Transcript:

Steven Jack Butala:
I am Steven Jack Butala.

Jill K DeWit:
I’m Jill DeWit. This is the Land Academy Show.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today we have a couple of topics. We’re going to talk about first improving land due diligence. We’ve got the six As already. We have formally added the seventh and eighth A.

Jill K DeWit:
It feels weird.

Steven Jack Butala:
It does. I agree. But I promise it’s good.

Jill K DeWit:
Do you know, as we’re working on new content for 2024, I’m here … Hey, spoiler alert. This isn’t it. I’ve been dropping nuggets in our community about stuff coming in 2024. One of the reasons you’re in our community and you’re listening right now is because of our experience and who we are, the number of deals we’ve done, and how we can watch. We know the trends. We live the trends. We can spot things that are coming, we can adjust, and we can come up with things that are going to help you that nobody else has or knows about, because you don’t have it unless … I have to poke … unless you have this. This is called gray hair. You’ll never hopefully see my gray hair if I do this right.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’ve got enough for both of us.

Jill K DeWit:
There we go. We’ll show his gray hair. Mine you won’t see, but trust me, it’s there.

Steven Jack Butala:
You want experience.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s it. But my point today was the seventh and the eighth, they are not really the whole 2024 new content.

Steven Jack Butala:
No.

Jill K DeWit:
No. We got some stuff that is really important to professional land investors like you and us.

Steven Jack Butala:
We’re adjusting with the business. Then, a little later in the show, we’ll talk about the truth about the actual real amount of money that you can make in the land business.

Jill K DeWit:
It’s not a billion dollars, and it’s not 13 cents. It’s somewhere very healthily in the middle. Each week on the show, we answer questions from the Land Academy Member Discord Forum, and we review land acquisitions from our weekly Thursday member webinar. We take a deep dive into the two land-related topics by popular requests, like I just mentioned. If you want a sneak peek on our Discord Forum, go to landacademy.com. It’s free.
All right. Let’s see. Greg wrote, “I just closed on my first unintentional wholesale.” I’m waiting to see, let me see if it tells him what he means by wholesale here because there’s two meanings. “I sent out a photographer during the due diligence period, and he stirred up the neighbor accessing the property via right of way through the neighbor’s land. He stirred up with the neighbor by accessing the property via the right of way, which was on the neighbor’s property.” Got it. “The neighbor suggested a double close and then made an offer to buy it right from me, like, “Let’s just do it. I’ll give you this.’ I would have liked to have gotten more for it, but heck, since I didn’t put any money down at all, I didn’t put any money into it, we just did it all at one time. I’ll take the proceeds with a check for $16,000.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Let me paraphrase what happened here, which I think is-

Jill K DeWit:
I like it.

Steven Jack Butala:
… really, really healthy. Greg puts a property under contract for, let’s say, I’m just going to use round numbers, $10,000, and it’s in escrow. He orders a photographer to go out there because he’s prepping to sell it on the sales side with maybe the real estate agent that he has, but probably not. He probably just got a photographer. The photographer goes out there. The neighbor says, “What the heck are you doing?” “Oh, yeah. Well, I’m taking pictures of this property. Here’s the guy that hired me to take the pictures. His name’s Greg.” He hands the phone number to the-

Jill K DeWit:
Neighbor.

Steven Jack Butala:
… neighbor, and the neighbor calls him and says, “Are you kidding? For $26,000? I’ll write you a check right now.” So now Greg doesn’t have to write the $10,000 check at all. He just transfers the transaction in escrow to the new buyer, which is the neighbor, and then collects the difference between $10,000 and $26,000, I guess, if my math is right.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. That’s 16 grand right out of escrow. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. In or out of escrow. There are some people that make this their business. It’s called wholesaling. Incorrectly labeled as wholesaling, but that’s what it’s called. It’s very appealing. There’s a lot of pros and cons to this. I don’t like it at all. I would rather control the transaction because maybe the property is worth a lot more.

Jill K DeWit:
Here’s the crazy thing, because that neighbor could have easily not called Greg and just called the seller directly, called the owner of the other property directly and said, “What’s going on? I’ll buy it from you for that price, and I’ll add five grand.”

Steven Jack Butala:
You have no control over the deal.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. They could have gone around you.

Steven Jack Butala:
This had a happy ending.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
We have people in career path that this is how they conduct business nationwide. If you have 400 deals going on at any given time and you’re closing-

Jill K DeWit:
10%.

Steven Jack Butala:
… 10% or 20% or 30% of them, it’s a real good living.

Jill K DeWit:
It can work.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s just this is very much frowned upon. I don’t believe this business model is going to be around forever. There’s a lot of trickery and dishonesty just by the property.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, just things can go wrong. I’m going to say it’s not that everyone’s not being truthful or trying to trick someone. It’s just that too many things can go wrong. That’s it. If you believe in the property, buy it. If you don’t, don’t. Don’t waste your time. If you believe in the property and you don’t have the money, come to me. I do. Show me why it’s great, and if it is great, I got the money. We’ll do it together. Then we don’t have to worry about any of this. But I love that question. It was a good story and a good happy ending. It was like, “I didn’t mean to do it, but I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. I’m going to take the money and go.” That worked out great.

Steven Jack Butala:
This exact thing has happened to Jill and I several times in our career, and we’ve always said yes. I don’t seek it out, but it happens.

Jill K DeWit:
I’ve been the person doing that. We’ve had deals come our way, like, “I don’t really want to deal with this property. I want this property. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it yet, but I’ll just pay you, and then I’ll take the deal.” They’re like, “Sure. Done.” It’s good.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s first topic, improving land due diligence with the seventh and the eighth As. There’s no way we can talk about this without first talking about what the As are, one through six. This is a methodology that I came up with a lot of years ago about assessing a property. You want to uniformly assess all the properties that you’re looking at. If you’re looking at five deals all at once, you want to say, “Let’s put them into a box and judge them equally, each property along the same scenarios.” So I came up with the six As.

Jill K DeWit:
Can I go back and go there? There really are four. I want to give a little more of the history. So yeah, what is this? Like Jack just said, when you’re doing your due diligence and you’re looking at all these properties, what’s important? Jack taught me there were four As in the beginning. This is what you need to make sure they have. If they have all four As, then move forward. Access.

Steven Jack Butala:
The original four.

Jill K DeWit:
These are the original four. I want to talk about this because this is really cool. This is what I learned. Access, it was really back then, do I have legal or physical? Back then, I’d take either. Now I want both. It’s a whole different thing. But at least I could see a road. That’s access. Acreage. Back then, the bigger, the better. That was what was our thoughts. Now it really depends on what I mailed for. So access, acreage, affordable. Does the money work? That sure makes a difference. Duh. And then-

Steven Jack Butala:
Attributes.

Jill K DeWit:
Attributes. What’s around there? It was not just seeing the ranches nearby and what’s possible, but is there something special about it? It’s got a creek. Is it near Vegas? Fill in the blank. What’s something?

Steven Jack Butala:
Is it land that’s being farmed? Is there an old barn on it? Is there a water feature running through the back?

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Anything that makes it not just a regular piece of land with no attributes.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. For years, we went on with our four As. Then I popped up with one that, like, “This is slowing me down.” So I came up with five, and you came up with six, seven, and eight. Do you want me to add number five?

Steven Jack Butala:
Sure.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I’ll add number five, and I’ll let him do the six, seven, and eight. 7, 8. I came along and said, “Oh, I got an A that will kill every deal if it doesn’t work.” He’s like, “Well, what is it?” I’m like, “It’s alive.” If the people on the deed are not walking around this planet and alive, it may kill your deal, depending on is there a probate issue? You understand where I’m going here. If there’s some legalities that I can’t easily transfer, the property needs to do probate, or we don’t know where this cousin is, or fill in the blank kind of thing, not everyone on the deed is here and able to sign, that will kill it. So that was number five for me. Then you did six, seven, and eight.

Steven Jack Butala:
Back to alive just for one second. This is really significant. If you’re heavily into the land business or any type of real estate business, you know that the person that owns the property, who’s on the deed or signs for the entity that owns it, a trust or an LLC, they need to be alive. It’s not impossible to get the deal done. What it’s going to do is dramatically slow it down. What happens is-

Jill K DeWit:
Maybe on money, too.

Steven Jack Butala:
What happens is, whoever thinks they’re in control of the deal, they are alive, but they might be the heirs to the person on the deed.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
What they believe is probably not true.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
So they’re very frustrated by the time they get to you about, “Why can’t I just get this deal done and get some money out of it? There’s been three people before you, and they weren’t willing to go through this stuff.” So there’s a huge opportunity for you to solve the alive piece, and it’s very state specific. Some states make it easy. Some states don’t. Alive matters, and your first choice is, Sally Smith is on the deed, and you’re looking at it. She’s the owner, and-

Jill K DeWit:
And you’re talking to her.

Steven Jack Butala:
… you’re talking to Sally Smith.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s alive. Number six is adjacent. What’s immediately adjacent are all … Let’s theoretically think. There’s four adjacent properties to every property, all four sides. If all four properties are single family residences and the sale price ranged between $300,000 and $325,000, you can pretty well guarantee that that’s going to be the use for that property. So now makes it easy. It’s $325,000. A house that’s going to go on this property. It fits. I can pay 10% to 15% wholesale pricing or acquisition pricing for that property, which ends up being about 30 grand. If you’re staring at a purchase agreement at $60,000, this all can happen in 13 seconds. It’s just too high. It has to be around 10% of the value of that house. Adjacent’s beautiful. Adjacent actually changed how we buy property.
What you don’t want to see with adjacent is, here’s a piece of property, it’s got all the other As, and there’s nothing there. I mean, it is in a very, very rural area of, let’s say, Wisconsin or Arizona. It’s just nothing but land there and no real traffic accounts and all of that. I’m not saying it’s valueless. I’m not saying, “You can’t flip that,” because we have flipped lots of property like this. It has to be so cheap. Whatever you’re about to sell it for on the other side of the deal, you’re forcing people to buy it because it’s so cheap. That’s the thought they’re having in your head. “Yeah, I don’t like the property very much, but it’s 10% of what all these other properties have sold for over the last few years.”
Recently, Jill and I, somewhat out of frustration, came up with the seventh and the eighth A. Due diligence. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with the property itself. In fact, it doesn’t. It has to do with the person, meaning you who’s buying the property, or thinking about buying the property. The seventh A is afraid. As a percentage, are you afraid to do this deal? Because I’ll tell you, we only do deals, Jill and I at this point in our career, and I’m not suggesting that you do this, but this is where we are in our career, where we’re not afraid at all, where we’re looking at the deal saying, “What am I doing wrong? This is the greatest deal I’ve ever seen, and we need to buy this fast. We need to get control of this property and then throw up a great posting on the internet with the real estate agent that Jill chooses, and really make some money on it. We’re zero percent afraid on those deals.

Jill K DeWit:
For you land ladies like me, that means your stomach is not doing knots.

Steven Jack Butala:
Does your stomach do knots?

Jill K DeWit:
Sure. I’ll tell you, that’s the easiest way for me to tell. I’m like, “Something’s not right here.” Or you just have that spidey-sense, that “I’m not sure about this. Comps are all over the place. This could be on the wrong side of the tracks. I talked to a couple brokers. Two are really low, and one’s really high. I’m trying to figure out who’s right, who’s not right here.” You’re just not feeling it. That’s afraid. You need to have confidence.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you’re 50% afraid of the deal, you have to ask yourself, “Why? Why do I like this deal only half? Well, I like the adjacent. I like the access. It’s a big property. I love the acreage. But I’m not sure about the price, so I’m a little bit afraid. If this deal was priced at $20,000 instead of $50,000, then I would be zero percent afraid.” There’s your answer.

Jill K DeWit:
You know what a lot of people do? They come up with afraid. You know what they’re afraid of? Not doing a deal. They’re like, “Well, this is the best one I’ve got, so I’m going to do this one,” which is the wrong answer, too, by the way.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, that taps into the eighth A, which is abundance. If you send a mailer out and at the end of the mailer, or at the point in the mailer where you think it’s run its course, or at least the first phase of its course, and you’re looking at two deals. The seller said, “Yep, I want to sell.” One person signed it for the number that you sent it out, and one person came back and said, “Yeah, not for $14,000, but $20,000. I’ll take $20,000.” So now you have two deals to look at. That’s not abundance. You want 10-20 deals

Jill K DeWit:
20.

Steven Jack Butala:
Where you’re staring at this saying, “Of these 20 deals that came back on this mailer, I’m going to pick the best two, where I have zero percent afraid.”

Jill K DeWit:
Well, how much mail is that, Jack?

Steven Jack Butala:
I don’t know. That’s the real question, isn’t it?

Jill K DeWit:
I’ll tell you what it isn’t. 100. 1,000. Maybe even 2,000. That’s not enough, you guys. You need to send some mail, especially not sub a thousand. Yes.

Steven Jack Butala:
It needs to be priced right. When you go through Land Academy, all the the critical steps to make sure that your mailer, or your series of mailers, better yet, is creating an abundance of acquisition opportunities, so you can get to zero percent afraid.

Jill K DeWit:
And you’re not wasting time and money guessing.

Steven Jack Butala:
We see a lot of people who are new in this business, Jill and I. They fight this.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, I listened to all the podcasts. I got it.

Steven Jack Butala:
You need it to have abundance for you to soak some real wealth out of it. You don’t want to stare at two deals and then start to have thoughts like, “Well, I can forego access. Everything else I love about the deal.”

Jill K DeWit:
Right. So what if I can’t get there?

Steven Jack Butala:
So now you’re making these two deals work somehow, or one of the two deals, instead of looking at 20 and saying, “Oh, my. It’s so clear to me that these 20 over here really work.” Well, what’s the trick to getting abundance? There’s three main components to getting where you clearly have abundance. Number one, you know how to do a mailer, and you know how to price it. Number two, and I can’t express this enough, the person that’s answering the phone or doing the deal, in this case, it’s Jill. You have a tremendous amount of confidence in that person.
Maybe it’s you. In my case, it’s not me. In most cases, it’s you, that you can convert and create real estate deals, because no matter how many mailers you send out, you’re going to get some response. It’s your job to convert that response into a real estate deal. Some of it’s going to be liquid anger. Some of it’s going to be sign it and send it back. So that’s very critical. The third part is the mailer’s got to be big enough because if you send out 150 mailers, you will not get abundance. You’ll start convincing yourself to do a deal, and you don’t want that.

Jill K DeWit:
Correct.

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a lot of moving parts to this, but it’s crazy profitable.

Jill K DeWit:
Let’s take a look at one of our favorite land acquisitions from one of our weekly Thursday member webinars.

Steven Jack Butala:
Hey, the end of the year is coming up. What does that mean for us?

Jill K DeWit:
Well, Land Academy is closed right now. Sorry. But there’s a wait list.

Steven Jack Butala:
Look how happy she is.

Jill K DeWit:
I know. Well, we have a really amazing, elite group of people doing amazing deals, not just learning. They’re doing the deals. We need to give them the attention and the focus and the help that they deserve. In order to do that, I have to limit capacity. So that’s it, and it’s closed right now. Can you find out more? Yes. Can you talk to someone on my team about it? Sure. Is there a wait list if you’re like, “I already know. Can I just get in the queue for when you guys reopen?” Yes. Go to landacademy.com, see the join menu at the top, and you can at least get your questions answered and get on the wait list. We’ll let you know when it opens back up.

Steven Jack Butala:
Let’s take another question posted by one of our members on the Land Academy Discord channel. Again, if you want a sneak peek, please go to landacademy.com. It’s free.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Is this right? Aaron? Okay. Aaron wrote, “I’m used to old mobile homes, but would you hesitate to buy a property with an old one like this? Four acres on a lake, just the lot is worth a minimum of $80,000 cleaned up.” I don’t know what that means.

Steven Jack Butala:
It means there’s structures on it and stuff.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. When you say “cleaned up,” Aaron, I’m like, “Are you going to landscape it?” What are you going to do?

Steven Jack Butala:
You have to braille your way through these questions.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. I want to know what it’s going to be not cleaned up because that’s usually how I roll.

Steven Jack Butala:
What he means is there’s structures and a bunch of crap on there.

Jill K DeWit:
Like old cars?

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s worth $80,000 if it’s all removed.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. He’s getting it for $8,000, but here’s what it has: a 120-year-old brick house, and there’s a lot of crap on the property. House is a wreck. Looks expensive to remove to me. Still, this should be a no-brainer, right? Oh, and yes, it snowed already. Okay. So wherever this is, it’s going to be a problem.

Steven Jack Butala:
These are good problems to have. About 20 people replied to this in our group.

Jill K DeWit:
Based on what I’m reading right now, I’d buy it.

Steven Jack Butala:
I would not have even written this in Discord. I would have bought it so fast.

Jill K DeWit:
And been already bought it.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what every other Land Academy member in Discord said, and really experienced ones, too.

Jill K DeWit:
For eight grand, see what happens.

Steven Jack Butala:
You should see the structures. It’s nice. This isn’t a bombed out mobile home. This is an old school.

Jill K DeWit:
What he needs to know, too, don’t move things. It’s a wreck, expensive to remove. I mean, all this stuff, leave it alone. Leave it. Make it look as good as you can on your photos, in the blue sky and all that good stuff, because someone’s going to come along, and probably, they just might use it and make it better. Not move it. But at least, give them the option.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s the exact opposite of what’s been drilled into our brains on HGTV.

Jill K DeWit:
True.

Steven Jack Butala:
Make it look pretty. It’s worth more. That is not the case with land. There’s few exceptions. There’s a couple of exceptions where you need to do a clearing to get to some beautiful water feature in the back. I understand that. Leave all the crap there. The type of people that buy vacant land, picture a guy with a beard. Probably has a gun collection, in most cases. Not info lots, but lots like this, they wait for this to come on the market. They revel in it. It really creates a lot of value.

Jill K DeWit:
Totally.

Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s second topic, the truth about the real amount of money to be made in the land business. Jill and I teach a class called Career Path, which is a high-end class for people who want to get to the next level and make this their career, or they already are making it their career, and they want to make more money. This came about because we were looking at the bell curve and financial performance in this industry. I want to be really clear about this because I think there’s a lot of misinformation, mostly from people that, for whatever reason, think they know a lot about buying and selling land online. They’re ready to teach you, the unsuspecting person, and they have no real experience. So I’m telling you, you are not going to get a Ferrari by buying and selling land the first few years that you do it. You’re not going to ever make a billion dollars buying and selling land.
This is not a side hustle. There’s nothing side business about this in general. It’s not anything that you can do with any serious amount of part-timeness and really make some money. This is something you need to make a commitment to. You need to be into it. We’re land people. We have an RV. Every time we have any amount of time off, we dust that thing off and go out and look at land. We play on the land and all of that. The people that make real money have that type of personality.
Here’s the deal. If you send out 10,000 letters a month, it’s going to cost you about five grand to do that, ish, between postage and everything else. So now you got 10,000 units going out, 120,000 units a year. You should be able to buy one to three properties that are zero percent afraid properties every month, and you should be able to make between 50 and let’s say a hundred grand of property. Let’s say you do one deal a month, and you send out 10,000 units, maybe 15,000 just to be safe. You make $50,000 on that net, net, net, and you do 12 deals that year. That’s 600 grand. That is a perfect amount of money, perfect, realistic, top of the bell curve amount of money that I think you can budget for.
If you’re crazy enough about it, some of the people in Career Path make 10 times that, many of them, because they’re organized. They understand staffing. Most of them have already owned a business, so some of just the basic business stuff, they learned about the land of business from us, but the basic business stuff, they learned that owning a restaurant or owning a metal stamping company or a chain of convenience stores. So that’s very realistic. Are you going to make a hundred million dollars doing this? I think it’s possible, but that’s not the Land Academy model. If you want to make a hundred million dollars buying and selling land, this is probably a good place for you to start because we just looked at it-

Jill K DeWit:
But there’s nobody above us.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, yeah. There’s not-

Jill K DeWit:
Hold on a moment.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, listen. If you want to make a hundred million dollars-

Jill K DeWit:
We are the top.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you want to make a hundred million dollars, if you brought a deal to us, somebody just did. Brought a deal. It’s 12 million dollars, and they sell it for 20. We said, “No.” That’s just not what we want.

Jill K DeWit:
But wait, wait, wait. Let’s be honest for real, though. There is no other person like us out there doing deals as big as we are.

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m not cutting us down here.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. That’s why I wanted make sure everybody understood that this is the end.

Steven Jack Butala:
The way that you would make that kind of money-

Jill K DeWit:
You could make it bigger.

Steven Jack Butala:
… is if you got a junior acquisition position at a company like Toll Brothers, and you work 10 years under somebody who … This is a pipe dream. Work 10 years making a remedial salary, learning about how to buy farmland and converting it to subdivisions. We have members-

Jill K DeWit:
But we have people in our group. Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
Just hold on a second, Jill, all right?

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. All right.

Steven Jack Butala:
I mean, you’re really pushing back on this, and I don’t know why.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, because I feel like you’re saying, “This is not the place,” but this is the place.

Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s my point. Maybe Jill won’t push back on this. We’ll see. We’ll see. Follow along with me, and we’ll see together. Making half a million dollars a year, working four to eight hours a week, is very, very realistic if your heart and soul is in it. If you want to make more than that, it’s totally possible and feasible and you’re going to tick yourself up onto the right end of the bell curve, and take it as far as you want. Are you going to end up in a jet flying around the country? Maybe, but that’s not the Land Academy model. That’s for the people that get to the tip end of the bell curve and see some other crazy thing in this that we haven’t seen. I’m tired of pie in the sky. If you concentrate on-

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I hear you.

Steven Jack Butala:
… making 10 million dollars your first year, you’ll never get that first deal done. That’s why I’m saying this.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
If you concentrate on sending 10,000 to 15,000 mailers out intelligently, answering the phone right, the mechanics of this business, you can expect to make up to, let’s say your first year, half a million bucks. Then you can start to make some intelligent, adult-like decisions about rolling money back into the business, going into a different state. I want to bring serious reality in this business.

Jill K DeWit:
I understand.

Steven Jack Butala:
In the past, we’ve had people come in, send a lot of mail out, don’t go through the real … It doesn’t happen now because we have a really good group of people right now … and look around and say, “This is not working. Where’s my Ferrari?”

Jill K DeWit:
I understand. You’re just trying to differentiate us from other stuff, and make sure everybody’s getting the right point. This is not to come in and have a Rolex and a Ferrari. That’s not this group. I guess that’s it, too. You’re trying to correctly say, “We’re here to put our heads down, work hard, and make good dough. Real, good, consistent. Then you can dial it up and dial it back to whatever you want. Do we have people in here making crazy money? Yeah, we do.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s not a hundred million dollars.

Jill K DeWit:
A year.

Steven Jack Butala:
A year.

Jill K DeWit:
Thank you. But, I mean, look, the framework, you need to understand it’s you and what’s possible. I mean, I’m never going to put a cap on anybody’s limit, but I will say, “I understand.” Please don’t come in thinking that you’re going to be that guy. Does that make sense?

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. This isn’t the lottery.

Jill K DeWit:
You sound very pessimistic today, is where I’m going with this.

Steven Jack Butala:
Well, we’re not on the same page about what this means, you and I.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Well, then we’ll-

Steven Jack Butala:
I’m trying to be-

Jill K DeWit:
… use later today off camera to get on the same page. How’s that?

Steven Jack Butala:
I want you to be realistic. Shoot for half a million dollars a year is my point.

Jill K DeWit:
To start. Or not even that. I would say low.

Steven Jack Butala:
From the point where you hit half a million dollars, that first year that you hit $500,000, then I want you to go to six.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, wait a moment.

Steven Jack Butala:
Then eight.

Jill K DeWit:
I wouldn’t even do that.

Steven Jack Butala:
And on and on. So we’re not-

Jill K DeWit:
Give a BK story.

Steven Jack Butala:
She’s not on the same page.

Jill K DeWit:
We have someone, BK. BK is one of my favorite stories, where he came in. We didn’t even know about him until he was in year three or four. He’s like, “I came in. I made 50 grand my first year.” I’m like, “All right.” “Next year, I made a hundred. The next year I made 250. Then, the next year, I made 500.” Then he came into Career Path, and he’s on our radar. So he very calmly and consistently doubled his money every year, to the point where he’s like, “Now I don’t want to work that hard.” He’s like, “I’ve got it now where it’s just me and a part-time assistant and a couple of VAs. I have a great life. I have little kids, and I love to hunt, and this is what I want to do.” You know who you are.

Steven Jack Butala:
Now we’re on the same page.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, yeah. So I’m saying that is a very good, realistic story, and I want you to know. That’s a perfect approach. We can absolutely help you with that. Then we also have people that join Career Path. They’re already making three million, and now they want to make six. I’m like, “All right. Let’s talk about that.”

Steven Jack Butala:
I totally agree with everything that Jill just said, and you can expect that after a bunch of hard work and-

Jill K DeWit:
Following what we tell you to do.

Steven Jack Butala:
… a healthy dose of-

Jill K DeWit:
Humility.

Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. I guess I screwed that up pretty good. I’ll figure that out in the next mailer.

Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.

Steven Jack Butala:
I just want to add an amount of realism to this because I think there are a small, select group of people that enter this, or anything else, and expect it to work for them. That’s just not how this works. You work for that. You work toward and make it yourself fit into the program.

Jill K DeWit:
Is this a side chat in Discord that I haven’t spotted?

Steven Jack Butala:
Mm-mm.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I’m just making sure. I’m like, “Is there a subgroup that’s a little lost?”

Steven Jack Butala:
There’s a subgroup that’s lost, and it’s a group that I was recently exposed to.

Jill K DeWit:
Oh, okay.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what’s going on.

Jill K DeWit:
We need to reel them back in.

Steven Jack Butala:
I keep trying to say this final sentence, but I can’t let it do it because my partner here is steering it in a different direction.

Jill K DeWit:
I understand.

Steven Jack Butala:
You’re my partner.

Jill K DeWit:
I know that. Well, you know what I think you’re trying to say? This is not the lottery. You’re not going to come in and send out one mailer-

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what I mean. You keep saying-

Jill K DeWit:
… and make a million dollars.

Steven Jack Butala:
I know. You keep trying to tell everybody what I’m trying to say.

Jill K DeWit:
Sorry.

Steven Jack Butala:
This is a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication. If you do it right, you’re going to hit the numbers that Jill just described BK hit, with a lot of pride. You’re probably going to quit your job. You’re going to coach your kids’ soccer team, or whatever ends up happening, and make a great living. You will not become Elon Musk doing this. If you start out trying to be Elon Musk, you will fail really soon, get frustrated, because you took off too many big bites. You have to take it in small, little tranches, with little successes in. If you understand that, that’s the first … Oh, yeah. I did that over here with … I had one convenience store and then two and then 15 and then 20, and then I sold the whole thing to Circle K. Then you understand that. That’s the kind of people we want in our group.

Jill K DeWit:
No comment.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s how you get to the end of the podcast.

Jill K DeWit:
There we go.

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

Jill K DeWit:
Well, first, I got to wonder how many people listen to that at three speed or half speed, like, “Oh, watch this”? I got to slow this down. They’re not on the same page on this one.

Steven Jack Butala:
If that entertains you, I wonder.

Jill K DeWit:
It does for me. We’re not going to always be on the same page. You know what? It’s not that we’re not on the same page. I think I describe it differently. I think I look at it differently, and I describe it differently than you do. That’s not that I don’t believe in what you believe.

Steven Jack Butala:
I know.

Jill K DeWit:
Also, too, this is going to be my inspiration, then. My inspiration today is, how much is enough? I’m going to go with that. Based on all these numbers that we’re throwing around, we just had my Land Academy ladies call last week. We get together once a month. Samantha did a beautiful, great, very easy to read and understand and digest spreadsheet, showing if you send out this much mail in the month, and you do one deal, and then you do two deals, and then you do three deals, and then I think the most was four. Maybe, I think it was right around two or three a month that you’re averaging.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, geez. Okay. Good.

Jill K DeWit:
She’s like, “Here’s the deal.”

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s great.

Jill K DeWit:
You start off making $10,000 on a deal. Then you start off making $20,000. Then you have a $10,000 and a $20,000. Then you have one that you make $10,000 this month and a $30,000 this month. It was so calm and methodical.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s what I was trying to say here.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, hold on a moment. But it was in two years. This is doing one or two deals a month, sending out between 5,000 and 10,000 units, not to start, but starting with 5,000 units of mail in the beginning. You could look up and go, “Wow.” And your initial investment is 15 grand. You started off buying your property for 15 grand. Well, maybe it was just your mail, even. But the point then, at the end, you come up in two years with half a million dollars. There’s nothing wrong-

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s so realistic.

Jill K DeWit:
… with that.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s my point here. All kidding aside, boy, we are exactly saying the same thing. Just be realistic about this, and it’s going to work.

Jill K DeWit:
Well, the thing is, from my inspiration today, how much is enough? We were on a conference call with our team the other day. We were talking about interest rates. What was our team? I remember who we were on the call with. We were on a conference call. I think it was Carl and Sam because Carl said, “Do you know that the average American has less than $10,000 of liquid cash right now?” I’m like, “Are you flipping kidding me?” He’s like, “No. That’s how little cash people do.” I’m like, “Wow. That’s shocking to me.”

Steven Jack Butala:
Me, too.

Jill K DeWit:
We’ll digest that in a second. But for me, if the average American has less than 10 grand and you step into something new where you’re like, “Boy, Jill, I followed everything you guys just talked about, I did it all wrong, and in two years, I only have $200,000,” like, “Oh, hello? Big whoop. Look what you still did.” Be realistic about this.

Steven Jack Butala:
Oh, my God. Being realistic is what I want to talk about, so we can do this together.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I love when we meld everything together and do it all together. It’s my favorite.

Steven Jack Butala:
It’s just one big ball of failure.

Jill K DeWit:
Let’s work on another project together. Also, my extra favorite is when we try to close a deal together because we always win when that happens.

Steven Jack Butala:
No.

Jill K DeWit:
No. Anyway.

Steven Jack Butala:
You need to know your partner is better.

Jill K DeWit:
When you don’t know what the other person did all day, that’s when you win. You just see the bank balance? That’s really when you win.

Steven Jack Butala:
No truer words have ever been spoken. I don’t know what she does.

Jill K DeWit:
But I’ll look at the bank balance.

Steven Jack Butala:
A lot of money keeps coming in.

Jill K DeWit:
Exactly.

Steven Jack Butala:
She says, “Yep, I’m not sure where he is.”

Jill K DeWit:
I don’t know.

Steven Jack Butala:
That’s how you do it. Exactly.

Jill K DeWit:
That’s exactly right. Anyway, my thing is, my inspiration, come on, don’t be greedy. Don’t be greedy, but aim high. I want you to set some good goals for yourself, and then accept what comes back, change it, and really think about how much is enough. Like you said, there’s a lot of noise out there. Do I really need a Ferrari? No. Do I have a Ferrari? No. Come on. I don’t have a Rolex, either.

Steven Jack Butala:
Reality is my whole point. Let’s just make a big dose of reality about if you do it all wrong, you might make 200 grand. The reason I bring this up today is because as a young, professional person, I would scoff at that. I would scoff at $200,000. Are you kidding me? I’m not going to work real hard to figure out how to make $200,000. You get a little bit older, and you realize you got to put your soul into something to make 200 grand.
Then, if your soul really is, it’s working, you’ve tried four things, and it didn’t work, and then try this, and it’s like, “Hey, this works. Yeah. I put my soul into this thing, shot for half a million, and made 250 instead?” Well, now it’s very possible, realistic, actually, to make half a million next year, the year after that, because you proved it to yourself. You proved the system that you chose that actually works for you. You work for it. Now you’re on your way to making five or 10 million dollars a year and getting to the other end of that bell curve. That’s very realistic, in my opinion.

Jill K DeWit:
I completely agree. Did you have anything else you wanted to add that’s informational, or do we just roll it all in, and I’m happy with that?

Steven Jack Butala:
That was it.

Jill K DeWit:
Okay. Hey, don’t forget, if you want to find out more, you’re like, “Shoot, stupid wait list, what do I do?” Just cut to the chase. You can send a note to my team via support@landacademy.com.

Steven Jack Butala:
We are Jack and Jill. Information.

Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration.

Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property. Out.

Jill K DeWit:
Sorry. That thing at the bottom was confusing to me for a second. I’m like, “What is that?”