Gave Claude His API Keys and Replaced His CRM

Brandon Parker00:00Welcome to the show. Today, we've got Rick Sheldon. He is the co founder of LandAlly. Welcome to the show today. Rick, it's great to talk to you. I'm interested to hear what you're using AI for. So, yeah, what's your what's your daily workflow look like? And what's the most common thing you use AI for? Yep. Thanks for having me, Brandon. And

Rick Sheldon00:20I guess the first thing I should do right now is go and ask AI help me with that answer essentially, I use AI for everything. Not that I have turned into a drone that doesn't think about the work that I'm doing as much as most things that I do can be done better if you incorporate AI properly. So it's about knowing when to use it and how to use it and maybe when not to use it. But really, I use AI from the time I start working until the time I finish for the day. I've got subscriptions to all the different LLMs.

Rick Sheldon00:52So, if I run out of usage on Cloud, I can jump over to Manus or jump into Codex. So bounce between the three for all the different applications so I can have enough usage throughout the day.

Brandon Parker01:04What would be a common use case for Claude chat or co work?

Rick Sheldon01:12What have you used it for today? So I use code pretty much exclusively. Even the things that a lot of people use Cloud CoWork for, I find that I have to encourage it or remind it to do things the right way less often if I just do it in a thread on Cloud Code. But an example from last night and today is I have different acquisition managers on our team, different JV partners. So I have given Claude all the context on our entire business model essentially.

Rick Sheldon01:43And what I'm able to do now is just say, Hey, pull today's reports. And it knows that I want a hit list report for each JV partner. I want a list of all the activity or bugs maybe that have been reported throughout our apps. I want a quick brief overview of pipeline movements throughout the last twenty four hours. So we've got a set of different reports. So for example, I was able to just say, hey, pull a list of cold leads that are over 20 acres or more.

Rick Sheldon02:17Maybe they've been neglected for at least two weeks, but they seem like they need to be poked to move forward. And give me 10 of those per partner and frame up templates that after I approve, you can send them out one at a time with an email followed by a text sequentially. And now the next thirty minutes, I just watch those messages go out. And from that, we sent 30 messages or so. And we actually got three people responding to those that seem like great leads that are like, Yep, call me, please.

Rick Sheldon02:50So that's one great use case, but there's so many.

Brandon Parker02:55And what you're talking about there is lead follow-up for land investors. I mean, so where are your leads? Where's the database for these leads? Because it sounds like you're not even using a CRM. You just have all the leads in a database and then you just say, do all the CRM work for me. Go. Mhmm.

Rick Sheldon03:11So we actually do use GoHighLevel at the moment. We are working this year at moving away from GoHighLevel in favor of a a fully custom app that'll be used for everything that we use GoHighLevel for, which is basically the direct to seller communication. But for right now, we do use GoHighLevel. And this is actually a great lesson for anybody who's, like, starting to get into using Claude and specifically maybe Claude code. Giving your Claude the private integration token if you're talking in terms of GoHighLevel, but just API key if you're talking about general tools.

Rick Sheldon03:47Giving Claude the ability to access your other apps and tools and giving it the proper context on like, hey, when you get into the GoHighLevel account using this private integration token, this is what I want you to do. I want you to pull this type of record. I want you to analyze the conversations. I want you to look at the notes. I want you to look at all the fields. But maybe these are the fields that I want you to pay closest attention to. So really giving it a lot of context. But now we do... I use Claude to go into the other tools like Go High Level and to use those tools for me.

Rick Sheldon04:22So, know, I'm in GoHighLevel quite a bit as well. But quite often, I'm just encouraging Claude to go do those types of things for me in the other tools.

Brandon Parker04:33I think of Claude, I spent a lot of time getting to know how to delegate tasks to a virtual assistant. And I think that's like one of the big business hacks for people who are looking to let that used to be like the entry level, like get a personal assistant. And the first skill that you need as like a business owner is learning how to effectively delegate tasks. Like, because a lot of people are like, I have all this stuff I do, but I can't hand it off to someone because they don't get it done right.

Brandon Parker05:05And that's a a skill issue, and the skill can be developed. And the the skill is here's how to properly hand off and delegate a task. You know, you have commander's intent. And and so I I have, like, a little structure that I used to use with my assistants, and it's commander's intent. Like, what's the purpose of this and what needs to get done? What you need to get this done? So, like, here's all the tools you might need or the logins. Anything... Any other details you might need to know? And then what does the end state look like?

Brandon Parker05:40When it's done, this should be the outcome. And then what to do when you're finished? When that outcome is done, send me an email with a link to the... To what you did type thing. Mhmm. That five step process also feels like it plays out with co work. It's all about giving enough context to what you want to do, and it comes down to the prework of thinking it out. And you can think it out with Claude even before you give the instruction.

Brandon Parker06:12Be like, here's the things I'm trying to do. I'm trying to think through this. And getting the idea sorted on the front end before putting it into action, I feel like is, an effective way to think about it. Is that... What's your thought process around how to properly send it on to errands for you? Yep. Good question, and it brings up kind of a a broad topic.

Rick Sheldon06:33I think of my main responsibility on our team coming down to one word, which is enablement. So I'm enabling our JV partners to have a great opportunity to make money. I'm enabling our sellers to make it easy to sell to us or easy to want to sell to us. An example of that is the way that we've designed our PPC funnel. So they come in through a form. They immediately get redirected to a long survey. If they fill that out fully, they're redirected to a third page, which has a picture of the acquisition guy and his calendar.

Rick Sheldon07:07And it says, Hey, I'm Clay. I'm going to call you in the next few minutes. Or if it's on a weekend, it might say, I'll call you on Monday. So we make it very user centric. So all the different types of contacts throughout our environment, our partners, our sellers, our buyers, our lenders, our team, I think of my role as enabling each of them. So when it comes to what you're talking about, I think the co worker side is, or you know, cloud co work, when it comes to that, it's about giving enough context to those team members so that when they prompt their Claude co work to do something, it knows everything that I would have wanted their Claude to know.

Rick Sheldon07:48So I actually don't generally tell them to create the context for their own cloud co work projects. I'll have a Zoom call, which by the way, Zoom transcripts are gold in today's age, take the transcript where you discuss the project. Now, I process that transcript to get a big enough file set together that's cohesive enough to give to them to be the basis for their Claude CoWork projects. So that's part of it. But then even more than that, Claude has a new thing called artifacts.

Rick Sheldon08:20It gets in the way of my nomenclature because I think of Claude code as my way of creating artifacts, which is like an app or a tool, which helps the team member even bypass the need to go into Claude co work. Because what's even better than that is to go into one of the Claude code apps or projects that I've put together that's, to your point, already given the context and an interface for the team member to process their job that way. But the the problem is, and why I bring both of these up, is what I'm really selecting for when hiring these days is computer language knowledge, essentially.

Rick Sheldon08:58Computer engineers can be taught how to be a deal researcher or how to be a deal coordinator. But it's hard to teach somebody who has no understanding of coding at all to come into our systems and hit the ground running and use the tools properly because they're usually in a bit of a state of flux. So I'm building those artifacts or those coding apps. I'm helping fill the gaps by giving them enough context so they can use Cloud Cowork. But at the end of the day, I need people who can say, Even if that doesn't work, I'm resourceful enough and I know how AI works, so I can kind of help myself if I don't get enough context from me, the leader.

Rick Sheldon09:42All that blends together. Think we are actively hiring computer focused team members. We're always looking to enable them more with pre built tools while helping them fill the gaps of their own context windows of their own cloud projects in the meantime prior to us having that full tool set up and established?

Brandon Parker10:07Yeah, I think about that with a little bit different angle actually with the hiring, which is I look for a tinkerer, like someone with the level of AI and how quickly people can get up to speed. I lean less on the engineering understanding and more on the being hungry, creative, wanting to learn, and being down to tinker. Like, get... If you can get in Claude Cowork and start asking the right type of questions and start building, there's a lot of effective low hanging fruit that you could come into a company and just crush Mhmm.

Brandon Parker10:49Without engineering knowledge. On that same note, you still want that engine... Like, solid engineering knowledge on the back end, but cleaning things up, like taking care of the infrastructure, making sure that it's secure. You want that overall umbrella, but I almost look at it like a barbell approach where you have just exceptional tinkerers. We're gonna come in and get creative and just build stuff, and then you have exceptional technical knowledge on the other end. Feels like the stuff in between, people who are just people managers or...

Brandon Parker11:27Basically, anything where you're not willing to get in Cloud Code and Tinker, we can just build and eventually automate, and people need to start to be able to create value. So,

Rick Sheldon11:39yeah, that's something I would add in there. Yeah. I think both of these kinda tie into one more theme that I talk about sometimes, which, you know, maybe it seems a little weird, but I dress up as Ang for Halloween sometimes. My dog's name is Zuko. I love the Avatar show. So I try to teach our team to be data benders as well. And what I mean by that is like, look, we can scale to much larger list of leads than a traditional team of our size before if we embrace the concept of data bending, which is like, hey, instead of working through that list that you have to work through on Monday morning, one at a time from top to bottom, How about you export the list, put it in Claude, give it context, help, you know, draw your attention to positive leads, come up with templated responses that we can poke people with in bulk, and then start to just approve or deny or tweak those from there.

Rick Sheldon12:30But having a good understanding of, like, 17 leads came in this weekend. How do I effectively work those 17 leads in the context of our 1,700 leads total and not just, hey. It's Monday morning. I got seven leads I gotta get through.

Brandon Parker12:45Absolutely. What's the... What do you think in the last month is the most useful thing that you've built that only could have been done with Cloud Code?

Rick Sheldon12:57Well, I'll brag about my newest team member, actually. He just rolled this into our main lead intelligence app. I should back up and say, when when we're talking about replacing Go High Level, what I mean by that is I'm building an ecosystem of apps all accessed from within one app that I call the Shell. So we'll log into the Shell, and based on your permissions, you'll have access to sub apps within there. So one of our main apps is our lead intelligence app that's essentially replacing Slack and ClickUp and those things.

Rick Sheldon13:29So we're in there all day communicating. And one of my my newest team member, he just built a new feature into it. So one of the channels is Zoom calls. This is so crazy. We can just drop a Fathom link in that channel now, and it pulls the video, pulls the transcript, and it essentially analyzes the transcript for a broad topic and gives you a a full summary. But then it also creates clips, kind of like Opus clips, but it's really using AI heavily on not just creating a random clip that looks like it ties together.

Rick Sheldon14:03It's graded for coherence and value and completeness of the thought and coherence, I believe. Those four factors, if they all pass the the gate, then it results in a clip being created. So now we have just one streamlined way of every single Zoom call we have. We just drop the Fathom link in this channel. It pulls all the transcript, analyzes it, fills it into our knowledge base, creates clips that are coherent and valuable and complete and whatever else.

Rick Sheldon14:36And then the third thing is it pulls out the tasks that were obviously discussed as being needed to be done. And it creates an easy way for us to accept or reject those tasks. So this is like taking, like, I'm just excited about this project. I don't even know how to relate it back to your question as much as like, that's in place now. And I could never have imagined building something like that before. Drop a Fathom link in, now you've got marketing content, training content, tasks being assigned to the team in a custom app that's also used for tons of other things.

Rick Sheldon15:14It's just crazy.

Brandon Parker15:15Yeah. The ability to capture that type of content, I think that is really powerful. There's two things happening with content. One is we're getting a bunch of slop. I was talking to Seth Williams at the event we were at in Tennessee at the... With the Land League. And me and Seth were talking about, like, what social media look like now because just anyone can get out there and just pump content. And a little... Like for someone like Seth who's put in like a decade of just having the best content, for him, it's like an existential crisis.

Brandon Parker15:51It's like, well, shoot, dude. Like, I've built so much on this. Now other people just have this very low barrier to entry. Like, that kinda sucks. My angle... And and... But he... He's very optimistic about it. I mean, his his content is getting better. My take was kind of... It's... It becomes all about your unique angle. Like, it becomes all about having something new to say. And so the people who are regurgitating topics, like, there's so much just slop out there. It's just it's just gonna fall into the mess.

Brandon Parker16:23People like Seth who have unique thoughts, who are always right on the cutting edge, they'll remain there as thought leaders, so those would be more powerful. The barrier to entry though for people who have good new ideas is lower. So people like you, who maybe you wouldn't have been creating content in the past, you just have all these epic ideas, but you're too busy building. Now you can extract those epic ideas and show them to people. And so I think that we're gonna get more good ideas out there.

Brandon Parker16:54It's a little bit counterintuitive, but if you kind of follow that reasoning, I think that we're gonna get, like, the good ideas out of people's heads who we wouldn't have got those from before. That's exciting. That's what lines up with what you're talking about. Yeah. When it comes to content on Facebook and Instagram,

Rick Sheldon17:10I could not agree more. So much slap out there and also just like I've never felt more manipulated going on social media these days. But aside from that, I think another thing that it comes down to is it's not necessarily about coming up with something new. So this system I just explained with the Fathom exists, Transcripts, you've always been able to analyze those. Putting them and sharing the information with your team is nothing new. Taking that downloaded video and throwing it into a tool like Opus or Loom or something like that already exists.

Rick Sheldon17:48But there's all these different apps, you have to remember the links, you have to go to them at the right times and do them in the right orders. I think what it really comes down to is the custom nature of each person's business. Even within land investing, at Austin's meetup, everybody had a different angle. Everybody's angle is profitable and really cool, but each person's is a little bit unique. So the ability to now take all these pre existing concepts and pull them into one cohesive flow for your exact business model is a big part of the value as well.

Rick Sheldon18:23So nothing ground... I guess that app is pretty cool, but really nothing groundbreaking as far as new capabilities as much as just how perfectly it fits into our flow and saves us time and saves us other software subscriptions. We can now cancel a bunch of subscriptions and be more effective while we're saving that money and time.

Brandon Parker18:47The unique thought here that you're that you're bringing out is this idea of what happens to SaaS. So software as a service used to be like, okay. You know, you've got a go high level who's gonna come out with this Goliath, and now everyone, you fit your business into our Goliath. Mhmm. And now it's like, nope. We don't need this central hub that tells us what to do. Like, my single specific use case perfectly catered to how I operate just comes in and does what I do, not how go high level.

Brandon Parker19:20I don't have to fit into those frameworks. It's like, this is exactly what my workflow is. And just like magic, it's like, okay. Now I'll just like take these 10 disparate tools, put them together, line them up for you. You click the button, and now we'll do what you want. And it's this personalized software. There's there's gonna be some clever name for it. We should coin it. Yeah. When it comes... When it pops up to you on this, coin it. I'll trademark it.

Rick Sheldon19:45Well, here's the thing. We don't we don't need to come up with it right now. We need to jump off, take the transcript, put it in the cloud, tell it what we want, and have it coin it for us. That's a big- And do the trademark, yeah, for sure. That's a great concept. If you have a business partnership and you're not making Zoom calls to have the transcripts analyzed and using those to impact the next part of your business, it's a huge wasted opportunity. But I feel like that what you just brought up actually ties into both these topics that we've talked about. One is, more directly with what you just said, we can build this totally custom streamlined way of approaching your unique business model.

Rick Sheldon20:22But that also relates back to the first point of you don't even... Like, that's high level, that's advanced, but at a bare minimum, you should be feeding all your API keys and things like that into Cloud. Now you might not even need to have built that proactively. You can say, like again, maybe it's not going to be capable enough to go process your video in that very particular way, but maybe it can go pull all of your leads and sort them top to bottom from pursuit score so you know who to reach out to today.

Rick Sheldon20:54There's a lot that you can do just from Claude by giving it access to your different APIs. And then you can evolve into creating this streamlined business approach. So yeah, most of those SaaS products are cooked.

Brandon Parker21:08Yeah. Let's actually zoom back out because we went down the rabbit hole, got technical and have a great use case for people who follow that. But also, you don't have to be like a wizard. Like, you... You've put tons of your full time for however long into getting good at using Claude code. There's also people who are just like, that went over my head. So let me just give an example of something I used it for yesterday and, like, what that looks like. So I was analyzing my...

Brandon Parker21:40Like, you have CEO time. It's like I have to think of the strategy. Where is the company gonna go? What are the next decisions? If I only have a certain amount of time, like, my main constraint is where do I spend my time to drive the company forward effectively? And so I have to consistently be analyzing what's our current bottleneck. Out of these five things, which one should I focus my time on that's gonna drive us forward? And that's like, basically, what what a company comes down to or a land business comes down to is where do you focus your time, and do you make the correct decisions?

Brandon Parker22:16And if you put your time in the correct spot, your business grows. If you put your time into, you know, tweaking CRM automations for the next two weeks and it... There's barely any returns from it, doesn't drive your business forward, you're gonna stall and, you know, that that... The only difference between making more money and less money is where you put your time. And so that decision process is ex... Exceptionally important. So let me get to it. The way...

Brandon Parker22:48Just a a way to use Claude is you... I just went on a walk. I hit the talk to Claude button, and I just started talking like, I can either focus on developing JV partnerships or I can focus on building ads and bringing more clients in, or I could focus on client churn, or I can focus on rejiggering our offer, or I can focus on our website rebuild, like, talk through with me what I should be analyzing here.

Brandon Parker23:18And then I had a a literally a two hour long conversation. Just it's talking to me, asking me questions, and I'm feeding it more information. Mhmm. Then I come to... Then I come back home, and I come to some sort of answer there. But then I take that entire transcript, and I feed it back into Claude. And I look for, like, errors in the logic or repeating patterns or things that I missed. And I get, like, an output of another way to think about it, and then I go on another walk. And I spend, you know, it seems crazy, but I spend half a day, like, walking and talking to Claude and processing the transcripts.

Brandon Parker23:55And then I come to, okay, here's the decision. Here's the go forward plan. Here's very specifically where my time is gonna be spent so we can grow the company most effectively. That can be done at a company like Land AI. That can be done in a land investing business. But that's something that that type of decision making process was left for people like, you know, Charlie Munger, who's... Who famously said, I think in frameworks. I have a lattice work I have a lattice work of mental models that I think in.

Brandon Parker24:26Mhmm. And now now someone like me who's just like a normal guy who just... I always thought, oh, Charlie Munger, what's that even mean? He had a lattice work of mental models? Well, now I know. Now I have a lattice work of mental models. Claude tells me them. What mental model should I be using? You know? So anyway, that's simple. Anyone could do that today, and it's highly effective.

Rick Sheldon24:46Well, I I totally agree. And it's so funny. You probably saw me smiling because I I have a system around this as well. I will start kind of simple, but I think I'm going to go deep Yeah. Have, when it comes to land flipping, I have five daily themes Monday through Friday. So lead generation, lead qualification, lead conversion, transactions, dispositions. So when it comes to transactions, that's like lender relationships, due diligence things.

Rick Sheldon25:20So that's the only one that's kind of unclear. All the other ones should be pretty clear. Get leads, qualified leads, get them under contract, buy them and sell them. So if I can, every single week push all those items forward, I think that I'm doing my job. And based on our model where we've got acquisitions handled by American based closers with the JV program, I've got a great business partner who's helping the JV partners and really more on the offer structuring and deal execution side. I'm lucky because I'm able to kind of hang out in the back end and really push all these areas forward.

Rick Sheldon25:56So at a general level, you know, hey, it's... What's today? Tuesday? It's qualification day. Earlier we were talking about how to export all of our deal summaries, look at which ones are more qualified, and how to qualify them better in the new system. So that's a project that the team is working on today as a direct result of us kind of thinking, hey, we've got an hour here. What do we talk about? It's Tuesday, lead qualification day. So that put us on track. So that's how we could keep it simple. Just bucket five daily themes, try to live within those, and try to make the themes broad enough so that it touches all the parts of the business.

Rick Sheldon26:32Otherwise, you might neglect something or have to work on the weekends. Going deep, here's where if your audience is pulling out nuggets here. Claude is game changing and the other ones are catching up too in the sense that they connect with files on your desktop. Claude code on desktop, codecs, they connect and they can manipulate your files. But that was a game changer when I signed up for Claude and download Claude desktop. That was the first time I'd been exposed to that. So that's where my mind has been really opening with Claude is, okay, I have this folder called Claude.

Rick Sheldon27:09And when I'm working with Claude, it's organizing and cleaning up and archiving and making new files within that folder. So as long as I can keep all the proper context and organizational stuff in there, Claude and I can stay in sync on how to move forward. So I say that because it's important to know that all of our app code bases, all the various apps that we're building, they're all organized into that folder. So Claude has access to all those. And whenever we make an update to any of our apps, it knows about it in the daily report.

Rick Sheldon27:43So back to the daily report, I say, hey, pull today's reports. One of those reports is called the suggestion. And I can send you some screenshots, maybe throw them up on the video here or share them later. But it might say something like this. Hey, it's Monday, and that's lead gen day. And based on the stuff you guys are talking about in the communication app and these updates I noticed that you guys are making in the code base, kind of implying that you guys are looking to email lead gen, I think it'd be great if you guys focused on tying together this little gap that is missing from your current code base in alignment with your master plan.

Rick Sheldon28:24So we have a master plan doc. We have an alignment scorecard doc. The alignment scorecard at any given time tells us how close we are to the master plan and how on track we are. So Monday, the daily suggestion comes in and it says, hey, it's Monday, lead gen day. You're talking about cold email. I know that you're struggling to build some stuff over here in the code base around cold email. So what I would suggest is you do this very targeted project and I know all the endpoints because I have access to all your apps. So here's a very targeted Monday focused project that you can do.

Rick Sheldon28:57If you like this idea, here's a snippet on how you can assign it to your lead developer. And if you do that, here's a snippet that he can feed into Claude to basically do it for him. So all that's in one report called the daily suggestion.

Brandon Parker29:15I love that. And how many team members are you running through that?

Rick Sheldon29:21Only my... Me and my lead developer are the only ones who do that daily suggestion report. I have other reports to enable the other people. So I have pipeline reports to enable our sales... Our acquisition guys. I have an audit report to help me and my business partner stay in sync. We have this daily suggestion, and I have the hit list, which is like master list top to bottom of who do we need under contract this week.

Brandon Parker29:47It's beautiful. And how long have you been using that for?

Rick Sheldon29:56March March, I think. Okay.

Brandon Parker29:59Do you have a project manager or is... I mean, you're basically using Claude almost as... Don't have a project manager. You're using Claude as a project manager essentially, which is a $80,000 per year hire that you have built. How long did it take you to just build those processes around that? Well, that's where it's like, I'm a little obsessive.

Rick Sheldon30:22Who knows what's wrong with me on this? But downloaded Claude in March after SquadUp Summit with Sub2. I went to SquadUp. I watched Nick Turnbull build something insane in front of me at the event. I'm like, Okay, well, obviously, I've been using Manus for too long. So it's not that I wasn't using AI, but I was using ChatGPT like everybody else. Then I got into Manus. I loved Manus so much that I kinda dug my heels in with it. And then when I used Claude, I'm like, okay.

Rick Sheldon30:53Night and day difference. This is where it's at.

Brandon Parker30:56Yeah. And there's something to be said for trying to pick the winner to some extent, I feel like, because we're gonna pour a lot of resources and time into learning a tool. The the deeper we can drive into a single single tool, there's things in Claude that I don't use. I use Claude all day every day, and there's still things that I haven't really started to hit on. Mhmm. And I kind of look at it like I'm putting my faith in Claude to to continue to be the forerunner, but that can also be a double edged sword.

Brandon Parker31:27Like, I could dig my heels in too deep and not see the next thing. You know? And so it's almost like this idea of having strong opinions loosely held. And right now, I'm very, very, very bullish on Claude and all our team and time is going into that. But I'm trying to stay open minded when I hear other things like, oh, you should try this. I... My mind's like, no. You... No. We put too much. We learned too much. But what I really thought was ChadGPT 5.5

Rick Sheldon31:59because at that point, I'd already moved away from ChadGPT in favor of Manus and then Claude, now I hear that 5.5 is really good, and it is, so ChadGPT 5.5 is worth giving a try. But to your point, it's like that folder structure that Claude helps me create could easily be digested by any other LLM. So that one folder structure coming together with Claude's help, I'm definitely kind of a Claude guy right now. But if a new one came out or when ChadGPT 5.5 came out, I just had a great context folder to give to ChadGPT to just get it up to speed really quickly.

Rick Sheldon32:38Yeah.

Brandon Parker32:40I had a hard lesson on this during the crypto back in the day, twenty fourteen, twenty fifteen. I helped launch the EOS chain, which just became a giant cryptocurrency for a second. I was so bought in, like, over Bitcoin and all kinds of stuff. And I didn't switch quick enough and just, like, it ended up not winning out. I thought I was gonna, like... Anyway, I put too much eggs in one basket, and it was like, duh. Like, it's it's a call when you devote too much time sunk cost fallacy.

Brandon Parker33:12Yeah. And that sunk cost fallacy is easy, I think, with... I learned my lesson good there. But it's easy. You see the same patterns playing out with all the new cool stuff that pops up and not having shiny object syndrome is... It's important to not have shiny object syndrome. It's also important to not dig your heels in too deep. Like, in a very fast moving thing, like, two weeks from now,

Rick Sheldon33:37we could need to switch away from Claude. I don't think that's gonna happen, but we're be open to that idea. Yeah. I know. And I don't wanna, like, you know, sound like a jerk. I know everybody's not in the same situation, but I think it's like, why not have all of them? They're they're so worthwhile. They're so... We're in a time where you do need to stay at the cutting edge, and you... It is worth your time and energy to put some thought into the different models so you can keep up with the latest trends. But also, like I said earlier, it's like, I'll run out of my cloud usage with one great Now I gotta switch over to one of these other tools.

Rick Sheldon34:12So it's convenient to have multiple. It's helpful to stay in the cutting edge. And I've never felt like any other thing... Like ChadGPT when it came out, I signed up faster than I signed up for Netflix. Right? It's like... Yeah. Easiest It's subscription to justify. The costs have been going up. Tokens have been getting more expensive. They seem like they burn up faster, but they're still all worth paying for at the same time.

Brandon Parker34:39Yeah. I pay for, I do ChatGPT and and Claude. What are the tools that stick out to you that are worth trying on that note? You've mentioned Manus. What's What do you see the advantage or the unique angle that you get from Manus?

Rick Sheldon34:53Well, Manus was my step up over ChatGPT before I had tried Codex. So if you can imagine, if you're familiar with these tools, can understand, okay, Manus can hold a conversation better. It can start to connect with more connectors. And maybe it was a chronological thing as well. As I started using Manus, it was when those types of capabilities were becoming more prevalent. Connect your Google account, connect this, connect that. So I just felt like it could digest more context about my actual use case and then help me create things like create a list of 20 documents that can be fed.

Rick Sheldon35:36This is a great thing actually, I forgot. Now you're taking me back. So I started building my apps in Replit. So Replit is like Lovable. It's a separate type of tool. It's more like just hosting your app. You can organize your files, which your app really just consists of a folder of files. So you can use Replit or Lovable to just talk to the AI and have it create your app. But then you can start to do what humans do and build in a bunch of inconsistencies.

Rick Sheldon36:07You're telling it to do one thing and then you tell it to do something different that contradicted the first thing, you start to confuse it. But getting out of the way of the AI and using manus and say, Hey, absorb all this, create the set of documents, I'm going to take that set of documents and then give that to Replit, so I'm not contradicting myself so much. That was when I made a big push forward on being able to create apps that worked instead of having a bunch of bugs in them. Again, that might have been a chronological thing.

Rick Sheldon36:38It just so happened that time is when those types of tools started having more advanced capabilities. But but, yeah, now I don't really prefer Manus over Claude for any single thing. Like, nothing about Manus, in my opinion, is better than Claude.

Brandon Parker36:55Yeah. Do you see an advantage with Vercel versus Replit or you just landed in Replit and that's where you are? That second option.

Rick Sheldon37:06I got lucky because I feel like a lot of people do love Replit, but I never tried Vercel, I never tried Lovable.

Brandon Parker37:13So I think I just kind of got lucky in that way. I do like Replic quite a bit. Okay, nice. Yeah, I ended up landing in Versal and we've built so many apps and things in there. It's like, okay, we're there. So I'm always just curious. You know, something interesting that happened to me that's so ironic. I went to San Francisco last week to... They had the Notion... They had a meetup at Notion headquarters. And I was like, oh, epic. Like, I... I've been using Notion for years. I love that tool. I'm I'm going.

Brandon Parker37:44And I actually met the founder of Notion, which was which was rad. He was like... I was like taking selfies with him. Like, he's like, what are you doing, dude? So

Rick Sheldon37:54the vibe, but I didn't care. You should be flying two bigger families over Notion. Yeah.

Brandon Parker38:00I'm at the Notion meetup and someone sells me on using Obsidian instead of Notion. And it came back, I started building out using stuff in Obsidian, which is funny that I got talked out of Notion at the headquarters. Have you used Obsidian or Notion? What do you think of those tools? Yeah, I started using Notion

Rick Sheldon38:23I think back in 2021 or something like that. I used it for a couple of years. I signed up for a free trial of ClickUp and canceled Notion that week.

Brandon Parker38:33Nice. Okay. ClickUp

Rick Sheldon38:34is... So I have not used... What is it Obsidian? Obsidian. I have not used that, but what I liked about ClickUp was it was more task based. So in Notion, everything's a task. But in ClickUp, a task is a task, and a document is a document. And they have better identities in those ways, or at least they did at that time. So I just naturally moved all the way into ClickUp, but that's one of the apps that this year I've been able to fully get our team out of. We don't use ClickUp at all anymore because now we're fully in one of the apps that I've built fully custom that handles our team can make...

Rick Sheldon39:10Our team communication, the Fathom, Zoom call processing, a ton of other things, you know, lead scoring using the AI with recommended next steps, reporting, planner, inbox, education. Yeah, we've got a lot built into that one app. That's kind of our brain. And then we're building about 10 other apps at the moment as well.

Brandon Parker39:36Yeah, I reframed my thinking on Notion. Now I use it just like almost like a database that we can query. It's like a source of truth for documents, but I rarely go into it. So I spent years building out, like, here's the SOPs. Here's, like, everything so we can find it and we can search it in resources or SOPs and the team knows here's your list of what your tasks are. With what you're referencing, now it's... That all happens in Claude. It's like, hey. Go to Notion. Look at the database.

Brandon Parker40:07Like, see what tasks we need to do. See if any of those SOPs are out of date, update them, like... So it becomes a database for a source of truth that we use Claude to reference, but we don't necessarily go into it anymore. Just... It's like the Exactly. Where where the stuff's stored. But now we don't have to use the interface anymore. And so that's like a... Such an exciting transition that is, exceptionally powerful. And people could do that anywhere. You can do that in Google Docs. Like, doesn't matter. Like... And it's so easy to build SOPs now and processes for the company like you're alluding to.

Brandon Parker40:42You have fireflies. You meet with your lead manager, and you talk through, hey. What'd you do today? What'd you do yesterday? What are your tasks today? You know, you have, let's say you have ten weeks of meetings with your lead manager. You'll take all those transcripts. You throw them into Claude, you say, hey. What are... What's like a task description of what this person does on a daily basis? What what are the SOPs? What are some holes that might be missing in their role description? Like... And then it will ask a couple questions clarifying and then just knock it all out.

Brandon Parker41:15And now you have the most epic, usable living document for what a lead manager actually does. And now if your lead manager leaves, you have like the perfect, hey, here's your here's your checklist to like onboard yourself. Let's roll. Yeah. And and what I would challenge everybody to do is have

Rick Sheldon41:33that type of mindset around like literally every single Zoom call in your business, like your lead manager, your team calls, your partnership calls, your seller calls if you happen to have a Zoom call. But I guess to that point, like, you can transcribe your calls and go high level as well. So now you can actually pull all the seller calls. So Claude doesn't... You don't need to limit it even to like, hey. Help me with this one idea that I have of managing my lead manager. It's actually like, I record everything.

Rick Sheldon42:04I feed it all into one streamlined process. And then later I can query against that for any question. And if we don't have enough context in the documentation, then maybe it tells us that, you know, I don't I don't have a good answer or, like, you can just tell from the answer itself that it's a bit vague. And then you just go, like, do a deep dive on that in a new Zoom call. But, like, the idea of, like, just recording all the calls and just not even thinking about it as for one particular use case, just the fact of recording all the calls, taking all the transcripts, and getting them into a queryable database is just game changing.

Brandon Parker42:48And there's these unknowns. Like, if you collect big data, so if everything you say in your company between all your team members, all the conversations, everything's recorded in the transcripts, don't you even know what you might find in that big data. You know? You might take all of those calls. Hey. Take all my calls between my leads manager and my acquisitions manager. Take all those. Like, where are they overlapping on tasks? Or what do you see that could make this process? Run a lean six sigma analysis on this. Like, what could make this more efficient during the handoff between those two?

Brandon Parker43:19Like, there's things that you can just think of. And if you have the big data for every role and all of that, you can just you can be a magician. You can run a Fortune 500 company just by thinking of cool stuff. Know? And it's it's really

Rick Sheldon43:34exciting. This ties back to the theme of data bending. Know? Like Yeah. Data takes the... In many forms, like your seller list, but also this is data, all of this is data. So collecting the data in a way that can be used later, even if you don't know yet how it's going to be used, that's what has been a huge blessing to us. I've had Fathom ever since before I started the land company, and we've transcribed every single call since we started it as well. So we just happen to make the decisions that have allowed us to retroactively build this type of database.

Brandon Parker44:12And here's a little hack that that I do just on transcripts because I'm so obsessed about, like, having the... So useful to have transcripts. So I have this guy. This is a little handheld recorder. So it's like if something falls out of Fireflies or something like that, and it's like, shoot. I need this. This is in my desk drawer. Bang. I just pull it out, and then we're having the conversation. We're having the Google Meet, and I'm just holding this right here. Like, I'm not gonna miss it. Or if I'm on a phone call, hey.

Brandon Parker44:42I'm gonna record this real quick. They don't care. No one cares. Yeah. Then I'm on a phone call. It's on speaker phone. I got speaker phone, and I've got this, and I'm transcribing. Because it is... It can give you such intuitive insights into angles. Oh, maybe you should have said this. It could be powerful for... I mean, I'm just picturing if I was on the phone with sellers, like, doing the sales, the acquisitions manager stuff, the amount of data you could pull from a 100 calls with sellers, like, where do I lose these calls?

Brandon Parker45:13What question do I ask consistently that, like, you can hear the tone shift? What question do I ask consistently that gets me wins or that moves the conversation forward? Like, that type of that type of insight with, with sales calls for people talking to sellers, start collecting all of that because you'll... You can become a a good salesperson, like, real easily. Tell me, tell me the one thing. Analyze these 50 seller calls that I've had. Tell me the one thing eighty twenty that would make me a better salesperson that I can do on the next call.

Brandon Parker45:45Exactly. And and that's the thing. It's like, at any time you can have that thought, and if you have collected the data properly,

Rick Sheldon45:51you don't have to have, like, known that you were going to have that question after you collect it all. It's like, Hey, look at all the data I have. I'm curious. What can make me better? And you just ask it and now you've got an answer and it's based on real data and real calls. I think that's a great point is transcripts are gold. A lot of people are missing that point. That's

Brandon Parker46:15why I think that there is currently a shift in the land market, and it's moving fairly quickly. But I think that there's people who are using the leverage of AI effectively that are racing ahead. Like, there's people who are being very successful in the land business right now. There's people who are still... You know, they're keeping up. They're keeping pace. But over time, these types of advantages are gonna compound. You know, the people who are really leveraging this, they get a little bit better at sales, they get a little bit faster processes, they get better dispo, they get better outreach.

Brandon Parker46:49All these things start to compound. And then those people who are just crushing with AI start to pull more deals off the market and they're the ones closing them. And that's my theory on why we see people saying, hey, the land market's getting harder. It's like, yeah, it's getting harder because you have like superhuman computers that people are leveraging and competing. You're competing with those now. And so so I think it's both getting harder, but also in an odd way, it's getting more effective and efficient for some

Rick Sheldon47:20people. Yep. And I think keeping up at that cutting edge so that whenever the uncanny valley does get crossed, you're able to maximize and just basically go fully autonomous land acquisition. That's coming eventually, right? It's not here quite yet. But if you are doing things the old way, and then we get to that point, you're going to have a lot of work to do to catch up. But those of us who have implemented these strategic use cases will be like, Oh, yeah, I've already collected enough transcripts and already got the systems to just flip a switch, throw this agent, this AI agent into this one seat, and now we're able to maybe do 10% more deals that we would have missed or take the whole system end to end.

Rick Sheldon48:10And I do think that's coming, but at the same time, I do also really love the fact that we have an American closer based acquisition team as well. I think that's been a big part of what sets us apart. Just the business model that we've put together allows us to pull in that American based closer, which it's a huge asset.

Brandon Parker48:33Absolutely. And the other thing is, there's almost like a philosophical take here because I love land. I love American land. I love the idea of people being able to own their own piece of The United States. Like, that's... That feels like the most American patriotic thing you can do. Like, I have 20 acres, and I've got a a a cow and a little mini farm and, like, you know, I'm self sustainable. Like, that is to me the American dream.

Brandon Parker49:04And so as I, like, push AI forward as fast as possible, I talk about, you know, teams coming together and consolidating and buying tons of land and, you know, all that. It's also like, what ends up happening to that. You know, I hope that as this evolves, people who kind of win keep their eye on the ball. Like, it would be it would be a philosophically, I just... I push back on the idea of, like, you know, some San Francisco tech company figuring out a way to do all this and buy all the land, and they become the black rock of land.

Brandon Parker49:40You know? It's like that to me feels that to me feels like not the direction I wanna see it going. What I'm happy about is that, like that event we're at in Tennessee, like, there seems to be a vibe around land that as we talk about all this technology, it feels like there's a a... The correct heart behind it. We'll just say that. I don't know how to explain

Rick Sheldon50:04that. I agree. You know, I was very surprised. I got into the land flipping business before I'd ever bought any land. And when we went to sell our first subdivide, one of our first buyers was like, I just want to own the land. I was like, What are you going to build there? He's like, I bought a tractor. I want to go play on the land with my tractor. That was why he bought it, because he just wanted to own the land. That was what opened my eyes to exactly what you just mentioned. Because I never had that desire before. But now that I've built the land business, we got some land over here that I wouldn't mind holding onto, some land over here I wouldn't mind holding onto.

Rick Sheldon50:40But at the same time, when we do sell, I never had the thought of like, hey, let me call the nearest hedge fund and see if they're going to sell or buy the 95% of the value like people thought in the single family space. All of our buyers are retail buyers, normal regular people on the MLS buying the land. We don't really have any model that results in us selling land to anybody like BlackRock. So maybe you're saying that we should just do our best not to lose sight of what matters and become that type of group ourselves.

Rick Sheldon51:21And I agree, but yeah, mean, all of our land that comes through our system ultimately gets sold to a family or that old guy who wants to drive his tractor on the land. Yeah, it's a great model that I think we've got, but I think most land investors, the retail market is the best exit, not necessarily some huge hedge fund.

Brandon Parker51:44Well, yeah. And there's not necessarily a use for them to own a bunch of raw land. And so it naturally tends towards that. I think that's one of the fulfilling parts about buying and selling land is that the end buyer is some person who wants a piece of land, you know, and that ends up being the end buyer. Most of the end buyers is not... And there's just not enough. There's not enough development and subdividing that's gonna go on that's gonna make any sort of dent in people buying recreational property. You know? Mhmm. So, yeah, there's not necessarily a a big spot for for giant hedge funds.

Brandon Parker52:18But it's just like a a philosophical thought I have sometimes. I had a a debate with someone about like, they were just attacking the idea of, you know, wholesaling land. Like, you're a you're basically like a rent seeker. You're coming in and taking advantage of people. And and my my take is that making a market efficient, like there's a place for what essentially becomes a market maker. Exactly. Finding liquidity, you're going and seeking it out. It's dead land. You're buying it.

Brandon Parker52:50You're giving someone liquid cash so they can go back into the economy, and then you're reselling that to someone who's gonna use it that... And and so it's it's facilitating the transaction, and there is a lot of value in that. And it's not a it's not a rent seeking position. It is a value adding position that is contributing to the American dream. And that's my that's my take on that. And contributing to the

Rick Sheldon53:14perfect market as much... Like, it's an imperfect market, but it helps make it more like a perfect market because we're not convincing people who should sell in the MLS to sell to us. It's like you could sell in the MLS or you could sell to us. There's different scenarios, different life events, different scenarios, really, different life scenarios that the sellers find themselves in that might make it so that selling on the MLS is the right move or selling to an investor is the right move.

Rick Sheldon53:45But if you're selling to an investor, I think about this a lot too because I always want to do the right thing and make it to the end of my life without having a bunch of regrets about how I got there. And I feel great about this business because while we do get a good discount when we're buying these deals, it's the only way the deal pencils out. We can't borrow money unless we're protecting our investors. We don't want to do the deal and hire a team and pay for the AI and do all this stuff to break even.

Rick Sheldon54:15So there has to be some inherent margin built in there. And protecting the lender, ensuring for the seller that the deal actually goes through, allowing our team to earn an income as well, Those are all important pieces and they're just one option for the seller. And if they are better off selling on the market, we would encourage them to do that. So yeah, all positive feelings about the business on my end. Yeah. It's an exciting

Brandon Parker54:46it's an exciting niche to find. I think a lot of people find it and they... It resonates with them. You know? When I first found Land, I was like, oh, this is... I I love everything about this. I've done all these different businesses, learned things I liked and didn't like about different business models and structures. And when I found land, it's like, oh, this is the one that I could just do for a long time, basically forever. You know? And so, yeah, there's a... People who find it and have that natural draw. I think it's really obvious to them. So why don't we talk about what LandAlly is?

Brandon Parker55:18We've glossed over the idea. You know, you founded a company. We might as well just, like, bring that up. What do you guys do? Yeah, so we are a land buyer. So sorry if you guys are wholesaling.

Rick Sheldon55:29We scorch the earth on you guys. When you're talking to the seller, we present ourselves how we are. We will buy this land. We will not lock it up and mislead you. At the end of the day, we're a land buyer. We buy the deals and we sell the deals. We bucket deals into a few different buckets, so we might do deals a couple different ways, whether it's a land flip or a rural subdivide or a development deal. Each of those buckets have different deal strategies and margin targets and things like that. But we market for land, we negotiate with the seller, we buy the deal, and then we take it and sell it on the market.

Rick Sheldon56:07And yeah, we can dig into any of those parts of the business that you want. It really kind of goes back to those daily themes like how do we generate leads? How do we qualify the leads? How do we convert them into contracts? How do we buy them? How do we sell them?

Brandon Parker56:21Let's talk about how you generate leads.

Rick Sheldon56:23PPC, in short, that's our preferred strategy. We started off, going direct to agent. Did not have good luck with that. Had basically three deals in a row just get killed by the agent for one reason or another, usually greed and miscommunication. But we pivoted the PPC, May of last year. I think we put in about $90,000 and our pipeline of projected profit is around $1,300,000 or so.

Rick Sheldon56:55If you don't count this one development deal that we've got under contract, but we may or may not be under contract with the right person. It's a whole story on that one. If we take that deal out of the mix, $90 in, dollars 1,300,000 of projected profit, that's why we're really bullish on PPC. But we're also adding in some other lead sources. My next main focus is cold email. So whereas PPC, we're a magnet and we're like, Hey, who wants to sell land to us? Send it to us.

Rick Sheldon57:26We'll bucket it, we'll disqualify it, but send it to us with whatever land you want. The cold email is a little bit more of a targeted hunter outbound approach where we can actually say, hey, the leads aren't gonna be as hot, but when they do come in, we know that it's a deal that we would be willing to buy. So there's a couple different advantages to either one, but PPC is really our bread and butter. And what we do is we have a cool, JV model where our JV partners... Again, I mentioned these American based closers that we work with.

Rick Sheldon57:58So if somebody's good at closing deals or willing to negotiate with sellers and they've got a decent budget, then they can contribute a PPC budget to our team. And I will personally take that and run Google Ads. And the leads come into all of our custom systems and we have all the notifications and internal team members and automated qualification. We have a lot going on to enable that acquisition person to ultimately get the deal under contract.

Rick Sheldon58:30A little bit of due diligence involved there. But then we take that off their plate, buy it and sell it and split the profits with them. And they just get to kind of stay in the acquisition seat.

Brandon Parker58:41So it's like a done for you. They come in, they pay for some PPC, you capture leads, you send them to them, they close the leads and then you run the transaction for them and then you guys JV. Yep, good

Rick Sheldon58:52summary.

Brandon Parker58:53Yeah, that's clever. I like that. Do you find Google Ads as the most effective way to do that? Like, what have... Have you tried Facebook, YouTube, anything else?

Rick Sheldon59:02Well, I think Google also includes some YouTube ads with the way that we do it. I believe. I think I checked that box when I set up the PPC campaigns. I've tried Facebook ads. They work. Of course they work. But if you can imagine the two scenarios as a seller, Google how to sell this land that I want to sell right now. The Facebook is scrolling. Facebook said, Oh, this person is probably somebody that Land Ally would like to talk to.

Rick Sheldon59:36So they show that person the ad and they're intrigued enough to click on it. Maybe they even clicked on it on accident because Facebook is like, Hey, let's tell them we got them a lead, even if it's not really that good of a lead. Yeah. So Facebook is more of interruption based. It kind of intrigues them enough to click in and give their info. But it's not intent based like Google, where they were actively searching how to sell this land. So I really preferred the high intent Google ads over Facebook. And then the the cold email is just kind of a cherry on top.

Rick Sheldon1:00:11We've got some good leads from them. We're ramping up to basically 30 or so inboxes, so we can be up to about a thousand emails a day. So, you know, of course, we're gonna get some deals out of that with that volume, but the cost or the number of leads per deal is gonna be way higher with cold email than it is on PPC.

Brandon Parker1:00:33On PPC, are you... It's funny because I don't even picture people using Google. I like that left my mental model of typing like into Google a question. Oh, yeah. But I... I'm guessing that people still use Google and so that that's alive and well. If they type into chat GPT,

Rick Sheldon1:00:55hey, I want to sell my land. Is there any way to target them with ads? Or is that not where I they are imagine ads are coming. I don't think they're available yet. Right? I don't ever see ads on on those types of tools when I use them unless they're kind of sneaky and they're just like in the But anyway, don't use any ads. I don't purchase ads on large language models, though I will soon as I understand how to, I will definitely try that out. But when it comes to showing up in those searches, we have a pretty specific approach.

Rick Sheldon1:01:28We call it the answer engine. So again, back from all those transcripts, all those transcribed calls from all the thousands of sellers who've come through the pipeline, what questions do they have? Hey, Claude, can you make a thousand websites for me over the next twelve months, please? Maybe 20 per day based on questions or variations of questions that these sellers have often. And now a way of automatically publishing these answers in the form of articles that will be displayed in the new app that I'm working on, which is the acquisitions app.

Rick Sheldon1:02:02So when a seller lead comes in, right now they come in through a Go High Level form. But what they will come in through is a direct form in my custom app. At that point, that's when they will be exposed to this answer engine, which is in development right now. But yeah, that's going to be the thing. It's articles based around real questions from real sellers and just having a ton of them with citations and data. Data and citations in the answers will help you then show up when people are...

Rick Sheldon1:02:34It's generative engine optimization. So the way... Some big factors to improve your generative engine optimization or GEO, unlike SEO, are data citations. And, yeah, I think that's, you know, it's an effort of ours. I don't know how many leads we will get from it or how many we may have already gotten from things like it because we have a couple smaller scale projects that we've already done to push out blog articles and things.

Rick Sheldon1:03:04But but, yeah, this answer engine is a big focal point for us this quarter.

Brandon Parker1:03:09Yeah. So you've got the organic

Rick Sheldon1:03:11GEO that's inbound of websites and things like that. And then there's some sort of lead capture, I'm guessing, those. Like, you wanna sell your land also? Oh, yeah. All of our websites basically have a good way of funneling towards a form. Like, we have, like Okay. A couple different forms, but, like, all of our websites ultimately direct people within one or two clicks to a lead intake form or a form number. There's basically two conversion points on any of these websites. There's the form or the phone number. A lot of people will call in.

Rick Sheldon1:03:42And if you get call in leads, do not ignore them. I know that they might not have a name. We get spoiled sometimes when somebody fills out the full survey and they tell us, How big is it? Why are you selling? When do you want to sell? Is it well? Septic? HOA? What do you want to get for price and why? We get spoiled when we see all that, but if you have a nameless contact that's a call in lead, those are just as hot as the intake form leads.

Brandon Parker1:04:13Yeah, absolutely. So I like that. Yeah, you have the kind of the GEO for organic capture casting wide net. You got the Google Ads for the intent based searches, and then you're going to start doing the outbound for email to kind of capture those three different avenues and leverage leverage AI to to get leads and then close deals. I mean, that's a

Rick Sheldon1:04:36land ally. Smart idea. I love it. Yep. Yep. And the, yeah, the number of... The traction's great. So I'm super excited about going basically from four JV partners up to 50 over the course of the next few years. And, we'll see what happens over the next few years, but, but that's the goal. Yeah, like that. How'd

Brandon Parker1:04:58you find land in the first place?

Rick Sheldon1:05:00Well, I sold a white label version of Go High Level for real estate investors. So what I mean is I was offering that white label version of Go High Level. And I was still doing the sales calls, which is one of the reasons I sold that company. It was like a lot of key man risk because I was doing sales, which is one of the reasons why I've got this model now where I do not do the sales calls or the acquisition calls. But anyway, at that time I was having a sales call with a lead and I could just tell from the tone of his voice, he's like, Dude, why are you doing this when you know how to build that?

Rick Sheldon1:05:36Because he saw what I was building and what I was offering and he's like, There's no way that your time is best spent on this type of call doing this type of thing. And I could just tell from where it came from and how he said it that there's a bigger opportunity at hand. And what he was talking about is like, You should do what I do, which is market for land and get it entitled to do development deals. And then I went and posted on Facebook. I said, Hey, who wants to start a land company? I can build something on the side in a go high level sub account that I can administer.

Rick Sheldon1:06:10And then I built that with my partner Rachel. She'd already been doing land for five years or so by that point. She responded to the Facebook post, we connected, we started building that out. There was about a six month period where I was running both as I was trying to sell the white label version of Go High Level. I sold that around June or at the beginning of July of twenty twenty five. And ever since then, you know, just all in on the land business.

Brandon Parker1:06:37Yeah. That's, that's wonderful. Well, as we start to wind down here, was like a fire hose of information for people. And so it's probably good that we get on another call a month from now and share what's up because everything will be changed by then. We'll have all kinds of new ideas. Is there any use cases or interesting things like that people can just use on a daily basis with AI?

Brandon Parker1:07:08Any quick little hacks or things that stick out to you that we didn't cover, like just off the top of your head?

Rick Sheldon1:07:16Well, I don't know about not covering, but I think what I would really emphasize is like why I liked Claude is no longer unique to Claude, but it was the fact that it can now control and organize a set of folders in a location on your desktop. If you can just dive into that and start to slowly but surely get Claude to create, organize, and understand the context of the files that it's helping you create.

Rick Sheldon1:07:46And then you just build from there. But now you've got an actual location on your desktop with actual files that are being created and organized by an LLM. That's, I think, gonna set you off on the right track.

Brandon Parker1:08:01A 100%. And tactically, the way to do that is go into Claude, get the desktop app, go into Claude, go into Claude co work, create a project, and then just, you know, name that project, the acquisitions. And then it'll build an acquisitions folder for you, then start putting all your acquisition stuff in there and it'll help you just build all the files out. And then those will stay up to date. Every time you go into that project and you talk to it about acquisitions, just tell it, hey, update the files.

Brandon Parker1:08:35And it'll just go through and update your file stack. And that'll be a living system. And that is just... It's really such an astonishing hack. Like it's the easiest thing and eightytwenty would take any business and make it far more effective. It's just so exciting. One more thing just to...

Rick Sheldon1:08:55At the sake of, you know, extending too far, I think this will be something that we can leave them with. Maybe we pick this up on the next call. But two concepts that could work together with that file structure, the folder structure. The one is like, hey, before you do what you're about to do, ask me 10 questions that I can clarify for you. And then do what you're about to do. That, as a habit, will help you give the right context or just give way more proper context to Claude before it does what you're about to ask it to so it doesn't go off the rails.

Rick Sheldon1:09:29And then the second part of that is a concept that I call the mega roundtable, or you could just call it the roundtable or whatever. But you're going to build a skill in Claude that says, Hey, whenever I tell you to do a roundtable, I want you to figure out the best seven to 10 experts that would have that discussion and then only move forward when there's an expert consensus of at least nine out of 10. So simulate this discussion with the high level experts.

Rick Sheldon1:10:02They don't move on until everybody agrees in their field of expertise, essentially. And now after that, then update my file structure. So now if we tie this together, ask me all the questions you need. I'll give you more context. After that, I want you to do a roundtable and don't move on until everybody's at nine out of 10. After everybody agrees who's smarter than me, take their consensus and implement it into the folder.

Brandon Parker1:10:29Mhmm. Mhmm. And that sounds complicated, but it's literally... If you just talked to Claude and said the thing that you just said, it'll help you get that set up. Gotcha. That's crazy. And, I mean, we should run another few minutes here because this opened up some interesting stuff. So you got another 10? Okay. Cool. So riffing off that idea, there's actually... You start getting into skill files. And there's skill files that you can just download that people have built that are highly effective.

Brandon Parker1:11:01So one that I use is called the LLM council skill. All I did was I went to GitHub. I searched on Twitter or searched whatever, just searched LLM council skill, go to GitHub. Sounds fancy, but it's not. Get the GitHub link. It's got all the code for the LLM council skill. Put it in and be like, hey, give me this LLM council skill. It'll build the skill for you. And it's a really well built out what you're describing. It brings in a council of members. There will be the the contrarian, the expansionist, the, you know, protective downside person, the the...

Brandon Parker1:11:35Whatever. It's got these different personalities that are experts and look at it from a different way. But like you're saying, you can just have an idea. You can have like that conversation that I had... I mentioned earlier where I was like, what's my bottleneck? And then I come to this idea. And then when I come to my idea, okay, here's my action plan. Then I say, okay, run this through the LLM council. Run this through the council and let's get their take on it. And then they'll come in, they stress test it from every angle and they'll actively try to poke holes in it.

Brandon Parker1:12:07And then it'd be like, oh, yeah. Like, just me and Claude together, we missed that angle, but the council hitting it from all these other angles found like a hole in the logic. And then it'll stress test the ideas, steel man them, make them better. And so the level of quality thinking that we can get to is basically inhuman. Know, you can you can... If you put a little bit of time into learning how to leverage these couple tools here, which would take not too long, You can think at a level, you know, like a decision making level, like some of the some of the greats, you know, like Charlie Munger, Elon Musk type thing, which is a real superpower for anything you're doing.

Brandon Parker1:12:51Mhmm. Absolutely. Have you heard about... You see Carpathi on Twitter? You said you're not on social media, but you... Carpathi is the Claude guy. You heard about the Carpathi brain thing?

Rick Sheldon1:13:06I think my my team member told me, but I'd... You... Yeah. Shed light on it. That's a fun one. I just built it out last

Brandon Parker1:13:13week, actually. Maybe getting on two weeks now. But it's a it takes like how you think and makes a second brain and then updates it over time. So for example, I built one that's called the CEO brain and I collected all the mental models that I've learned over the years and I put them in there. And then I took a bunch of my favorite thinkers like Naval Ravikant and Nassim Taleb and Elon. Then I said, hey, give me like a list of all the mental models, the things that they use to make decisions.

Brandon Parker1:13:47And then I went through those and I picked the ones that like resonate for like how I like to make decisions. And then I put them all into this brain. And then I have conversations with the brain and it pulls up these different angles. Like here's the mental models that apply here. Here's ways to think about it. And then I say, okay, you know, I like this and this and this. Let's use those to make this decision. And then it keeps track of which mental models that I use over time. And it starts... It's like this living brain that's a synthesis of how I think augmented by just all the great thinkers.

Brandon Parker1:14:24So it's like I get all of my favorite pieces that I... And it's and it's actively... What I actively use over time starts to synthesize into my own. Here's how how... Here's how I think. And then that's what I can riff off of for... Just have conversations with. And then as I have conversations with it, it continues to upgrade, update

Rick Sheldon1:14:46and like grow. And then over time, as you need something done, like a new app, or a new pipeline of leads, or new lead source, or whatever you need to implement later from scratch, you can implement something much more detailed with the proper context more quickly without having to really pour all that context in at that future moment. The more time you spend building the context that you just described, the quicker that helps you adapt over time.

Rick Sheldon1:15:19And that's where I talked earlier about, once we do pass that uncanny valley of your AI agent can run your whole business for you, then you'll be very close to being able to make that pivot. Whereas somebody who's like, Oh crap, now I need to build my brain so it knows how to do it. They're going to be quite a bit further behind at that time.

Brandon Parker1:15:40Yeah, it's like that recursive learning where it goes back and then it also scores the outcomes. So, like, every week I say, what what did the outcome of this decision, did it turn out the way I wanted or did something not expected happen? It rates the outcomes. And so, the recursive learning makes it sharper over time with the decision making. So, yeah, the idea is that at some point, the CEO brain represents how I actually think and how I would make decisions, but just in a sharper, faster way.

Brandon Parker1:16:11And I can start leaning on it more and more, you know, six months from now. Maybe I'll attach an avatar to it and it just runs the company, you know, like, so coming wheels off at that time. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, there's just a lot a lot of exciting things happening with that. What's the craziest thing that you've built with AI, you think? I mean, you've already described like pretty insane stuff, I don't need to press you there. Let me let me take a quick look at my cloud folder really quick.

Brandon Parker1:16:44Yeah. There you go. Go ahead.

Rick Sheldon1:16:57So the... Yeah. I think this would be a a good one. The Lead Intel app. That's basically what Nick built at SquadUp Summit. They kind of proved to me that I should be using Claude. He found a prompt on X Twitter, and that one prompt was capable of getting a clawed session to build an app that essentially scrapes county GIS data and pulls it into this app that can then have filters applied.

Rick Sheldon1:17:30It can score by different scoring profiles. So a big theme of what we're building towards is something we've loosely called the Dev Deal Engine, because the idea is like, hey, developer, what do you develop? I can take your buy box and build it into our scoring system so that all the deals that come through, I'll know, is this going to make a good outdoor industrial storage or senior care campus or single family residential development? So these are different buy boxes, or what the app that Nick built at that time referred to as scoring profiles.

Rick Sheldon1:18:04So we built that, it's called LeadIntel. And that's one of the apps that we're building. And that's going to be what we pull data from for our outbound email marketing. Right now, we've got 1,200,000 properties in there, but we're going to continue getting all the properties hopefully. So it's basically pulling county GIS data, which is like the most reliable way of pulling them, and then building different scoring profiles in. So I can just click a button to say, I want to pull 1,000 records sorted by how likely they will be to fit for the senior care campus development project.

Rick Sheldon1:18:42Now, that is going to be the list of data that goes through our ecosystem of apps using the different APIs into instantly, actually, because we use instantly for cold email because that's just a great tool. But that is API ed into all of our other tools for lead intelligence and acquisitions and lead intel. So it's really the craziest thing. I brought up this lead intel app because it does strike me as a pretty crazy part of it. Really, it just evolves into like, it's all one thing.

Rick Sheldon1:19:14It's all this one big ecosystem of apps where each custom app does its purpose. They all tie together and we have a brain or a persona called Neo. Actually, this will be kind of cool. Can show you. Let me show you one thing in a sec. But Neo is going to be the way that we use chat based interaction to pull the data from all the different sources across all the different apps in the ecosystem.

Rick Sheldon1:19:45So lead intel feeds into all those other things, but really it's all one big crazy thing. Two months from now,

Brandon Parker1:19:52we'll be in a much different spot and AI will be in a different spot and we'll have a whole new set of stuff to talk about. So this has been a cool conversation. Where can people find you online?

Rick Sheldon1:20:02On Instagram, it's Rick SheldonREI. On Facebook, it's Rick Sheldon. I also have my phone number here on my banner. It's (864) 732-2323. And if you are interested in partnering up on the acquisition partnership opportunity that we have, you can just text me there with the word partnership and we'll get you directed over to learn more about that. But that's really what we're looking to do right now is collect a bunch of acquisition focused land investors who want to pool together and build something huge and

Brandon Parker1:20:43do a bunch of deals. Okay, great. I'll put your number up on the screen there so people can see it. And that's fantastic, exciting for people who are just looking to do some deals and work with someone sharp and get behind the curtain on all this, that's cool. Give call that number. Rick, I usually ask people as a, final question. If you could post onto x and everything... Everyone in the world would see it. Let's say everyone in the world was on x, they'd all see the message.

Brandon Parker1:21:14So it's gotta be short and concise. Everyone would read it. What message would you post to the world?

Rick Sheldon1:21:21I would say that with the way that I understand the universe to work, you should always look at your choices and choose the one that takes you towards the you that you want to become. And as you do that, you'll stay aligned with the version of you that gets to that end goal. That's how I plan to live my life.

Brandon Parker1:21:49Beautiful. Thanks for coming on the show, Rick. Good to see you. You too.

Rick Sheldon1:21:54Bye.