How to Grow Your Land Investing Business by Building a Team

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, thelangic.com and on this week's roundtable podcast, if you've ever tried to hire a key member of your team, you're going to want to listen to this roundtable as we discuss one of Kirk's hiring processes or hiring issues. But before we talk about that, we've got to talk about our roundtable panelists. We've got Eric the Technician Peterson. Eric, how are you?

I'm good. Good to see you, Mark.

It's good to see you. How's the smoker? The smoker?

It's all good.

It's all good. Got Landon putting in the reps. Harris. Well, you landed AI.

By the way.

I am sober for this podcast. When I see landatrea, sometimes, the nicknames get all confused.

You know, it was funny.

I'm all excited to see Eric. I'm all the fluster.

You should have seen Teriya's face, though. She's like, no, no.

Put in the rep's ears.

We are both very well.

And of course, I love it when you call me Big Papa. Tate Litchfield. Kirk, let's go into it. What's our issue?

I mean, it's not really an issue so much as. As, you know, just one of the ways that you grow is by adding people to your team.

Right.

Adding capacity. And so I'm in the process of building up and out my sales team, so I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that.

Right.

Like, because that's, I think, one of the more most intense and also most critical roles is the business. So, you know, I'm actually curious for. For the rest of you guys, how what you have done to either bring on your first salesperson or even more interestingly, you know, to scale up and. And multiply your sales team. What are some of the lessons that you learned that you implemented as you grew out?

I. I love that question. I mean, let's just start with Landon, because why not Landon? AI Harris?

You know, one of the things I think we did and when we were trying to scale up and trying to build out, we. I think we hired, like, three or four salespeople, and we went through a vetting process. And then once we had figured out, okay, well, after about eight of these. These people that we've interviewed, let's see if, you know, some of these will shake out. So we. I think we hired three or four of them. And what we did for the.

You hired them at the same Time to start them off at the same time.

Yeah, starting them all off at the same time. And I'll be honest, it whittled itself way down because what we did was we gave them all the same. We all the same training. We gave them all the same information. And then we started giving them old leads to kind of go through. So they went through some of those old leads, then started taking on specific counties as we started looking into those. And we kind of went through that process of listening to what they're saying and then seeing what they. How they responded. How quickly were they able to respond to these people? Did they discuss some of the pain points that they were going through? What was their demeanor like as they were discussing these things?

They're getting.

And we.

Are they the kind of people that get depressed when they get rejected or they kind of people that are like, yeah, one day, that's 100 ago.

Yeah.

I mean, that's kind of what we wanted to see. Were they going to be, you know, killers and just go in there and just try to really sell, or were they going to be real passive and, you know, oh, it's okay, you know, not really attack it? So we waited for that, and then what we did was we tried to just let them go through the process. And as they went through this process, we found some just weren't working for our business. They just did not match up to our model. They did not follow up in the manner that we felt like they needed to. Some just. They just couldn't hack it. And I'll be honest, the best. The cream rose to the top. I guess that's more what it came down to. You know, if you have a few, I said, let them battle it out and see which ones stick. And the best ones will be the ones that you kind of go for.

Yeah. Terea, do you want to add some color to this?

Yeah. Another side to it. He's absolutely right. We hire multiple people. But I think another thing that we learned in doing expanding was making sure that the infrastructure was in place for the expansion. So we needed to make sure that our CRM was ready for multiple people. We needed to make sure that whatever they needed to be successful, we had already implemented in the business. I remember when we first were like, oh, yeah, we're just going to hire three people. And it's like, well, wait a minute, how are we going to navigate the phone calls and how are we going to navigate the lead? So just making sure we understand when you're bringing one or three people on Is your infrastructure has it, you know, been refined so that you can take on this person? And then having the ability to provide them training, that was another thing that we also wanted to have in place prior to having someone having an idea of what we wanted and we could relay those expectations properly.

Are you guys using Follow Up Boss as your CRM?

We are, we are, yeah.

Kirk. Yeah, definitely, yeah, yeah. Eric could like sell training for it. I know, like a follow up boss expert. Tate, we're using it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eric, what are your thoughts on this?

I think that this, this conversation also leads into maybe a common question I hear from students and that is, you know, when is the right time to delegate or outsource a given task, whether that be sales or any other task in this business? And I think that, you know, for people getting started in this business, the, the idea of adding another expense can sometimes be hard. You know, I think that when you're getting started, you're, you have potentially a limited amount of funds and you're probably spending more in the business like in subscriptions and buying land and all this other stuff than, than you have coming in, obviously. So to, to add on top of that pile is hard for some people early on. And you know, we, we have a conversation around, well, what is your time worth?

Right.

But.

We can, we can talk through that and help them see that, hey, their, their time is much more valuable and spent in other places, but they still have to invest that money to go hire whatever VA that is, right? And that's still like a legitimate thing to, to be concerned about. And it's a hurdle that people have to overcome. And you know, I think that everybody handles it a little bit differently. But ultimately the only way that you're gonna progress in this business is to delegate some of these tasks and outsource them to others. And you know, where you can automate things because that's obviously less expensive. But not all tasks can be automated.

So.

You know, I think it comes down to a few factors. Outside of the extra cost, the expense that goes with outsourcing, I think that the student, the individual running the business has to be at a point where they are struggling to do things in the business that are working on the business as opposed to in the business. And in some cases they're, they're struggling to even just keep up with all the stuff that has to happen in the business because they haven't outsourced enough and their time is limited. Chances are they're, they're working a full time job and you know, you might have two hours a day, you might have three, four hours a day, but if you're doing all the tasks here, like that's going to add up and it's going to add up fast. So as that time gets full, you've gotta kind of bite the bullet, if you will, and, and begin to outsource. And that's where you get into kind of what Landon and Teria have talked about. You know, you want to hire potentially a few people to, to do a given task and let them kind of go through the motions. And a lot of times you learn a lot about those candidates that you hired. You know, which one is really good and which one's going to ask all kinds of questions, which one is going to miss deadlines and so on and so forth. So that can be extremely helpful in hiring for, for all areas of the business. I think that's probably easier with the more task based type roles, things like, you know, whether it be due diligence or creating maps or writing content or whatever, because those people tend to be easier to find. But when we get into the other bigger roles like sales and, and maybe intake, those, those roles are a little bit harder to find candidates for in my experience. So hiring three or five of them all at once could be challenging to, to find enough people to, to kind of put into the, the system and test with. But I don't know. That's some of my thoughts around the, the loose topic of, of grilling and, and outsourcing.

I love that. And that can be a podcast in and of itself is just that chicken and egg sort of dilemma. The psychological hurdle of I'm the cheapest person I can hire. I'm, I'm not seeing deals, I'm not seeing deal flow. I just see money going out and the coaches are telling me I need to invest more. And that's a very difficult pill to swallow, which is why you invest in coaching because we help you get out of your own way. And Eric alluded to it, well, what is your time worth? And oftentimes people would just discount it. And it's a podcast in and of itself. But I think it was really a great thing to sort of reframe just in the beginning is, you know, when do I do this and where should the business be when I start building team and in doing all that. So that's a, that's a great subject in and of itself, but I don't want to say anymore because I don't want to take the big Papa's thunder and hear what he has to say about this all important subject of hiring a sales team.

You know, when hiring a sales team, I think there's a lot of different strategies that you can take, right? And unless you're working with somebody who's got experience selling raw land, you need to treat them as if they're a little bit of an infant. Because raw land sales are unlike any other type of, you know, sales that there are out there. I mean, you think about it, we're selling properties in places a lot of people haven't been to, let alone a lot of these counties. People are mispronouncing the name of them. So it's hard to get emotional and excited about an area that you've never been to. And so it takes a special type of person to be good at selling raw land as, you know, as if that's their job, because they have to be willing to put in kind of extra effort. They need to be willing to do the research. They need to be willing to learn about these counties, because the successfulness of their job depends on their ability to communicate well. And if they can't answer people's questions or share that energy with other people, retail customers, they're going to struggle in this role. I've got a two new salespeople that we've recently hired, and it's been interesting to see just how gung ho they are about this position. They're viewing it as this is an unlimited earning position. They can earn as much money as they possibly want. And because of that, they're doing the extra work to get familiar with the properties. They're doing the extra work to look at images, to read about competitors, ads and listings, and read between the lines there. So I think anybody can be good at sales. It's just whether or not that VA or that hire wants to put forth the effort to be good at it. And that's why I say all of us, you know, believe that anyone who enters, like the land, Greek world can learn how to sell this stuff. And the reason we believe that is because we all get excited about the properties we represent. And that that energy, that excitement is contagious. So when you're hiring this new person, you've got to share that same energy, that same type of enthusiasm, because that will spread throughout your business. And there's nothing more powerful than that disease going from person to person about, hey, we're all in this together, we're all going to do well if we all work hard at this. But you really got to find that VA who has that long term perspective as well.

Yeah, I love what everybody said. And Kirk, just to put the cherry on top, the way I think about it, as far as mitigating risk is if I zoom out and I look at companies as a whole and I look at industries as a whole, and there's a tremendous failure rate. I think it's like 66% failure rate for companies that are growing in the Inc. 5000. So it's like the danger zone when you start growing your company. And the companies that have the lowest failure rate, it's 15%, are franchises. And why is that? It's because they have a system. And so if as you're growing and as you're scaling, you have that system in place and you have those sops or those playbooks, that's going to really increase the probability of a smoother onboarding transition with your team. You're going to have a lot less anxiety as you bring people on, as you do the Lanternia sink or swim way of, of. Of seeing salespeople, which I think is a great way to do it. Right. But you know, as Teresa said, like, we have to make sure that we have the tools for them. You know, Eric and Tate are putting as much into that process and that system as possible to increase the probability of success. So that we're isolating that it's just the person who's not right for it. And us as CEO and owners have provided them all the resources necessary to set them up for success. And so if you haven't done your legwork on that piece first, I would say do that first and then go through your process. But what are your thoughts, Kirk, as you we'd land the plane on this?

No, I think all of the commentary was awesome. Like, I, I actually took notes. I felt like I was in coaching again, you know, I think it makes perfect sense. I love, I love the approach of, you know, getting a few people. You're still looking for the best candidates. And it's not that you want anyone necessarily want any one of them to fail. Heck, it might be great if all of them were like dynamite salespeople, right? Like, you know, you hire four or five people and you actually found out that you had four or five superstars. It doesn't have to be that only one or two succeed. I mean, that would be an awesome scenario. Then you just figure out how to buy more land quickly enough. But then also the fact that adding those folks can stress your system. So if your systems and Your processes aren't in place, aren't well oiled. If you haven't run through it yet yourself and really haven't worked out a lot of the kinks, you know, adding people is going to be very, probably more painful than actually helpful. So that was what I got out of that as well. And yeah, it feels that great information and I'm definitely moving forward with it. So I like that approach. I think I'm going to, you know, open up my candidate pool a bit and see if I can find a few more candidates to join our little ragtag team. And we've been working really hard on our processes and getting all our documentation together and creating training videos. I think we have a good program that we believe will actually get people to success within the company. So, like, kind of makes me feel like we're definitely heading in the right direction based on the information that I got here and based on our discussion. This is great.

Yeah, absolutely. And the thing that scares me the most is when we're talking to a. A client and they have one salesperson and they tell me what a rock star they are. And I always think you have to have at least two. You need to have a competitive sales situation so that complacency doesn't set in. And you also don't have a critical bottleneck in the sales department as well. So two is one, one is none. All right, we're at that point now where we get to put Kirk on the spot one more time and ask him for his tip of the week. A website resource, a book, something else for the art of passing good listeners. Go improve their businesses, improve their lives. Kirk Par. What do you got?

What do I got? Looking at my bookshelf over here. All right, actually, so I've been playing around with AI a lot. I'll go go down that rabbit hole. And it is, it can be quite the rabbit hole. But I think it was a week and a half or so ago they released the interactive voice feature. So you can actually have conversations with your AI, your chat GPT now, natural language conversations in any language you want pretty much. And it just shortcuts the typing effort. So definitely check it out. I played with it. You can have whole long conversations and then ask it to summarize the conversation for you and get the bullet points out of that conversation. You can also have it listen to conversations. And there are AI tools that do that for you now, like Otter and things like that that now have AI built in. And we'll summarize those conversations for You. But there's so much that you can do with AI that everybody should be playing with it.

Yeah, you should definitely be playing with it. I know for me, personally, I don't need a therapist anymore because I'll just use that chatgpt function and talk to it and I'll just give the prompt, hey, pretend you're, you know, a therapist with 20 years experience. Here's, you know, here's my issues. And then, you know, and I just keep going deep. It's unbelievable the, the advice it'll give you, it's so good. But even though I think intellectually we all kind of know the advice, but it's great to hear it from that, you know, that AI as well.

It's just kind of that talking piece of it where you talk to it, it understands you, and then it talks back is the piece that is very interesting because now instead of typing into some black screen, you're like actually having a conversation. And it's just, as we said, it's the worst it's ever going to be today. It's just going to get better. It's kind of nuts.

It's kind of nutty. Absolutely. So I do want to remind the listeners that the only way Eric is going to come back on the podcast is if you do three favors. Follow rate review the podcast, send a screenshot of that review support thelangic.com we're going to send you a free copy of Dirt Rich. But even if you already have Dirt Rich or you don't care about the copy, you don't care about the signature, it doesn't matter. It just helps anyways so we get better guests. And I can twist Eric's arm and be like, see, look how many people downloaded the podcast. Because you're on it. So it's all good for that. Also, if you want to learn more about how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations, rodents, go to the Land Geek.com training. Learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life. Schedule. Call the Land Geek.com forward slash training. The Land Geek.com training. And I know you're thinking, what about the tuition? It ain't going to cost you nothing. Guaranteed you're going to make it back 180 days or less. Just show us you did the work. Land Geek.com Training Eric, are we good?

We're great.

Landon?

We're good. Mark J.

Kirk.

All good.

T. Tate? Yep. Well, I thought this was a great one, so thank you guys. And we ready to do this?

Yeah.

One, two, three, let's. Freedom. Awesome. Awesome. Terrible. It was pretty terrible, but it's always out of practice.

I wonder, like, can you actually get to be in sync since all of us are experiencing a del from the other? Like, I've always wondered that.

I wonder if. I wonder if we could do it in post, like, in the edit, if they're able to do it. I think. I don't think it can. Because you'd have to isolate the tracks, right?

Yeah, I don't think you can. Isolated tracks.

Jimmy Kimmel. No, Conan did it with his group. Was it Jimmy Kimmel?

Really good.

He did it with a group and they were, like, all in sync. It was like 12.

They were all. It was all isolated. Like, somebody was on the bass, someone was on the guitar, and so it was awesome. But you could tell they were isolated, but they brought them together. So they did a song stuck in the middle with you during Company, right?

Stuck with you.

That takes some hyper Internet, I have to tell you.

I can't. I can't listen to that song without thinking about the horrific scene in Reservoir Dogs. Have you guys seen it? Is it. Well, Tria, you can miss that one. It is. It is. Quentin Tarantino is one of his earlier films, and it is dark. It is violent.

He's.

No.

Thank you.

And so if for those of you that have seen the movie. You know what I mean. When I. When I stuck in the middle with you. Crazy. All right.

A happy song. How did he make it dark?

Oh, so dark. So dark. All right, well, thanks, you guys, and we'll see everybody later. Bye.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations, or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com forward slash training. Let freedom ring.