This is episode number 2,135. Jill and I are talking about the value of accountability groups for scaling your land business. This is a popular topic.

I need this stuff. I’ll explain more in a minute. You know me. Maybe that’s part of our personality, especially since this is feelings and opinions week. I feel like you like to be more of a loner than in a group. My opinion is you work better that way. I can understand. I like the group part. I’ll explain why in a few minutes.

This is not about me. It never is. In eighth grade, I took the personality test everyone hopefully takes in this country to find out what you should, might be set up for, to do with your life professionally. I was going to be one of two things, a farmer or a medical research person.

Very interesting. How do you remember that?

It is because I’m neither one of those things, and I wish I was.

I don’t remember that. All I remember is, like every girl, I loved horses, and I wanted to be a vet. That was a foolish mistake.

I can’t even remember the teacher who did that. I think it was a homeroom or something. He was a pretty funny guy anyway. He just looked at me, like, “It is because that’s what it all came out as. You want to be a cop? You want to be a firefighter? You want to be a farmer, a research person?” “Yes. That makes sense for you.” Thanks, Steve.

Everybody’s got a uniform and cool. You’re the weirdo in the back, like, I’m going to work in a lab.

I was the weirdo in the back. You nailed it.

That’s awesome.

Optimizing ZIP Codes And GPS Data For Land Pricing

Each day on the show, we answer a question from our Land Academy member Discord forum and take a deep dive into land-related topics by popular request.

Ian wrote, “I’m about to go through and price my first mailer. I found that zip to zip, there’s quite a bit of difference in the county, with some being in town and others being around features like lakes. In general, though, the price within the zip codes is fairly consistent. My issue is with the fact that the DataTree export data I’m going through, I’m going to use my first data set of 971 properties, is missing about 35% of the Citus zip codes, and about 20% of the Citus zip codes don’t match what spits back from Google Maps based on the GPS coordinates. Only about 45% were listed correctly. I even have a few where the GPS county and the Citus county are different. Number one, is it fairly common for the Citus data to be different from the GPS data? Question number two, do you use the GPS data or the Citus data given in DataTree for your pricing?”

This is a very intelligent question. I’m glad you asked that. I chose it so I could share this with everybody. You’re going to do well at this. Here’s the deal. Most pieces of vacant land do not have a mailing address. Why? It is because no one’s ever requested it from the post office, because they don’t need to get mail there. What you have, when you look at it from a database standpoint, is a bunch of pieces of property that have no mailing address.

How do you know what zip code they’re in? Fortunately for us, DataTree, as a data aggregator, provides GPS coordinates for each piece of property, to the point where their entire database, all 15 million records, is 99.9% filled in with GPS coordinates. Our job before we go price a mailer is to convert those GPS coordinates to zip codes. We use a tool called Geocod.io. It very quickly and very efficiently converts the GPS coordinates to zip codes for you. It even tells you how accurate their suggestion is.

It’s pretty cool when it does that.

It’s super cool.

It’s neat. I’ve watched over your shoulder as you run through that. It’s like, “This rooftop or percent.” I’m like, “I found it.”

If you watch Chapters 3 and 4 in Land Academy 3.0, which are my chapters, not Jill’s, I go through this process in demo format in great detail. Your question, number one, Is it fairly common for this to happen? It is. It is absolutely common. 90% or 95% of the properties that we regularly send mail to don’t have a zip code associated with them. We implement what I just said. Number two, do you use GPS data or Citus data given in DataTree? We use the GPS data out of necessity. The vast majority of properties won’t have an address. This is effective. I have ten years of doing this, and we have done it this way for years.

I’m going to add, for Land Academy members, something we discussed before the show. We’re going to do advanced training on this every month. Everybody’s like, “What are you talking about?” Within Land Academy, we have our whole detailed program, and everything’s in there. Sometimes you need a little more clarification or practice, or examples, on how to use tools like Geocod.io and how we’re getting these addresses so we can better price the properties.

Jack has already agreed to do an advanced training coming up here. Watch for that, Ian and members. That’s going to be cool. For all you Land Academy members, it’ll all be recorded and put on your member dashboard. We’re building quite a library of all these advanced training modules for you so that it’ll be there for you to go back and refer to, over and over and over again.

Accountability Groups For Business Scaling: Repeatable Vs. Scalable Growth

Our topic, the value of accountability groups for scaling your business. Before we get started, let’s do a simple definition here of scaling. There are two ways to grow your business, in my opinion, scaling and repeatability. If you think about McDonald’s, their business model was Ray Kroc’s. After understanding the McDonald brothers’ business model, he built one that he thought would be more efficient. It worked, and he repeated it.

He repeated it and repeated it over and over again. That’s repeatable and is very effective for some business model types. Same with Walmart, and same with buying a house and renting it out. It’s repeatable. Scalable, here’s an example of scalable, writing a book. You write the book one time. If it sells well, you sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies. If it sells well, you sell millions of copies. You only ever wrote it one time. That’s scalable.

It becomes at that point, it becomes about how capable you are of marketing, or, if your product’s great, did you write a great book? Did you do the book tour? Do people like you? It’s all of that. It’s not necessarily about the product itself. Another great example is software and apps, applications. Bill Gates released Windows, I don’t know when it was, in the ’70s, I think. The ’80s, maybe? Individual products first, and then it just became a marketing scenario and making sure that you can sell millions and millions of copies of the software instead of four. That’s scalable. What we do, in my opinion, is repeatable.

Jill and I talked about this before we sat down. A great example of what we do is, I saw an interview with Steven Spielberg a lot of years ago, and he said that on the E.T. set, he finally found all the people that he still uses now in his group to make a movie. It’s not so much that you’re starting from zero in every real estate deal, or, in his case, in every movie. You’re still working with all the same people. The script’s different. There are different things you have to address, just like in every real estate deal, but it’s the same group of people who bring all this past experience, how they work together and all of that knowledge. That’s what we are. You need some accountability to repeat land real estate deals and learn that.

You need some accountability to repeat land real estate deals. Share on X

Another way, or example, of how we do our business in a repeatable way is, I have a little team in Tennessee. I have a team in Colorado. I have a team in Utah, fill in the blank state. That’s the use of the same escrow crew, usually the same brokers who all give some opinions, and they’ll sell the property. It’s the same county people. We get to know each other, and that’s your team. It makes it repeatable, faster, and easier. Every time I’ve got a five-acre coming in, in this county, we all know what to do. Just do it again.

Do it again. Repeatable.

The Power Of Peer Pressure And Community Support

That’s it. I was going to add a couple of things about accountability groups, though. We’ve got the definitions down, and now it’s about the value of being in a community, in a group. I have two points I want to make here. One is, for me, I wrote down, The Peer Pressure. Peer pressure holds, not all of us. Jack puts a single finger up to peer pressure. For me, I need it. For me, I need to be held accountable.

A perfect example for me is going to the dumb gym. I don’t care how pretty my home gym might be or how wonderful it is, the latest and greatest toys, I’m not going to use it. I need peer pressure. I need to get up, go get in my car, drive to the gym, and stand with people staring at me, going, “You’re on time. Good.” That’s accountability for me. I won’t do it without that. That’s the beautiful thing about our groups. It can happen. I do it in coaching. Coaching’s a good one. We do one-on-one personal coaching.

Coaching is effective for accountability.

I thought about it as I was wrapping up one of the sessions. The guy even said, “What’s my homework?” I didn’t even get to it. I’m like, This is nice. He’s pushing himself, asking me, “What’s my homework?” I said, “If you want to push yourself, take it all the way to this point. If you don’t want to push yourself too hard, get to this. You have two levels, A and B. We’ll finish that last thing up when we meet again in two weeks.” We pretty much meet every other week when we do one-on-ones.

That was awesome. He held himself accountable. We also have groups that get together within Land Academy and hold each other accountable. “Did you get your mailer out?” “What the heck is going on?” “I’m not calling them back.” “Why are you not calling them back?” “Why are you not buying this thing?” You need that sometimes.

Jill is my peer pressure.

I am your peer pressure.

You’re my density.

What the hell does that mean?

It’s from Back to the Future. He means destiny. “You’re my destiny.” He says, “You’re my density.”

I missed that one.

You’re my density.

Why Accountability Groups Help You Learn Faster

That’s very good. That’s good. That’s reaching. The second thing I was going to say about the value of accountability groups is how much faster you’re going to learn in a group environment versus on your own. You’re going to make your own mistakes, and it’s going to take you ten times longer than being in the room with ten people making those mistakes. You all share with each other.

That’s valuable and powerful. Everybody comes together with, “Here’s a good thing that I learned this week, and here’s something I screwed up, so you don’t do this.” Even when we started Land Academy, I’m sure a lot of it, people came in, this is now year ten of Land Academy. You already had two decades of mistakes to share with everybody.

Everybody needs a different level of accountability. You have to decide what really works for you. Share on X

Thanks, Jill.

You’re welcome.

Two decades of making mistakes.

Isn’t that great? It’s now three decades of mistakes. How great is that? Coming into Land Academy, you’ve got three decades of stuff we screwed up to save you. That’s the truth.

Good thing we saved all that money.

That was early on when I was talking about Land Academy. Even now, “I’m listening to your show. Jill, we listen to your podcast religiously. I can do this all on my own.” Great. Go for it. You could take ten years to catch up with me, doing it all on your own just by listening to the show. Or you could join Land Academy and cut your ten years into ten months and then be on your way. “That makes sense.”

Everybody needs a different level of accountability, and you have to decide what works for you. I do not need a high level of accountability. I do not need a social group to go to at a gym. Every time I hear peer pressure, the first thing that comes to my mind is, are you the cause of the peer pressure or the recipient of peer pressure? I’ll ask you, reader, to think about that. If you’re the cause of peer pressure, you probably don’t need it.

Let’s go back. Don’t be Mean Girls. That’s not what we’re talking about here. It’s healthy pressure from a group of your peers who are hoping to motivate you to rise.

One value of being in a group is the healthy pressure from your peers, motivating you to rise. Share on X

That’s what it is. That’s perfect. That’s how I translate it to whatever that means for you. That’s perfect. Mic dropped there.

This is not hazing.

Were you hazed at the gym at all, ever?

No, I don’t get hazed. You should never be hazed. It should be healthy peer pressure. Think of it like that. This is good.

Join us again, where we discuss how the Land Academy CRM can help you streamline your deals. You are not alone in your real estate ambition. We are Jack and Jill, an inspiration to buy undervalued property.