Clay Hepler : Hepler Land Holdings

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. Clay Hepler built a 7 figure empire by investing in rural land, combining his farming background with strategic business skills. He played lacrosse at Middlebury College, worked at the US Embassy, and now runs Hepler Land Holdings and hosts the ground game. Since 2012, Hepler has specialized in buying and developing and selling rural recreational properties across The US, drawing it as roots as a farm kid from Pennsylvania.

Brandon Parker00:36You can find Clay online on Twitter at Clay Hepler. And in this conversation, we are gonna cover what it takes to go from a mid sized land investor making 100 to $500,000 per year to a land investor who scales into multimillions per year, what that jump looks like, and how Clay sees the three key things that hold people back from really scaling their land businesses. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversations with a landman, Clay Hepler.

Brandon Parker01:28Lehay Hepler, the land man. Welcome back to the show, my friend. Are doing today?

Clay Hepler01:32Dude, I'm good. I, one of the things that sparked this conversation, and I don't know when this podcast is going to be released, but you posted the top land investing podcast, which you had some really awesome hard hitters on here. And it was Clint was number one for those that don't know Clint Turner. He's been in the space for a while, man. I mean, he's the guy before everyone really got in the space. One of the one of the few people that I think is a pretty high integrity guy of what I understand. And then I was right below him.

Clay Hepler02:02And I'm like, dude, I don't wanna be below him. So I wanna bring the heat for this next episode for 2025.

Brandon Parker02:08Clay Hepworth is at the top of the list. We're coming for Clint Turner. We're coming for the Clint Turner top position on the legend of land podcast. Let's go get it. I know we briefly spoke, but you've got some interesting takes some where the land market's going, that type of thing. But yeah, what's new? What's going on? I think one of the things that we ask ourselves

Clay Hepler02:31in this business is first of all, like technology and information is accelerated business in general. And a business market, a market in general is going to be dramatically different from one year to the next. And so what I've realized is even this summer, was saying, Hey, there, there's a massive opportunity to serve an underserved niche in the land space, which was helping people go from zero to hero, zero to a 100 K, zero to 200 K.

Clay Hepler03:02What I've really realized with that is there's so much information out there. That's actually not where the land market, first of all, needs to be served from businesses, from services in general, but also what really is the big pain points for the land space. And so I've realized in my short tenure as a land investor and business owner is that markets mature, right? Every single market, there's a market efficiency theory. And so the markets become more efficient over time, which means that we just have to pivot it as business owners.

Clay Hepler03:35And so where people are really struggling now is really not getting involved, which there are a lot of people that listen to your podcasts. It's, Hey, I'm listening to these guys. I really want to get started in this business, which is incredibly valuable. And there's a lot of information that you can gather from earlier episodes, but really the people that I think are underserved and that really need to help are the people in the middle, right? The people that are, this sounds like you, you work really hard. You might be a W2 or part time land investor or full time land investor and you're between 200 ks to 600 ks.

Clay Hepler04:09And you're getting money through the door, but it's not as much as you originally thought. Right? The, the guru that promise you to be in this amazing business where there's a blue ocean realizing it's starting to get really hard. Right. It's not hard just because of more competition. It's hard because this is a business. Right. And so I always think of the the business. So my background was before I got into the land investment business, I think I mentioned this in the first podcast is I was working for a family chocolate. Right?

Clay Hepler04:39And so this business was a high overhead business. You had manufacturer equipment. You had a lot of human capital, like a lot of people like physically dip dipping toffee and manufacturing the product and holy heck Brandon. You think that the margins in this business are bad now that there's quote unquote more competition, get into a different business. Right? These are like 10% margins or restaurants are like 10%, 20% margins in terms of the net that you get after paying all your overhead.

Clay Hepler05:10What I'm really seeing is right now, there's this very underserved opportunity to help people get from that middle to the top. And so the way that I thought about it operationalize it is there is the system problem. There is the vision problem and there's the capital problem. And these three columns support a very robust business growth. This is going from our business. It's more than doubled every year. So first year we were, I gotta look back through our numbers, but it's six fifty, 700 in our first year, something like that.

Clay Hepler05:48This year, we're, we're double that in terms of gross profit. And then, you know, we're already set to probably triple that or four X that. And the reason why is because I've realized we've focused on these three pillars and breaking them down to scale.

Brandon Parker06:09How would you describe the vision problem?

Clay Hepler06:12Yeah. So this is really important, right? So people get into this business for a couple of reasons, but most of the people say air quotes, I'm getting in this business to have financial freedom.

Brandon Parker06:25Right?

Clay Hepler06:26So that's the thing that prompts people to get into the business. And then you're sold this, oh yeah, this is an easy business or business is easy in general. And you can just go out there and work really hard and hustle and just crush it. Right? The reality is though, people need to spend more time understanding like exactly what type of business they want to build. You go into a podcast, you listen to people, Hey, I'm crushing it in infill lots. I'm crushing it in rural recreational tracks between these acreage.

Clay Hepler06:56I'm doing one to two massive deals per year. I'm a development person. I'm flipping middle market rural recreational tracks. I'm entitling parcels. I'm doing strictly owner financing stuff. I'm buying mobile home lots. All these things are different types of businesses. The reality is, and the way that we focus on, I think about vision is the capital component, like what type of profit you want to build. And then what, and then the second thing is what type of business you want to have.

Clay Hepler07:27At the end of the day, when you get to a certain level, it's just like managing people. That's what all businesses turn into. But in the meantime, there's a very different type of problem that you have to solve. If you're focusing on larger tracks, more complex, there's almost more stress because you might have two or three big deals in a year, Brandon, and it's like, it's done. Yeah. Right? If you miss up one or two of those deals, don't get paid versus the person that's the volume game. I'm thinking of someone in this space. I never met the guy, but Anso Sharma, I think he has a really big wholesaling operation and he's just like the volume guy.

Clay Hepler08:02And he might make $15.20 k a pop, whereas someone else could make $203,100 k a pop. He probably has a bigger overhead, but he's spreading out his risk. Right? Yeah. So you need to understand what type of person that you want. And then obviously what informs that is the actual how big of a business do you want to build. And so that creates that creates the actions that bring you closer to the goal. There's a really good book, which is 10X is Easier than 2X. It's by Dan Sullivan, who is the CEO of Strategic Coach. He's an executive coach, has been in the business for, I think over forty years.

Clay Hepler08:34And he really talks about how going 10X, going bigger, whether it's the volume game, whether it's the quality game, really shows that you only have one or two paths to getting to your destination. And what I see a lot of people doing is they lose momentum in their business because they have so many different paths. They're like one month, I'm going to do cold calling and the next month, I'm going to texting next month, direct mail. And then it flows all the way up to one month. I'm going to target rural recreational tracks. One month, I'm going to do infill one month.

Clay Hepler09:05I'm going to do this. And they have this shotgun approach to this marketing. And so they market shotgun. They have their data. That's a shotgun approach. County selection is shotgun approach and the results end up being scattered.

Brandon Parker09:19And so that's the one I think about the vision component. That's really what I think about. Mhmm. Yeah. There's so many trade offs there. It's... I've seen... We've worked with dozens of land clients now, and so I've seen the different methods that people take. And to your point, the two or three most successful people that I've seen, they've developed their land businesses and then they've chosen, oh, here is where I specifically crush it. This one guy who made $750 in four months profit, he was targeting stuff by the water.

Brandon Parker09:55He somehow became an expert in stuff by the water, and he just did all lakefront, oceanfront, riverfront properties. And he just he fell into a niche. He got really good at something and he started just absolutely crushing it. And yeah, there's something to be said for having some sort of vision and niching down, but there's also, there's getting to that mushy middle. And so I work with a lot of clients who start, they've made $60 or a $100 and they want to get to that 2 or $300.

Brandon Parker10:27And a lot of times the people that I see successful getting to that middle part, they leave their filter open. It's almost like a discovery process. Like they come in and they're gonna flip rural recreational, and they're also gonna look for a simple subdivide every once in a while. So it seems like that flip that open filter where you have a big tool belt will get you to that $203,100 grand mark. But then you're saying to get past that $300 mark, now you have to decide on one of these avenues, become really good at it, drill deeper.

Clay Hepler11:00And that's how you scale. That's exactly right. The skill set that is required to get to the 200, 300, 400 ks, 500 ks mark is a different skill set than the one that takes from 500 to a million. Now, of course, throughout his man, like you can do this scattered shotgun approach and still be incredibly successful with doing just a high volume of transactions. What I'm saying is that you, the path that you pick has to be the path that you pick. There's a lot of people that are successful at the shotgun approach at scale.

Clay Hepler11:34But what I find happens is if you're not precise in your marketing, you don't really know what a deal is. So I have so many people that reach out to me and they say, hey, dude, like, and I've done this in the past, which is why I know this intimately. I I have this parcel, this commercial lot, and it's like right off the interstate. You probably saw one of my posts months ago about this. Right? Yeah. Right off the I've got someone we're looking at one of those right now. Yeah. It's right off the interstate and I don't really know what to do with it. And so I spend twenty five hours trying to find the right person.

Clay Hepler12:05I don't find a single person Cause I think that I'm going to be the, the commercial lots, the commercial lot guy. Now the converse opinion of that is like, Clay, you have to do that to actually become that person. Of course. So, so, so there are these two competing ideas, right? Which is what we have to juggle with in business. But you see people that have an unfocused approach. They don't really know where they're going, have a higher contract fall out rate. So the national average for, like, regular wholesalers, like, you're talking your hometown wholesalers.

Clay Hepler12:40I know this guy's, by the way, I'm not talking on my ass. I don't know if I could swear on this podcast, but I was a wholesaler and house flipper before I was in land. So the, the national average is like 70 to 75%. That fall out of contract. Right. No, no. The closing. Oh, the closing. Okay. The closing. So the, so the 25% or so is usually what you can close, maybe 30%. Right. What I find is people that jump from market to market, which has been the mass market pitch for land investors. They have a higher percentage of dropout rate.

Clay Hepler13:11So what you see is their ability to scale is limited because their cost per deal goes up significantly. They don't know what a deal is. And so they'll put deals on a contract. They'll put survey the parcel. They'll go through a variety of different parcels to get to one deal. And so their cost per deal ends up being just a two X ROAS. They might spend $10,000 to get a $20,000 deal. You can't scale with that. And so what I'm saying is you can do the shotgun approach from maybe 50 ks to 500 ks ish, maybe 700, dude, maybe even to a million.

Clay Hepler13:46But after you get to that level, you gotta be more precise in exactly what you're targeting. Whether it is the, I know these specific markets, I've hit them so many times. I'm cold calling. And so I have different results because I know these markets. I'm hitting them once every four months, six months, whatever it is. And I just have the relationships over and over again. I have such a volume game. Or it's the guy that focuses on waterfront properties. But I bet you any money, that guy that focuses on waterfront properties, he might make...

Clay Hepler14:18I don't know. He made 750 k in six months, which is pretty insane, but his profit numbers are probably a lot higher than you think. Cause he probably has fewer people on his team. Yeah.

Brandon Parker14:28He's a he is. Yeah. He's, I think he's got one helper. So yeah. I mean, plus us, but yeah, he's running a lean operation. So that's true. What's your take on vision or strategy? Are you, what are you looking at as far as

Clay Hepler14:44niching down and areas that you're focused on? Yeah. I mean, so there's a lot of different ways that you can do this. I think that like my philosophy is all around. What have you been good at thus far? Like I said, the initial approach is always let's send a ton of mail to a bunch of different counties. And then I might cold call a bunch of different counties or texting a bunch of RVM, a bunch of different counties. And then when I get to 500 ks, I can look at all my data and this is what I do with my private clients. And I say, dude, let's look at your data and see what, where you have won.

Clay Hepler15:16What deals have actually been the deals that have produced the highest return with the lowest amount of effort. And can we just target those deals? You could be the guy that stumbles into rural infill lots or infill lots, and you've just been crushing it. And so you know that market already. And so your ability to get to the next level, we're talking about level two, which is the $1,000,000 plus $1,000,000 to $2,000,000 plus range. You can get there by focusing down on the stuff that you're really good at. And a lot of times that's in the business, right?

Clay Hepler15:49So people want to go out and hire some person to get really good at this specific marketing channel. Right. When in reality, they just need to focus on what's working in their business. So cold calling is working. Then just use the cold calling to target more of the properties that you've already been successful with and use the data that you have in your business to dictate that. Right? So it's a rolling vision. Like at the beginning, it's really more about just putting the scattered shot out there to see what works. And then when you get to these certain milestones and you're just like, okay, now I need to take it to the next level.

Clay Hepler16:22And so I can look at the, what has been successful. And then maybe I work with my partner, whether it's a cold calling texting partner, or maybe it's just, I have an internal marketing person, we look at the data together and we could say, Hey, how can we build out a campaign to be more precise in what we're targeting?

Brandon Parker16:38Yeah, that's a Naseem Taleb, one of my favorite economist philosophers, he talks about via negativa, but addition by subtraction, but basically, rid of stuff in your business, so that you can drill deeper into other stuff makes a ton of sense. Mean, classic 8022, like, where's your money coming from? Do more of that.

Clay Hepler17:00Dude, it's see, this is the thing. It's simple. We all know it, but we just don't do it. Yeah. Sorry. That's the entrepreneur's plight right there. Right. And, you know, what happens when I see here's what I see, like a lot of people, they'll get, they'll do like a marketing channel and then they'll add another marketing channel because they hear that multichannel marketing is like the way to go. And they should just scale their existing marketing channel to a million dollars a year. And then they can add on all the additional stuff.

Clay Hepler17:31But the operational drag of adding additional marketing channels specifically early in your business is so much, right? So cold calling people think about cold calling, which you know all about cold calling, but it is a completely different marketing process and intake process and sales process than direct mail piece. I mean, you're like one in out of maybe 50 to 80 leads is going to convert into a deal. Right? And so what that means is you need a lead manager and you're going to have a lot more betting on the front end.

Clay Hepler18:03You're going to have to do a lot more offers per deal. Yep. But you don't, the cost per lead is way less. So people think it's like the easier marketing channel. It really just depends on what type of business you want to build. Right. The direct mail is going to be more expensive cost per lead. Right. But it's going to be a higher probability of closing a deal. So you might be one in ten, one in 30, but you could be half what your cost per or double or triple your cost per lead for, as it relates to cold calling, but your cost per deal is the same thing or less.

Brandon Parker18:37Yep. Yep. So you're getting into the systems problem, part of your three part vision systems, capital problems for roadblocks of scaling. The systems things interesting, because I get that question a lot. People a lot of times want to know, hey, like, what's the ROAS on cold calling versus mailing versus texting? And to me, the return on your spin starts to, it's like people are all over the place on that. To me, it starts to come out in the wash. That's not all of them are effective. To me, it's more where you have levers to pull is how good of systems can you build.

Brandon Parker19:10And you're saying, what type of business do you want to build? Because I had a person who started with us, who started cold calling with us and texting at the same time. And I said, dude, that's a mistake. Honestly, I would tell you to just go folk. If you want to do texting, go focus on texting because people look at these leads that come in, mail, text, cold calling, and they're like, oh, a lead is a lead. Once it, like, hits my thing, I'm gonna take care of it, but that's not true. Like, each of those needs its entire... Its own sales process. Like, when it comes in as a lead, it's in a completely different channel than all the other three.

Brandon Parker19:41So you're gonna have to build three entire conveyor belts to make that work. And so pick which conveyor belt you wanna build and then make that thing That's the way to do it. There's a big difference between how all those are processed, like you're saying.

Clay Hepler19:56Dude, I agree with you so much. What I've found is every subsequent quarter that I've been in this business, I've tried to look back and say, what has worked and what hasn't worked. In every single quarter? I tell myself the same thing. And I think I'm going to finally, I think I'm finally going to do it this quarter, which is just focus on one thing. Yeah. So one of the, I there's this profound question that I heard about if I worked for my, so our business goal next year is about 4,000,000, 4.5 top line gross profit.

Clay Hepler20:32And so I asked myself the question what's if I were to just focus on one thing, one thing next year to get to our $4,500,000 top line goal, what would that be? And your brain will give you 50,000 things and then it'll tell you, it'll tell you, oh man, but what if you do, you know what? You might be more effective if you focus on one thing or two things, but this thing works with this thing. And so maybe you can combine them.

Clay Hepler21:03Nope. What's the one thing, right? What's the one thing that you can do? And so here's how I think about the system. And I'll just give your, you, your listeners what we do with our private clients. Just one on one. So what I tell them is in our first meeting, we do a time audit. And so we focus on for the next two weeks between the first and the second meeting, we say, Hey, let's do a time audit. Let's look at your time, how you're spending it. And a lot of land investors that are at that 200, 300, 400, 700 range, which is the majority of my clients are in between there and where I see a lot of people stumbling.

Clay Hepler21:35They just can't get past this part. And so they're, they do this time audit and they realize I'm doing so many things that don't actually make me money.

Brandon Parker21:44Yeah.

Clay Hepler21:48When you do that time on, it gives you this visibility. And then we go through this hiring delegation ladder, admin, fulfillment, marketing, sales, and leadership. And so people want to hire sales before they hire an admin person, which dude, just get on the phone. And if you don't like getting on the phone, I'm sorry, you got to get on the phone and close deals. Cause that's the highest dollar value thing you could possibly do. And then after we do that, so we do this time audit and then we check out the delegation line and we say, Hey, where can we bring someone in to support you to get to your next level?

Clay Hepler22:19After we focus on that, it's okay. So then what's the actual constraint for us to get to our next level? And so there you have entrepreneurs like Alex Ramosy that really popularized this, this concept, which is from the goal. Elia Gold, Goldbrat wrote this book called the goal, which is basically around the theory of constraints, which is a system will grow until there is a constraint in the system and it will grow, grow until it hits the ceiling and it won't grow any faster or grow any more unless the constraint has been addressed.

Clay Hepler22:51Okay. So let me tell you about a constraint that we were dealing with. So we were dealing with a constraint of close like our cash conversion cycles was, were very slow, right? Which essentially we cash conversion cycles, the time it takes from a lead to convert into a dollar sign. Right. And your ability to shrink that is directly related to your ability to scale. So imagine if you can buy a deal, buy four deals and sell four deals per year at 15 ks versus buy two deals a year at let's say 20 ks.

Clay Hepler23:28You might make more money on the two deals, but your ability to scale is going to be a lot faster because you can turn your money quicker. Right? You can redeploy it and scale your business faster. And so we're like, Hey man, like what, like, how do we actually solve this problem? And this is the exact process that we go through. Oh, okay. So we solve this problem by, is it building a dispositions department? Is it like actually physically going out and actually building an apartment that helps us with selling deals faster? That could be a thing that we do.

Clay Hepler24:01Maybe it's just market selection.

Brandon Parker24:03There you go.

Clay Hepler24:05Because everyone wants to think that it's the end of the funnel. It's my broker that's screwing this up. It's the tight, it's the time in the market. It's some made up thing. That's not actually, that's not, not actually productive, or I need to create my own disposition department. Maybe not a bad idea depending on your scale, but I got a deal under contract for $40,000. This was two weeks ago. Okay? We thought it was gonna go sell for 80,000. Mhmm.

Clay Hepler24:36Guess what it sold for? 70. 140 ks.

Brandon Parker24:41Crushing it. Okay. Twenty

Clay Hepler24:43four hours. Woah. So you got a nice market. So we got the good market and so it doesn't matter what the broker is. If you have a good market, you can sell your deals faster. And so what we realized is we could spend this quarter, Brandon, focusing on building out a disposition department, which by the way, I hired someone to do that. But I, the highest paid employee should spend my time on data and market selection and getting more precise in the things that we're targeting.

Clay Hepler25:15And so that's like a constraint analysis. And so my whole quarter, I was just giving you an example in the past. My whole quarter was dedicated on the... This one thing. It wasn't like it wasn't acquisitions. It wasn't lead management. It wasn't processes. It wasn't building out a beautiful notion board. It wasn't transactions or it was literally that. And so a lot of people will say it should be, I should do dispositions and also I should do market selection. I should do data management. It should do notion.

Clay Hepler25:45I can all do these things together because I'm like an entrepreneur and I work eighty hour weeks or ninety hour weeks. Yeah. And you can, but the profound knowledge that you get in the depth of the process and the potency of your processes that you create, if you focus on one thing versus two or three things or four things during a quarter will allow you to scale.

Brandon Parker26:07Yeah. I mean, that's brilliant. That's the easiest, That's the easiest thing to talk about and the hardest thing for entrepreneurs to do. Like you get the 100 ideas, and I'm gonna fix all of them, you start fixing them all at once, none of them get done. But when you look at so I have a board that I start with every morning. And it's my morning ritual board, but the thing is like crush these things today. And what are the two things or three things that will move the needle forward the most? And then somehow dedicating time to those. It's, that's a constant battle for anyone. You're talking about that same concept on a quarterly level.

Brandon Parker26:40What's the constraint in your business? Where's the bottleneck? And if you relieve that bottleneck, it's gonna go and it's naturally gonna hit a new bottleneck and you'll have something new to work on. Our bottleneck that we've identified for the first quarter of twenty twenty five is is follow ups because we have thousands of leads that our follow ups pretty good. We have some automations and things like that. But what if we were to take those thousands of leads and with conversational AI, just absolutely crush follow-up. Like, that's calendar people booking on the calendar.

Brandon Parker27:11Those are leads that we're bringing back out of nowhere. So that's where we think that one of our constraints is right now. It's just we have thousands of dead leads and that's money on the table. And yeah, it's interesting that every business is going to have its own constraint unique to exactly where you're at in the scaling. And how, so how do you think about, Do you have any frameworks for people that might be able to like, look at their own business and identify where their constraints might be or where their system problem might be? Mhmm. How do you think about that?

Clay Hepler27:41Yeah, I think naturally, everyone knows where they really need to put extra effort. I think naturally that actually people know, but the easy answer a lot of times is like, you don't have enough leads. Like for most people it's, are you overwhelmed? If you're not overwhelmed, that's the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right? Because here, the, the deal is if you have a good opportunity, you will get it funded. There's no problem with funding deals. There are plenty of land funders in the world.

Clay Hepler28:14And I fund land. The neighbor down the street funds land. Like every, like there's a lot of land funders. Right. And so usually the core thing is the, is the leads. I mean, I find that's the core constraint in probably 80% of the people that I talk with, whether it's on Twitter, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's people personally one on one. When I talk to Justin Piche, my cohost of the Ground Game podcast, it's really just a lot of times it's the lead thing. Yeah. And you can solve this constraint with just being better at marketing.

Clay Hepler28:49And a lot of times being better at marketing is being more consistent. Oh my gosh. Did this guy just say consistency in marketing? Like, I can't I've believe never heard that. But the reality is a train, a freight train going 55 miles an hour can burst through a multiple foot concrete steel reinforced wall 55 miles, because it's just steady Eddie. It's got the momentum that it needs. What I see a lot of land investors do as it relates to their lead flow and why they can't really solve this constraint is they'll get super excited.

Clay Hepler29:27They're the entrepreneur in their family and they think they're special. Right? They think that I work harder than everyone else. And you're like, okay, dude. Yeah. If you're special, then the mark of someone that's special is someone that doesn't do what we just emotionally feel like we need to do, which is I'm just going to call up Brandon. I'm gonna say, Brandon, give me five cold callers. And you're going be like, dude, you don't need five cold callers. Now you need one for a couple of months. And then when you get that lead flow down, then you can add two or three or four. Right.

Clay Hepler29:57But the reality is people send out a bunch of mail at the beginning. I mean, I noticed this when I was, when I had the land and accelerate a couple of clients with that and people would send out mail at the beginning and then month three and four, they'd be like, I'm not getting as much hits as I thought I would get. And I'm just going to stop. And I'm like, this is the moment that you need to stay consistent. Yeah. And cliched is as it is oftentimes the constraint of the marketing is the consistency. After you get to the consistency, as we talked about earlier, right? You see these very clear delineations between beginners business and the mid side business.

Clay Hepler30:32The beginners is like, dude, just do your job. Send out mail, talk to sellers, get deals under contract, connect with funders, build out basic systems, have an okay CRM. You're good. And the middle group is okay. More precise targeting. Have that vision. So you can exactly know you're the waterfront guy. You're the subdivide guy. You're the infill girl, whatever. That's where the constraint happens in that size of market. So first it's volume of leads, then it's quality. So you see that sort of this is very clear delineation between the beginning and the middle.

Clay Hepler31:08I find that the way that you can stair step quickly is you get from volume to quality in everything you do.

Brandon Parker31:16Yeah. Yeah. And what what do you think the step after that is then is it finding constraints and attacking those constraints to scale after that?

Clay Hepler31:28The step after leads? Yeah, it's people. There you are. It's a 100% people. Because once you solve the con... Hey, I'm like, I I have a lead I have a lead problem. And now you're like, oh shit. Like, Brandon, quit sending me leads. Right? By the way, guys, I'm not like promoting Brandon. I just liked the guy. So I'm saying this, but after you get that, then you gotta hire people. And the most expensive thing to your business in your business is a bad hire.

Clay Hepler31:58Oh my gosh. This guy's just, did he just say another cliche? Like, I'm sorry guys, but it's true. Like I've gone through so many people in my business because of just really poor hiring. And so the next constraint is hiring people and in leadership. Right. I talk to people all the time. I had a guy that just joined a couple of weeks ago, has a successful business, hired his friend right before he and I worked together. I said, you know what a condition of he, he told me what he was paying his friend and what his friend had done over the past month and a half.

Clay Hepler32:34I'm like, one of the conditions of working together is your friend is not working with you anymore. We hire out of convenience and we hire out of pain a lot of times. Yeah. When we're, especially when we're early on, we're like, let my, my house is burning. I have too many leads. I don't know what to do. And some guy on the internet told me I should just hire some global talent And I don't have the systems to hold them accountable. And I don't know exactly what good looks like, because I haven't defined it before I hire someone. And so I just hire someone.

Clay Hepler33:04And then all of a sudden they take a sick day, you know, every twice a week for the first three weeks. And I'm like, wait, this person's sick a lot. It's no dude, you just hired the wrong person. And so as soon as we, you know, we were talking earlier about the systems component. Well, we do the time audit. We see the, the, what we need to delegate. And oftentimes it's the ad, this admin person. And then we elevate and we have our admin person, our data, our executive assistant, they're managing a lot of our stuff and we're still closing deals.

Clay Hepler33:36And then all of a sudden we need to hire the next level, which might be the fulfillment. And then the marketing, maybe it's an agency or someone else. And then the, where I see a lot of people mess up is they hire the wrong person for admin or hire the wrong person for the marketing or the operations. And then they need to redo everything or they prematurely hire the salesperson when they try to hire an acquisition person, because they're like, I need to scale out of my business. I'm like, dude, you don't need to scale out of your business. You're making a 0.25 of million dollars a year. You don't need to scale out of shit.

Clay Hepler34:07There's nothing to scale out of. Right? And so you need to focus on a lead manager, someone that can filter your leads, qualify your leads, right? Instead of hiring someone to come in and be the buck stops with you salesperson, you want to have someone at the front end that can really hire or that can really filter your leads. Right? And so making sure that person's good, not just a beating pulse, which is what a lot of land investors do. It doesn't work anymore, by the way, because there's more competition. So you have to have higher quality people. Right? And you also want to wipe the, wipe the floor on your competition.

Clay Hepler34:38And so in order to do that, you need to have higher quality people. And so that's the next constraint that I see with everyone.

Brandon Parker34:44Yep. And that lead manager can also be looked at as a sales setter. There's a reason that a lot of times you'll call to talk to an agency. You're not talking to the main salesperson or the owner first. You're talking to one of their people who's asking you about your goals and seeing if you're a fit first. That's what a lead manager is. They are getting it down to 10 or 20% of leads and sending you the people worth talking to. And yeah, that's very clutch. Everyone's trying to hire an acquisitions manager, but that's that is skipping a step.

Brandon Parker35:18It's skipping a couple of steps for sure.

Clay Hepler35:20Right. Unless you're independently wealthy. So if you're coming, if you're listening to Brandon and I, and you're like, I have so much money in the bank. I'm just going to skip all these steps. Okay, fair enough. I didn't have that when I started. And so this is the scaling roadmap for someone that is, you know, starting out with maybe 30,000, 50,000 in the bank. They've had a first success couple year one, year two, year three, and they want to get to the next level and want they want to be an entrepreneur in their business. They don't have the cash to just outsource it to someone else that can do this all for them.

Clay Hepler35:51Yeah. And land is interesting. I've actually seen a couple people that have come in and they they've done business before they're savvy. They know how to hire teams and they come in and they just start hiring people and plugging them in. Like I've had, I have a guy who hired

Brandon Parker36:07assistant, and then a acquisitions manager, and then turn that acquisitions manager into a high level salesperson and just started pumping leads through. And he's he's crushing it. So there there's something to be said, if someone's got like a bunch of money in the bank and they can just buy a team and put it in place, that's doable for people who know what they're doing and have capital. But yeah, that's not the that's a, that's not the path generally, for sure. There's a cool app for anyone who heard Clay mentioning the time tracking, but it's called Rise.

Brandon Parker36:38I use it R I Z E. I'll put it in the show notes, but it's an AI app that tracks everything that I'm doing on my computer. What keeps tracking when I'm messaging, when I'm in Slack, when I'm in notes, like all the stuff. And then it gives me weekly reports on how I spent my time, how much focus time I had versus bouncing around. And it's pretty cool. So anyway, tracking is a key part of what you do. Sounds like. Has that significantly impacted your productivity? It had for me because it will pop things up on my screen. I'm making social media content, and then I open Slack, it'll pop something up on my, in my, in front of me and say, Hey, is this a distraction?

Brandon Parker37:14And so it'll, it's a stop in my, in my just bouncing around. I'll be like, yes. And then I'll go back to creating social media like I'm supposed to. So yeah, it's a cool tool like that for someone like me who does probably a lot of people like me do a lot of things at once. Yeah, that's sweet. So we talked a little bit about the vision system, the capital problem that sounds like it relates to your cash flow cycle, narrowing that as much as possible. What else plays into the capital problem? There's

Clay Hepler37:44a couple ways to approach this. The first thing is finding a really good strategic funding partner is very important. I would implore the listeners to find someone that can help you with due diligence, especially if you're starting out find someone that they can help you with due diligence. They might be able to help you with co signing on a loan. If you're going after a larger track, if you work with the right funding partner, they can bring expertise to the table that you probably wouldn't have.

Clay Hepler38:17If you were just working with some normal funding partner that's been in the business for a long period of time. There's been a lot of new, funding companies that have come in that are more of a partner. This is not new, by the way. This is not isolated to land space. There's a really massive company it's called Harborvest Partners. It's a multi billion dollar private equity company that they come alongside other private equity companies and they co invest. So private equity company will come in, they'll have something in the technology sector and they'll bring the deal.

Clay Hepler38:53And by the way, I'm not affiliated with Harborvest. I don't know everything about them, but I just understand this is how their model works and they become a co GP. So imagine your funding partners, co GP and this person, they built, bring expertise and they bring capital, a big capital slug to the table. And so, especially for the land investors that are looking to scale or, or, or start out in general, having that strategic funding partner is critical.

Clay Hepler39:24And this is how I started out and this is how I scaled. And I outgrew my funding partners because they were more just money partners. They weren't relational or due diligence partners. But I think that there are new hybrid funders that are coming in and saying, Hey, we're going to help you take your business to the next level as this sort of Harborvest type of co GP that will come in and help you with the getting your first subdivide, getting it through, getting if you're, if you have a subdivide and you're like, Hey, I don't want to pay a consultant.

Clay Hepler39:58I just want to come alongside, have someone come alongside. They'll bring all the capital for me and they'll help run the deal with me. There are structures like that. People in the real estate syndication space do this too. Multifamily syndicators, industrial syndicators. There are the GP operators, the general partner operator that bring the deal that negotiate the deal. And then there are the co GPs that are the funding partners. And so they come in and they fund the deal, pure equity, right? And then they split the profits on the back end. This is not new to land.

Clay Hepler40:29It's just been the way that the land space is as the equity partners. That's just been how it is, but this is very popular in other spaces. And so for me, I think a lot of people are missing that part of the strategic partner. They're just picking a person for maybe it's for the interest rate. Maybe it's for the funding rate, but they're not thinking, Hey, how can this person help me strategically take my business to the next level? It's almost like a consultant that is also an equity partner.

Clay Hepler41:01Now here's one interesting tip. Depending on the equity partner that you have, started doing this early in my business because one of the core part problems with land investing in general is you're capital constrained and your deals may take longer than you originally thought. And so you're like, dude, I want to invest in marketing to keep my business going, but I don't know. I like, I need $6,000 this month or $15,000 to keep the business going so that I can make sure that I get more deals through the door.

Clay Hepler41:34And so a strategic partner might be able to say, Hey, here's an extra $3,000 towards your land operation. And so you can maybe the purchase price is 64,000, but you can have a little bit more to have a little bit of extra funding for your land operation to keep it going. And I started to negotiate this early on and where this came from for me was the house flipping world. Right? So we get rehab loans from house flippers. Right? And so I thought, why can't we do this in the land investing?

Clay Hepler42:06Why can't we help them? And sometimes the rehab loan helps the person scale beyond just the rehab of that property. Of course they never say that. And this is what helped us scale our business faster. And a lot of times our private lenders actually knew that we were using it for maybe our next direct mail piece or maybe our next call. And it wasn't about overleveraging. It was more about, because in fact, is better for the land funder because they have the equity in, in, they actually have the name on the title. So they're not concerned about you going bankrupt like a private lender might be, but this is a strategic way for you to continue to scale your business.

Clay Hepler42:44And so we've started to do that kind of come in and been a funder and also a cash injector for a little bit of cash to keep the business humming, right? Almost like an acquisition fee or asset management fee that these people get at closing similar to people get in the syndication model. And so that's been a way that the people that I've worked with individually like that approach. And so strategic funders can really bring this creative component, creative part of the process to the table And it enables people to scale faster and get to these critical parts of the process, which, Hey, I'm getting consistent cash flow.

Clay Hepler43:27And so I might not need this anymore, but at the beginning I might need a couple of strategic capital injections. Yeah.

Brandon Parker43:34Yeah, you're smoothing out that cash flow cycle a little bit. They're not feeling that cash crunch because now they have that extra $10 in the bank. How is that structured? Like, when are those disbursements or what might that look like? Is it something like a rehab loan where, okay, I'm buying this property, it's $60 and then you fund an extra $20. So that's sitting in the bank as a buffer as they deal with that property. Like when's the money come? How much is it? What's the cost of it? What's a little bit more of the structure of that deal? For sure. I mean,

Clay Hepler44:03structure it as it, you know, as it it's just an increase in the basis and we creatively structure it. However, the individual wants that to be structured, but it's just an increase of the basis. You know, what that means is if it's a $65,000 property and they want $70,000 then the funder is paid back the $70,000 first when the deal sells and then the equity there therefore is split thereafter. And so that's just a, it's like just being helpful to the actual fundee in that way.

Clay Hepler44:39And then the splits can be adjusted in that way, just to make sure that the funder is getting the right return and everything like that. But that's the way that smoothes out the cash cycle.

Brandon Parker44:48Okay. And that's, that is great for someone who is trying to get past that hump. I mean, that's the situation you described is common where they someone's deciding between marketing more, keeping their business going and emptying their bank account. And then depending on whether that next deal sells in time or not, I mean, they can people get in sticky situations. That's why they have that. Well, the big part, like you were mentioning consistency, a lot of that consistency derives from not having cash in the bank, not having enough runway.

Brandon Parker45:19And so they're making that choice. And then they have this stop go. And that little stop go on marketing just so many people are stuck there. Marketing, stop marketing, and that becomes a nightmare scenario. When people... Is this something that you're actively doing, offering with people who are private clients? Is this something that you're... Is it on the table for people who come to try to be private clients with you? And talk a little bit more about that whole angle of your business since you've gone away from, since you pivoted a little bit and upgraded.

Clay Hepler45:50Yeah, I mean, so it's very limited people in reality. I only take on six to eight people at a time. And so I already have seven people. I can only like really take on one other person. And it's just honestly a real joy for me to give back. Like I don't make a killing on it. I just really enjoy it. And it teaches me a lot about my business too. We learn by teaching. And so it's just a little thing that I know I can add a lot of value here. There's no real scale to it because I have a limited amount of hours and I can only dedicate a certain amount of hours per people every month because I have a business to run.

Clay Hepler46:24But I, but so many people were asking me about it. I was like, Hey man, like I can add this value here in a very limited sense for people that are interested, but it's for people that are making over $203,100 ks up to $1,500,000. That's the majority of my clients and yeah.

Brandon Parker46:44That's killer. What so we covered vision problem, systems problem, capital problem. And those are the road, the big roadblocks of scaling. As far as scaling goes, general thoughts or anything that we passed over a little bit quickly or you want to dig into a little bit more there?

Clay Hepler47:02Yeah. One of the things that really helped me scale my business was financial clarity. And people think it's too early to invest in a bookkeeper. It's really never too early to invest in a bookkeeper. We just did our 2025 projection of, hey, how do we get to 4.5 mil? Right? How do we get to hopefully more?

Clay Hepler47:33And it it... We have put it down to understanding all of our business when we add new people, why we add new people, structures of when we add new people, when we hit certain revenue milestones, when we hurt, hit constraint milestones. Now will this change? Of course. But we try to project out and say, have enough cash on hand for six months of operating five months, four months, depending on what type of business you have.

Clay Hepler48:08And so I can project out and say, I'm going to hire people in these parts of my process. Again, using the theory of constraints, but the financial component is the big component to scaling. If you don't have visibility of your numbers, what happens is it's the start stop. I'm sure a lot of your listeners know this, man. It's like I, one day I'm investing all this money and my deals aren't selling fast enough because I've gone way up. I've added five cold callers and now I have to call Brandon. I got to do one cold caller. I'm sending all this mail out and one month I send 15,000, the next month I send three.

Clay Hepler48:42And so a lot of times we can prevent that by having financial clarity. So having a thirteen week rolling cash flow forecast, this is something as simple as you can go online and download it and just start to put in your numbers and start to understand your cash conversion cycles and how long it takes you to sell a deal and your average profit on deal. You know, these types of metrics cost per lead, cost per contract, cost per deal, average profit. How long does it take you to sell your deals? And then understanding your financial position.

Clay Hepler49:14These are the things that you need to scale. Cause this isn't, this is a, we're building a conveyor belt here. Yeah. And the conveyor belt that we're building is defined by the the numbers that we have. How much cash do we have on hand? How long does it take us to sell deals? And so we can make strategic decisions in our business to scale. Hire someone. Don't hire someone. Don't I wanna hire someone because I have an emotional need to hire someone or I'm feeling overwhelmed. I wanna hire someone because it's the right financial and data driven decision for our business. Mhmm. And that's a big that's a big part of scaling.

Brandon Parker49:49That is, I think, a constraint of so many businesses out there, just not knowing your numbers. You ask someone something about their business, the cost to acquire a customer or their churn rate or something that they have an agency. If they don't know, then you can almost tell the size of what they're building. So if you don't know those numbers, then okay, I know where you're at in the process. And I think that's probably true on land as well. What do you do tactically to get those numbers?

Brandon Parker50:20Are you, do you dig into those yourself under, do you think it's important someone digs in themselves, understands all those bookkeeper will get everything organized? Then there is fractional CFOs that'll do it for you. How do you approach that? How do you think about

Clay Hepler50:34tactically getting those numbers in your hands? I think it depends on the size of the business, but at least the first time around, I don't like to, I'm not the type of business owner that wants to just frankly, just because I'm not like the gentleman that you were talking about earlier that just can install people in there. Like I had to do this without, with limited capital. And so when I install a new process in a business before I enroll someone new in that process, whether it's through hiring or internal promotion or moving someone from one part of the business to the other, I want to understand that process through and through.

Clay Hepler51:09I think it's an incredible exercise, even though it might be painstaking for a lot of those high D visionary sales based entrepreneurs, me being one of them. It's so helpful to actually know your numbers and physically manually do it. Now you can record a loom along the way. You can transcribe the loom so that you have the step by step process. You can give it to someone else after. But at the beginning, having that sort of clarity, a lot of times it's the clarity is found through the work that you need to go through.

Clay Hepler51:44And so I I'm a big proponent of having the people actually collect it. In fact, on my onboarding call for the private coaching clients, I go through this exercise because it's... It takes them hours. Yeah. None of them know their damn numbers. Yeah. It takes them hours and they're already like, this has been so eye opening for me because I don't know any of my numbers. Yeah. I don't even know my cost per lead. I'm like, wait, so you have a business that does $500,000 and you don't know your cost per lead.

Clay Hepler52:19How do you know if you should add another person in your text marketing?

Brandon Parker52:24Yeah. It's it's tedious. Would say also, it's extremely gratifying. Like the point that I finally got all my numbers, which is like, say eighteen months ago when I finally got things organized enough where I was seeing all the numbers. Now when the end of the month hits, I still do it myself because I'm excited to go plug numbers into this spreadsheet that I spent months building and, like, tweaking with and see what the numbers are. There's... And I'm a really high level bounce all around high energy person.

Brandon Parker52:55Like, I'm not generally in spreadsheets, but this end of the month, when I do it, it's exciting. It's very gratifying. Knowing your numbers and seeing how the engine's working is I think really important and probably overlooked often.

Clay Hepler53:08So I agree with that. A lot of times I think people don't do it because they're afraid. It's like not looking at your bank account when you're poor. It's true. That's true. And we all know that I've been there and you just don't want to look at your bank account at the end of the month. You're like, dude, how much did I go out too much this month? Did I stick to my budget? I don't even want to look at my budget. It's the same exact thing. Your business P and L is your business budget. And in order for you to make strategic decisions and actually build a real business, you need to look at everything and you need to track it.

Brandon Parker53:47Yeah. I think that a lot of times that really hard stuff that's hard to get to that that's some of the best stuffs on the other side of really hard things. And the numbers sound small, but I know that's really hard for people. It was really hard for me. So I get it. Speaking of really hard stuff, you were a lacrosse player at Middlebury college. Is that, is the rumor true? That's right. That's crazy. So what's the what's the main takeaway you have playing lacrosse that comes over into the business world? I am not afraid of hard work and

Clay Hepler54:17delaying gratification. When you're a college athlete, when we were there we were like number five in the nation. We're, we had Middlebury's historically been an incredible lacrosse school, won multiple national championships and the amount of effort it took in high school to get there. In college, unfortunately I had a career ending injury, so I wasn't able to really play out my career in Middlebury, but it just teaches you grit. Like anytime I connect with a athlete, a college athlete, or someone that was a really good high school athlete, it just teaches you delayed gratification, grit, and what hard work really means.

Brandon Parker54:59Yeah, there's something deeply gratifying about hard, painful work. Like even the, even when you get what you wanted from it, it's almost like that looking back on all the hard work is more gratifying than whatever you end up getting. I've just grinded so hard and got it. And now I want to get grinding again. That was fun. I show you on that for sure. Good answer, man. What what else do you have as far as scaling the land business or anything else we might've popped over there a little bit too fast you want to dig into? Yeah.

Brandon Parker55:30I think one of the things is,

Clay Hepler55:32I'm going to just repeat this. Get clear on where you want to go. Get clear on what it's going to take to get you there. Now we have different stages of where you want to go. First thing is that I want financial freedom. I'm just going to work really hard. Stage one, as we talked about up to 300, 400, 500 ks is I'm just going to work really hard. Making sure when you work hard, you're tracking things like cost per lead, cost per deal, cost per contract, average profit, and cash conversion cycle.

Clay Hepler56:03When you understand those metrics, you really understand your business. And so you can use those metrics to strategically build a plan to scale, but you cannot scale with emotion. You have to scale with data. I can tell the level of the entrepreneur by the amount of data they collect and how deeply they can talk about it. Number two is about the systems, right?

Clay Hepler56:34Conduct a time audit. Know what, where you're allocating your time. Maybe do something like Brandon, you talked about rise earlier. Understand there's a hiring ladder. There is not a, I'm just going to hire someone and throw someone in. There's just, there's a specific set of people that you should hire at the beginning of the process. And then at the end, when you're at a multiple million dollar a year business, then you can hire the COO. Then you can hire the person that runs your business, but start slow and climb the ladder. So you're properly hiring people. And then after that, focus your energy on the constraint.

Clay Hepler57:07There's never two constraints of a business. There's always one glaring constraint. A lot of times early on, it is the leads. A lot of times it is the leads. First, it's the quantity of leads. Then it's the quality of leads. And then after you get through that, I find that the people is the biggest problem. Hiring the right people, putting together a very strict and systematic hiring process, getting references, making sure that you triple check, do multiple interviews, do test trials, maybe even do a test day to make sure that this person fits within the values, the standards, and the vision of your company.

Clay Hepler57:47After you go from there, then you got to worry about the capital part of it. Whether it's working with this capital funder that has the creative component that you can do what I talked about earlier or finding cheaper capital, if that's what you're looking for, that's where you really need to focus at that point. But those are the processes to really scale. Capital shouldn't be first. It should be last. Can you find good deals? You'll get all the capital you need. And so in sum, that's what I got. Good luck scaling.

Brandon Parker58:16I love it. We both look to find holes in the market, something that I've seen missing at the lower levels. A lot of people are trying to get started cold calling. So I started a school group, and I'm just putting basically everything I've learned about cold calling after 5,000,000 calls this last year and all the processes we use. I'm putting out like a little mini course in our school group. People who are just getting started, you can send blind offers. Great way to get started. Small batches. You can just get on the phone and crush the phones and find deals. I'm gonna put information out there for the school group.

Brandon Parker58:48That'll be in the show notes. And then, Clay, you've got all kinds of interesting stuff going on. Where's the best people... Place for people to find you online?

Clay Hepler58:56Yeah. I'm sure I'll get send you over some stuff for for the show notes, but Twitter and in Instagram, Clay Hepler, fellow Twitter brow, retweet brow here.

Brandon Parker59:09And, yeah, those are two great places to find me. Awesome. And you've got a great newsletter that I subscribed to also. Yeah. Check out that that newsletter. Any final thoughts for the... Our land friends out there, Clay?

Clay Hepler59:21Yeah. I think that 2025 is going to be a year of unique opportunity. And you can listen to the people that say that it's going to get it lands getting more competitive. Or you can just say good, and I'm gonna I'm gonna make it happen either way.

Brandon Parker59:35Good. I like that. That's a good one. I think this is gonna be our new number one ranking pod here. So I'll be I'll be watching the numbers closely.

Clay Hepler59:43Alright, brother. See you later. Thanks, Brandon. The Legends of Land show.