Arturo Paturzo : Diendei 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 Arturo Patturzo, an Italian Navy officer from Livorno Naval Academy. In 1993, he ventured into land investment in May 2021. Arturo began his land flipping business when he bought 15 infill lots in Arizona, and then he scaled from there. Arturo specializes in rural vacant land.

Brandon Parker00:31His approach prioritizes understanding market dynamics and collaborating with other investors. You can find Arturo at diende.com. In this conversation, we go through how Arturo works his business, has scaled it, and how he operates remote outside of his nine to five. Without further ado, please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Arturo. The Legends of Land Show with Brandon Parker. Deconstruct the tactics of world class land investors and learn tools to build a 7 figure land business.

Brandon Parker01:08The Legends of Land Show is starting now. Well, come to the show, Art. It is good to see you again and yeah, excited to have you on Legends of Land podcast today. How are doing today, Art? Hello. Thank you very much for having me here, man. It's a pleasure and it went very good. Cool. Well, let's start with just get right into land investing. How'd you get started in land investing and what's your current strategy?

Arturo Paturzo01:33I started in 2021 just by chance. At that time I was living in Turkey. I was not in Italy. And I had a very small amount of money to invest. And I've always found real estate investment something attractive, appealing. I do some real estate in Italy. It's very difficult doing real estate in Italy than doing it in The US residential rentals. And for this reason, wanted to because I knew the potential of real estate in The US, I wanted to invest in The US.

Arturo Paturzo02:07But I didn't have enough money to get into the house market. I knew about the crazy competitions. So essentially, I started with tax links and tax leads, but I found immediately that was not my way because of the competition. It was very difficult to get anything. For the algorithm on YouTube probably, then I noticed a video from Seth Williams, which is called Land Flipping Lifecycle, for those who want to have a look.

Arturo Paturzo02:41It's a twenty minute video that explains exactly how the business model works for land flipping. Straightforward. So it's placing public data. And I thought, this is for me. I understood the potential, especially for someone who lives outside of The US. And then I jumped into his masterclass, into his course, and the rest is just history. So I started there and improved.

Brandon Parker03:09Yeah, that's a great place to start. I know Seth gets a ton of people started. So now that you're where you're at, what's your strategy today? What are you doing? What do you look at for kind of target markets and how do you market? How do you process those leads?

Arturo Paturzo03:27Other than a very short period, I would say five or six months that I tried texting, not very successfully, I've done more or less always just mailers. I started with blind offers then, like for one year I did Neutrol, but I joined the lending sites group, which is the group of Samnath Healy. And they promote, let's say, the use of direct mail slash blind office. And I said, okay, I want to give it a try again.

Arturo Paturzo03:59And I started in January 2024 with a group, and it worked very well. So I went back to Madoff in January 2024, just blind authors. I target overall end, so I would say starting three or four up until there is no limit, but generally I didn't buy anything more than 100 acres. Know, probably more than that size, you need some other marketing channel. I'm not sure that blind offer would be a good one.

Arturo Paturzo04:33And that's pretty much it. The amount of letters that I'm sending out throughout 2024 was between 10,012 a month. Now, from January, I'm increasing it to 20,000, 30,000 a month. So we'll see what we got.

Brandon Parker04:54Wonderful. If you send out 10,000 letters, what is the approximate deals you close, contracts you get signed from that, and what dollar delay are you looking at? Yeah.

Arturo Paturzo05:08So my KPI said that in 2024, I closed a deal, every 6,500 ish. Random remember now the exact number. So let's say we bought a couple of deals a month and the buy box I shape my buy box when I create the list in a way that I can get a profit in my pocket, which means even if there is an equity partner to share the split, the money that needs to come into my pocket must not be less than $20,000 This means that, of course, I need to target higher value properties.

Arturo Paturzo05:50Normally the lowest market value that I target is between 40 and $50,000

Brandon Parker05:59Nice. Okay. Have you seen any patterns or anything change over the last six months to a year of sending blind offers? Then have you seen any interesting trends that pop up to you?

Arturo Paturzo06:12I'm not sure I saw a trend, but the reason why I like to stick with blind offers, which doesn't mean that I will not test another multiple channel also because, you know, to send out 30,000 letters, have to download a lot of requests because after you scrub them out and so at least 60,000, 70,000 need to be downloaded, let's say, role list. Okay? Which is quite an intense work.

Arturo Paturzo06:42I have someone now helping me doing that, but it's still quite a big part of all the acquisition process. But some point, of course, to scale you need to make use of some other marketing channels. I will probably try something else. But one thing that I believe is true, even if I didn't verify, is that blind offers is expensive. I mean, definitely it's obviously expensive. It's not going to cost any less in the future because passage will continue to increase.

Arturo Paturzo07:16But in a way, this is something that makes a lot of people moving from blind offers to other marketing channels, which are cheaper for sure. So I don't think that today there are so many people sending out blind offers. I must say direct mail, like it was two years ago. So overall competition has increased, but I think that a lot of people jumping into this business, why two years or three years ago they were doing just direct mail because that was the marketing channel.

Arturo Paturzo07:49Today, a lot of people jump into texting, into cold calling, jump into LvM, but not a lot of people, I think, do dive made, which is a kind of competitive edge. Besides, I believe that the reason why I do blind offers and in general, this is again direct mail, could be also neutral range is also because I didn't track this as well.

Arturo Paturzo08:22But if I think about all the calls that I took, I would say that 90%, 80% of the people that I talked to were all like 55 years old, 60 years old and more, which means that seven times out of 10, they are not very tax savvy. I sold a property in Arizona that came back to me the owner came back to me after two years. It was one of my first campaigns because they had it in the drawer and they found it and they decided to sell.

Arturo Paturzo08:56Well, was a very great profit, like probably 15 or 20,000. But that is the letter is something that you can stick in your fridge. You can take in the drawer when it's the right moment. You take it out and you sell. You are old. You don't read the phone, you don't know how to text on the phone, you don't read the email, you don't have an email, but you receive a letter always. So I think that there is something into a direct mail that is not going to die.

Arturo Paturzo09:26Of course, you need to have the budget to send out enough letters to get deals. That is with no doubt.

Brandon Parker09:36Yeah, it's almost the same concept as the email never die, like the email newsletter list or your email list never die, it's a direct link to someone's inbox. You know it's going to hit home, whereas text, phone calls, all kinds of inbound automations, all the technology stuff. There's spam filters and all kinds of stuff that try to stop that from happening. But if you send a letter, it's going in their mailbox, it's going in their hand, and you have that confidence. It's simple,

Arturo Paturzo10:05straightforward. There is not I mean, there is work if you do blind offers, of course, as I was mentioning. There is work you need to price, you need to download the listing, need to scrub. You know, you don't need to have any system like providers, the call caller or whatever to do. It's simple. Yeah. In simple ways, always. Again, crazy expensive, unfortunately, but in my opinion, it's still the most effective marketing channel.

Brandon Parker10:33So you have an interesting situation because you're working asynchronously. So you're in the Navy. You work at a job all day, which is probably pretty, I mean, be busy. And then you're coming home working on land at night asynchronously.

Arturo Paturzo10:48Talk

Brandon Parker10:49about your work schedule, how you fit it all in and how you manage that from a time perspective?

Arturo Paturzo10:56Yeah, sure. I work in the Navy. I'm an Navy officer. I joined the Navy in 1993, so now it's a long time. Work normally, if I am not deployed, I'm not around, I don't have the special things, special duties to take care of. I work normally between eight and half past four or 05:00 in the afternoon, and then I made the choice to leave not far from my workplace, so to reduce the commute time. And so in five minutes after that, finished work.

Arturo Paturzo11:30Am in home and I grab something to eat. I mean, latest 06:00 in the afternoon, I start to work on my business. And this, I keep working until midnight, 01:00 depends, sometimes 02:00. It also depends what time I have to start the following day. So today, for example, is Friday and so probably I will go along tonight because tomorrow I don't have to go to work. The thing that of course helps a lot is to have team helping you, which is something that I'm building.

Arturo Paturzo12:09And this is not just to scale your business so that you can focus on things that are more important to your business, but also to find the time to do that. You couldn't do all yourself having just a part of your day allocated to the business. Don't think that a certain way is difficult to do it all by yourself, having a very limited amount of time. You can do all by yourself, to some degree, of course, if you have all day to do that.

Arturo Paturzo12:40But if you have just a little amount of time and then you work bigger volumes and you want to scale your business, at some point you necessarily need to have someone helping you. Otherwise, you can. This is my opinion, please.

Brandon Parker12:55And what's the first hire that you what's the first person you brought in to help you out with your business? And then what's your business look like today as far as who's helping you out in what roles? Yeah. The first person that let's

Arturo Paturzo13:10start by saying that I believe that in the eightytwenty principle, the 20% of my business is represented by opposition. So I'm not too concerned ever about this position. I'm sure that if I can buy properties at a good price, I can sell them eventually. Probably I cannot sell in one month. I will sell in three, four, five months, but I'm going to sell and I'm going to sell for a profit. 100% sure about it.

Arturo Paturzo13:41So having this in mind, I was looking for a position into position that would help me. And that person was Nika, who is a girl from The Philippines. She was already coming from a real estate experience in The US, showing more than one, and she is my intake manager. So she's the entry point of entering into BAT and Gas, willing to discuss about the offer that they received or ask questions. She does this kind of preliminary check, go on land ID, verify wetlands, zone, total access.

Arturo Paturzo14:17And then the second step is, of course, to pass the lead to until today it was to me, and I was calling in case of the need of renegotiating the offer or there is the need to talk to the seller. I was the one doing it. Starting from the last month, I hired an acquisition manager, US based, Wesley. He will start to work on the February 3. So he's currently under training, but his experience was working even if he's young, but he has worked two years in a similar position for big land investment company.

Arturo Paturzo14:57And then there is me, so he will replace me as a position manager and he will get the signed purchase agreement essentially. And the other person that I'd have is Malwan. He's an Egyptian. These two, they both work full time. My one worked full time, he is what I call a lead generation manager, which means that he is the one I select the markets, he downloads the list, He scrubs the list. He prices the list.

Arturo Paturzo15:28And then the list is ready to be put into my CRM and to be sent out to RocketPrintMA, that is the provider that I use to send out the letters. Actually are these figures that I use. Of course, I have a person in The US who is in charge of more admin tasks. I have an office in The US, which is his office, and he's taking care of receiving emails from the county at Tornay's or whatever, and then PDF them to me. He's also the guy he and also Wesley I use both of them to help me with the signatures of the paper, being that most of the time I'm here in Italy, so they can sign and authorize and be our company.

Arturo Paturzo16:16And this is pretty much the organization that I have. Next, I would like it to be someone able to cover the two roles of executive assistant, which means jump into my email, jump into my calendar and potentially organize my life. Not necessarily business related, my life. So I need to take a ticket, need to rent a car, I need to make a reservation for an hotel. I need someone to take care of that.

Arturo Paturzo16:47And at the same time, this person would like her or him to be also a transaction coordinator. These are the two most important figures that I am looking forward to hiring in 2025 as someone.

Brandon Parker17:00And are you doing the underwriting? I guess, obviously, that's one of the main things. How do you think about the underwriting portion, especially when you get this acquisitions manager in between you and negotiating the deal? Are you going to do a bit of pre underwriting, give him a negotiated final price? Or are you going to train him to do that? And then what's that process look like, kind of getting the deal over the line and doing the underwriting when you put the acquisitions manager there? Yeah. And the

Arturo Paturzo17:30thing is, he still needs to start, so we're stuck on the three. At the moment we are trying, I improve my SOPs because before it was me doing that, so I really didn't need any SOP. I had to create them, show to them and discuss with them, try with them. And the way that it would work is once Nika, my intake manager has pre modified the list, going on LEN ID and verifying it, she will say, 'Okay, for me, it's a good property or it's not a good property.' This is just a pre qualification, so it's the assessment of the intake manager.

Arturo Paturzo18:07And then at that point, once that I will have, let's say, now we talk about Wesley, he will be in place since starting the February 3. Essentially Wesley will go into the CRM, will verify the opportunity into the CRM, the card of the property into the CRM, analyze the property, go on the accounting tool that I am using and Zillow wrapping and come up with a market value. Now, once the data comes with a market value, there is some rule.

Arturo Paturzo18:39I actually took this from Jay Sharma in a podcast that I think was with Seth Williams, he explained very well how he has his acquisition manager working. So essentially, and this is also what I will do, I want Wesley to be at least 75% confident about the price, the market value that he will find. If he's not 75% confident, then he will call me and we will see it together.

Arturo Paturzo19:12If he is 75% confident, remember also that he has extensive experience, okay? So I feel that he can do that. If he is 75% confident then and let's say, I am 75% confident that this property is worth $100,000 okay? So he can take 10% less and 10% more, which means 90,000 to 110,000. He takes the lowest, thousand, and he can make an offer up to 55% of that 90,000 by himself without telling him.

Arturo Paturzo19:47Is autonomously he can do that. If that is not enough, he can arrive to there is a sliding scale depending on the market value that he identifies, but he has a sliding scale and has also autonomy to make a double close offer to the sellers that are not happy with the initial value for, let's say, the straight chase. But of course, Wesley is aware that I'm always formidable. If he has any doubts, he's better to ask me, especially at the beginning. In any case, we will do.

Arturo Paturzo20:18And if we will work together, I will show him exactly how I want him to work.

Brandon Parker20:25Okay. And it sounds like the double close is if he's over the minimum price that you say he can automatically do, then he can try to negotiate a double close above Okay.

Arturo Paturzo20:35Yeah, like for properties between 50,000 and 80,000, that he can offer between the 6067% of that lowest buying property between and so on and so forth. Price intervals, market value intervals, and for each interval he has autonomy to go up to a different price for the closing.

Brandon Parker21:02Okay, and what do you see the big for the initial offer outside the double close? It sounds like there's up to 40,000 to $60,000 range. What are your ranges? How do you chunk that down and think about what you might offer

Arturo Paturzo21:18Well, consider that normally my offer, I mean, in my blind offer, the offer always goes between 48 55. And there is so let's say for the straight gochase, okay? So there is a lending scale and the lower is the value of the property that I come with when I price the list. And the lower is the percentage that I'm going to offer, but generally never less than 45%.

Arturo Paturzo21:50I don't think that in this market when I started, I was offering like 15%, 20%, and what's working now is not anymore, so the margin is getting interrupted, but it's still there. And this is one more reason why we want to target higher value properties. And then meanwhile, let's see the price of the property increase and I can arrive in my blind offer up to 55%. But this is just, as you well know, it's just a ballpark price that you hope to be accurate.

Arturo Paturzo22:24And then when the purchase agreement comes back or the seller calls and you get into the nitty gritty and you see that exact property in Redfin or on Zillow, you realize that your offer probably is off, hopefully not too much. And then you work, as I was mentioning, so he will wisely identify the price and offer up to 50% of the lower. And then it's for the blind office, and now I don't remember, but I have three or four intervals there into my SOP.

Arturo Paturzo22:57And I think the first start from 40,000 to 70,000, and I think it goes between 66% to 65. And then there is a second one that goes between 71 to 100 that arrive at probably 70%. 70%. And then 75 is the most that I also have for properties that are more valuable still with public closing. You know, if you offer 75%, it is a lot.

Arturo Paturzo23:29I mean, it's insane. It's a very high offer that you make, but it's still a double close. And if the property is valuable, if you have 75% of $200,000 I mean, it's how much? $150,000 probably. So you have still a 50,000 gross profit that you can make out of it and without using any of your money. So I believe in double closing. Actually, it's not my first way to go, but it's a very nice backup plan always in my offers.

Brandon Parker24:08What percentage of your offers do you think end up being double close or excuse me, of your contracts end up being double closes?

Arturo Paturzo24:15I would say I didn't try this, but I would say 70% is a straight good chase and 30% the double close. But I have no problem. I mean, one of the things that during the pre qualification that is run by my intake manager, so why don't she talk to the sender the first time, is, are you in a rush to sell? And this is a very important question for someone doing double close because the guy says, 'Fun evil.' In that case, even more, if I'm not 100% sure about the market's value, there are not too many columns, the double close might be currently planned, so if I know that seller is not in a rush, I have some doubts about real market value, so that could be on high 80.

Arturo Paturzo25:06But today, I would say 70% straight purchase, 30% is double close.

Brandon Parker25:14With your acquisitions manager, it sounds like he's got training in the past, so he'll be pretty creative. Do you have a fairly standardized script for the acquisitions manager, or is that you think about that more teaching concepts and then putting them on the phone and maybe listening to calls?

Arturo Paturzo25:34Yes. Actually, this is something that I thought about. Having this acquisition manager has experience, I am more towards in fact, I call it training. What we are actually doing is not the training, it's just onboarding. So I'm explaining in how to price, how I price, because probably it was pricing with the other companies. So how I price, how I come to an author, and this is how I work.

Arturo Paturzo26:07I don't want to get too much into the details of how to talk to the seller. Also because I believe he has more sales experience than I am. So it would be other than teaching him how we work and the things that I want, the how, I'm sure that he is more than qualified to find it himself. Besides, I suggested him to join, and this is true for all the people out here, probably they already know if they are landflippers, but Ajay Sharma came out on school with a nice free channel that is Land Closers Academy.

Arturo Paturzo26:48There is a free course. It's all about sales and I asked to Russ to join the channel and I am considering actually also buying an, I don't remember how he's calling into a JE program, but it's a paid program for him to train my acquisition manager. It's not something that probably I do now. I want to see how it goes. Probably there's been a need, but in case that I will need and to improve something, I think that would be like a good way to get it done.

Brandon Parker27:24Yeah, I worked with John Matzner back in the day as a consult. He did consulting for me, he's a really process oriented guy. He's like everything, SOPs and Notion, and he really got me all squared away as far as that goes. But then it was like the flip side of that that's not as intuitive is that sometimes you just need to hire people who are better than the SOP. Like you can't, for something like you're talking about, okay, we can go through and write down the answer to every single question in the world, or you could remove all of those processes and that just tedium of documenting, and you could just hire someone who's great and then skip that.

Brandon Parker28:03Totally. Yeah, that's like a balance as an entrepreneur that it's always like wrestling with. What do we document just so solidly that anyone can do it? And then where do we hire talent that can come in and just do things that we can't write down? Yeah, exactly. I also said to Wesley, you

Arturo Paturzo28:24have experience. I mean, actually he was working more on a disposition role and also doing some acquisition, but it's always a sales position. So it's acquisition, it's still a sales position. And I said to him, you work for this big land investing company, I don't want to make my name, but everyone knows it, and for two years. So probably you are able actually to help me, you know, doing things better. It's not just me explaining you how to do the thing because you already know how to do the things.

Arturo Paturzo28:58I tell you how we work here. But if you see that something can be done better or you were doing it better in the other company, don't be afraid to raise your hand and say, 'Hey, we were doing this way and I think it could work better.' And we can try to apply it. So it's a very and this is true for all the person working with me. It's not that they work for me, they work with me. So essentially we work together and of course there are bonuses and series are not if we go well, everyone gets this slice of the cake, so everyone is happy.

Arturo Paturzo29:36So it's interesting. Everyone grow the company. And I mean, Wesley is a very promising guy into the company. As I said to him, would like him to cover in the future to role like in higher level, like CEO or something like that. Once that I will be able completely to, I want to say step out of the business because I will never do that, but to work a little more in the background today. Wes is the right person that can help me grow the business, I think.

Brandon Parker30:08What do you see as a way to incentivize acquisitions managers? So Wesley's a great example. I think about that, I've heard all kinds of creative ways to do it, but an acquisitions manager has 5,000 or $10,000 of leeway that they could get for you on each deal just by negotiating a little harder, how do you get them to get that last few thousand dollars? Have you thought of a creative way to incentivize that?

Brandon Parker30:40What's your incentive structures look like? Is it just...

Arturo Paturzo30:44The moment, there are two things that I think are important, especially. It all goes into money, which seems like the easiest one because, of course, nobody does anything or nothing. So you need to be motivated. You need to motivate your people by paying them the right amount of money and especially I believe a lot into the bonuses system, so it's paid monthly, but he has bonuses for each closing.

Arturo Paturzo31:22So I pay him at closing. And also the other people, not only Wesley, they took a percent of the gross profit at closing. Of course, they are different percents depending on the role that they cover. Westlake takes more than one, because it's a more intensive job, in terms of bonuses, so it's compensating in a different way.

Arturo Paturzo31:55But money is an important one and monetary bonuses is the best way to have the people involved. But it's not the only way. Think that if you base all your incentives on money, it's just about for them, for your employees, it's just about finding someone who bring more money and they go, you know, which is the best way to lose your talent. If someone is good, you must be able to pay, but it's not only money. There will always be someone bigger than you that knows that Wesley is good and is offering great more than I can do.

Arturo Paturzo32:34So the next thing, which is probably the most important, is to consider them really part of the company. As I was mentioning before, you don't work for me, you work with me and we are kind I don't want to say family because I never met Wesley. I will probably never met Nikki, never met, but I would like to meet them. I would like to meet their family. I would like to be as close as possible to them. I'm not the kind of guy that if they come to me and they say, 'hey, today I don't feel well, don't work.

Arturo Paturzo33:08It's not the end of the world. Have an emergency. It's okay. Just go. I'm not the person I'm not even the person I know a lot of people and probably they do right and it's the way that it works for them. Checking, you know, there are a bit of software checking the hours of the VA, the VA in front of the computer or whatever. Don't care. I mean, I need them to answer the phone when the phone rings to do the job in a way that I like.

Arturo Paturzo33:40I use OpenPhone besides so I can hear the recording and listen to the recording and if there are corrections, I can write corrections. I also have some nice AI. I use the AI in a way that I can also train them. It's something I'm working on it, but it's almost the final stage. So essentially uploading the recording and using custom GPT comes out with some suggestions for them and that's pretty much it. I don't need to check them.

Arturo Paturzo34:10For example, Marwan Marwan is the Egyptian degeneration manager. Okay. So he knows that he needs to provide me 15,000 letters on the fifth and 15,000 letters I roll this on '25, published month. And I don't care if he works one hour a day or thirty hours a day. I really don't care. He can do whatever he wants, but he knows that both are the data that I need to receive. If I don't receive and there is no warning, I got COVID, fine.

Arturo Paturzo34:45But if I don't receive, then there is something that doesn't work. I want explanations, but otherwise I'm not going to check. So the reports for me that you create and the trust that you have with these people, which must be neutral in any case, they put their trust in me. And so I put my trust in them and there must be a good feeling among the people working in the company, and that is the most important thing. Money is the other one.

Brandon Parker35:12I think that since you have your military background, you're an officer in the Navy, you have a ability to lead. I've seen a lot of military people in the land business, and it seems like they have these leadership skills that are important. That's cool.

Arturo Paturzo35:29Yeah. And the thing is that I was listening also to the podcast. You had also Justin Pichet, and he was also a Navy officer, right? He was in submarines. And it's true in the sense I have this kind of discipline and motivation and team building mentality. Unfortunately, it is not always when you're in the Navy, you are a military talking to other military. So you speak the same language.

Arturo Paturzo36:00They know what to expect from you because they are in the same environment. And you know how to talk to them because you are on the same level. When you are a military and then you want to apply the kind of military framework mindset to your business, it's not always easy because in this case you don't talk to people who is they might be not as familiar as you are with this kind of discipline or whatever, but it's something that you can explain to them and you can try to instill in them.

Arturo Paturzo36:36And this is always about finding good talents. And there are a lot of people who are willing to work and do a good job, so it's not impossible. It's just it is not enough to be in the military to have this disciplined culture into the company. You need to build it.

Brandon Parker36:54Yeah, and it takes the right person. Part of what you're saying, it sounds like it takes the right person. And sometimes it takes sorting through 10 different hires to find that one person who's a leader themselves who go that want to be part of that. You know, some people just want to check-in and say, okay, got to sort through those people as quick as possible and look for the people that are looking for something a bit more. When I find someone that's a leader on my team, I bring them up. I start doing weekly meetings with them. Then I learn about them, like, hey. What are your life goals?

Brandon Parker37:25If you're here five years from now, what roles do you want to grow into? What do you wanna learn? How much money do you wanna be making? I know you're not working here just because you want to just work somewhere randomly. You have things you're trying to get to and goals you're trying to meet. What are those? And then I try to move them through the company in a spot where, okay, you said you wanted more leadership stuff. Can you be in charge of this team? It's 10 people instead of five. And challenging people, I think, in the direction that meets with their goals and then tying that to higher pay is my kind of recipe for when I find talent, keeping them around up.

Brandon Parker38:00Yeah, I agree. So that's so cool. I like the account, the acquisitions manager role because there's so much there with how to properly incentivize that position. Just seems there's always some improvement to be made there, and I'm always curious what people are doing. Have you tied any of your bonuses to the back end after you dispo and you see how much profit was actually made, just kind of as a yeah. It doesn't matter. Heard someone doing that?

Arturo Paturzo38:32I know. It

Brandon Parker38:36seems like when you start thinking through the incentives and all the different ways, since I worked in sales, there was all these metrics, I just remember no matter how many metrics they put in, a salespeople could always find ways to kind of game the system on behalf of our bonuses. And so I'm always very conscious of the different incentives, and so trying to think through that. I haven't heard any great stuff for acquisitions managers. It feels if they were tied to the profit on the back end after everything panned out, but that's hard to do because then you have to wait six months for them to get paid and stuff like that.

Brandon Parker39:08One thing that I was considering actually was to do that.

Arturo Paturzo39:12But I actually discussed this with Wesley is you. I pay Westlake a certain percent, let's say, of the profit at disposal. So when we sell the property, but of this percent, I'd pay a flat amount. The higher is the value of the property and the higher is the sled and loan after the closing on the purchase side. And then at this position, you pay the difference to the percentage that you have agreed with.

Arturo Paturzo39:48That could so he get money on the acquisition, like a flat amount, because he did his job at the end. So his job is an acquisition, but he got most of it when we split. That could be a way for him to get some money, some cash flow immediately, because especially with mailers, you you send out the mailers and then it takes time for the mailers to arrive there, be read, respond and whatever. We send a mailer today and we close the contract in five months. Like you start the project.

Arturo Paturzo40:18So it's going to be there is something there. I mean, we actually am studying a solution that might work in this way. Not yet. The details are still. Exactly.

Brandon Parker40:32Yeah, I know. It's each level of complexity you add on how you pay people. You're the one who actually has to get around to paying them three different times, all these different ways, and so that can get annoying also. Just that that's something maybe if you get your executive assistant, you can be like, hey, figure this out for me.

Arturo Paturzo40:48Executive assistant is a figure that I think is very useful. I realized that I need also to live a life rather than to meet a job. Sometimes I don't have time to buy groceries. It seems stupid, or to I find myself in a situation where I have to run behind the little things that a normal person does every day because I don't have time to plan them.

Arturo Paturzo41:21So to have an executive assistant this multi can be a big help. And of course, can take care also of the business. That would be a great hire, the next one, I think. And there is a book about it, it's Buy Back Your Time. You know, Buy Back Your I've heard that over and read. I've done that. And that book actually is a very nice book. I was living there because I have my own book section. That book essentially explains a very nice, very nicely written book and it gives some actionable ideas and tricks that everyone can apply in this business.

Arturo Paturzo41:55You hire someone, the first person that you should hire is an executive assistant taking care of all the little things that take away time, that you're wasting, little things that don't bring money to your business. And so you can pay someone whose time costs way less than yours to do that, and you can do bigger things for your business that are more valuable, whose return is bigger for your business. So the concept is running everything.

Arturo Paturzo42:28But of course, I didn't apply it. But the next hire is definitely going to be an executive assistant and I would like to associate also the figure of transaction coordinator, but they're all listed.

Brandon Parker42:44Yeah. Where do you hire generally?

Arturo Paturzo42:46For Niki, I hired years ago actually from a company in The Philippines. At that time it was called We Find Talent and then it was voted by Basca Pandey, who is another land investor, very active in Texas. And just the last month I pulled Nika out of the company. I paid Elise a release fee and now she works for me, not through the agency anymore. Marwan was through a poster that I put on Facebook and Wesley saying that actually before Wesley, I started with another BO.

Arturo Paturzo43:25We tried together, but the workload for her was a little bit too much. She realized why we were training, let's say, during the onboarding. She asked four little kids and she said, I'm not able to say, well, yes, fine. But yeah, so essentially they were Facebook and this company, but I know that there are nice services. Like I know a lot of people using outsourced your tasks, which they say is very good. And for US people, if didn't find Wesley on Facebook, I would have probably used the Haimaima.

Brandon Parker44:04Yeah, know. I've heard some people like Drew Haney has a killer executive assistant who's local that he found on Hire My Mom, so I recommend them for a pretty high quality, especially when people are looking for someone like boots on the ground that can file paperwork and things like that for working in a specific county. Yeah. Curious what CRM you use. I use the Go HighLevel.

Arturo Paturzo44:27Okay. Nice. Go HighLevel.

Brandon Parker44:30You build that all yourself?

Arturo Paturzo44:32Yeah. Yes. It's not... Actually, I know that if you buy Go HighLevel just from Go High Level, it is going to be more expensive, but it comes with full assistance. And in my case, I mentioned before that for a short period I was doing texting and I was doing texting using Arial Reply. Arial Reply comes with an embedded go high level CRM site today, and it is very cheap because it's like $49 per month.

Arturo Paturzo45:05So today I don't do texting. I still have my real reply and I use it just for the CRM. So I use this GoAir level. So I have to customize it myself. I'm sure that it could be done way better than it is. I don't have a lot of calculations. There is like the new lead and the received the message on open phone and so on. Other than that, I don't try to explore anything further than that. But at some point, probably I will hire someone to make it more effective.

Arturo Paturzo45:36At this moment, it's not a priority. Works well as it is.

Brandon Parker45:41Yeah. GoHighLevel is a great tool. Actually, we're We're going really hard in right now. What we're working on is automated sequences with text and email, but with conversational AI, with the goal of reactivating old lists with conversational AI and then booking appointments for people. So the idea is that there's probably some like low hanging fruit as far as all these leads that we go out and capture as land investors, we might have hundreds or even thousands of kind of dead leads.

Brandon Parker46:11If we could throw them in a bucket and then just with AI have conversational text and email booking appointments, I think there's some value there hidden, some hidden value. So that's what we're playing with or we're not playing with it. We're going hard on that right now. The

Arturo Paturzo46:26time is nice. It's a great tool and I want to become better. And I don't know if I really need now that level that you are at, but I heard also Pete, he also sell his Go ahead and Amul CRM that has some functionality, like the one that you were mentioning. For example, the ring ringless voicemail, and they can answer all 20 fourseven sort of the speed up, how do they call it, speed to lead, probably, I don't know, but the velocity respond to a lead coming in seems to be like a very critical part of, you know, plays an important part in closing the deal and so he wants to reduce it by having an automated AI plugged into go high level and do a lot of nice stuff, is trained and all this kind of I'm

Arturo Paturzo47:26very far from it. So it's very I

Brandon Parker47:29mean, and you said it well in the beginning, you run a simple, simple, provable business. You can run asynchronously and like you're setting up something for freedom of your time, which is yeah, everyone does the land business differently. You can get as You can build a company with 100 people in it, you can do it where you can take off for two weeks and still be doing deals. Can do it all kinds of different ways. Art, it's been so cool to learn about your land business, and I love that you do it at the same time that you're working in the Navy.

Brandon Parker48:04That's impressive. The team you've built, leadership that you have to pull off what you're doing is really cool. Yeah, I'd love to follow-up with you six months from now, see where you're at and what you're doing. Did you have any final thoughts, anything we kind of skipped over that you'd like to retouch on? And then is there anything that you're looking for, like as far as connections or people that you'd like to meet in the land community or anything like that? Yeah.

Arturo Paturzo48:25Yeah. I just like whoever wants to reach out to me, they can shoot shoot an email to rartdnday dot com or they can find me on Facebook. I am moderately active. I wasn't more active before, but now I don't have a lot of time to be active in other groups. But I always see a lot of stuff earlier and I'm just looking forward. For me, I mean, to be in the podcast is just a way to have people talk to people and networking is the reason why I love to talk to.

Arturo Paturzo49:04I really love the land, doing the land, talk about the land. So I don't look anything out of a podcast or a conference other than knowing people and have fun talking about the things that we love the most especially.

Brandon Parker49:19Awesome. Great to have you on the show, Art. I'm sure we'll talk again soon. And that's it for today. So have a good day. The legends of our world show.