Debunking the Passive Income Myth in Land Deals & 10-15 Deals a Year to Millionaire Status (LA 1943)

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Debunking the Passive Income Myth in Land Deals & 10-15 Deals a Year to Millionaire Status (LA 1943)

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Subscribe to the Land Academy podcast

In this episode of the Land Academy Show, Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit discuss the myth of passive income in relation to buying and selling land. They also delve into how only 10-15 deals a year can lead to millionaire status. The hosts answer questions from their Land Academy Discord forum and review land acquisitions from their weekly Thursday member webinar. Join them as they take a deep dive into the world of land-related topics and share their insights on the industry.

Transcript: 

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, and this is the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is episode number 1,943, and today we are talking in depth about the myth of passive income, as it applies to buying and selling land. In the beginning, we’re going to talk about that, and then ultimately, later in the episode, we’re going to talk about how it only takes 10 or 15 deals a year to make a million bucks.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s fun when you really think about it and you work it backwards, you’re kind of like, “Oh, yeah, that’s really is all it takes. Like I could do a deal a month and make a million.” “Yeah.”

Steven Jack Butala:
We have a bunch of people who signed up largely because of some promotions that Jill and her staff did at the end of the year, so it’s March, and they’re getting mail-out, and there’s a lot of chatter in a very positive way in Discord, “But I sent a mailer out. I got 12 or 13 responses back, but there’s no deals.”

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, that’s different. Oh, that’s a whole another thing.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, no. There’s a deal in there, I’m sure.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s another conversation.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about later, but there’s deals in all this stuff, and you don’t need to do 22 deals in one month. You need to do one.

Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that funny?

Steven Jack Butala:
One great deal, every month.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, wait, wait. Let’s talk about that. When we get to the passive income part, in a minute here, and we talk about that, and then I have some stuff to say about the 22 deals in a month.

Steven Jack Butala:
Hey, I hope you’re enjoying this new 2022 weekly show-

Jill K DeWit:
’23.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sorry, ’23 version of it. Anyway, Jesus, almost the first quarter. Each week we answer questions from our Land Academy Discord forum. We review land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar, and then ultimately take a deep dive into the two land-related topics I just mentioned here, and those are all requested on Discord.
Now, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the Land Academy Discord online community. If you want a sneak peek of our Discord channel, please go to landacademy.com. It’s free and a read only format, and I really would encourage you-

Jill K DeWit:
Not all the areas, too. I was clicking around that the other day. It’s kind of cool. What you see on the Discord from our website, there’s some hidden areas where there’s even more deep dive deal discussions.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s why it’s a sneak peek, my dear.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. Exactly. All right. Bailey wrote… Or wait, is it Bailey or David?

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s David. Sorry.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Excuse me. Okay. David wrote, “Hi all. Kind of a random question. I’m curious if anyone has experienced creating mailers for commercial office space? Specifically, I’m looking for 5,000 to 10,000 square feet in the King County area in Washington, and 15,000 to 20,000 square feet in ‘fill in the blank’ parts of Florida. Right now, just trying to figure out if that criteria is too specific for this type of model before I really spend a lot of time on it. These would be owner-occupied offices for call centers, so could probably expand the criteria to some types of industrial spaces as well. Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Jack, why would you put a question like this? We’re supposed to be buying and selling land. That’s what this show is about. This show is about a lot more things than buying and selling land, and this person’s an established commercial real estate agent or broker, and he’s sitting down thinking, “Wait a minute, I have a database. We have a database of all the people who own land, 99.9% of the people who own real estate. We have a access to a database for those owners, and so do our Land Academy members.” There’s other databases, I have long threatened myself, not anyone else, threatened myself to do a program on the value of offers in direct mail for all kinds of stuff. You’re only as great as that database.
So, yeah. Yes, Jill and I have done this for apartment buildings. We’ve done it for specific, in very urban areas, very specifically zoned property for future high rise apartment buildings on behalf of one customer or client. I had a guy in our group, Jill and I had a guy in Land Academy, really early on, who took our database after a hailstorm, sent everybody a letter because he’s a roofing contractor, and said, “If you have these issues with your roof, please give me a call,” with great success.
So, this concept of sending direct mail with a serious call to action, like, “I want to buy your property, I’m going to buy your land for $5,234.22.” It’s very hard not to respond to that, as a recipient. And so, if you have the owner of office space, a receptive database, it’s workable. I would highly encourage you to do this. I’m working on a data set right now where we’re, Jill and I are thinking about expanding what we have to, this year, buy us some commercial buildings to collect the depreciation for tax reasons for 2023 taxes, and we’re going to do the exact same thing. I will send out a mail, Jill will answer the phones on some very specific tenant-driven, commercial, triple tenant buildings, and yeah, it works.

Jill K DeWit:
It works for everything. There’s a healthy number of people in our community that have used the Land Academy model like, “Hey, this is how we’re going to find our next cabin, sweetheart. I know where I want my cabin to be. I know the area, I know the zip code. I know exactly how big I want it to be. I know exactly how old I want it to be,” kind of thing, and use it for just any kind of thing. When you think about it, it’s a little scary what we have at our fingertips. Yeah. It’s not just land, it’s any-

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s every property.

Jill K DeWit:
… real estate property, every zoning. It’s the whole doggone assessor database nationwide, dream it up, with mortgage information. You could really get granular. If you want to get granular about this, you could. So, everything you just put in here… I think it’s David. And then you could add in, “I want a loan that’s been in place this long,” even loan the value. “I want to know that they own at least 20% equity into this building. I want to know it’s owned.” Yeah. You know what? You can. You could even dig in and find just the LLC-owned ones, or privately owned, maybe you want to just dig into the mom and pop ones, dream it up.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is a finite data set. The database is between 150 million and 155 million contact records-

Jill K DeWit:
That’s awesome.

Steven Jack Butala:
… for every single piece of real estate-

Jill K DeWit:
Everything.

Steven Jack Butala:
… not just every piece of land, or house, or condos, all of it, every commercial property. Is it incredibly simple to go in there and say, “I only want these properties that are owned by this person in this area”? No, you need to be-

Jill K DeWit:
Dig in a little bit.

Steven Jack Butala:
… honestly, you have to be into it.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
The first time I opened a data set, it was RealQuest, back in the day, I had to take a day off, literally. I was so elated with the possibility of what was going to happen in my life. I tell you, I was-

Jill K DeWit:
What’d you do with your day off?

Steven Jack Butala:
I can tell you, “You know what I did? It’s the same thing I do”-

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, it was more than a day. So, first, he spent a week in Mexico, party like a rockstar, then he came back. That’s what I think you did. Let’s be honest.

Steven Jack Butala:
I was very, very single when this happened and I didn’t go to Mexico-

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, excuse me.

Steven Jack Butala:
… but old town Scottsdale-

Jill K DeWit:
Served to the purpose.

Steven Jack Butala:
… was in for a treat. And that’s true. It was probably two days because I knew right then and there, after looking at it for an hour what was possible. And here we are. That was the late nineties. That database that you have access to as a Land Academy member, the Data Tree national database, the one that’s got all of it, and they continue to improve it. It’s something else.

Jill K DeWit:
The one that you get when you’re in Land Academy automatically.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Yes. It’s worth the price of admission, and I’ll tell you, if you had to go get it on your own, it would be worth more slot. I’m not selling anything here. It’d be a lot more expensive.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s why we do this.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Today’s first topic is the myth of passive income as it applies to buy and selling land. In the Discord section, we have a section called Noob for new people, and we ask you in our program, the first thing is go to Discord, introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself and what’s going on and why. And in there is a very lengthy, very well written entry about how a person who has a lot of commercial real estate experience joined another group on the internet and wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the group or, quote, unquote, “How in depth it was about this topic”. And so, he finally found us, which forced me or sparked the idea for this topic. Passive income, which is what this specific group teaches, does not apply to this. And throughout the next 15 minutes, I’m going to basically describe to you and prove to you why passive anything doesn’t apply. Are you passive in your marriage? Are you passive with your little sister? Are you passive in your schoolwork or passive in college?

Jill K DeWit:
Can I jump in?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you are, you’re going to fail at it.

Jill K DeWit:
So, here’s the thing. That’s what we were talking about this morning when we were thinking about this topic is-

Steven Jack Butala:
Did you just roll your eyes over there?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, I’m sure I did because it’s stupid. It’s bad.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, I thought you’d roll your eyes at me.

Jill K DeWit:
No. Yeah, no.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, good. There’s another target besides me today.

Jill K DeWit:
No, you’ll know I roll my eyes at you.

Steven Jack Butala:
No, I don’t. That’s the problem.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, God.

Steven Jack Butala:
It could be anything.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, well.

Steven Jack Butala:
It wasn’t me this time.

Jill K DeWit:
No, no, it’s not you. It’s sometimes you, but not at this time. So, no, I roll my eyes because I don’t want you to feel bad and I want you to know that you are not alone. If you thought that, “What do you mean I can’t buy a property here for $1,000, and then get $300,000 down and then $99 a month for five years, and have 10 of those, and just sit back and go, ‘Woo-hoo.’ And I do nothing.” Well, because that’s what some people are out there kind of teaching and talking about and coaching, and I’m like, “What do you mean there’s not going to be any work?” “Oh, there’s work.”
There’s always people that don’t pay, lose their jobs, things happen, fall off the planet, whatever it is, you get to take and you don’t want to take it back. There’s so much customer service, especially when you think about it too… Let me think about this for a second. A person who’s buying a couple thousand dollars property or a person who’s buying a hundred thousand dollars property, think about how different those people are. One’s like, “This is all I have. I’m so excited.” And one’s like, “I’m a pro, we don’t need to talk about this.” So, that’s one aspect to think about.

Steven Jack Butala:
A lot of years ago, early on in the Land Academy scenario, I wrote a blog called Chasing Zero. People still contact me about this concept. So, I’m literally writing an ebook, a pretty substantial ebook. I don’t know what it’s going to be at some point, might be a regular book. About chasing zero, and what chasing zero really is, and apparently it sung to a lot of people, at least the type of people that join Land Academy is this. I wake up in the morning trying to do less stuff than I did yesterday. So if I can remove somehow something that was a pain in the butt or something even that I just had to do, remove that out of my life so I can go and do more meaningful things to me, then that’s what chasing zero is for me. And so, I’m constantly chasing this concept of how can I outsource with the stuff I don’t want to do?
How can I get a partner to do the things I don’t want to do to make everything more efficient so I can actually go do the things that I want to do? And I don’t mean go fishing, I mean start a new company or something like that. A great example is getting a housekeeper. I don’t want to do all this housework. Jill doesn’t want to do it. It’s really not expensive at all in the scheme of things, let’s get a housekeeper. Check, that’s one thing I got out of my life. I have many, many, many other examples. This is why we have employees because we can’t all do all the stuff that they do all day.
We could possibly do it all. You get burned out, you’re not going to do it right, we have people that are marketers limited, Jill has a transaction coordinator, to this day, I believe this and so does Jill, that is way better doing deals than Jill and I is. She’s better on the phone. She’s more meticulous. She’s part kook, and I say that-

Jill K DeWit:
In a good way.

Steven Jack Butala:
… with affection. She’s just kooky enough to talk to these real estate agents and these escrow agents. And so that was a huge chunk out of our lives. And our lives are better because she’s in it, so we’re chasing zero. I’m constantly chasing zero.

Jill K DeWit:
So-

Steven Jack Butala:
The passive-

Jill K DeWit:
Go ahead.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, my point in saying all this is that I wake up trying to chase some type of passive income. It just doesn’t work that way. Anything that’s worthwhile is going to require some type of involvement on your part. Might not be after you’ve got all the pieces in place and the players in place and all of it. Your involvement might be, I’m on standby, Jill is on standby for all the deals that we’re doing. We’ve got great people in place, so they don’t need her very often, but they need her once in a while. So, that’s not passive income. Passive income is when you take a thousand dollars and you put it into a CD, a certificate of deposit or a checking… Not even a checking out, a passive… There’s all kinds of passive investment vehicles, but even then, you still get in a statement every month, and you open it, and you look at it.

Jill K DeWit:
So, my whole thing, this comes up often when I’m talking to people about joining Land Academy. They’re like, “Well, why wouldn’t I do this?” I said, “Well, let’s talk about that for a second, because I’ve been there, done that, and I know a lot of people that have been there done that. And you do this model, okay, you go along, I’m going to buy 50 properties and I’m going to get $99 a month coming in. That’s my goal. Awesome.” Is that five grand?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, I had to think about that.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a Jill rhetorical question.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. So, that’s still for a lot of people. I’m like, “That’s perfect. That’s all I want to do.” “Okay, now think about this. You got 50 customers. You think that every single month, all your 50 people at $99 a month are going to pay? Please test that and call me in a year.” And they do. Well then, so, that’s number one. And I’m like, “I just have to say it from experience and please ask the community because a lot of people in our community have been there, done that.” So you’re like, “Okay, here’s the other thing. Think about do you want to get wealthy? It’s one thing to sit back and just say, ‘I got five grand coming in every month,’ but that’s all I got. I’m not building anything right now too. When those five grand pay off and I deed them the property, I don’t have anything.
I just got those months of, I had all my expenses paid for, versus, what if I take this money and I put this into a property one deal? I start with $10,000, instead of buying 10 $1,000 properties and setting them up like this? What if I put this $10,000 into one property and made that 20,000? And then I put that 20,000 into something, next month and I made it 40,000, and then I make it 80,000 and now, I’ve only done not even five deals and now you’re staring at $100,000. Now, you can start making some different decisions. Do you still want to go do that? Probably not. And you could do one deal a month like that and you’re doing so much less work and it’s just-

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s still not passive-

Jill K DeWit:
It’s not. But not-

Steven Jack Butala:
… and that’s my point. But none of it is passive.

Jill K DeWit:
… no, for me, passive is… I’ll tell you right now, I feel like I have passive income because I work maybe four hours a week on land deals. Not kidding.

Steven Jack Butala:
And I honestly would argue, Jill, because I think that’s what happens. That’s actually what our just if we didn’t have Land Academy, Jill and I would probably work four to eight hours week, probably four hours a week.

Jill K DeWit:
You would work more than I do. So, your mail would take more yours. Trolling and mail probably takes… Mine’s like I’d just wait for the phone to ring.

Steven Jack Butala:
But it’s still not passive. So, I thought this term would go away, but it’s just stuck around. Geez, when we started Land Academy, there is such a trend, a massive trend, way bigger than it is now. Now it’s like side gig or side hustle. Those things are cute little words for you don’t want to work that hard. And so, if you go into Land Academy-

Jill K DeWit:
Which I’m doing either.

Steven Jack Butala:
… listen, if you go into all the stuff that you see, I’ll use Grant Cardone as an example, or just anybody who’s standing in front of their airplane, if any of it’s real and most of it’s not. But I think in his case it’s real. He started in a college dorm with three stinky idiot, got kids who were probably amounted to nothing and he just believed in himself and had that first employee, and then that second employee, and a third employee, and maybe a first wife, and then that second wife, whatever. I don’t know his… It is good-

Jill K DeWit:
It’s his first wife I think, and I think she’s awesome. Please don’t [inaudible 00:18:59] Elena.

Steven Jack Butala:
Is that her name, really?

Jill K DeWit:
Yes.

Steven Jack Butala:
How do you know this stuff?

Jill K DeWit:
Because I think she’s okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is truly amazing.

Jill K DeWit:
Because I think they’re cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, I’m just using him as an example. But the guy-

Jill K DeWit:
We don’t go to lunch or anything. Not yet.

Steven Jack Butala:
… the guy, he’s just full of fire.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, he worked his ear off.

Steven Jack Butala:
He doesn’t want anything passive.

Jill K DeWit:
No.

Steven Jack Butala:
He’s waking up every day smashing it. So, I would like to make this official that buying and selling land is not passive. Well, there’s a lot of work.

Jill K DeWit:
Come say-

Steven Jack Butala:
From when you join and figure it out and do your first deal three to five years, it can be almost passive, but it’s the word’s not passive. It can be not very much work.

Jill K DeWit:
How about on autopilot? A lot of it, that’s what I think.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.

Jill K DeWit:
Here’s my final point on this. No matter what you’re going to do right now, if you’re listening to this because you’re trying to make a change, right? You’re like, “All right, do I go into land? Do I go get my real estate license? Do I save up and buy a Domino’s pizza chain?” I don’t know, whatever franchise, fill in the blank. They’re all going to be work. No matter what it is, they’re all going to take something. And especially in the beginning, I don’t care really what it is and what it’s going to spin off, it’s going to take work. And it started going to, you got a lot to learn. So, pick something that sings to you, number one. And number two, speaking from experience from someone who has owned a pizza operation, pick something with a better ROI-

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, that matters.

Jill K DeWit:
… than a pizza. Because if you think two, $2 an order is going to get you wealthy this month, I got to tell you it’s not. It’s a slow road to a wealth.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s really, really deconstruct that. You have eight hours a day, eight to 10 hours of depending on what your personal life is like. Between eight and 18 hours a day to spend on whatever, chasing your dream, let’s call it that. You have all kinds of decisions to make because you could be Elon Musk if that’s what you wanted. or you could be a shopkeeper, a convenience store owner, or anything in between. Land Academy falls in the between that. And so, you have all kinds of choices, but chasing something that’s passive is not the right path. Chasing something that pays out that eventually you can scale, which is buying and selling land, in my opinion, and where you can grow it to as much as you want, and it’s mostly variable costs, that makes a lot of sense to me. A lot of commercial real estate people that are old school, I’m actually old school commercial real estate, this business model doesn’t work because you have to go out and churn these deals.
You have to buy a deal and sell it and buy a deal and sell it, which for whatever reason, between Jill and I, it really fits our skill sets really well. Commercial real estate people would argue, “Well, if I buy this regional strip center and I finance it correctly and I have the right partners with the right project, with the right property manager in place and it stays occupied, I don’t have to do anything.” But you do, you just enjoy it, that’s why you don’t think that you’re doing anything but you’re constantly thinking about, “All right, we bought it at a seven capitalization rate. The rent escalations are going to get us to a 12 cap. In three years, we got to prep for the 10.99 exchange.” Property management firms don’t do that. And you’re nuts if you let your accountant do it because they’re not going to do it right. And those of you who are in that situation know exactly what I’m talking about. So, no, it’s not passive. It’s just happens to be something that you really like versus talking to tenants.

Jill K DeWit:
I understand. You know when you think of owning an office building and things like that, all I could think of is… I’d be worrying, “The roof’s not going to need something, and all the plumbing’s going to work today-

Steven Jack Butala:
Same thing.

Jill K DeWit:
… fill in the blank.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, but Jack, there’s triple leases that you can lease to something like Bank of America.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure, sure.

Jill K DeWit:
And then you’re still thinking about the 10:31 exchange and the rent escalation and that service.
Okay. I know I said I was ending it on that, but now I’m really ending it on this for me, why everybody got so lazy? Maybe this is part of the culture. That’s a whole another show.

Steven Jack Butala:
No, I think now’s the time. I love this.

Jill K DeWit:
Why is our culture, why is this planet lazy?

Steven Jack Butala:
I love this, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
I remember going in, punching a time clock. “Wait, this is a discussion we had other days. What do you mean after three occurrences, you were fired?” I’m like, “Yes, I’ve had a job. And those of you know what I’m talking about. There was attendance, and you had to be on time, punch a clock, and after three you were let go.” That’s just what you had three in a year. You had a rolling 12 month period, you’re let go. And I remember getting excited when things would, after 12 months would fall off. Like, “Oh good, 12 months has passed, now I’m back down to zero.” So, if I’m sick one day, I’m late, car accident. That’s just kind of what it was. And you had to get up and go to work. And honestly, I kind of like it. I like doing stuff. I like moving forward. I like buying property. I like watching the bank balance go up. I like knowing that my daily stuff contributes to that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s a thought that I’ve had recently. I was a kid through the ’70s and fortunate enough to have computers in my life since middle school, whether they’re in school, in the library, and ultimately as a Christmas present for my parents because they were tired of me talking about it. And all I kept thinking during that period was, “I know where this is going. I know that this computer that’s on my desk is going to get better and cheaper because you could see that happening every year then, and they’re going to connect eventually.” I remember, me and my friends connecting our computers together for the first time when we were in maybe junior high and then looking at each other saying, “Well, what if all computers are connected?” And so, we were always never appreciating the time we were in.
So then, you get a little bit older, it’s like, “wow, these times next year are going to be greater. They’re going to be better.” And then, I was in accounting for commercial real estate, “oh, next year I’m going to have a better year than this year. Oh, accounting, I’m going to get promoted and it’s going to be better.” And then something like COVID happens or 9/11 happens, when both of those things happen and it didn’t make it better. COVID made this worse, and that’s what Jill’s referring to. We are now socially kind of depleted or diminished because of these events where there’s more restrictions on us now. Everybody’s staying at home for two years, it doesn’t help anything. It doesn’t help anything. Certainly, under the guise of being passive. That’s what be staying at home for two years is, passive. It’s not active.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
By the way, Land Academy and our land business thrived during those two years. We smashed it. I mean we doubled our revenue, company-wide and we’ve kept it there.

Jill K DeWit:
I wasn’t expecting that too when it all happened. I’m like, “Oh, everybody, this is going to sink the ship,” and then like, “Oh no, this is even better for all of us.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, in summary, I get chasing zero. I get wanting to put your feet up with a cocktail in your hand in the Caribbean permanently someday.

Jill K DeWit:
Mexico. I get that. I get it. I have those same versions of those same goals. They all involve Jill now, not just me, in our family, but I’m way too young for that. And we do it a couple times a year and that’s good enough for me. And we have a ton of employees that are doing this stuff. So, you’re not going to do this in the first 24 months of anything that you start, but it will happen if you’re not chasing something passive. Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from the weekly Thursday memo member webinar. That was kind of ranty on both of our parts.
Maybe. Did you know, we have a full-blown ready… Boy, we just visited it again a couple of weeks ago. Direct mail printing operation to help you. Check out offers and the 2owners.com. It’s awesome. So, let me tell you a little bit about what we can do. If you’re like, “Okay, this is great. I hear you guys talking about data or hear about talking about getting offers to sellers. There’s a piece in the middle. How do I get these letters to these people? Am I handwriting things? Oh my gosh, no. Can you imagine how long that would take?”
No, offers by the thousands are getting out to property owners to buy their property and that’s how we got where we are today. So, check out offers at 2owners.com. Basically, what you’re going to do is go on there, give them a call if you have any questions, but it’s where you can go and upload a spreadsheet. They’ll put it into a beautiful letter format for you and get it in the mail with your offer price, your company logo, your website, your name, your phone number. Everything will be on there. And including, if you’re like, “Okay, that’s great, but I’m still not that good about the data part.” Well, don’t worry, we have a service there. It’s our concierge service, and they will actually go download the data for you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Same one we use.

Jill K DeWit:
Get it pre-scrubbed for you, ready to price with stuff for you to know how to make an accurate price like some sales comps and price per acre from wherever you guys scrub it, and you can accurately price these offers and get them out and it really will keep you on track too.

Steven Jack Butala:
Nice work, Jill.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take another question posted by one of our members on the Land Academy Discord online community. Again, if you want to sneak peek at this, go to our Discord channel and take a look at it on landacademy.com. It’s free and it’s read-only.

Jill K DeWit:
Greg wrote, “Hi, everyone. I’m James from Salt Lake City, Utah. Brief background, I got started in a commercial real estate 2005 by raising an investing capital in the 50 unit multi-family property in the Bronx, New York City. I’ve since raised capital for more of those over the years with the biggest raise just last quarter. While in New York City, I attended NYU’s commercial real estate master’s program and was very involved. So, I know commercial real estate folks all over the world. I worked in acquisitions for a couple of years, then transitioned to a brokerage where I’ve spent most of my time in the office and industrial sectors in Salt Lake City. I’ve spent time working in every CRE sector. I’ve gotten nice fees, but I’ve seen my clients knock the ball out of this park comparatively. So, joining this group is my foray into running my own business and calling my own shots. Thrilled to be a part of Land Academy, although it’s taken me a bit to think of that as Land Academy rather than, oh, Los Angeles.” LA, LOL, got it.

Steven Jack Butala:
I agree with you.

Jill K DeWit:
Didn’t think about that.

Steven Jack Butala:
I did, I think about it all the time.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, that’s funny. “And looking to be actively involved and bring value where I can. I have access to pro versions of CoStar and LoopNet at my brokerage, which may prove useful at times. I’m a recently joined member of the Land Geek program as well. But the deal sizes here are ultimately more my size or style. I’m committed to probably both. I’m committed to sending a large amount of mail out this year, so I’m just trying to get set up right now so I can pull the trigger on my first mailer ASAP. Looking forward to learning from all of you and creating something special here.” You’re not alone. There’s a lot of people that came here from other groups and a lot of it is, “Hey, I got my feet wet. I get it. I learned the land thing, but now I’m here to do some bigger deals or make this my career. “

Steven Jack Butala:
This is exactly how I got started in 1993 in commercial real estate. I got tired of making other people money as a broker. I got tired of waiting on the phone. Jill knows this. Waiting on the phone for a decision after talking to somebody and listening to somebody described their perfect acquisition. Me spending a month and a half on my own dime to go find out, find that perfect acquisition or 10 of them, and only to have that person say, “Yeah, I changed my mind.” So, that being the person on the other side of the phone has always been my dream until I was that person on the other side of the phone. Then now, Jill’s the other side, and that’s it’s even better. Jill’s on the other side of the phone.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re thinking about joining LAN Academy, this is the kind of people this person just joined. These are the kinds of people that you’re going to rub shoulders with. And if this makes sense to you, this person has a tremendous amount to offer this group. I hope they join career path. Because I have questions for this person because raising capital of commercial real estate is not what it used to be. It was very hard in the past. But the internet, raising capital has become a lot easier. It’s easier for you as a Land Academy member, potential Land Academy member, because that’s what we all are. We’re sources of capital for you for your acquisitions.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally.

Steven Jack Butala:
I love having this type of person in our group who comes to us consciously saying, “I have a bunch of experience and I get what you guys are doing and it makes sense to me to send out a ton of offers.” Today’s second topic is not written in the script.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh.

Steven Jack Butala:
Who does these scripts?

Jill K DeWit:
Good thing we have people that can edit this.

Steven Jack Butala:
I do these scripts. That’s what I say.

Jill K DeWit:
I know.

Steven Jack Butala:
Hey, it only takes between 10 and 15 deals per year to make a million bucks in this environment. I’m not here to sell you something. This isn’t some sales pitch. This is the truth. And like I said earlier in the program, there’s a kind of a trend. We have a lot of people who joined Land Academy during during January, December and January, and it’s always like that every year. And Jill runs promotions and stuff to satisfy that desire. It’s the same desire I would like by you’re a lot more prone to think about buying a treadmill in January. It’s the same thing, because you want to make change healthily, make changes in your life. So

Jill K DeWit:
There’s trends end of the year coming into the new year. Also, at the end, when people are going back to school, we all think about what should I be doing more to when the kids are going back to school? So, I totally agree with all of that.

Steven Jack Butala:
So my point is, there’s a trend in Discord, these newer people that have signed up who are new and sending mailers out there, getting the responses and the results from their mailers right now, and they’re talking about it in Discord, and there’s somewhat of a trend like, “Geez, I got all these deals back and my phone’s ringing off the hook. It’s not working and I don’t mean not working. It’s just like, yeah, it’s that the deals are not…” So there’s some kind of disconnection at the end of this where we’re not communicating this correctly or maybe to certain people. Jill and I are not telling you what to expect when all these diamonds that are crusted in carbon are falling out of the sky under your lap when you open all these these, but you got to crack that carbon off. There’s a diamond in there.

Jill K DeWit:
I was going to cover that more in a few minutes in my little part, so I’m happy to share that.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, let’s do some real easy math then.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you for jumping ahead. I appreciate that. So-

Steven Jack Butala:
What you’re looking for is one fantastic deal per mailer, one deal that where you look at it and say the offer signed off or figure till he drops out of your hand on the desk and you say, “Boy, I have to do this deal. I don’t care where I get the money. I got to do it.” This thing’s going to make $120,000, maybe 80,000, maybe 60,000.” If you multiply every deal that you due by 12, that’s how much money you’re going to make that year. If it’s 60,000, one deal from one mailer a month, if it’s 60,000 bucks, you’re going to make 60,000 times 12, which is 720 grand.

Jill K DeWit:
If I may, here’s the whole point, and this is stuff that I talk about all the time when I’m talking to people that they’re like, “Okay, what’s going on? What do you mean I don’t have to work that hard? What do you mean I could just do one deal a month and make a million?” And when you really sit back and look at it, you go, “Oh, I guess it does make sense.” We talked about earlier, passive income and all these little deals, and I mentioned, you know, can do some much bigger deals and you should. This is normal and natural progression. It’s scary starting off in adding zeros. But if you can jump right in and go for these bigger deals, your life is so much easier and there’s so less work to do and you have so much more time, and then you can decide if you’d like to keep it like that, or if you want to do even more deals.
When you learn to make 1 million a year, and I’m going to tell how in a second you go, well, “Shoot, I can times five find that in a heartbeat. Or even times four, if I do one deal a month and I make sure that I’m going to make at least $80,000 to $100,000 a month.” “Got it, noted. That’s great. That’s easy.” Versus, “I’m going to do,” and then you do, “I’m going to do one deal a week like that once I figure it out.” Then you can see how it all adds up.
The best way is if you’re a new Land Academy member and you haven’t got into the dashboard, scroll down to the tools, which is all new and configured for you and found the equity planner. This is what I’m talking about. Sit down and look at that equity planner, which is a spreadsheet that Jack lovingly made for us a while back and we share with everybody, and this is what we do all the time. Open up that equity planner and put in how much money you want to make this year. Let’s just say it’s $1 million. Awesome. And then you fill in another box that says, “Well, how many deals do you want to do in one a month?” Great. Now, that’s figured out. So, now, you figure out, “All right, well that means I got to make $100,000 a month on that one deal. All right, great.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Realistic or not, we don’t know.

Jill K DeWit:
And you start backing into it like-

Steven Jack Butala:
Maybe 60.

Jill K DeWit:
… well, how much do I need to buy for, how much do I need to sell for, obviously, to make that money work? And you start back, you can really back into, “Well, how many mailers is that going to take and how hard am I going to have to work? And how many deals am I going to be looking at every month that comes back?” It’s all kind of right there for you. But when you really have to sit back, look at that and digest it all, and you can see that it’s really possible. It’s not nuts. I know a lot of people are like, “I’m just happy making $100,000 this year.” Well, shucks, when you think about that, well, great. Especially those numbers. If you just want to make an extra 100 grand this year, totally serious.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh geez.

Jill K DeWit:
Say, “I’m going to do one deal a month and make $10,000.” In this group, that’s like child’s play-

Steven Jack Butala:
Or just one deal in June, you make 100 grand.

Jill K DeWit:
… that’s nothing. Honestly, we have taught our kids to do that. Now, do they get excited about and motivated about it? Not yet. But they know how to do it. And that makes me feel good, and that’s another show. We are teaching, it’s kind of neat. That’s another little byproduct of this, that there’s a lot of people in Land Academy that are here to not only do this for themselves and make this income to fill in the blank, fill that hole, but also teach their kids so they know that their kids always know how to make money and keep food on the table, and they never have to worry, which is awesome. But that’s it, you’d have to sit and work it backwards and it sounds like, “What? You guy’s sure it’s going to be that easy?” When you do the math and then you look at what works involved in it, and then you just kind of dive in and you come up for air, you realize you’re doing it.
That’s it. You’re going to sit back and know that, “All right, oh, I got to send out 10,000 units a mail a month. All right, and I’m going to get two deals, minimum. Two to four deals, let’s just say, because I’m new. When you’re better and more experienced, you’ll get more deals out of that. And as you get rolling, you’ll get more deals out of that because those 10,000 units you send out every month, it’s going to keep yielding properties for you, potentially for your lifetime. It is for us, especially right now. I’ve got so many people calling me back from mailers that are over five years old, some over 10 years old. So, this stuff will keep spinning off property once you get going.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, my point is, in writing this topic and really spending some time talking about it, is that if you look on the internet, everybody’s standing in front of a jet on a tarmac somewhere, say, toasting themselves about how incredibly successful they are, and it just gets lost. It gets lost in this myriad of, “I got to send out a hundred thousand mailers. All these offers came back. I don’t know what to do.”

Jill K DeWit:
It seems overwhelming.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. I’m not going to use the word overwhelming. It just lost. This topic is meant to help ground this to this concept. You only need to do one deal a month. Do you only need to send five to 10,000 units out a month to pretty much guarantee that you are going to find a… If you do everything we talk about in the programs, if you walk, watch the weekly calls, and how we analyze these products, utilize all the resources, most importantly, Discord.
Ask questions along the way. So you send out a real effective mailer that’s priced correctly, and you answer the phone, you’re at five to 10,000 a month. If you do, you’re going to make a million dollars a year. Yeah. Am I guaranteeing that? No, because the mailers got to be right. You have to choose the right area-

Jill K DeWit:
Got to answer the phone.

Steven Jack Butala:
… you have to have a Jill-like personality, whether it’s you or somebody else, really engaging, even with the people who are angry, engaging the person on the other end of the phone to get the piece of real estate that you’re talking about to a price and acquisition price that’s going to be make you successful financially. So, forget about the jets. Forget about, there’s people in our group that make six, seven, $8 million a year. All you need to do is one deal a month.

Jill K DeWit:
Agreed. That’s why we’re here, that’s what I was starting to say. That’s why we’re here to help you too. We’re spelling out this big picture concept. You’re like, “Okay, great. But there’s a lot of little pieces in there.” Yeah, there are a lot of little pieces in there, but you know what? Lucky for you. We’ve done them all. We’ve done them all wrong-

Steven Jack Butala:
We’ve failed it all.

Jill K DeWit:
… we’ve done them all right.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s right.

Jill K DeWit:
We’ve done them wrong. We’ve fixed them, and we continue to make mistakes and fix them. We continue to test things. We’re always going to say, that’s something about us too, this is our business. I’m very proud to say I love Land Academy, this is my passion. I love Land Academy ladies and all the other things that we do in career path, but hey, I’m a land investor first. That’s my thing. And lucky for you, I’m a land investor first because I need to be out there in front of you figuring things out. He needs to be in front of us going, “Uh-oh, this changed.” Like the whole zip code thing, and so is now it’s not showing zip codes, so here’s how you have to go get it. We’re always right there ahead of you, helping you, guiding you, showing you the way.

Steven Jack Butala:
I know these things change because when I go to do my mailer, I’m like, “Well, I have to change how I’m doing this mailer.” because what I did last time just doesn’t work this time. Well, I’d better tell everybody else.

Jill K DeWit:
Can you imagine, it’s having a… It’s funny, I think about Cold Stone Creamery. I don’t know why this? Because we’re in Arizona, so our former mayor-

Steven Jack Butala:
Governor.

Jill K DeWit:
… Doug Ducey. What’s that?

Steven Jack Butala:
Governor.

Jill K DeWit:
Excuse me, former governor. Thank you. Doug Ducey. I love being corrected like that. Just kidding.

Steven Jack Butala:
I love that.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m sorry.

Steven Jack Butala:
I love it too. I’m going to hear about it after return of Microsoft.

Jill K DeWit:
No, you’re right. Thank you. No, our former governor, Doug Ducey, was the head of Cold Stone Creamery, And it’s interesting because he obviously left Cold Stone Creamery when he became governor. He can’t effectively run the franchise when he is the governor. I don’t know if it’s as effective now. Do you even see them growing up? I’m sure he did a good job starting it up. I remember watching it here in Arizona, take off and grow and getting more Cold Stone. I didn’t even know who the guy was. I remember seeing along the freeway, along the 101, the office buildings, and I knew and he’d take the owners in there and do it, but he took a different role. So, he had to transition. Are they as effective? What do you think? I know, for us, we are as effective because we’re still in this business. I’m not going to leave it to do governor.

Steven Jack Butala:
First of all, Jill has this fascination with Cold Stone Creamery, and here’s why-

Jill K DeWit:
I like ice cream.

Steven Jack Butala:
… because it comes up. If you have 7,000 hours on your hands, go back and listen to this. And Cold Stone comes up a disproportionate really number of times. And Cold Stone comes up in our lives too much. Here’s why.

Jill K DeWit:
I didn’t know that. This is the first time I brought it up, and I don’t remember when. Now, Dairy Queen-

Steven Jack Butala:
When Jill’s a kid in Laguna Beach, she worked at Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory-

Jill K DeWit:
I did.

Steven Jack Butala:
… and is there a high school job or a teenage job?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, every single place we go, a lot of Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
We got to go in there and Jill talks to everybody and the people that work there, and I don’t even go in anymore. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I noticed that.

Steven Jack Butala:
And she comes out with a grocery sized bag of chocolate and stuff, which we should never be eating. So, she’s predisposed for this business model, this little shop that’s got chocolate and happy people in there, and it’s a big treats thing. And then a bunch of years ago, her family came to her and said, “We should buy these Cold Stone locations, that we should be a franchisee of Cold Stone Creamery.” It never materialized. So, she’s got that half fascination about what goes on.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
As a business model, tiny little shops that you’re so capped and the amount of money that you’re going to share, that you can potentially make, if you spreadsheet it out, it’ll never work.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s true.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, you’re capped anyway. Then you’re capped, as a franchisee, you have all this responsibilities about where you buy supplies, how much money you pay, top line revenue, you have to share percent revenue percentage. Yeah. They help you with the leases, but your shop has to look a certain way. It can’t just look, if I was just an independent. So, as a business model, the only person who ever probably wanted that is Doug Ducey. And I’m not knocking him because I actually think Steve did some great stuff for our state, but I just had to bring that up because we talk about Cold Stone too much.

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t bring up that often, but that’s okay. Apparently twice a year is too often.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yes. Once a quarter, talking about Cold Stone, often walking into a Cold Stone. What is it? Is it better?

Jill K DeWit:
Is it my turn? Oh, is it, my turn? What’s today? Oh my God.

Steven Jack Butala:
Is ice cream better?

Jill K DeWit:
No, it has nothing to do with that. I don’t care. Nah, has nothing to do with that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, go ahead-

Jill K DeWit:
Oh my gosh.

Steven Jack Butala:
… what do I talk about too much? Money?

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, I’m thinking, let me think for a few minutes. I’ll come up with something.

Steven Jack Butala:
Money depreciation and single malt scotch.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah, we’ll come up with some other stuff. I’ll save it. That’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar. Jill, you have something inspirational to share.

Jill K DeWit:
I wanted to talk for a few minutes about how people sometimes are missing deals. This came up the other day… We leave it on the screen while I’m talking-

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, sure.

Jill K DeWit:
… okay, good. So, this came up the other day, about a week and a half ago, you and I did a live thing on, we did a live webinar. It was really cool, and I’m sure you can still get the replays out there. And someone brought up, almost like calling it a failed mailer. They didn’t use that term, but it’s like, “I sent all these offers. I didn’t get any juice back.” And I’m like, “Well, let’s talk about that for a second. There are usually common things when you send on a mailer and you feel like you’re not getting induced. Let me paint the picture. The mailer goes out, phone calls come back you, or you may or may not be answering the phone.” I’m just going to say, “Maybe you have a day job, so it all goes to your Google Voice. You listen to your Google Voice later on and everybody’s just saying, “Go jump on a lake,” and now, two weeks have passed and you feel like, “I bombed, I did nothing.”
Well, often, there’s some things that you could do differently right out of the gate to make this a successful mailer. So, this is really, I want to talk about how you can turn every single mailer response… Or there’s an opportunity in every single mailer response that you get, and a lot of people miss this. So, can you… That blue is distracting for me. Thank you very much.
First of all, one thing I want you to do is when your mailer goes out, I want you to be ready. I want you to kind of already know the area, because if you did your own picking the county… If you don’t have a partner like I do, right? You’re doing it yourself. You put a lot of recon into picking the count, you did a lot of recon into properties in that area, you did a lot of recon into what’s going on, price per square foot, what the terrain is, what you’re looking at, you have some ideas here. And you know too what you should be asking these sellers when the calls come in. So, that’s number one, being ready.
Number two, here come the calls. That’s going to be the first thing that happens. The mail hits, you know it, when you get these phone calls coming in, and if you’re afraid of those or you can’t answer the phones, you’re shoving them off to your Google voicemail, you’re going to miss stuff right out of the gate. I want you and or a live body, whether it’s even PATLive answering the phone, that’s going to already set you up to get a better response. They know how to do it. When you set it up through us, they know who you are, they know you’re Land Academy, that team is ready for those phone calls. They’re coached and counciled by PATLive before we coached and council. And when I say, I mean me, it got to that. And then now they do their own coaching and counseling too, to be ready for these calls. They’re ready for them. They want to take in as much information. I want you to take in as much information as you can.
You need to answer the call and like I said, think of everything as an opportunity. Think of every mad person as they’re reaching out to me for some reason. And usually, they’re reaching out because they do want to sell, and maybe they don’t like your price, or maybe they even do, they just need to get it off their chest. They’re not happy about it. They need to know you’re a real person. They need to understand this process. They need to understand that it’s real and they can sell to you, and there’s an opportunity there.
So, there’s usually two things. Like I was saying going into this, and then we talked about that the other night in the webinar. Two things that will make you think it was a not successful mailer. Number one is you didn’t answer the phone. There’s not a live person there. And number two, you’re not following through and asking the right questions. So, when the call comes to me, I automatically assume that I’m going to get a deal here. This is what you need to walk away with right now. You need to automatically know that every time someone’s calling your phone, there’s a deal right there. And all I got to do is figure out, is it my price or their price? That’s it. And as quickly as possible, get to that point, get to be on the same page with them and churn those people into an acquisition opportunity.
Who cares if it’s not your price? What is the price? You just need to know that there’s something there and say, “Look, the bottom line is…” Now, there’s a few rarely that they’re like, I really don’t want to sell ever. And you’ll get that, but that’s less than 1%. I’m going to argue. Or maybe 1%. Let’s just say that I’m really only calling you because my husband’s buried here. My grandparents are buried here. My great-grandparents are buried here. I will be buried here. All right. When you think like that, there’s a 1%, that’s really it. But the other people, there’s a number, and maybe it’s a make me move number, but there’s a number there, and you just got to get that out of them, and then you decide that works for you. So there’s always an opportunity.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let me describe, I think this might be very helpful to bring clarity to this topic because Jill’s exactly right. But let me describe the process that I had. Before Jill and I joined forces, in a very successful real estate operation, it was so different than it is now and much less successful than it is now, largely because of Jill. But I was starting out back then and still were finding stuff. But here was my process. I had a person who I hired, her name was Debbie, and she was a very successful escrow agent, and she was very, very good on the phone. And so, I did what I do now. I sent all these mailers out. We had a CRM, very similar, well, effectively the same thing as Airtable, sent all these mailers up just like I do now. Same format, same verbiage, and same way we priced it.
Took a lot longer, it was a lot harder, and more clumsy, and took me a lot more time to do it, and it was way more expensive because we didn’t have offers to owners. But I got these mailers out in the mail and they would call back, and Debbie was not in the same office that I was in. I couldn’t see her and she couldn’t see me, but I could hear her and she could hear me. That’s just how our offices were set up. And these calls would come in and I could hear if it was going to be a disaster or if it was going to be a happy person that just really wanted to do the deal. And she handled every single deal the same way.
“I’m sorry you feel that way. Would you like me…” Because my name’s on the mailer at the time. Would you like me have Steven re-look at the deal and see if it’s a more appropriate price based on what you’re telling me? Maybe we price the mailer. She was full of one-liners, and so she would put, and this is the rules back then, and I would encourage you to follow some version of this, put every deal on that CRM. Unless they signed the offer or said, I really want to do the deal at that price, she was not authorized to negotiate anything on that one first phone call. So, everything went in the CRM and it went into acquisition opportunity because every deal is an acquisition opportunity. Every single one is an acquisition opportunity. And I just telling this story, my heart starts to beat and I start to have endorphin rushes and this positive thing because when people start to call in a mailer and there’s complaining about it, all I feel is glee-

Jill K DeWit:
Me too.

Steven Jack Butala:
… it’s like, wait a minute-

Jill K DeWit:
This is an opportunity to have a conversation.

Steven Jack Butala:
… I know now, they got the mail. They may or may not be happy with the price. It’s only a matter of time before I find that diamond and crusted in carbon and we smashed one out of the park and we’re probably going to hit a lot of singles along the way. And so, she would jam these properties all day long. These properties would start to populate in the CRM. And so, every morning, I would come in, we would all horse around, and at about 10:00 I would dig into that. And this went on for years, dig into that CRM. And I would make write in comments just like we do now. And if it was a go ahead deal, I would move that deal from acquisition opportunity to a acquisition approved, or I would move it to acquisition pending, if I looked it up and found out it didn’t have access or I needed to adjust the price, or, “Debbie, please go back and do whatever this is.”
But little by little by little, we chipped away at a mailer and found the deals that were standup, triples, slide in doubles, singles, and once some great while you hit one out of the park. That is turning every mailing response into an acquisition opportunity. Not a deal, not everyone’s going to be a deal-

Jill K DeWit:
Correct.

Steven Jack Butala:
… but they all deserve to be looked at and if they don’t have access or there’s some huge flaw, there’s still worth something, go back and offer 1,000 bucks and say, “The people are responding to this because they probably need money or who knows why, but they want to do a deal in their soul.” Jill’s been saying this for 10 years.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s what I think. They reach out to you for a reason. I think everyone that reaches out and calls you really just want to sell. You just got to get on the same page about the price. And sometimes, getting on the same page is letting them know who you are. “Look, I’m not an agent. This is not retail. We’re not here to one up your neighbor. That’s not what this is. This is my business. I’m going to give you a good price if you really want to unload this and let’s talk about it.”

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re a one person show, and most of you are, if you’re new, you’re doing Debbie’s job, and my job, and Jill’s job, or my job. And so, since then, Jill has her own process and it’s way wildly more successful than it was back then and she’s able now to cut… There’s a lot of back and forth. She, was Debbie’s on the phone for eight straight hours and her staff’s not because they’re able to cut through a lot of this stuff much more efficiently.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re a one person operation, you’re going to have to do both of these things. You’re going to have to be on the phone a ton, whether it’s returning calls or answering calls or whatever, taking the heat, temperature of what’s happening and seeing if there’s a deal there or not, or just report what… It’s easier, largely, I would say it’s if you’re a one person operation, it’s easier because right away you don’t have to put it in the CRM and wait for somebody to make a decision and call back and all of that. And that’s why Jill’s so refined at this, because she’s just got it licked. She, can tell right away whether we’re going to do the deal or not.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s deals in all of this.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally. All right. Your turn. Jack, what have you got to share for us today? Something informational.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m going to talk about cash flow.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
This goes back to my accounting days, but it goes back in into my soul too. The topic is the real problem with managing your business and life by cash flow. There’s a concept out there. It’s not new, but it’s been regurgitated by people and economists talking about it, and they use a tube of toothpaste as an example. When you buy a new tube of toothpaste and you crack it open, how you use that toothpaste on your toothbrush is very, very different than how you use toothpaste at the very end of the tube. You know, might in the beginning, just slather it on there and enjoy yourself-

Jill K DeWit:
I’ve never heard this.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s an economic concept.

Jill K DeWit:
I didn’t know this.

Steven Jack Butala:
And it float over to accounting too, because it’s very rare that accountant’s in economics agree in-

Jill K DeWit:
It’s kind cool.

Steven Jack Butala:
… anything.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
When you’re at the end and you’re jamming a thing on the sink and you’re trying to just get that, I can get one more day-

Jill K DeWit:
You rolled it up, that’s what I do.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. and in college, you look in the inside the grout for toothpaste and rub your teeth.

Jill K DeWit:
Ew.

Steven Jack Butala:
Anyway, that’s what I did.

Jill K DeWit:
Yikes.

Steven Jack Butala:
Maybe that’s why-

Jill K DeWit:
TMI. Oh, I want to kiss that.

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill, you’ve always had low standards in men-

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
… I can help you with that.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, no. I wish I didn’t. Now I can’t unsee that. This is awful. Oh, yuck. Not hugging my teenager or my college kid.

Steven Jack Butala:
Is it so fun to disgust certain people here in your family? Not sure.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s great.

Steven Jack Butala:
You can’t manage your life like tube of toothpaste. You can’t do a mailer, in my opinion. And if your bank account’s full, it’s at full tube of toothpaste and you got 100,000 bucks in there or at you’re at the end and you’ve got 5,000, you can’t look at the same deal based on that. I know so many people. Over the years, I’ve heard a million people say this, “Well, it’s the end of the month and I don’t have any money left, so no, I can’t go to the show with you.” “Well, I just got paid. Sure. Let’s go out.”

Jill K DeWit:
Can you imagine the market? That’s awesome.

Steven Jack Butala:
How many times has your friend said that all throughout your life.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh no, that’s true. It’s like bonus check Tuesday. Ooh. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

Steven Jack Butala:
If everybody’s on the same payment cycle, like working for the same company, which I think Jill’s experienced, so-

Jill K DeWit:
This is hilarious.

Steven Jack Butala:
… they’re all broke at the same time of the month.

Jill K DeWit:
I forgot all about this, but yeah, it’s totally true.

Steven Jack Butala:
You’re all splitting the same $5 bottle of vodka and eating ramen noodles until you get that paycheck.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
I can’t wait till I get my paycheck.

Jill K DeWit:
And then I can go out. Yup.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s a terrible, terrible cycle to be in. And you can break the cycle mentally by forcing yourself, especially now with automatic payments and all of that. Forcing yourself to stop living by cash flow because you’ll never get out of that cycle. Never.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
What you will do to smooth it out is to find sources of credit. And so, now you’ve got credit card debt and it’s on a personal basis, that’s not good. You have to save money. You have two choices that break this cycle, both in your business and personally. Save money, which sucks, nobody wants to talk about it. And who wants to save money, or make more money. Make more money and allocate it as you’re making more. You might allocate it toward mail. You might allocate it toward putting an retirement fund or a college fund, go ahead.

Jill K DeWit:
What about spending less?

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, spending less is, that’s up to you. That’s a personal choice. If you’re spending too much money on stuff that you don’t need, then you need a psychiatrist, not this. You don’t need this podcast. I’m really serious about that. Nobody needs a new hairbrush, really.

Jill K DeWit:
No, some people, like, Because today I can afford that two bedroom, whatever, awesome apartment on the top floor, whatever.” So, when you’re like, “Do you really need the two bedroom apartment on the top floor by yourself?”

Steven Jack Butala:
Jill’s really, right?

Jill K DeWit:
I’m just asking.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s obviously two components for revenue and expense. And so, talking about managing your own personal expenses is not something ever want to talk about. I think, if you can’t do that again, I think that’s some… And we have, separately, when we were younger, Jill and I’ve talked about this many times over the years, experienced that. We’ve experienced, well, I need new shoes because everybody else has new shoes. I think it’s a normal part of grow becoming an adult. You should grow out of that. If you’re having trouble with that, I would suggest you go figure that out, not here though.
I’m talking about managing cash flow-

Jill K DeWit:
Sorry.

Steven Jack Butala:
… and the mentality with that. Especially in your business, so we just covered personally how the toothpaste thing. In your business, especially in this business, you’re going to hit it and you’re going to hit it pretty soon. And so when you get $80,000 back, or if you go do deal funding or whatever, you choose and you get $30,000 check or $40,000 check, do not spend that money. Allocate it. You need to allocate that money for a new mailer… If you have bills to pay, I get it. That’s fine. And then continue to use deal funding until you don’t need it anymore and manage your money not by cash flow. It’s a downward cycle that will never end. And the reason I wrote this topic is because I just wrote a very interesting article. I’m going to talk about it later today on that Thursday call about the differences between, and I’m quoting this article, it was fascinating. It was one of these articles-

Jill K DeWit:
You read or you wrote?

Steven Jack Butala:
I read it.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh.

Steven Jack Butala:
Did I say wrote?

Jill K DeWit:
I thought so. I’m like, “Where can I read this?”

Steven Jack Butala:
It was one of these articles where I started to read it like most articles, I’m like, “This is so stupid. Who’s doing…” And then, it ended up being great, the mentality or the thought process of people who are very, very poor, people who are, this is what the world would call middle class. I don’t believe in these titles, by the way, but I’m just regurgitating this article. And then people who have wealth, and I do agree with that title, and the people who are poor, and the people who have wealth think very similarly. It’s the people in the middle that are spending too much like Jill is saying and are living their lives through by cash flow. Yeah. They’re doing the right thing revenue wise or most of them are, they just can’t get out of it.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s sad. I get it.

Steven Jack Butala:
So, please, if this sings to you… We have such limited time on the show all the time. If this sings to you, please look it up because you can change your life within 30 days pretty quickly if you start to just understand what the decisions that you’re making and why. Somebody within this article, the person who wrote it, did a extensive poll, they had access to an extensive poll, where they asked people to define the difference between assets and liabilities, and 85% couldn’t do it.

Jill K DeWit:
Understood, noted.

Steven Jack Butala:
Join us next Wednesday for another interesting episode. You’re not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill-

Jill K DeWit:
We are Jack and Jill-

Steven Jack Butala:
… information-

Jill K DeWit:
… and inspiration-

Steven Jack Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.

Jill K DeWit:
What’s funny, I’m not an accountant ,and I never will be, and I thank God I have you.

Steven Jack Butala:
Likewise.

Jill K DeWit:
Yes.

 

Thanks for listening, and finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts.

LA 1998 WP

How To Be Successful At Flipping Land (LA 1998)

In this podcast episode, learn how Jack and Jill successfully flip land. They emphasize the importance of experience and knowledge in the land flipping business, and highlight the value of learning from those who have been in the industry for a long time. They outline

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LA1997WP

Respond To Change in Real Estate 2024 (LA 1997)

Jack Butala and Jill DeWit explore the real estate market, discussing the anticipated stagnation in 2024 and offering valuable insights for investors. Jack shares three crucial strategies to thrive in this shifting market: increasing offer volume, recognizing the rise in rental demand, and predicting demographic

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No need to hire staff - we did it for you.

Land Academy PRO is the brainchild of founders Steven Jack Butala and Jill DeWit. Designed at the request of Land Academy members who are ready for a higher level, we’re excited to continue to provide the tools and support needed by professional investors.

Each level comes with a preset amount of included data, Concierge Mail service, and postage. For example, the Green level includes 6,000 units of completed-for-you mail completely out the door at no extra cost to you.

All levels include a PatLive introduction and preset script (we will set up your phone answering for you), use of Land Academy’s personal Transaction Team to manage your deal flow, an AirTable (CRM) base setup managed by our (and your!) Transaction Coordinator, personal consulting, regular office hours, and includes your Land Academy subscription cost.

If you’re making this a business, Land Academy PRO takes the work off of your plate so you can focus on the things that matter – like running your business.

Green

$10,060

per Month

Silver

$14,590

per Month

Gold

$19,120

per Month

Platinum

$23,650

per Month

Black

$28,180

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
6,000 mailers 9,000 mailers 12,000 mailers 15,000 mailers 18,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value $500 value $500 value $500 value $500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value $7,500 value $7,500 value $7,500 value $7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value $100 value $100 value $100 value $100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
- - $1,000 value $1,000 value $1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value $2,500 value $2,500 value $2,500 value $2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value $150 value $150 value $150 value $150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value $23,000 value $23,000 value $23,000 value $23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value $300 value $300 value $300 value $300 value
Subtotal: $8,550 value $8,550 value $9,550 value $12,050 value $12,050 value
Mail Value: $7,500 value $11,250 value $15,000 value $18,750 value $22,500 value
Total Value: $39,050 $42,800 $47,550 $53,800 $57,550
Apply Now Apply Now Apply Now Apply Now Apply Now

Green

$10,060

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
6,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
-
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $8,550 value
Mail Value: $7,500 value
Total Value: $39,050
Apply Now

Silver

$14,590

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
9,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
-
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $8,550 value
Mail Value: $11,250 value
Total Value: $42,800
Apply Now

Gold

$19,120

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
12,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
$1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $9,550 value
Mail Value: $15,000 value
Total Value: $47,550
Apply Now

Platinum

$23,650

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
15,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
$1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $12,050 value
Mail Value: $18,750 value
Total Value: $53,800
Apply Now

Black

$28,180

per Month

Concierge Data+ (with data) Included mailers each month (data + concierge + mailer + postage). Our team will do your data for it and get it out the door.
18,000 mailers
PatLive introduction at no cost We will help you establish your first script and get PatLive set up on your behalf to answer your phones.
$500 value
Transaction Coordinator Use of our personal Transaction Coordinator team to manage your deals. Trained and ready to go!
$7,500 value
AirTable Ready-for-you CRM managed by your personal Land Academy Pro Transaction Coordinator
$100 value
Personal Consulting 1 on 1 personal consulting with our Transaction Coordinator each week.
$1,000 value
Regular Office Hours Regular office hours with Jack and Jill + our staff. Private for LA Pro Members Only. (Think Career Path Office Hours)
$2,500 value
ParcelFact ParcelFact is included in your LA Pro membership with unlimited pulls.
$150 value
FREE Career Path Access
$23,000 value
Land Academy No more separate charges - Land Academy is included with LA Pro Membership. This includes all education, tools, support, and future releases.
$300 value
Subtotal: $12,050 value
Mail Value: $22,500 value
Total Value: $57,550
Apply Now

Disclaimer: *We have a monthly “use it or lose it” policy with mail and data – Land Academy PRO is designed to keep you on-track and consistent.

To cancel, all packages require a 30 day notice to move you back down to regular Land Academy membership.

Office Hours Schedule

Scheduling a Career Path interview call is currently on hold and will resume closer to Fall 2024 as we approach Career Path 10.

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