Scottsdale. Imagine that.
Jill K DeWit:
So rules have changed. I’ve almost got all the software and all the details lined up. Where you could be sitting at your desk or on your camera or out and about on your phone, and I can online notarize documents for you or your sellers or your buyers, whatever it is. It’s great. We haven’t even named it yet. If you want to know more, please call eight, three, three, five, two, two, five, five, four, five, or send a note to support@landacademy.com.
Jill K DeWit:
We are Jack and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information-
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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