This is Your Company not a Side Hustle (LA 1818)
This is Your Company not a Side Hustle (LA 1818)
Transcript:
Steven James Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello.
Steven James 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 sunny Southern California.
Steven James Butala:
Today. Jill and I talk about how this is your company, not your side hustle. I love this topic. Jill and I were talking about it earlier, because we are really, for some reason in 2022 here attracting people that want to make a massive change in their life and make a bunch of dough.
Jill K DeWit:
The right people.
Steven James Butala:
Yeah. Instead of let’s see what happens and I’m not sure. I just kind of want to make extra money on the side.
Jill K DeWit:
Right. I mean, I’m not going to be that serious about it, because I’ve got this going on, which I understand.
Steven James Butala:
I do too, and I love this level of commitment.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven James Butala:
This topic came out of a total different conversation Jill and I were having just in life about commitment and follow through.
Jill K DeWit:
Welcome to my world.
Steven James Butala:
What would you rather be talking about?
Jill K DeWit:
Where we’re going for dinner tonight? That’s what I’d rather be talking about, not commitment.
Steven James 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 I hope you know by now Jill and I instruct a class, a 10 unit, 10 week class called Career Path, which is very specifically for the topic we’re talking about today. If you want this to be your career, not necessarily your side hustle, this might be for you. Please check out support@landacademy.com and ask them all kinds of questions.
Jill K DeWit:
Cool. Nicholas wrote, “Question. I’m in the process of pulling a list from DataTree. When I’m messing with the filters, there’s a change in the numbers. When I change the living area square foot and the assessed improvement, the assessed improvement gives me a smaller number than the living area. Do I keep both filters on or just one?”
Steven James Butala:
Nicholas, I know you’re new, and I put this question in here for the benefit, obviously, of everyone. I can tell by this type of question you’re going to do very, very well at this. This is a very extremely intelligent question for a new person and I will explain. I’ll answer your question. In DataTree, which is owned by First American Title, they were all nice enough to write an amazing piece of software that gives us really organized access to an assessor’s data base. That’s what we’re looking at. There are 3,200-
Jill K DeWit:
3,144-
Steven James Butala:
3,100-
Jill K DeWit:
Roughly, approximately-
Steven James Butala:
3,124-
Jill K DeWit:
Counting some parishes.
Steven James Butala:
Townships, like Jill said, counties and in Louisiana parishes that generate their own little database to make sure that they can have control over and they can effectively tap property tax areas, property in their jurisdiction. And so during the course of that, if you can imagine, most assessors are elected. And so they have a time and then they leave, and then another one gets elected, and so they go in and so… Each assessor manages that data based on how important it is to them, or how important it is to their board of supervisors.
Jill K DeWit:
And there’s no… What am I trying to say? Lists of qualifications I think they have to have going into it, like I have a PhD in tax history.
Steven James Butala:
I mean, or-
Jill K DeWit:
Pretty sure that I wish they would, but I’m pretty sure they don’t.
Steven James Butala:
Do you look good in a cowboy hat seems to be one of the criteria for assessors, which I kind of respect. There should be, in my opinion, maybe, can you pass an eighth grade math test?
Jill K DeWit:
That would be nice.
Steven James Butala:
I don’t know.
Jill K DeWit:
Can you do Excel?
Steven James Butala:
I think everyone-
Jill K DeWit:
Can we have an Excel test? That would be nice.
Steven James Butala:
All kidding aside, there’s a lot of different things that go on behind from each one of these jurisdictions. But when you go into Data Tree, because First American has made it so beautiful and pretty, it looks like it’s all the same. It looks like if I’m pulling data from LA County, and I’m going to do the same thing, I’m going to do assessed improvement percentage of zero here. And I’m going to make myself a little list and then every time I do it, no matter where I go around the country, I’m going to pull my little list out. It just doesn’t work that way.
Jill K DeWit:
I have my same little checklist.
Steven James Butala:
It just doesn’t work that way. It’s not like buying stock through software. You have to mess with it and you have to pretty dramatically mess with it. To make a long story longer-
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you for saying it so I don’t have to. I’m like, “Woo.” No, I’m sorry, and you are correct. We have not got to the show yet.
Steven James Butala:
Your question about living square footage and all of that, that may be filled out by the assessor. It may not. In Eastern Washington state, there might be a county that loves to assess property based on the square footage of the house that’s on there. In LA County, they may love assessed improvement percentage. There’s land improvement percentage and vertical assessed percentage, land value and assessed improvement value. You have to mess around with this long…
And what’s great about Data Tree way over any other product I’ve ever used is that it allows you to horse around with it and find out before you even spend a dollar, before you even spend any money at all on data, you can see, oh yeah, this is working now. I’m capturing the data that I want. I’m keeping houses out of it. I’m only capturing land, maybe some mobile homes. My answer to you is this. You got to mess with it hardcore, hours and hours and hours. You have to mess with this to make sure and test it and retest it to make sure you’re capturing the data you want.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Can I answer it like a man?
Steven James Butala:
Like a man? What are we reversing role? Wow.
Jill K DeWit:
Pretty much. That was pretty long.
Steven James Butala:
Answer it like a man, that’s a classy subject.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, the one sentence you said wrapped it all up. Nicholas, you got to mess with it. Jiggle the wires. See what works.
Steven James Butala:
Jiggle the wires.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s error code 10.
Steven James Butala:
My gosh.
Jill K DeWit:
Just got to mess with it. That’s it. That’s all we got to say.
Steven James Butala:
Jill’s having some problems with her electric bike and she’s getting error code 10s.
Jill K DeWit:
Error code 10.
Steven James Butala:
Everything’s error code 10.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s error code 10.
Steven James Butala:
I’m one big walking error code 10 today.
Jill K DeWit:
Yes, you are error code 10. Yeah. Careful.
Steven James Butala:
Latest topic, this is your company, not your side hustle. This is the meat of the show.
Jill K DeWit:
How the heck did that dumb title get so overused?
Steven James Butala:
Side hustle? I don’t get it either.
Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t it funny? When I see that, immediately it evokes an image of me, of a man or a couple, because he’s standing with a supermodel girlfriend, leaning up against his super car in front of his jet.
Steven James Butala:
Or helicopter, yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. That’s where it comes from, and it bums me out because it’s a good title because a lot of people… I see this. Well, there’s a lot of people in Land Academy that have started out this way. They started out as a side hustle used the right way. It’s kind of like the word wholesale. That got turned around too. I can’t use that word anymore. They started out the right way. This was a side hustle. They were hustling, working hard, doing it on the side until it became so big that they didn’t have to have their day job anymore and now it’s their business. This whole side hustle thing, I don’t think that word now evokes the seriousness that I think it deserves.
Look, whether you’re doing it on the side, I mean, a lot of us are, our ourselves included. Us included, man. We’ve been there. I know what’s like to work your little fanny off on your lunch and your breaks and your evenings and your weekends and your mornings. Remember, we had the 4:00 AM club for a while? We had a group of people that would get up at 4:00 and they would connect.
Steven James Butala:
Yeah. Yeah, totally.
Jill K DeWit:
It was when we started the accountability group period. There was a group of them that said the only time I can really do this is at 4:00 AM, and they said, “I’ll do it with you.” And there’s a handful of them that would all be on 4:00 AM shift, whatever. And they would get together and have their own accountability group. That was the best time for them. But for me, the whole point is here, this is serious. You’re running a business.
Steven James Butala:
Thank you. This is serious.
Jill K DeWit:
You’re running a business. This is not funny, not playing around. I’m not just going to throw $10,000 at it and see what happens. I mean, you could. I wouldn’t though. I wouldn’t. I’m like, if you’re going to do it, just do it. Whatever you are going to do, give it your all, I don’t know how not to. You know that with me. Sometimes you have to pull me away from things. You’re like, “What are you doing?”
Steven James Butala:
It’s totally true.
Jill K DeWit:
I’ll get so into something. Then I’m actually doing everybody’s jobs.
Steven James Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
Because I’m like, I have to make sure it’s done right. And that’s a whole nother show and a whole nother topic. But I take everything that we do, every deal I look at, every phone call I answer, very serious, like it is the one, is going to make or break my company.
Steven James Butala:
I grew up in an environment in Detroit that was a very manufacturing-based situation and so there’s no manufacturing anything halfway. Very often all throughout my childhood, as I was exposed to people who were involved in that environment, whether it was in sales or accounting or actual manufacturing as maybe a machinist, or an administrator in a small parts company that was supplying General Motors on and on and on. And very often I would hear people talk about, especially as the people that were in the softer parts of it, not necessarily the machinist part that they have a side company they own. They’re part owners.
My dad was one of these people his entire working professional life. He always had something else going on. Oh, I just bought this apartment building over here with this guy. And so they never called it a side hustle. They were really serious about it because they would buy it, manage it, resell it, and it took a lot of time. And so they would always say, “Yeah, I started this company over here. I have a company on the side. This is my regular job. I have an accounting practice, but we were also buying these buildings with some of my clients and we’re…” And so that was always a very normal state of being professionally for me, and it still is now. We’re always coming up with the new stuff on the side.
Jill K DeWit:
You know what’s funny about that, though? I think back in the day, your example of your dad, I don’t think that his goal was really to have that overtake his business. I think it was just-
Steven James Butala:
It was totally his goal.
Jill K DeWit:
It was?
Steven James Butala:
Absolutely.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh.
Steven James Butala:
Yeah. He wanted to get out of there.
Jill K DeWit:
He did? Oh, I thought it was just like a way to make money on the side.
Steven James Butala:
He had an accounting practice where he had to talk to people and he that was never his natural state, just like me.
Jill K DeWit:
But he worked up to get a practice. There was a lot that goes into that in employees and staff and customers.
Steven James Butala:
Yeah, and then I don’t think he liked it that much.
Jill K DeWit:
But I didn’t know that was his whole-
Steven James Butala:
He accomplished it. His whole intent was to buy a bunch of buildings and sell them for a lot more and not work anymore, which he did.
Jill K DeWit:
Very, very interesting.
Steven James Butala:
I think that where the confusion is, is the word hustle. I don’t know. Hustle had a really negative connotation when I was younger and still does, for that reason.
Jill K DeWit:
It shouldn’t.
Steven James Butala:
Yeah. It means one of two things. I’m a drug dealer on the corner, hustling hard to sell. It’s very negative connotation or hustling, which is probably a lot more positive, is just like, I’m a go getter and I’m… What does it mean to you?
Jill K DeWit:
It’s my Dad. Pick up the pace. Hustle, man.
Steven James Butala:
We’re talking about our dads today.
Jill K DeWit:
Totally.
Steven James Butala:
It’s weird.
Jill K DeWit:
We did that with our kids, though. Come on, you got it in you. Pick up the pace. Hustle.
Steven James Butala:
I believe people are born with a certain mile per hour and that’s it.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh no, you could have changed it. There’s a percentage that you could dial it up, dial it down.
Steven James Butala:
Okay.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, come on. We know there is.
Steven James Butala:
Right, so here’s the other part of this. It’s your company, so you need to plan for or implement payroll through things like ADP. You need to file a tax return and your tax return shouldn’t file you. You should file a tax return. And this comes up because it’s very popular right now, for some reason.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s a popular topic.
Steven James Butala:
It’s just because of what I said. We’re getting the right people that are really, really taking this seriously. And they’re like, “Hey, tell me about bookkeeping. Tell me about taxes.” We talk about this stuff all the time, whether it’s in Discord or on the Thursday webinar. And so it tells me that they’re asking these questions, they’re treating this like a company and they’re out there buying and selling land and they don’t want to pay too much in taxes or make some big mistakes from a company ownership standpoint, not just buying and selling land.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. I can end it on this for me. If that’s you, if you are here because it’s not just a whatever you want to call it, something on the side to make a little extra money and just see how it goes, if you’re here to… Oh, no, I want this to take over my income, my wife’s income, plan for my kids’ colleges and maybe even make this a family business, then you are in the right place.
Steven James Butala:
Totally agree.
Jill K DeWit:
There you go. Happy you could join us today. Whoops. Where am I? Thank you.
Steven James Butala:
Oh, sorry, Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. Five days a week you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven James Butala:
Tomorrow the episode on the Land Academy show is called Land Academy is a Performance-Based Ecosystem. I’m proud to say you are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Sounds like a marine biology show. Is it because you’ve been watching all those animal shows?
Steven James Butala:
No.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh.
Steven James Butala:
No, it’s not.
Jill K DeWit:
Are you going to tie this into animal shows and the ecosystem?
Steven James Butala:
Uh-uh (negative).
Jill K DeWit:
Okay.
Steven James Butala:
No, we are slowly creeping away from performance-based reward system in this entire country.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh.
Steven James Butala:
And moving our way into… It’s okay, you can have a participation ribbon.
Jill K DeWit:
Everybody gets a trophy.
Steven James Butala:
Yes. Along the theme of today, everybody gets a trophy, along the theme of today, I’m so happy to say that the people that are joining our group are all about performance. They’re all about, hey, the more mail I send out, the better I answer the phone, the more I’m involved in the Land Academy community and then use the tools that we provide, the more money I’m making. And it’s really evident. And we’ll talk about it tomorrow.
Jill K DeWit:
Awesome. Hey, thanks for tuning in. By the way, in case you did not hear, we have recently released, in 2022, our latest and greatest and updated program Land Academy 3.0, Catching Up With Land Academy. Go check it out at landacademy.com or send a note to support@landacademy.com. We are Jack and Jill.
Steven James Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information-
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration-
Steven James Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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