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’s Jack Thursday. I’m going to talk about confidence. I mentioned yesterday that I don’t think this topic gets enough attention and I think that it’s an underrated topic that needs to be talked about more often than it should. And I came up with this concept because we just got done with Career Path, Jill and I, for last year-

Jill K DeWit:
In the summer-

Steven Jack Butala:
And the last group of Career Path people, it was pretty clear which ones had confidence and which ones didn’t. And it’s very, very interesting to hear everybody’s stories and how they present their land acquisition stories in Career Path, and see how confident they are. Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It’s free, and please don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel. Comment on the shows you like.

Jill K DeWit:
Evan wrote, ‘When sending neighbor letters to find a buyer from my property, has anyone found it more effective to set filters on who receives a letter? For example, I could send a thousand letters to all the property owners within a two mile radius of my property. Or I could send a thousand letters to everyone that owns two or more parcels of land within a 10 mile radius. I’d love to hear opinions on this.’ It’s a good question.

Steven Jack Butala:
I would do both because let’s do the math-

Jill K DeWit:
[inaudible 00:01:31]-

Steven Jack Butala:
A thousand letters to everybody in a two mile radius, that’s $500. A thousand letters to everybody who owns two or more properties in a 10 mile radius. Yes, do that too. So now you’re spending a thousand dollars marketing expense, let’s call it, to reach, geez, thousands and thousands and thousands of people who already own real estate surrounding the property that you have-

Jill K DeWit:
To 2000 people. A thousand dollars to reach 2000 people who are likely buyers.

Steven Jack Butala:
Very, very logical buyers.

Jill K DeWit:
I agree with this.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ve never, ever… Stop me if I’m wrong here, [inaudible 00:02:05] this-

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I will.

Steven Jack Butala:
But I’ve never, ever had anyone in Land Academy or anyone else come to me and say, “Yeah, this neighbor letter thing-

Jill K DeWit:
Is stupid-

Steven Jack Butala:
And it doesn’t work. And I must have missed it because I didn’t get any response.” No. Everybody’s going to respond. The amount of response that you’re going to get in that little community because you have a property that’s for sale and it’s undervalued.

Jill K DeWit:
Right.

Steven Jack Butala:
Everybody wants to know what their property’s worth. They want to talk about it.

Jill K DeWit:
And you’re also going to drum up buyers.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep.

Jill K DeWit:
That often happens too. I don’t want to sell, or I’m not interested in this one, but what else do you have over here? Now I know how you roll, that kind of a thing. That happens on the sell side too, or with our regular mails too. I love it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday. I’m going to talk about confidence. This is why you’re listening. Confidence really is a huge indicator about how successful you’re going to be just about anything in life. I think that it’s something that you can develop. I don’t think you’re necessarily born with it. I think that-

Jill K DeWit:
I agree.

Steven Jack Butala:
Obviously there’s nature nurture to everything. But I really believe that working on… If you’re going to work on yourself, let’s say, and-

Jill K DeWit:
Let’s talk more about that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill loves this topic. I think most women love this topic.

Jill K DeWit:
Please tell me. All right, finish your sentence and I want to ask some questions please.

Steven Jack Butala:
You know what we should do? We should spend about eight hours a week working on our relationship together.

Jill K DeWit:
No, no, no-

Steven Jack Butala:
And another eight hours working on ourselves.

Jill K DeWit:
Please tell me. Wait-

Steven Jack Butala:
And then we can file bankruptcy.

Jill K DeWit:
Please tell me, Jack, what are you doing working on yourself right now? I would like to know. I’m sure Jill spends eight hours. Jack spends eight minutes. I get new face cream. You’re like, “Hmm, maybe I’ll cut my nails today. Maybe I won’t.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Yep. Probably not.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Eventually they break and it works out fine.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think that if you pick up… If somebody’s calling you to sell their land and you have a real sense of confidence. I’m not saying cocky, I’m not saying that at all. I just mean confidence about your pricing, confidence of the real estate and a little bit of basic knowledge of the area where you’re sending property, what comparison values are and you know that waterfront property is more valuable than not, and just basic stuff. And you’re presenting yourself in a way that is confident, it will dramatically increase your success percentages on a mailer. And that goes with everything. What I found after we started Land Academy in 2014 or ’15, there’s a lot of confident people that join this group.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh gosh, yes.

Steven Jack Butala:
Because I think confident people are whatever the motivation is to join this group, aside from getting rich, like we talked about earlier. Confident people don’t want to work for somebody else their entire life.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s very true.

Steven Jack Butala:
They also don’t want to be told what to do in their relationship.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s for sure.

Steven Jack Butala:
I think I would go so far as to say there is no replacement for confidence. And this is why I brought up working on yourself because I’m sure, I haven’t looked, but I’m sure if you Google how to be more confident, there’s going to be all kinds of classes you can take and groups you can join and books you can read or however you become a better person as you go through your life. Confidence should be at the top of the list.

Jill K DeWit:
How would you become a better person, Jack?

Steven Jack Butala:
You know Jill, I’ll let you answer that for me.

Jill K DeWit:
Because I will. Here’s what is going to happen.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, it doesn’t involve toenails.

Jill K DeWit:
You’re going to be a better person right now and here’s why. I’m just kidding. No, no. What’s funny though, I’m thinking about confidence and this comes up often when I’m working with people and they’re getting ready for the phone to ring. Everything they’ve done up to that point, they haven’t had to talk to anybody really. They’ve followed the steps to [inaudible 00:06:19] came and the mail goes out, and now calls are going to come back like, “Oh, I don’t know this area, I don’t know this, I don’t know that. I don’t own anything yet. I’ve never done this before.” That’s the first big time that I experienced people like, “Jill, I need help with confidence on this.” I’m like, “Okay, so here’s what you do. You need to have practice. Just do practice with your friend, practice with whoever, seller phone calls, and know what questions you need to ask and what information you need to get. That will help you be more comfortable and that will give you the confidence that you need.”
So what do you do real quick? In Land Academy, it’s in your program material or if you just go on landinvestors.com, I think it’s on the left hand side if you scroll down, I still think it’s on there on our website. You can have a sheet, Jill’s inbound seller checklist. Print that out and have that seriously on your desk or however you want to do it. People have made it all automated and made it fancy before and made where it just goes into Airtable for themselves. You don’t have to do all that. But just that list of questions right there will help your confidence right away. If you know, okay, I need to get their name, check. Contact information, check. Do they like the offer price? Okay. Things to ask about the property, that kind of a thing. That helps right there.

Steven Jack Butala:
What you don’t want to have is a false sense of confidence.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
Knowing-

Jill K DeWit:
That’s cocky.

Steven Jack Butala:
Knowing the subject material like Jill just said, is really the fastest way to get confident on anything. And then maybe sharpening-

Jill K DeWit:
And then just do it.

Steven Jack Butala:
Voice intonation in your speech and how you talk on the phone and a lot of that, which you can learn on the internet fairly quickly, and find somebody who is a great example that you can follow. One of the first things you do before you get a YouTube channel is they tell you to find somebody out there who’s a celebrity or maybe somebody in your life that you want to follow, and you want to sound like them and come off like that.

Jill K DeWit:
I never read that. Isn’t that funny though? You were the first time I’d ever heard that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, it worked for me. I love Tim Allen. I just think he makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. And so what ends up happening with a false sense of confidence and I don’t know where this comes from, is you don’t know the material and you start spewing all this stuff like you do know the material, and what you’re really doing is regurgitating what somebody said a few minutes ago in a different environment. We have direct experience with this right now because there’s a handful of people that over the years have copied the entire Land Academy program and recreated it for themselves with their own names and their own stuff and word for word.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh yeah!

Steven Jack Butala:
Copied it all and they’re out there hawking it with the false sense of confidence.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true-

Steven Jack Butala:
They’ve done about five real estate transactions in their entire lives.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s true. Five minutes and five deals and you too are a pro.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re addressing that, how we think that’s appropriate.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s kind of funny.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’ll leave it at that.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
All kidding aside, confidence is really important for everything. Like I said yesterday, starting with attracting somebody else, whatever that means to you, who’s got the same level of confidence you have and then growing together. Like I said, I couldn’t get a girl like Jill if I didn’t have at least some confidence. Or at least I fooled her long enough so that she thought I had a sense of confidence.

Jill K DeWit:
Fell for it. You know what, the thing I’m going to end it on this for me is the nature part of me. There’s nature and nurture. So nurture is get the checklist out and practice and gain confidence. But there’s a lot of you in Land Academy, like you’re an eight on the Enneagram test or I’m a seven, maybe you’re like me, and you naturally just go for stuff. You’re not afraid of it. You’re not afraid of making mistakes. That for me is beautiful. I love that. There’s healthy people in our community that are like that. They’re like, “Okay, what do I do? Great. I just do that.” So if you don’t have it too, you can follow our steps, put your head down and we’ll guide you. Lots of ways to do this. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow’s Jill Friday. She’s going to talk about how to qualify a real estate, a real seller. How to qualify a real seller in a minute or less. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.

Jill K DeWit:
I want to make a comment here about what’s coming up this month. This is January 2023 and you asked for it, we listened. We are changing the format of our podcast. It’s going to be longer. We’re going to get to go more in depth on some of these topics, and it’s going to be a once a week thing so we could do some more deep diving into it. So I’m pretty excited about that, so stay tuned. That’s going to be changing over here quickly.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re Jack and Jill-

Jill K DeWit:
We’re Jack and Jill-

Steven Jack Butala:
Information-

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration-

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.