Justin Piche : Scout Land

Brandon Parker00:00This is Brandon Parker. Welcome to the Legends of Land Show, where it's my job to deconstruct the tactics of elite land investors, how they think about their business and strategies that drive their success. My guest today is Justin Pichet. If you caught our third episode, you already know Justin as a former US Navy submarine officer who made a remarkable transition from corporate roles at Amazon and ExxonMobil to dominating the land investment space. Since then, he's continued to lead a 7 figure land investment and development business with over a 100 deals closed and a team of over 20 across the globe.

Brandon Parker00:32Justin's commitment to personal growth is evident. He's invested over a 100 k in education and coaching to fast track his success. Keep an eye out for Justin's new podcast, the ground game. You can find Justin online at scoutlandgroup.com and Justin Piche dot com. In this conversation, we cover team structure, cold calling, leadership, culture, his education, and coaching, and, again, his new podcast coming up, The Ground Game. Without further ado, please enjoy a wide ranging conversation with Justin Piche. The Legends of Land Show with Brandon Parker.

Brandon Parker01:05Deconstruct the tactics of world class land investors and learn tools to build a 7 figure land business. Justin Piche, welcome to the Legends of Land show, my friend. Welcome back. How are doing today?

Justin Piche01:25Hey, I'm doing great, Brandon. Thank you so much for having me back. It was great to see you at Ajay's Landscaling Summit

Brandon Parker01:31last weekend. I believe it's already been a week. I feel like I'm still not fully recovered from the exhaustion of just the weekend. Yeah. That was so fun. That was killer. That's always good to see everyone in one spot, and I'm always surprised how much I learn. Like, I picked up a tip from you before the first day, I think, and it was a skip tracing tip that'll save you tons of money that... But paid for the conference a few times over. I was like, oh my gosh. Perfect. You recommended first because people will probably ask about that. So I'm gonna look into that. But Yeah. Yeah. Those conferences are worth their weight in gold.

Brandon Parker02:02Yeah, man. You've been on the show before, but give a thirty or one minute intro about yourself, your background, and then we'll hop into the first questions.

Justin Piche02:10Yeah. So I started investing in land in 2021. Before that, I had done some kind of house wholesaling, single family rental type properties. And before that, I was in the Navy, and then I worked for ExxonMobil Bank corporate life. I got three kids, and they're the reason why I decided to pursue entrepreneurship, something that allowed me to have more freedom over my time, my mornings, my evenings, and more flexibility to spend time with my family. So since kind of 2021, I've just been scaling an existing business.

Justin Piche02:40And now we're at 21 people on staff, which is is obviously not the largest of all teams, but it is, like, a a good sized team, people say. And, yeah, with that comes its own unique challenges. But overall, it's just... It's really fun. It's fun. We've got a really good group of people and enables us to maybe handle more leads and look at more fun potential deals than your average SLAIN investor. But,

Brandon Parker03:04yeah, it's not for everybody, but I really like it. Let's just go with that. That's awesome. I mean, that's... I feel like that's gonna be part of the theme of this show. It's just you're managing a team at 21, and that's hectic. That's a running a real legit business. You've got teams. You've got, like, middle management people taking care of other people for you, everything that comes along with that. What... Maybe give, like, a quick structure of what those 21 people are doing and how that is laid out from a structure standpoint.

Justin Piche03:34Yeah. So 21 direct reports would be a lot, I think. And so the way we have the team structure is the business is broken down into three main components, acquisitions, admin finance, ops, sums everything in the middle, and sales. And I have an acquisitions manager who is in charge of, obviously, the whole acquisitions team. I think there's people on the acquisitions team. And then we have the sales team, which is three people, a sales manager and two assistants.

Justin Piche04:05And then the admin finance kinda middle portion of the business, we've got the rest of the folks, my assistants, transaction coordination. We have a marketing data manager that's not really in the chain of command other than really reports to me, but is ancillary to the acquisitions team. That's all kind of prepping stuff, getting it ready. We have a project manager, underwriter who just started at the beginning two weeks ago now, who's getting up to speed. She's she's awesome. And now a social media manager to help create some content and kinda get information, educational information out there.

Justin Piche04:40So the acquisition team, primary infrastructure, we have cold outreach. That first call lead qualification is what I... Lead qualification, and then we have lead management and negotiations. So the two pieces of the acquisitions team.

Brandon Parker04:55Okay. And when you were growing, let's say you're doing cold calling. Is that right? That... That's what's been... So how many cold callers are there? So that would be the bottom Yes. To to get in the acquisitions.

Justin Piche05:07We have seven... One cold calling manager and six cold callers. And the cold calling manager will call part of the day, but her job is also the admin ready mode, which is I know the software Mandy Leeds uses as well to manage cold calling. It's exceptional software, honestly. KPI reporting is great, easy to use, but, yeah, that's the team. And then we have some other cold outreach team members as well. We'll send a lot of mail, and that's the base. And then... So I guess something that's everybody handles leads a little bit different way, but we can just dive quickly through how leads come in and how they're handled through.

Justin Piche05:43A lead comes in as a cold outreach, and obviously, you have to get past the no. Right? That's the hardest part of any kind of cold call situations. You gotta get past the no. And then our goal on the first call is really just... It's to answer three questions. It's do they wanna sell? Do we wanna buy? And what's the price? What's the price that they want for their property? Those are the three questions. And we don't really try... There's no sales really on the first call. It's all trying to build up our credibility as a company that actually knows what piece of land we're talking about and can ask intelligent questions about the land and then try to figure out if it...

Justin Piche06:19Basically, perform some triage on that lead, and that's where the price comes in. Right? Because we've all seen people that have a one acre track in the middle of nowhere, and they want $10,000,000 for it. They don't really want $10,000,000. They want you to go away. That's what they want. And so there's a triage component based on what they're asking for their land to say, okay, this is actually reasonable. They have motivation to sell and their prices in line with market or slightly less. And so that is a lead we should prioritize versus a lead we should maybe put on a slow drip for the future or just discount or just discard altogether because there's no motivation there.

Justin Piche06:52So that's the first stage.

Brandon Parker06:54Okay. And then how do you ask the pricing question?

Justin Piche06:58Man, yeah, golden. There's a couple different ways. We don't ever say what we can offer. A lot of people, especially in texting and in cold calling, a lot of people are like, okay. I just wanna qualify these leads. I don't wanna talk to people that aren't interested in taking a discounted price. And so I'm going to tell them a range that I can offer and see if they... If that's within their realm of possibility. Right? So they'll say, hey. We're offering anywhere between 4 and $6,000 an acre for a 10 acre tract here. But I think the challenge with that is that you immediately put yourself at a huge disadvantage of being essentially hung up on because now the lead is thinking, okay.

Justin Piche07:36That's what you can offer in my land. But the truth is, especially on that qualification call, you don't really know. Like, your agents or co cars are not going to know. They're not comping. They're not looking at every comp. It's impractical to have put... To create, like, a whole set of comps to understand exactly what you can pay for a property before that initial phone call. So what we try to do is we do three methods of trying to get the price out of them. The first is we will say, hey. Other investors or other... We've seen other land of this size trade between 4 and $6,000 an acre in this area. Is that in line with what you're looking for?

Justin Piche08:07So immediately, it's not... We're not committing to what the price is. We're just saying, hey. This is what we've seen happen. And at a minimum, we're gonna get either a very negative reaction from them, but not so negative they hang up because in general, we're not saying we're gonna pay that. Right? Somebody else is paying that. We're just giving information and just gauging their response, and you'll get some information from that. Another way we do it is, especially in states where the tax assessed value is relatively good, like the states that are on top of it. North Carolina, for example, is a state that generally is on top of the pricing.

Justin Piche08:38Some of other states we work in, like Alabama is not usually the the tax assessed value is far below what the market value is. So it's hard to use that in a state like Alabama, but we'll say, hey, the tax assessor has your property value right at about a $100,000. Are they way off? Or is that kind of what you're looking to get for the property? And again, that will give you some information. They'll respond to that. They'll say, oh, they don't know what you're talking about. A lot of times people are like, oh, they're assessed my property way too high. People don't generally say that, but they might think it, and you can tell what...

Justin Piche09:09Based on their response, what they really think. And the whole goal again is to get them to say their number. And then the last way we do it is logic based kind of approach where we say, hey, Lip. I get it. So you don't wanna give your number out. We called you. You want us to give you the offer for your property. But, hey, I'm gonna go back to my analyst team, and we're gonna do some work, a good bit of work to get you the most money we possibly can for your property. And if we're gonna do all that work, like, we wanna make sure we're not really far off because we don't wanna waste your time. Like, I don't wanna waste your time by scheduling a callback and give you a a low offer that you will never even think about accepting.

Justin Piche09:45And so it really helped me to get you the most money I can if you just give it a number. It doesn't have to be your lowest number. Just... You probably have a number in mind. Just give me something to work with so I can bring it back to the team, and we can work to get you as much money as possible. And that logic based approach works more often than the other two. So that's... But that's harder to do. It's harder to have a train a cold caller to have that conversation. So that's our last attempt.

Brandon Parker10:09Interesting. And how often are you getting a solid price out of them with that strategy, you think?

Justin Piche10:14Yeah. Probably 70% of the time, we'll get somebody to say an actual number. And we still will push a lead if they... If we can't get a number out of them, if the rapport was good, if the conversation was good, if we can tell that... If it's a really good property that we'd know we wanna buy, and if we can tell they do wanna sell, there's interest, they're engaged, they're listening to our questions, they're answering, we'll still push the lead. But we know that in terms of priority, if we have five leads pushed in the same hour, three of them gave a price, those are the priority leads. Right? The ones that don't give a price are a little bit lower priority, we'll get to those, but maybe not as quickly as the ones who did provide a price.

Brandon Parker10:51And so the... How is the training your cold callers on those three questions? How smoothly they maneuver through them, and how often are they nailing those? What's that look like? How do you get that done? Yeah. I know. Yeah.

Justin Piche11:04So when we bring on new cold callers, the first thing they do is they basically spend a week shadowing, and we have a series of training videos we've used. I base... When somebody joins my team, I want them to understand the whole picture. I don't want them to just go, oh, I'm just trying to negotiate this property. I want them to know, hey. When we get a property under contract, what do we do with it? How do we process it through? What does the whole process look like? So they can answer some of the general questions that people have truthfully and be confident about that answer.

Justin Piche11:35So that's the first week or so shadowing and watching those videos to figure out how does the business actually work. And then once we say, okay, they've shattered enough, we just give them a list and we let them get some practice. And then at the end of the day, the cold calling manager will get the new callers in a thirty minute meeting, and they'll review calls. They'll talk it over. They'll give them some extra other additional strategies to get over the know and ways to communicate with folks. And we have a script, but we always tell them, like, the script is a crutch.

Justin Piche12:06Don't use the script. Do not read from the script. Understand what we're looking for in land. Understand what questions to ask, and you have a list of them you can ask and lead... Let the conversation lead itself. Don't read from the script. You have to listen to what they're saying. You have to respond to their questions, and then you have to ask... Always ask good follow-up questions that get you more information about the property. And then we have a a weekly training, an hour on Monday mornings and or where the whole cold calling team gets in, and they do cold calling reviews.

Justin Piche12:36And then the cold calling manager, part of her job is to watch, like, sales videos on YouTube. Mhmm. Find other people that are having success and strategies that they use to get through these calls and bring that to the group and give them one thing or two things to work on the whole rest of the week to practice. And how do you

Brandon Parker12:57see if they're implementing that?

Justin Piche12:59Yeah. We track... The KPIs we track are, obviously, there's like a baseline daily KPI of how many connected calls do you have and how... What's your talk time. Mhmm. So those have to be met. That's how we know they're just doing the work in general. But then the other side of it is the quality side of it. And that we track how many leads they push. Nothing is rewarded based on how many leads they push because that's an easy thing to chain. Like, they could just push a lead that isn't really a lead. So nothing is rewarded based on that, but we track that number. And then we track how many contracts result from the leads they pushed.

Justin Piche13:31So those are the kind of quality things. And then we again, we do call reviews with them. Yeah, that's and whoever is like the two kind of lowest producing for the week, they have a separate meeting with the cold calling manager to review some of their calls separate from everybody else and, and maybe help them to get up to the same level that everybody else is producing at.

Brandon Parker13:50Interesting. Yeah. That's a killer setup. One thing we do in our onboarding with our cold callers that is... Has felt like it's been an improvement is we get them on the phone quick. We don't put them on the phone for a lot, but it's like, there's seems to be a mental thing where if we onboard them for a whole week and then get them on the phone, it's like getting on the phone. It's like this thing. And so we... We're under the... We... We've switched this idea of you come in, and we're gonna put you on the phone, like, the first day, just for a half hour, but you're gonna start talking on the phone. And we... Exactly. We do that too.

Brandon Parker14:20We put them on for a little bit of time. We get their account set up, put them on for a little bit of time a day, but it's usually about a week before they're now full time calling. Okay.

Justin Piche14:29That's killer. Yeah. I love that, though. You're right. Yeah. Just seems like we're rip the Band Aid off. And one of our core values for the... Wait. Wait. One of our core values for the company is having essentially, like, the mental fortitude to overcome objections. Mhmm. And we do a lot of... I don't wanna call it, like, mindset coaching, but I lead a weekly meeting with the team. And and that's really a lot of what I talk about is, hey. Like, always say to the cold... Like, in front of the whole team, all 21 people, and we have seven cold callers, but I say, hey. Cold calling is a hard job because you are reaching out to a lot of people that do not wanna be called.

Justin Piche15:04A lot of people are credibly rude to you, and you have to recognize it is not personal. It is not you. There's nothing about you. They're not mad at you. They just have all these things probably going on in their lives, and you are an annoyance, and you're a faceless, nameless person that they can unleash some of their anger on, and it's not personal. It's like golf. You know, you should play golf. But in golf, if you're not so good, then you have a lot of bad shots. That's me. You just gotta forget about it. Yeah. I know. Right? You gotta forget about it. You forget about that bad shot, and you take the ball where it is, and you hit another one.

Justin Piche15:37And the next one could be, you could sink it from a 100 yards out. But you just gotta forget. You gotta have the memory of a goldfish, I think, is is the only thing I like to say to the team. Have you ever read the inner game of golf or the inner game of any of those books?

Brandon Parker15:51No. But it sounds like something I should read. Inner game of golf is next level, but it's about that mindset. It's about playing a different game. Golf isn't golf. Golf is basically a game with myself where I'm, like, battling my own emotions. It's a... That's the game of golf. It makes it... It's it's really fun. It's a cool book. But anyway, that's killer. We do a stand up meeting once a week, and I think I'm gonna steal that because that's fantastic. Like, we get into that cold callers, like keeping them on board and keeping them engaged. I feel is eighty twenty is one of the most high leverage things that people can do.

Brandon Parker16:25And I think it's one of the hardest things to do because like you said, it's a really hard job. They're working remote a lot of the time. They're sitting in what's three in the morning in the dark in some place in in The Philippines or in South America or maybe... I don't know. You have... You might have people in The States too. But yeah, you gotta... All my cold callers are Philippines or Latin America. Most of them are are Philippines. It's... Yeah. Exactly. But, yeah, it's out. Yeah. And so, like, how do you get them bought in? And it's had a... One of our cold callers, like, almost in tears during our company call the other day.

Brandon Parker16:58Happy of... Like, with just happy about working at the company. So it's... I think getting to that level is that changes outcomes drastically. That'll triple what other teams do if you have culture like you're building. Yeah. Talk a little bit more about that. Yeah. Maybe just to touch on that. Yeah. I... That's such a good point.

Justin Piche17:16When you're working in a completely remote team, it can feel like you're operating in a silo. And so we use Slack as our company message system, and we have a family channel where we just post things about what's going on in our lives, vacations we've taken, our kids, and everybody kinda celebrates. So that's one thing we do. We celebrate birthdays. And so everybody who has a birthday, we'll buy them a cake and have it delivered to them or something, and then we'll all get on a Zoom call and sing happy birthday. It sounds horrible because everybody's got this to...

Justin Piche17:47But it's really fun, and and everybody looks forward to it. And so we celebrate milestones in people's lives. One thing we do with the acquisitions team as a whole is we put them on teams, and the teams compete against each other for the number of contracts that are signed from the leads they push. And there's a little bit of financial incentive tied to that, and we swap up the teams every single month. So every month is in... They they come up with team names. Let me pull up my Slack real quick and tell you the latest team names. Let's see. Because we just... Obviously, October was a new month, so we were just redoing it.

Justin Piche18:17Let's see. This is part of your monthly? Okay. Yeah. Yep. So we have... Okay. So we got this is so fun. So we have the... One team is the Soil Sisters Nice. This month, and the other one is Jesse's Leading Ladies. And so Jesse is our only kinda guy on the acquisitions called Outreach Team. So he's got Jesse's Leading Ladies. Let's see. What was the result for last month? I don't know if they... Oh, yeah. Okay. Oh my gosh. Okay. Last month, we had Call of Duty was one of the team names, and the other one was KPI Pirates or k pirates is what it was.

Justin Piche18:55KPI. It's just... They're funny. That's Cove's really good team names. That's clever. And those are... So those are... You have two acquisitions that then you just switch them up each month and then Yeah. It depends on how many people. Sometimes we'll do three different teams, but usually, we just split it into into two teams. But And you do it based on contract signed? Yeah. Contract signed. Because I I don't want the KPI to be tied to a metric they can control. Yeah. They can't control the number of contracts they're signed. That's... The acquisitions manager or lead manager, that's their job. But the cold caller or cold outreach team's job is to forward quality leads.

Justin Piche19:29And the more qualified quality leads, the more contracts they will get from it. So, like, I wanna be careful about incentivizing

Brandon Parker19:35something that would actually hurt our team, like pushing more leads that aren't qualified. Gumming up the system because people are Gumming up. Trying to scam the metrics. I worked... I did phone sales, biotech phone sales. Stole stem cell, baby umbilical cord blood. We would freeze it. Okay. But anyway, we had crazy metrics. We had like 20 different sales metrics and a big sales board. It was like boiler room type thing. And everyone could still game them. Like, you could be as so sophisticated. It's all... Yeah. Just getting some metric that people can't game is is the way to do it for sure.

Brandon Parker20:08So I think that's an exciting way to do it. Because then people get focused on whatever you incentivize. So a lot of times you put in some sort of metrics, and then now they're just doing that. They want to lose sight. So That's exactly right. What's your team's output? Like, how many leads could someone expect from a good cold caller in a day versus just when someone who's been Slacking?

Justin Piche20:30Yeah. Generally... And, obviously, this is so, like, data dependent, the area that they're calling, the time of year. There's all kinds of different things that go into this. But in general, I expect one cold caller to be able to get one to two good qualified leads, qualified in the sense of we wanna buy, they wanna sell, and the price is somewhere near market or less every day. And

Brandon Parker20:52on that cold call, it sounds like you're doing sometimes a little bit almost like lead manager esque in that cold call as well. Yeah. Because, yeah, a lot of people think of cold call like just, are you down to sell? And then lead manager, a little bit of qualification, and then acquisitions manager. So, yeah, talk about how they blend those.

Justin Piche21:12Yeah. I... Exactly. This is a place where I probably differ from a lot of folks that are doing this. My thought behind it is I would rather have less leads pushed and more quality and like just higher quality leads so that I can have more work being done at the lower dollar per hour level employee than the higher dollar per hour level employee. I really want the lead manager, the acquisitions manager to focus on comping, negotiating, closing deals and not focusing on is this lead a qualified lead?

Justin Piche21:47Should we even bother comping them or not? We try to push some of that lead management down to the cold callers, and it helps. It does two things. One, it provides me, like, a really good pool of candidates for additional roles in the company. So if I needed to hire another acquisitions manager or, like, lead lead manager, some... Somewhere... Someone who's doing some of that negotiating comping work, then I would be able to pull potentially from my best cold caller because they already have the sales skills. They already have the conversational skills, the rapport building skills.

Justin Piche22:17They already know how to qualify leads. Now I just need to train them how to comp and actually close a deal versus having to train them to also better qualify leads. Like, they already have kind of this base skill set, and it it leads to just more flexibility on my team. Right? Higher quality employees of the lower level, better trained employees at the lower level. Nice. Yeah. It makes sense. That's a good way to do it, especially if you're simplifying your own operations. If you have seven cold callers, they're each bringing in five leads a day, 35 leads a day, and you're pushing that all... Yeah.

Brandon Parker22:48That's... That could get crazy. It could get real crazy. So what happens with a lead? You get a lead, comes in. What technically happens with it? It goes in a form, drops directly into a CRM. How do you manage the leads, and how do you manage speed to lead, researching those, and what's that look like? Good question. So in our ready mode, we have a few different folders

Justin Piche23:09that we put leads in or buttoned. It's really the buttons that you push. Mhmm. Obviously, the one is push to CRM. And so when a lead is fully qualified, they click the push to CRM. And what that does is we use Follow-up Boss as our contact management CRM source of truth, and then we use Notion to manage our deal pipeline. And so when a lead gets pushed to CRM and Follow-up Boss, it changes the stage. And so now that's in a lead Notion stage, and then there's another automation that pushes that lead and create a new deal card in Notion.

Justin Piche23:42And then that's where the lead manager and acquisition manager... I have two different titles. They're both essentially doing the same thing. The acquisition manager has responsibility over the entire team as well as the primary negotiator, and the lead manager is just working deals, comping, and negotiating. The acquisition manager just has more responsibilities, but they both essentially do the same thing when it comes to handling lead. And the expectation is within an hour, that person is getting a callback. It's comped. It's ready to negotiate. And... But even still, that second call that we do is the goal is never...

Justin Piche24:14It... It's not usually to close the lead. It's usually to... The person that is going to do the offering is now introducing themselves and now building up a rapport of their own, asking deeper questions about the property, and also basically setting the stage for our offer. Because, again, we don't wanna blindside them with some low offer. We want to lead them into understanding our offer is probably gonna be a little bit lower than what they really want for the property because that's the nature of this business. Right? Like, we have to get good deals on properties, and we have to be able to explain why that second call serves to do that.

Justin Piche24:50And so it goes, hey. We're... Maybe we're looking at a property. It'd be easier if I probably pulled up land ID, but I'm not gonna do that right now. But let... Let's just, you know, imagine a property has good road frontage, but we wanna ask some deeper questions like, hey. I noticed there's no driveway or culvert to access this property. Have you ever had one installed? Is there any other, like, physical access onto the property? And they'll say, no. I I haven't. It's just vacant land. And they'll be like, okay. Great. Have you done any clearing work? Is the property really accessible from the front? Can we see into the property? They go, no. It's, like, totally overgrown with bushes and trees. Okay.

Justin Piche25:20Is there a water line along the road? We probably already asked that question in the first call, so now we know. So we say, have you ever installed a water tap? Is there a water tap ready for somebody to build and be provided water? And they'll say, oh, no. And so we're leading them into all these negatives about their property that maybe they didn't think about or consider. And so it's helping maybe them understand the value they're asking for may not be what we're gonna offer because of all these things that we're saying aren't there that we probably will have to do to make the property marketable or in line with whatever the market is in that area.

Justin Piche25:52Yeah. Okay.

Brandon Parker25:54And then with the comping, are... How solid are you on price on that second call? This is how much we think we can resell it for. This is our range.

Justin Piche26:03Yeah. We do... Generally, we do a maybe fifteen minute comp. We pull three of the best comps from... And we're looking at data tree data. We're looking at Lands of America back end property control center, looking at land vision, we're looking at price comp reports and priced average pricing, we're looking at Zillow, we're looking at all the different places and trying to find the most like three properties that are nearby and coming up with kind of an average based on those features, or maybe like a up or down because those comps have better features and then coming up with a number.

Justin Piche26:35But we're not... We're generally not solid with a number. A lot of people are like, oh, what percentage of market value do you offer? And this is one of the other things maybe I wanted to convey to people in this business is that margins have been pushed or compressed in a lot of cases. People have maybe more information than they used to have. People are getting letters with higher offers than they're used to getting. And so their opinion of the value is often colored by those other interactions with either less experienced or newer land investors that are sending them these offers.

Justin Piche27:06And so you need to be able to take advantage of your leads in some way, like monetization of your leads in some way. And it doesn't always look like anymore offering $504,030.60 on the dollar. Right? Sometimes if you have a really good saleable property, $20,000 margin, $30,000 margin, even if you're buying at a 100 k and it's worth $131.40, that could be the right deal for you if you have the strategy to be able to monetize that, aka, like double close or, an ovation contract where you have much more time to market.

Justin Piche27:39You can do some of the necessary improvements to get that property sold faster. And so I don't have a set number because I want to look at every possible property that has an interest in sis, every seller that has an interest in selling and figure out, hey, what is the best way for us to monetize this? And a lot of times we can't, obviously, but we have more opportunity to do it with more strategies.

Brandon Parker28:01Yeah. That brings up an interesting thing. So I've talked to over 200 land investors now in my CRM, and I boiled down the people who are successful. And it is two things. One, just being decent at sales. Like, you can... They're good on the phone, and they're biased towards action. And then the other is their tool belt. Like, the people who have maybe done real estate in the past, but they can come in with creative eyes, and they could either maybe they can entitle, maybe they can subdivide, maybe they can sell it to a developer, maybe they can just flip it, they can do owner financing.

Brandon Parker28:32Like, people who have... Can do whatever end up crushing it from what I've seen. And then the more narrow that scope becomes, the less often they're doing deals. So, yeah, I encourage people to continue to open that tool belt up or add to it. Sounds like that's a really good point. Yeah. Sounds like you're doing a lot of things, though. That's probably part of what your success is.

Justin Piche28:53I I think so. When we started the business or when I started the business, I say we... Because I... I... Well, I think of the team as a whole. But when I started the business, I did coaching with LearnLand, which Mhmm. At the time, back in 2019, 2020, 2021, I think was one of the few land education platforms, teaching people how to actually grow and scale a business and go after bigger deals rather than the maybe the lower tier course type folks. I don't necessarily want to name any names, but we all know the folks that produce courses in mass and don't necessarily update them and don't give people tools that are really needed to succeed in this business today.

Justin Piche29:30And even still, I really only had the strategy of, hey, I'm gonna buy, then I'm gonna sell. And I need to buy for a certain percentage, and I... I'm looking to get all my money cash back out in a year, and that's it. And so early twenty twenty two, end of twenty twenty... In mid twenty twenty two, we're like, I'm I'm not taking advantage of all these deals that look like good subdivides because I don't know how to subdivide. And so I spent a lot of money and time looking up or figuring out how to do that. And then that was, like, probably the biggest step change is just being able to offer close to market or even market or what some might consider above market because the forced appreciation side of it is huge.

Justin Piche30:09It's huge. It gives you so much more opportunity to take down deals and make good money on the back end if you can manage that project. And we still haven't really, like, fully adopted double close as a primary kinda sales method in our business, but there's a lot of opportunity there too to be able to... Especially if you're in a good sell through rate, high desirability market to be forthright with the seller and say, hey, look, I am going to get you this number that we've agreed on. But in order to do that, I'm going to need to market and improve or...

Justin Piche30:41And find the end buyer for this property. And, yeah, I'll make some money as well, but I'll make sure you get what you get. And having that honest conversation at the front end to make a margin of some amount and really put a market you push behind selling it, that's another... I guess, a huge tool to get more deals done that a lot of people don't consider or don't do.

Brandon Parker30:59Yeah. And you've had... I've noticed a shift into a lot more educational content, a little bit of coaching on your end, and just giving a lot of solid information. What's that shift all about? I know that you got a huge business running. Why are you putting so much information out

Justin Piche31:14in a good way? I touched on this. You heard my talk when we were at the land summit, but one of the things that I really found a lot of value in when I was in the Navy and even at my time at ExxonMobil was building up my team and, like, building up their knowledge, helping them succeed. And I really see coaching as just... It does two things. One, it helps people. It really does. Like, it helps people shortcut the hard process of learning lessons by learning somebody else from somebody else's failures and successes and adopting those before you have to figure them out on your own.

Justin Piche31:48And there's a huge value obviously in that. And the other is it keeps me sharper. Because if I'm gonna explain to somebody how I'm doing something or even still, I'm forced to put myself in their shoes in their specific business to overcome their specific problem that maybe I haven't encountered in quite the same way, then I have to explain and think through what does that actually look like. And I can look introspectively and say, oh, man. I'm not quite doing what my own advice is. Why? I need to fix this in my own business. And that happens, like, every coaching call. Like, literally every coaching call.

Justin Piche32:19I I did one a couple weeks ago with co... I consult coaching with LearnLand, and one of our clients had asked something about ready mode and how the calls are cycled through. And I was like, I don't actually know. Are we just calling through the first few numbers and then it's resetting and we're calling through them again? Or are we dialing through the whole list first? So I'm like, immediate response to my cold calling manager, hey. You need to figure out how our leads are, how these are going through so we can make sure we're calling all these numbers sequentially, and we're hitting them all in equivalent number of times as we work through this campaign. Just as an example of something that I take away and then immediately fix on my own team or figure out on my own team.

Justin Piche32:55Okay. Maybe one more quick point is I feel like good things come to you when you put good stuff out there. Like, when you freely give, call it whatever you want. Call it the lord's blessing. Maybe that's what I would call it. Call it karma. Whatever you wanna call it. I I think putting out good value, giving value to others for free makes people wanna work with you. It makes people trust you more because giving this thing, and you're really not expecting anything in in return. But people inherently will see that, and they want to work with you. Like, they want to be a part of what you're building, and there's a huge value in that.

Justin Piche33:29And if I can help somebody take down a large deal that they may not have been able to figure out themselves, My first instinct, especially for my coaching clients, and I just had this conversation this week, is I see myself as a fiduciary of sorts. That's maybe not the right term, but but when you think of fiduciary, you think of, okay. A fiduciary has the utmost responsibility to ensure their client or their... The person they're working with has the maximum benefit. Like, you have to act... It's similar to a general partner limited partner relationship. The general partner has a fiduciary responsibility to protect and make the best decision for their limited partners or their investors.

Justin Piche34:03And I see the same thing. I see myself as in the same position as a coach. My first job is to help my clients maximize their returns on every single deal that they do. So if they have an exceptional deal, that's a great deal. My job is to coach them through it, and that's it. But if they decide, hey. We actually would rather partner with you because we really like you, and you have the expertise, and we'd love to give you a piece of that. That's incredible. That's incredible. But it's never expected, and it's never asked for. It's always just my goal is to help them. And if that's the best way to help them and that's what they want to do, then, of course, the Lord's blessing.

Justin Piche34:34Right? Bringing good things to you for putting good stuff out there. Yeah. That's wonderful. There's this...

Brandon Parker34:39Starting up a business, there's this drive, and there's this feeling that the gratification is gonna come from making money. And then you get to a point where you make money and it's, oh, actually, there's not that much there. And that's part of why I love working with land people. I work in a different vein than you do, but similar. I love being part of other people's businesses and seeing them succeed, and there's real world impact that you're feeling like you're helping other people, and that's more gratifying than just the monetary burns out quick.

Justin Piche35:09It does. There's... Yeah. And I see... It's really like my team as well. And we touch on some leadership philosophy stuff. It's the same... It's really the same type of mentality as sometimes I think, why don't I scale back the team size and focus really on the highest value possible tasks? Like, I could probably make this team a whole lot more leaner, just much more lean, and still realize personally the same or more net income at the end of the year.

Justin Piche35:42If I got real lean and real militant about making sure that team... There's not even, like, a millimeter of fluff on the team, but that type of attitude leads to more turnover. Right? And you do need to push people harder. Right? That that... That's part of it, especially when you run a lean team. But I also see part of my job as supporting the families of my employees. And so it's like, why what I'm trying to build is something that lifts a lot of people up. It doesn't just lift me up.

Justin Piche36:12It lifts everyone who works with us up. That's the goal. The goal is to lift everyone up. And I was talking about this at the summit, but there's probably 50 plus people that are reliant now on my business, not just my employees, but their families that are reliant on my business and the salaries that we pay and the commissions we pay for the deals that we do to flourish. And that is bringing way more value than if I just went super lean and just maximize my own personal profits. That's bringing more value just to the world. Right? Just bringing more value to the people involved.

Justin Piche36:42That gives me way more fulfillment. That gives me way more purpose than just making money for myself.

Brandon Parker36:50That's beautiful. I love it. If you had one message to send out to Twitter, how to be fit in Twitter, everyone would see it, what might you say to just people listening?

Justin Piche37:02Everyone That's a great question. I think people who are authentic and people that really truly care for others and build something that lifts other people up, I think that's the reputation that you wanna have. I think that's a much more valuable reputation and just a much better way of being seen as, like, a shark or being seen as, like, a ruthless business person. And I'm never gonna be a billionaire or start some huge, like, corporation that... I I never... That's not really who I am, and that's not what I'm gonna build.

Justin Piche37:36And so I think you really just need to look introspectively and say, what's really important to you? So if I guess maybe... That's a really tough question to phrase, but for all of Twitter, I'd say, if you look back on your life sixty years from now, obviously, family is gonna be the thing that you care about the most. But what is your legacy? What does your reputation say about what you did? What's your mark on the world? Is it that you just made as much money as possible and were seen as the most ruthless, amazing business person, or is it that you help dozens of families build incredible lives for themselves?

Justin Piche38:07What's a better legacy? And I know what it is for me personally, but you gotta figure out what your own purpose is. That's epic.

Brandon Parker38:14Good answer. And then I like that. This is the new final question for the show. I'd like you to give a question for our next guest. And then towards the end of the episode Who does that? Diary of a CEO. Yeah. That's where I'm that's where I'm swooping it from. So, yeah, let's throw that down there. If I... There's a bunch of people in the pipeline too. I'm not sure who it's gonna be, but they're... Well, it'll be... It's happening soon. Yeah. That's a great question. I think it goes in line with something like kind of what I just said is, like, besides your family, right, and and and your family kind of legacy, which for me is the most important.

Justin Piche38:45Right? When I look back on my life, and and I'm 80 years old, I wanna see just, like, incredibly a large family that loves each other, that supports each other with flourishing children and for... They... Them having flourishing children and families and lives themselves. That's the most important thing to me. But other than that, when you're 80 years old, what do you want your peers to say about you? What do you want people to say about how you lived your life? Like, that's the question. Yeah. What do you want what do you want people outside your family to say about your life looking back on it when you're eighty eighty five years old?

Brandon Parker39:18That is a fantastic note to end on, and I can't wait to ask that question to the next person. Wonderful. A killer to see you again, Justin. I can't wait till we run across each other again and hang out. And Yeah. Thanks thanks for coming on the show again, man. I appreciate it. Yes, sir. Thank you very much for having me. I think... Can I do one little quick plug? Oh, 100%. Let's hammer it. Okay. Yeah. So I don't know when this podcast will air, but

Justin Piche39:40me and another of my friends from X both know Clay Hepler. We're starting a podcast, and it's called the ground game podcast. And it's a little bit of a different format. I find so much value in, for example, your podcast for Seth Williams podcast, Ari Tipster, for Kendall Lejeune's podcast, Only Land Fans, where y'all are interviewing land investors, business owners, and people are talking about... You're just giving away tons of value in this podcast.

Justin Piche40:12Well, one of the things that doesn't actually exist in our niche yet is deeper dives into business decisions, goal setting, leadership of an active team with big goals. And so the... Clay, as he's got big goals. I personally have some big goals, and we're both continuing to scale our businesses past 7 figures. And I wanna give listeners and people in the land space maybe an inside look inside baseball. What goes on in our businesses?

Justin Piche40:42What are we actually focusing on quarter by quarter? How are we adapting to the changes in the market? How are we empowering our teams? How do we think about those type of things? It's really more of a discussion and an inside look at our businesses, and I I think it's gonna provide a lot of value to people who are looking to break through maybe to the next level, scale their teams, change their mindset, and just bring more prosperity to them and their teams.

Brandon Parker41:05Brad, that's gonna be epic. I'll listen to that for sure. I'll put to Ground game. The ground game. We've, yep, we've recorded four episodes. I think our shot launched in ten days. Launched by October 14. Perfect. Yeah. Hit... We'll put a link to your launch in here. We'll launch with you. Hit me up on Twitter. I'll blast it out there and put this episode out to line up with that. So we'll get all that going. So the ground game podcast. I like it, man. Can't wait. We need more good info out there. Thank you. Yeah. Alright, Justin. Good to see of land show.