Building a Strong Land Business

Question. We got a real question too, as well as that. Jake. Jake. Thank you, James. I'm sorry. Thanks for the shout out. I do appreciate that we have a James Braun. How do you offset expenses in the early stages when the main objective is to build repeating payments?

Great question.

That is a really good question. And we probably would all answer it. We could all answer it slightly different. I know that, Matt. We all had a little different path, the way we set up our systems and so on and so forth. The initial expenses could have varied. There's one idea where the only expenses you really have in the beginning are the mailing expenses, the acquisition cost and your time, which is an expense. It's kind of like if even if you, you know, even if you're using your own time and you're hiring somebody, there is an opportunity cost loss because you could be doing something else.

Right.

So there's a real time value. We joke on here that if you take your yearly salary, you know, take off, cut it in half and take off a few zeros, that's your hourly rate. So someone's making 100 grand a year. 50,000. $50 an hour. So yes, in the beginning it could cost you $50 an hour of your own time.

Right.

So that's one way to look at that. But really, other than that, you could get away with doing that. Right. Very simply. Then build forward as you find pain points, outsource them and to the point where you could maybe have deals coming paying for that. Or Matt, you could talk a little bit about how you sort of.

Or you can do it the other way, which is not recommended.

It worked out wonderfully for you. It's just different.

I know it did. Well, I knew it. So I'm a pretty long term thinker and I'm in a position where I have a really great corporate job and I love my job, I love my company. So I did it differently. Right. My wife and I in the very beginning did it ourselves for a month or two. But then we really started outsourcing before you should. Right. So I started bringing on a lot of VAs, like an intake manager, that kind of stuff. Well before I think you should do it. And so in the beginning and for a long time, I really wasn't making money. The company was making money and the company was growing. But every time I would go and get another deal, you know, we would add more expenses to it. And so my methodology was I don't care about the money, which by the way proved to be false in the end. For the record. But my mantra was, I don't care about the money. I care about building a really, really strong business that can run on its own. So that in a year, in two years, in three years, it can just sort of go by itself and I'll be good. And that's exactly what we did. It's what we always knew we would do. So me versus another guy in flight school who I still talk to, you know, I'm at twice as much, you know, monthly passive, if you will, than he is, but he makes slightly more than I do on, like, what he actually takes home. But he does all the work and I don't really do a lot of the work. Like, most of that is outsourced. So it's. What kind of a, you know, what cup of tea are you looking for, right? Do you have a stable job where you have income and you don't need this, but you know, you want to build this because one day it'll take over? Or are you in a place where you don't have that and you're going to have to trade a lot more time, you know, to build the business? You can do it either way. You just have to sort of think around how you want to do it. My recommendation is to do what I did, which was called Scotty Bosman. I literally talked to Scott, I don't know, two, maybe three times, and he gave me kind of the perils of the way that I ended up doing it. I did it anyways, but I knew what I was getting into, right? So that's, you know, I have a very robust land business. Without me. I mean, we had a sales meeting today. I'm like, what's happening? I literally don't know, like, who's signing? Like, I'm signing contracts. I don't know who these people are. I don't know where we got this land. Did this come back to us? Like, what's happening? My wife is like, we have to go send all these checks. We're buying all this stuff. I don't even know. And it's just sort of going. Which is exactly what we had always hoped it would be, but that took three years to get there. So you can make it where it's just the mailing cost and you do intake and you do sales and you do everything and you get to keep all that money you make minus the mailing. And that's a great way to go. And that's probably what I would recommend for most people. If you have a full time corporate job where you work, you know, 60 hours a week or 70 hours a week. That's really, really tough to do. I have four kids, a new house. I was building a house when I started this, so I knew I didn't have the time, so I just did it a different way that I don't necessarily recommend, for the record, but that was my path. It was my path to get here, and I'm really happy I'm here.

Yeah, that's. There's a balance. You got to find the balance between doing everything yourself and outsourcing everything. It's right there in the middle. I think what James was. Another thing he was kind of getting at is how do you offset expenses when. Because our ideal goal is to create passive income for ourselves. Right. On all of our terms deals now. But however, if you only have a few thousand dollars in the bank account and you buy a property for a few thousand dollars and you sell it on terms, you're gonna run out of money for other deals. So how do we compensate for that? Well, there are different strategies. Mike Zano, you're the wholesale king, right? So you infused cash back into your business, because during your first year in the business, you bought, I don't know how many properties at 25 cents on the dollar, and you sold them to a land investor like me for 50 cents on the dollar.

You.

You infuse that cash back into your business. I must have been a good time, I think, in the land business for cash sales, because I did just 30 deals my first year, which is pretty average. But 10 of those were cash deals at retail, where I made three to five thousand dollars per deal.

Huge.

I mean, that's huge. Right now. The market's a little different right now. We're not selling that many properties on cash. There are other ways you can infuse cash back into your business. You can sell notes. I mean, we talk about this tlfolio.com you sell a property on terms, you can then sell the first year of that note and infuse the cash back into your business. So there are all sorts of strategies that we teach you in Land Geek to be able to make your money work for you. And that's not even talking about partnering up with people for funding. I mean, those things are huge, right? When you know this is an amazing business because you may only have five grand in your bank account, but if you come across a deal where you're able to purchase 20 properties for 20 grand, we can help you find a way to get that deal done. Even if you don't have the bank. Even if you don't have the money in your bank account.

Yeah. You control the deal, you know, that's all. If you didn't have any money, mail, you go into the group and you say, I have a, I have a property. Anybody want a partner? You're going to light up. You're going to messages, lighting up your Facebook, and you're going to have plenty of people willing to do that.

So.

And I've known people who have done that for the first, you know, five, six, seven, eight deals, and then they don't need funding anymore.

Sa.