I am Steven Jack Butala.

I am Jill DeWit. This is the Land Academy Show. For ten years and counting, Land Academy has been the place to go for the education tools and support you need to start and or grow your land investment company. We are the most seasoned and experienced investment group on the Internet.

Our topic from Solo to Squad: The first three hires every land investor needs. I love this topic because we have been through it multiple times, and I feel qualified to say we have done it right and we have done it wrong.

I was going to say, we will lead off with, let me tell you all the ways not to do it, because we have covered all those, and I know we will get into that.

Before we get to the topic, though, let us hear from our Land Academy community.

We have several wins to share. I love this part. Marcus T wrote, “I finally stopped overanalyzing, and I sent my first 5,000-unit mailer. I already have two signed contracts back, and one is maybe a double your money 10-acre lot.” Congrats.

Fantastic. Keep it up.

Derek V said, “I had a seller who was for a price that did not work. I stayed with it and followed up every 30 days or so.”

This is the Jill model.

Yes, it is. “Six months later, he called me back and accepted my original offer, and he actually said he liked my persistence.” Patience pays. Sometimes it is not always around the house.

Patience does not pay domestically.

Not always. It gets annoying quickly.

I just thought that was so.

No, but then other things too. Yeah, it does not work. Tyson Case said, “I am trying a new info lots strategy in a high-demand area.”

This is excellent. I love this.

“I was nervous about the higher buy-in, but I just bought a lot and listed it for $40,000 over my buy price.” It is amazing how much faster these move in an urban area.

Shifting From Rural To Urban Land Strategies

There is a big lesson here. We all love to buy rural vacant land, but the single potential downside with rural vacant land, especially in an economy like this, is that it takes a little bit longer to sell. You have to ask yourself this question. Would you rather pay a little bit more or, in some cases, an uncomfortable amount more for an urban piece of property but sell it faster? That is honestly the way houses go, too. You usually overpay, but you still get some good money out on the buy side fast, as long as your buy side price is low enough.

Can you define overpay? It’s because that will confuse people.

Define overpay?

Yeah. It’s because not overpay, overpay. I want to be really clear on that.

You never want to overpay ever. When I overpay for a piece of property, overpay might not be the phrase here. Paying an amount that is a little bit outside your comfort zone, but not enough to stop you from buying the transaction.

Thank you.

That was patience.

It is. That was patience on my part.

There is one big thing of patience.

Yes, it is. That is hard. The thing one and thing two, we have shirts that say patience one, patience two. Last one here, Sam R. He said, “My VA just handled my first deal from initial call to escrow opening without me touching it.” That is a new thing for Sam. I finally feel like a business owner instead of a guy. Just a guy with a hobby.

Identifying The “First Hire” For A Land Business

This is a perfect, strangely, perfect segue into what our real topic is, which is hiring people to do the work that you essentially do not want to do. Let us get right into it. Our topic from Solo to Squad: The First Three Hires Every Land Investor Needs. There are two schools of thought here. I subscribe to number one, which is to hire somebody to do the stuff that you do not want to do. As it develops, your relationship develops with employee number one.

I always look at employee number one like you are hiring them in as an assistant/administrator, but they have such potential to be a CEO so quickly, because I never want to be the CEO. I want to be the owner who does the special stuff, that makes my company special, let us say more than somebody else’s acquisition decisions, places to send mail, really important stuff that I cannot, to this day, I still make choices daily in the land investment company that Jill and I have.

That first key employee, if you can season them, it is going to take a lot longer than you think, maybe six months to a year, if they are honest with you. If they are telling you every day, “I really do not understand that. Can we go over it again?” Which, believe me, this is 2026. People are not wired to behave that way any longer. I grew up in an environment where you just ask as many, never say no, and do not screw anything up. Just ask a thousand questions before you start to act. Times have changed a little bit. I am not complaining at all. I am just saying they have changed. People tend to say, “Yes, I get it really quickly. Wait, too quickly.”

That first key employee—if you can season them—will take a lot longer than you think. Share on X

I know what you mean. I have got this. I am like, “No, do not.” Let me finish my sentence.

Employee number one is to be somebody you are seasoning. Maybe it is somebody like Jill, because I will tell you, when I let Jill and I revamped everything during the economic downturn in 2009, 2010, we joined forces first socially and then professionally. It ended up being that way without intent. I did not intend to take her on and have her be an employee. She was always a 50% partner.

Wait a minute.

You were always a 50 % partner from day one.

I just had a light bulb moment. What if that was subconsciously going on when we got together socially? I do not know.

I shelved buying and selling land around 2009 entirely. In fact, I honestly thought maybe it was just over because the economy was just atrocious. It was. We were brought to our knees financially between 2009 and 2011 with a bank, all kinds of banking issues, and you just cannot sell a piece of real estate. Jill got involved and really changed that for us. She just got on the phone, which is not my forte. You got my concept, and then you got probably Jill’s concept, which is to collect some people and be their director.

Not necessarily. You think so?

I describe amply. Are you going to do option number one? I can describe number two if you want to.

You want to go through your three, and then I will do my three?

I just did the three people. You hire one person, you season the heck out of them, and it could take up to two years. Hopefully, they stick around. Hopefully, they are a family member that you get along with, or, like in our case, a spouse, and things do you see immediate results when you choose the right people. That person collects people below them. You, as the owner, are always at0 making the really important decisions.

The Importance Of SOPs

One of my pieces of advice for people is that, especially when they get into this and they are having some success, they are like, “I want to make this an empire like you guys.” I am like, “All right.” Everything you do from this point forward needs to be as if you are replacing yourself. Be thinking of your establishing procedure.

How is that working out, in front of a camera right now?

There is something she cannot. I can go on like, “You did this.”

Maybe you should, Jill.

That is true, right? I tell them, “Think about starting to get your own SOPs.” Establishing your standard operating procedure and how you like things done. Think like that, number one. I do agree, you want to bring in the first two. You want to bring in that person, and you are like, “I am losing money right now. I am doing busy work. It is keeping me from the deals I could be making.

I could have somebody else holding escrow’s hand. I could have someone else making sure the agents are doing what they should be doing on the sales side, all of that. That is easy for me, first hire, like, “I know I have got to do this because it is costing me money.” You do not feel bad about spending the money because I know a lot of people, too. There are a lot of things that go on in this. Not just about the first three hires, but I just want to touch on a lot of things, like the fear of it. There is a huge fear that a lot of people have about bringing on an employee.

Especially when you are your own boss and you are running your own business. You just tackled making sure you can handle your own household finances, and maybe you have your wife not working now, fill in the blank, or your husband’s not working now kinds of thing. You just have a handle on that. You are like, “Now I am going to bring on somebody else, and I am going to be responsible for their livelihood also.” I know it is a big thing. As I said, that is when it clicks when you are like, “I am losing money. It is a no-brainer kind of thing.”

When she says losing money, she does not mean losing money.

You are not making as much money.

I should be really working on the next mailer, but I am not. I am talking to real estate agents. I am doing some stuff on the sell side. In fact, it ate up my entire week. I might be losing money because I am not getting the next mailer out and jamming that pipeline full.

My dream thing, which I have now, is I love being a dealmaker, hanging up the phone, and telling my team now what to do. “Here is what we decided. Please open escrow. This is how it is going to go.” They do all that work.

She has me because her phone is always ringing. No matter what, she will come to me once in a while and say, “My phone is not ringing enough.”

This is a whole other point. I love the way you covered it. I am filling in some things for you to think about, so this worked out well. One of the things that I see a lot of people doing is getting into the business. They understand the business. They struggle with parts of it, like the data, let us just say. Their first hire or your first hire is going to be someone who is like, “I s*** at this. It is not just that I need the help, and I could be doing that much further, like I am so flipping slow at it.”

“I am going to find someone. I do not care if it is my sixteen-year-old nephew, because he is an Excel whiz kid or whatever it is, he understands data and numbers, he can do these things.” Get somebody like that to fill in the places that you are not that good at, and it is going to make you faster and more efficient.

Get somebody to fill in the areas where you’re not as strong, and it will make you faster and more efficient. Share on X

First person that I ever hired in this land environment, not back in the day, and other things I was involved in was somebody who was my friend. I had this conversation with her. I sat down and said, “Look, you are obviously an intelligent person, and you have some office experience. I would love to hire you, but I want you to do all the stuff I do not want to do so that you do not have that feel like you are losing money experience like Jill described earlier.”

Regardless of how you choose to hire people, whether it is one person, three people, or a squad, as the title says, that first person has to be stuff that you do not want to do because you are human. We are only going to do stuff we do not want to do for so long. It is going to wreck the whole thing because you are going to eventually do stuff you want to do. You might want to just retire, which I understand, and do nothing. Make sure that the first employee really understands that you are going to dump everything on them.

I will talk about a few things that we did wrong. I tried to save one person one time. I thought I could hire a friend. I have a really good one. I had a dear friend that we knew for like over a decade, and she was so successful in her other life. They were downsizing, and she was going to be laid off, and she kind of needed one more job to fill the gap to retirement.

I am like, “This is an awesome opportunity. Look how experienced she is. She has had all the staff, and everything was totally unrelated to the industry. It was food service stuff, but she ran the show.” I am like, “She could run this stuff.” She could run my stuff like standing on her head.” It started out pretty. I realized she cannot be alone. It was great.

Was that the problem?

That was a lot of it. That, and then the mindset changed. Not every customer was following that. She loved it because I was in the office with her. I was training, we were having fun, and we were laughing and like, “What are you doing for lunch? What do you want to do this?”

That is exactly the opposite of work experience.

Even our staff down the hall, she really wanted to be in all their lives. It was more social than work. You and I are both. We get in. We like to work, and we like to get out.

This is how we work. That was years ago. I did not know any of that until today.

I realized later that was part of the problem. Again, I thought I was saving her. Do not do that. I thought I was saving her. It is going to work out great. All this experience. I am sure she could handle it, and she could. The minute I stepped off and said, “You got this now.” I needed to go back to doing all these other things. Go, “I was in a different location and doing different things.” Everything started to go.

You are tuning in to this show because you are or you want to be an entrepreneur. In an untrue sense of the word, an entrepreneur looks at regular stuff that we are doing and sees it differently. That is the actual correct meaning of the French word. You take something that is regular, like buying a piece of real estate and selling it, and you add or see things differently, which makes you ultra successful.

In my case, it was like developing this concept of these mailers. Jill’s every day I am sure is subconsciously trying to improve how she is on the phone with people and to get people to do what she wants professionally and otherwise. We are all entrepreneurs. It is very hard for me. This is under the guise of what we screwed up. I believe that, and I incorrectly believe this, that people are startup-type entrepreneurs.

Every person?

Everybody.

They have been bubbling in.

You just do not know it yet, yes.

They just need you to bring it out.

After I cannot, we probably have hundreds and hundreds of employees that no longer work for us, and about 3 or 4 do work for us. What does that say? Does that say I was a successful owner/boss? No, it says the opposite. I know people who have original employees from 1992. To me, that is just amazing. The fact is, people need to be told what to do. They need not have their feelings hurt.

Jill just identified one of at that time she was a key employee. What you want her to do is horse around at work and be social. I am not the person in any way to honor those things and pay attention to those things and then provide them. I am the person who is going to have a real, honest conversation with you for about two hours, and then you are on your own. That does not work. It has not worked for me.

It is hard for entrepreneurs. There is a personality type. Both of us have startup personality types. We are very good during the startup phase. Most people are not good with risk. It is exciting. As long as it is capitalized well, we do, and I do great in that environment together. But once it comes down to operations, where the whole corporate cycle kicks into operations and daily stuff and SOPs and administrative things, and not the core.

People pay.

Not the core of buying and selling of land, really, which is still what we are both really good at. I become an administrator or an operations person. That is when it is not good.

What have we done to solve this in our own world?

We have.

I do it.

There is a key staff that are very autonomous now. That staff is very.

It is funny, though, I have to say. As I am rewriting the ebook right now, I am doing my own version of our ebook, and I hope you all enjoy it. It will be out in a couple of weeks. One of the things I have identified in there is, back in the day, like when we figured out working together, that no two people can be working on the same deal, especially no two people can be on the phone, and it goes a step further, you do not even like talking on the phone. I love it. It trickles down into our staffing thing. The majority of the time, I am the one communicating with the staff. It is kind of funny.

No two people can work on the same deal, especially no two people can be on the phone at the same time. Share on X

The vast majority.

That is how we have solved it. If Jack needs something, this is good for people who are in couples. There are a lot of people that come just because you are couples and that is my whole focus on the ebook I am working on. You come to us, and you are like, “This cannot all be easy. How do you do it without killing each other?” This is one of the ways. What Jack needs gets to me. I get it through to the team. I make sure it gets done.

I am going to end on this, and we will move to the questions. When I was in my late 30s, I decided to have a child. When that happens, as you know, most of you have had children, you get all kinds of advice from people that you do not want. You are not asking for advice. I got a lot of advice.

Unsolicited advice.

One thing stuck in my mind, one bartender said this to me, “The whole key to having kids is to meet the kids where they are coming. A one-year-old is very different than a four-year-old, a five-year-old, and it is not about you. You just meet the kids within reason from where they are coming. That obviously always stuck with me. If you apply that logic to an employee, you will go out of business. You cannot meet them from where they are coming and then attempt to get what you need out of them. They have to have most of it in their soul by the time they get to you. I am going to get so many negative comments about this. The only way you accomplish that is through turnover.

I am sitting on my hands.

Hiring For Unteachable Traits

No, go ahead. I want to hear the counterbalance.

No, because I do not know. There are things you can hire. There are things that you cannot train. I cannot train ambition. I cannot train enthusiasm. I cannot train a positive attitude. There are lots of things like that that I hire for. I hire for diligence. I hire them because they have to complete a task, things like that, that you hire them for. The little minutiae about what we are doing day to day, I can train that all day long. Part of me is, you say you do not mean it, for where they come.

One thing I do do, that tenet spills into that, is I do try to find out what motivates them. I always try to find out. It is not always money. Most of the time, by the way, it is mostly not money. There is something else. Maybe they want to learn from you. They are a mentor they want, or they love pleasing you. They love knowing they are doing a good job, and that just “Now I am going to work even harder. I am so excited. I am going to do this now and do that now and do this even faster and better.”

This is a working, real-life example. Jill and I are sitting here right now because I found the ultimate professional relationship for me, which is with her. It ultimately made us very wealthy.

Thanks.

Up until then, I was doing okay, but not like we are now. We have multiple revenue streams because of Land Academy and all kinds of things. You have to work, surround yourself with the right people, whether they’re below you, above you, or vertical. Look, I am going to leave with this tiny little anecdotal story here. There is this old adage, anecdotal/fable from way back in the day in Europe, and this guy was a shipbuilder, and they were making ships.

He was making ships out of wood as you did back then, and he could not for his life find guys that he could trust to make these ships. Instead of being their boss, he developed the system. It has lasted until now, and we will go, we will ask forever about motivating them to travel around the world, sail, be part of the boat, and be part of a crew, and go on this adventure.

Once he successfully did that with these groups of people who were building these huge boats for him, they were motivated. Now they cannot build the boats fast enough because they want to be on the crew and go around the world. They bought what he was selling, which is a sense of adventure. The guys who were not into that were off the crew. That is honestly what, if you are an operations person, I am not, Jill seems to be. I am not sure.

It always happens. I am always the operations person in the end. I start there, I try to give up, and then it comes back to my lap.

You have to find a way to motivate your people. Let us wrap up with a few questions from our Land Academy community.

Land Academy Q&A

Question number one. Alan asks, “As popular markets like Florida and Texas increasingly become saturated with newbie mailers, what data sets are you looking at to identify the next sleeper states before the rest of the industry catches on?”

I chose these questions out of a lot of questions that we get. I intentionally chose all three or four of them, sophisticated ones, because I think if you are listening to the show, you are thinking about getting employees. You are probably at this point. “I sent a mailer to Florida, and Texas did not really get it. I passed the red, green, and yellow test. I did all the stuff I was supposed to do. I did not get the results that I wanted.”

I have made a second career out of finding little areas to send mail. I mean little, not entire states, but little areas that I do not think are hitting a lot of people’s radar, smashing them with mailers a couple of times, maybe. Gets the calls, and then she closes. You have to devise a system. Land Academy is a bachelor’s degree on its own. We have many people in here who are giving themselves through coaching.

This coaching product that we have is just, Jill released it this year, and it is crazy, wildly successful. We never really had a coaching product like this. There are a lot of people who are where Alan is. He is, “Look, it has been working. I am making a bunch of money. Now I need to hone in on and perfect it.” You can go to really any state and look at each zip code from a relational database standpoint and pick out the best places to send mail, and then send it to like three zip codes that are adjacent to each other that show some promise.

You may have to adjust your product type. You are certainly not like we had a comment or the win earlier. You might have to go to Dallas, Texas, and buy InfoLots. You have to be really flexible. The fact is, Alan, you have to do this. If you, as a new person, run the red, green, yellow test, come up with a county or two counties, like let us say in North Carolina, that is really over saturated in my opinion.

You have to make different decisions. The context in this question is this. I do not care about how much money I mail I send. I am going to send a ton of mail. If one mailer did not work out, I will send another one. That is the number one issue with new people in this business. They do not understand that you are going to have might have to send a bunch of mailers out before you get some really good deals.

Jeanine asked, “When sending out a 20,000-unit mailer across multiple counties, how do you balance the efficiency of broad brush pricing with the necessity of surgical pricing to avoid overpaying and declining sub-markets?” I love these. She is just like a PhD student. Can I rephrase this in my terms? You have got the right side of the tracks. You have got the wrong side of the tracks. You know these are good zip codes. You know these are sucky zip codes. How do I make sure I price effectively for that zip code versus that zip code? Go ahead.

Well said. Thank you. Think about your audience. Think about the zip code that you are sitting in right now, wherever it is, and think about all the neighborhoods there. Some of it might be industrial. Some of it might be an apartment building. Some of it might be different types of neighborhoods with different-sized houses that are new and old.

You cannot broaden, Jeanine is right. You cannot broad-brush price all that stuff and expect to have huge success. I am not saying there are two ways to go about this. You can cast a massive net like you are fishing. You are going to catch some fish. It is going to be a lot harder, or you can surgically throw some lines in with specific lures and a specific type of bait, and you are going to get the fish that you are trying to get.

I prefer the second way, and I have done both and both work. On the broad brush thing scenario, you need to send a lot more mail out. With the surgical pricing, you have to separate the mailers, and there are lots of ways to do this. This is what I talk about when it is master’s degree/PhD coaching level stuff. There are a lot of ways to separate tiny little surgical mailers and get them all out at one time, and have a beautiful financial experience.

Question number three, Chris asked, “If I get a $500,000 deal under contract, but the usual deal funders are tapped out, what unconventional capital stacks are you seeing work right now to close without using your own cash?”

This will never happen, Chris. I want you and everybody listening to this to forget that this is even a possibility. There is so much investment money out there. It blows your mind. This is the reason Jill and I started Land Academy. We did not start it because we wanted to teach for the rest of our lives and collect money for educational expenses. That is not what we wanted. We wanted to get access to unlimited capital. It happened about three weeks ago. It all took us three weeks in 2015 when we started Land Academy to realize there is endless capital. Do not worry about it.

Do you remember my mind, Mike? Already right now, as I am reading the question, Chris is like $500,000. I am like, “If it is that great a deal, could I come up with $500,000?” I was already thinking of what I could do to come up with $500,000. Do not even worry about it. Somebody will come up with the money, but is it that great a deal?

Land Academy is a collection of people who are very kind. Maybe it is like you, too, a very like-minded collection of people that if you present a single, maybe one or two paragraphs, reason why you have a property under contract for $500, 000 and why you can sell it for $750,000, they are going to throw money at you. I would, but I need to believe in the deal, and it needs to be a great deal.

It is worth a million right now, too, by the way, $750,000 goes fast then. That is the whole point.

The whole key is your confidence. It needs to be a great deal of your confidence, and you need to follow through. None of that is to be expected on your first transaction, but just trust me, trust us. There are tons and tons of investment capital out there.

By the way, did you know we released it earlier? Actually, it was last fall that we soft-released it. Now it is officially out there. Deal Complete. It is our new way to automate your whole land business as best you can. Basically, there is a pizza tracker in there that walks you through everything you need to do from start to finish, including a CRM to help with pricing, all included. Go check out DealComplete.com, and there is a free training you can watch right now. DealComplete.com/training.

If you liked this episode, please drop a comment or follow the channel. You know the drill. If you share a win or a question, we might just feature it on next week’s episode. Join us next week, where we discuss another interesting one.

Thank you for joining us. We will see you then.

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