3 Topics from the Advanced Member Discord Channel (LA 1794)
3 Topics from the Advanced Member Discord Channel (LA 1794)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here. 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 this sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about three topics from the Advanced Member Discord channel.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay, let’s back up.
Steven Jack Butala:
How do you get to be an advanced member?
Jill K DeWit:
What the heck are we talking about? All right, so within Land Academy, we have an elite group of people who are doing deals like us. Volume wise, dollar amount wise, we’re kind of all doing similar things, or they’re pretty darn close and they’re trying to get to our level. So we, a long time ago, handpicked people. We could tell… We would go back and look at who’s sending the mail out, and who’s sending the volume of mail, basically through our company. We could tell, and know two of them, and we would hand pick people and ask them.
Since then, now everyone comes from Career Path. We do have some grandfathered in people that were handpicked, and even those people though have already gone through Career Path, anyway. They’re like, “I need Career Path, to make it even better.” So, that’s where they come from. Then we have our own monthly meeting, we have our own Discord channel, because we’re talking about some really high level stuff, and we’re going to share a little bit of that today.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s right. Career Path graduates are the advanced members. Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of the members on the landinvestors.com online community. It’s free. I hope you know by now, Jill and I started and successfully operate a full blown commercial printing company to get your offers in the mail. It’s called offers2owners.com. We set it up several years ago out of our own frustration with a regular commercial printing industry. Fast forward to today. We do between 700,000 and a million offers a month on behalf of our members and non-members. I should add, if you’re sending out more than about 5000 letters a month, it’s more efficient cost wise for you to be become Land Academy member.
Jill K DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack Butala:
Contact support@landacademy.com or if you’re trying to get a mailer done, support@offers2owners.com.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. So Dan S wrote: “Okay, here’s my summer intern update. So the computer science kid decided to work minimum wage at a sports retail shop instead of learning data and pricing.” Yeah, that happens. “The mechanical engineer student is about to be onboarded to do data.” That’s good. “Land is not sexy, so I guess it takes a certain type of person.” That’s hilarious. I think land is sexy. I’m going to argue land’s sexy, but I understand.
Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t think land’s sexy, but it’s awesome.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay, you’re right.
Steven Jack Butala:
… and profitable.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, you know what? Land’s pretty to stand on. Your bank balance is sexy.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
There we go.
Steven Jack Butala:
Well said. What’s a sexy business, anyway? I’m not sure you want to be in that.
Jill K DeWit:
What is a sexy business? I guess fashion?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yacht brokerage?
Jill K DeWit:
That’s sexy.
Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know if it’s profitable.
Jill K DeWit:
That’d be a lot of work though.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t want to do that.
Steven Jack Butala:
You got to deal with personalities that are… They think they’re better than everyone. I just think… I don’t know. I think sexy and money making are separate. You make a lot of money, and then do sexy stuff.
Jill K DeWit:
Do you know where it gets confusing? It’s those shows on TV where they’re all hot blondes. There’s 20 hot blondes, supermodels that work in a real estate office in L.A. I’m not kidding. They throw these parties to sell these multimillion dollar homes, and they perpetuate that this is all sexy and glamorous. That’s a lot of work.
Steven Jack Butala:
You have 10 blonde real estate females in one office, someone’s going to die.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s hilarious. The one that I’m thinking of that I’ve watched little snippets of, it’s two guys, it’s their brokerage, and all they do is hire these super models. The problem is too, they have run across this where there’s people that come along and are like, “Hey, I want you to show me around.” This guy has no intention of buying a house. He just wants to drive around with me all day.
Steven Jack Butala:
And be on the show, probably.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, that too. But I think it’s just driving around with the girls all day, and that’s the wrong guy.
Steven Jack Butala:
You know what? That’s their fault.
Jill K DeWit:
They need a bodyguard. It’s stupid.
Steven Jack Butala:
Well, they shouldn’t-
Jill K DeWit:
I don’t know.
Steven Jack Butala:
… be driving customers around anywhere.
Jill K DeWit:
Anyway.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s not… That’s how you do it in 1974.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, they maybe don’t drive around, but they still take him to homes all day. Let’s just say that
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s topic… I don’t know how we got off on that. Three topics from the Advanced Member Discord channel. This is why you’re listening. By the way, Discord was a smash hit as a product. Sometimes we release products within the Land Academy Group. Some work, some are just in failure. This one really worked. If you want to sneak peek as a non-member into Discord, just go to land investors.com, right on the front page, and you can click around. You can’t participate, but you can click around and see what we’re all talking about in real time. It’s a really good window into what goes on in Land Academy in real time.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.
Steven Jack Butala:
In one of the sections in there is Discord, which you can’t see, because it’s only for advanced members. Like we mentioned earlier, if you are a former Career Path member or graduate, let’s say, you are an in the Advanced Group.
Jill K DeWit:
Once you graduate, you get bumped up to that level.
Steven Jack Butala:
I looked at it recently, and I kind of quantified what the three things are that we really all talk about. A typical advanced member is somebody who’s kicking it. They’re doing really, really well, probably better than Jill and I do financially. They’re doing more deals. There’s things at the advanced level that are an issue, and I put them in three categories.
Number one, employees and hiring. We just heard from a Sports Authority intern just a second ago and how we can’t… If you own a company, you know what I’m talking about. Employees are hard to keep motivated and hard to keep, in general, right now. It’s just the environment that we live in.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, that’s what I have too, hiring and training. The first person, it seems like, within… If they haven’t already hired someone by the time they hit us in the Career Path and the Advanced Group, everybody’s kind of asking for the same thing, which is a transaction coordinator.
Steven Jack Butala:
Right, and during the Career Path, throughout that education and our presentation, we present Jill’s transaction coordinator, Jan, to the group. She does a whole presentation, not only on how it works between her and Jill and why they get a lot of deals done together, but how to hire a transaction coordinator. She has a whole module on that.
Jill K DeWit:
And how to use her effectively and get deals through escrow, efficiently.
Steven Jack Butala:
My number two is pricing. Pricing and just general, “Hey, what do you think about this area?” It’s a group where we all bounce stuff off of each other. Most of the people in the Advanced Group or past Career Path have already chosen places to send mail, and they’re wildly succeeding at it. But as we all know, you got to try new stuff, new states, new areas, and we give opinions on that. We don’t however, give strong opinions on that in the general public or in the regular Land Academy group. It would just be… If I said Juneau, Alaska, or whatever county that’s in, is a great place to send mail, then 350 active Land Academy members are going to send mail into that county. That’s a bad idea.
Jill K DeWit:
My number two is kind of similar. This is what I… I’m thinking about our calls and our communication stuff. We’re talking about deals, we talk about oddities, and we talk about workarounds. It’s a lot of, “Have you ever encountered this, and how did you handle it?” “Here’s what I did. I think it’s going to work out.” We’ll all go, “Oh, yeah. I had one of those too, and here’s what I did.” “Oh, great. Thank you.” That’s another thing that we do.
Steven Jack Butala:
Finally, and this is the biggest one, scaling. I made $2.2 million last year. I’d really like to make five. What’s the easiest, fastest, best way to do that? I can’t do it myself anymore, because we’ve been through that. Many other advanced members are… Jill and I are constantly going through that. At a certain point you hit the ceiling of how much one transaction coordinator can do, how much mail you can effectively send out on your own, or even using concierge data. I believe, this is just my opinion, and I’ve been proven wrong over, and over, and over again. There’s a diminishing returns to this at some point. This is not a way to make a billion dollars. You’re not going to start a land company, or keep scaling it up and take it public. We’re not billionaires here, but we do make several million dollars a month doing this. For us, three, or four, or five million dollars a year is about where it comes in net, not gross. Depends on the year, and that’s good enough for Jill and I. For some people that are in the Advanced Group, that’s not even close to what they want to accomplish. We talk about that a lot.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Thank you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Those are my three things.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s it. My last one was… because your scaling is better. But the other thing that we talk about, and I think it’s kind of going along the same thing as what you’re talking about, scaling, and just really thinking outside the box. We have things… We’ll have a, “Gave you ever thought of this? Have you ever tried this? I think I can really make this work if I do such and such,” and we’ll talk about stuff like that, and I love it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Like, I bought a piece of land-
Jill K DeWit:
We’re not afraid to try stuff.
Steven Jack Butala:
“Bought a piece of land and there’s a fallen down house on it. What do I do? I’ve never done this before.” Back to those kinds of things.
Jill K DeWit:
Stuff like that, yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s good. I would like to say before I go, well let me do this. I’ll do this. We’ll do that, and then I have something special to say. What I’m going to do first is, happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here in the Land Academy Show, but sit tight, because I have something special to tell you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is an interview. We are doing a special interview with Nathan Chung.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s called… I love this because Nathan Chung is working full time, parenting small kids, and killing it in Land Academy. You got to hear it. Because if you think you have a time crunch, listen to this guy. You can figure it out.
Steven Jack Butala:
You’re not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. This is the only thing I want to say at the end of the thing here. Right now, today is Tuesday, July 5, as this is airing, which happens to be my birthday, which also happens to be the last day of our most recent awesome Land Academy promotion. So if you are interested and you want to… If you’ve not got an email explaining what’s going on, and the special, and all the good stuff that’s thrown in right now available through today, Tuesday, July 5, go to support@landacademy.com, send a note saying, “Oh, my gosh, what am I missing?” My team will reach out to you and let you know. That’s it. We are… That’s it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, that’s it?
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s all we’re doing today.
Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill, information…
Jill K DeWit:
… and inspiration…
Steven Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. When I said that’s it, that was for us.
Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay.
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