What Mindset Is Needed to Be Successful in The Land Business Today?

Hey, it's Mark Pelosi, the land geek with your favorite niche real estate website, www.thelandgeek.com. i am so excited. I am so thrilled. I don't know how long it's been. It's been maybe a week or two since we've had everybody, all the coaches on the roundtable podcast. Without further ado, we've got the nightcap OG the dude buddy, Scott Bossman. Scott, how are you?

I'm great. Mark, how are you?

I'm great. It's great to see you again. If you're not watching our Facebook lives, the majority of them are with Scott Bossman and probably annoying. Our next roundtable guest, the Zen master, Mike Zaino. Mike, how are you?

I'm doing great. Thank you for asking.

Anytime you want to jump on those Facebook lives, you are more than welcome. The three of us can do it.

I feel like I'm interrupting at times, so I don't know.

But speaking of Facebook lives, if you guys ever want to get, like, 10 times the views, all you have to do is a Facebook Live with the terrorist hunter, Mimi Schmidt. Mimi, you're blowing up the Internet.

Hi. How's it going?

It's great to see you. So Mimi's blowing up the Internet, but another person who does these Facebook lives that throws out those knowledge bombs is the technician, Eric Peterson. Hello, Eric. Even you make Zapier sound sexy. I don't know what's going on with that, but your Facebook lives are always very popular. And then, of course, if you aren't watching his show, lots. Go tolandgeek.com lots. Look over Tate's shoulder. He'll just make you a better human being. Not only just wealthier, just better learn more or less.

Lots.

Look over Tate's shoulder. Tate Litchfield. How are you? Doing well.

Yeah, glad to be on the call today.

By the way, I'm annoyed with you. I remember it was like being a new dad, having a baby, not getting any sleep, just. I was like, you think Eric Peterson's irascible? I was irascible, okay? Everything irked me. Everything.

Life is good, man.

Just. Just like. Honey, can you go, you know, clean this like. No, I'm tired. It's like, you're tired. The constant battling back and forth. Look at you smiling. You're happy, you're all rested. It's annoying. Congratulations on that.

Thank you.

But you know who's not annoyed? You know you love him. Scott Todd from scotttodd.net landmodo.com automating your Craigslist and your Facebook postings. Postingdomination.com thelandgeek learn anything about freaking anything investor ninjas.com Scott. Todd, you remember what it was like being Tate?

Yeah, I do, actually. It wasn't. I mean, it wasn't terrible. My wife would probably tell you, like. Yeah, because you didn't do nothing. But you know, I think I did a lot.

Yeah, but you weren't. See, Tate and I were working from home, so we're around.

Yeah. See that. That is a difference. Right? Like that. That is a. There is a difference there. So I don't remember that. I wouldn't remember that aspect of it.

Yeah, you, you know, you. I remember.

All right, you remember.

Whatever. We got a great topic today. Mike Zeno. Yeah, the Zen master. What is our topic? What is the mindset a flight school client or a coaching client needs to be successful in our niche?

I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is you want to empty your cup. Meaning you come to this far in life, you have a whole bunch of knowledge, whether I'm not saying about land investing, but business, about just about everything. And I think it can get in the way. It can kind of cloud your progress. So I always tell people, particularly when they're going into flight school, empty your cup. Meaning just forget all that you've learned and just go through with and just follow the process. I think if you're too kind of heavy with opinions and all this, you're going to restrict your actions.

So. And then, you know, when it's all.

Over, you can always bring back all the successes you've had priority and add them in. And I say that always, like seasons you or makes you better than the average person. But I think a good attitude have is just to be. I guess that's humility. Be humble, empty your cup. You know, there's many things you may know, but this is a very unique niche. Right. And you got to be ready to learn. So empty your cup and just follow the process.

I like that. That reminds me of the Zen philosophy of beginner's mind. But empty your cup sounds better to me.

Yeah.

Because you get that. You have that visual of emptying a cup which would for Scott Bossman be, could you just say empty your beer mug? And then for him that would be more like, okay, now he's getting it. So Scott, what would be your mindset tip for a new land investor?

So we talked about this a little bit yesterday, Mark, and Facebook Live. Not to take everything away from that, but you know, it's an Analogy for me is like physical fitness. Right. In order to get to your physical ideal, whatever that may be, you need consistent commitment to exercise, diet, that type of thing. With exercise, you have repetition, resistance, intensity, duration.

Right.

And all those things can apply to, like your land business. You need to repetitively do things before you get better. You need to intensely do things to get better. You need to be outside of your comfort zone and be pushed maybe by a physical trainer like Scott Todd to get better. Because you're not going to do it yourself. Some people do. But what's the percentage of people that do it yourselves?

3%?

Yeah, 3%. So in my mind, I kind of equate it to a physical fitness journey. And you can use that analogy in a lot of different aspects of your life. But the biggest thing with becoming physically fit is you need to experience periods of intense discomfort. And that's what this business is about. And if you can bring yourself to kind of consistently commit to that type of thing, you're going to get better.

Yeah. I mean, when you're saying that Eric Peterson and I were nodding because we just did that Matt Wilper's ride yesterday. And Eric, were we not intensely discomfort in intense discomfort? We were. But it does apply to knowledge work in the sense that it is these periods of intense work and then you rest. Right. So I'd love to hear where the terrorist hunter thinks would be that. That mindset as well.

Trusting in the process. You meet these guys on the Internet selling land and do you trust them?

Right.

Do you press the process or they're making it work. But can I make it work? Just trust the process, it does work and go for it.

So, Mimi, I mean, how do you. How do you get someone to. To sort of make that leap of faith? Is there, is there something that you can point to? I mean, do you tell your own story?

It's been a battle for me. Honestly. I think the more you do it, the more you trust it. Right. Particularly after you get that first deal down, it's such a confidence booster that, yes, it does work and yes, I can do it. But honestly, it's tough. You gotta. You gotta do it through experience and then keep doing it and push yourself to continue. Right. That's the second thing is just the grit to keep going. Just keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it.

Yeah.

Can I ask you a personal question?

Yes.

Was there something in your past, maybe from your parents, maybe a previous job that helped you in the land business? Because your grit is sort of legendary now. Where because you had such a big job being a terrorist hunter and managing so many people, you were really working in your land. Business quarterly at boot camps. Was there something that you could point to in your past that says, yeah, this really helped me because I had already seen how consistency and grit can get me to where I wanted to be in life. So whether it takes a year or three years, I don't care, I'm just keeping my head down.

No, I think I just always had wanted to do my own thing. I'd always wanted to be really independent and do my own thing. And I just saw this as the outlet, as the way to do it. The network was so positive and, and I felt like the barriers to entry were low, competition was low. It just seemed like the right combination of so many things. Thought, okay, this is it and I can do this. So I don't know, wasn't any one thing particular, just a culmination and timing too.

Okay, excellent. The technician, Eric Peterson. What mindset would you recommend for those newbie land investors to have where you could say, adopt this mindset, success will inevitably be yours?

I think that for me, I would say it comes down to determination and consistency. So, you know, if you come into this business and you do it half heartedly and you're not putting in the effort, you're not being consistent with your mailings and your marketing, it's going to be really hard to succeed. So you've got to be consistent in those regular activities that, you know, bring in you your inventory and in turn sell your inventory. That's the business we're in. So if you can't find an hour or two a day to do that stuff, it is probably not gonna work for you. So that's what I think is important for someone to be successful in this business.

Okay, I agree 100%, but I'd love to hear what. I love it when you call me Big Papa. Tay Litchfield has to say, you know.

I think it comes down to the idea of deferred gratification. You have to understand that what you do today is not going to make you rich immediately. Right. You have to understand that this is a big long term play here. You know, you're going to sell properties and you're going to have tremendous success doing that. But realistically, you're building your income $200 at a time. And that takes a lot of commitment to something to just see it go up like that. So like Eric said, you got to be really committed to this. You got to want it, you Got to understand that, hey, in three years, if you can build or increase your passive income by $200 a month, $500 a month, or like Jeff Detmer did recently, $1,000 in a month, you can do that month after month after month. You will have that long term perspective of what this business truly can be. And I think that's important. You got to go into this knowing that you can buy a bunch of property today and you might be able to flip it tomorrow, but that's not going to create the wealth that you're after. So you got to have your head screwed on right. And you got to understand that we're not preaching a get rich quick program. In fact, this is a get rich very slow program. But once the machine takes off, you can have absolutely insane results or insane months like I think everybody on this call just recently had.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And you know, delaying gratification, it's, it's a real thing. In fact, there's that famous study, the marshmallow test, where they took, I think these seven year old kids and maybe they're younger, maybe five years old, and they said, hey, look, if you can wait five or 10 minutes before eating this marshmallow, when I come back in the room, you can have two marshmallows. Well, some kids, they would follow these kids through life and some kids would immediately eat the marshmallow. But those other kids that would like, you know, they'd sit on their hands or they would hum, they would, they would sort of go through all these sort of coping mechanisms to delay gratification, end up doing way better in life. Which is why a lot of people don't know this. Eric Peterson did this with both his kids and said to his wife, we're only going to really focus on this one because he's more economically viable. So if your kids are listening, Eric, maybe you want to retest like the FTP test.

I don't even know what to say to that, Mark.

I just hope your mom's not listening.

So.

And of course, I'm obviously joking. Scott. Todd, what about you? Why don't you have the final word? You see a lot of people come through flight school. You've been doing this a long time, you've had tremendous success. What would you say is the mindset? Someone's going to need to adopt.

So you got, you got a lot of great, you got a lot of great suggestions on here. And the one thing I would just add to it is this, this is a simple business. It really is a simple Business, right? Like, it's so simple. I'm not saying it's easy, simple. And there's a difference, right? Like, the concept is simple. You buy a piece of land for this price, and you sell it for some price higher. There's no magic in there. Like, if you listen to this podcast, Mimi talked about how she saw someone sign a wholesale property, and I forgot the exact number. But, like, they were selling them for 1500, she knew she could sell it for 1800, and she bought it.

And.

And someone might say, you made 300 bucks. Yeah, it's like picking up little rocks, right? Like, oh, man, I know I can sell this for a little bit more, and then you sell it for more. Now, I wouldn't say go buy a piece of land for 1500 and sell it retail for 1800. That's not what I'm saying. But what I'm saying is think about the process. The process is very simple. Buy a piece of land for X, sell it for Y, and the Y should be more than the X. But what happens is a lot of people try to complicate this thing. And the way that they try to complicate it is they. One, they get too locked up on this buy number, right? Like, I gotta buy it for this price. Well, price is price, okay? Like, price ultimately becomes down to what two people will agree to buy it for and sell it for. So you can agree to buy it for one price and just know that as long as you know that there's some higher end, you don't have to hit the Mark Podolsky magic to profit formula of 300 to 1000%. People still think that, right? Like, that's ridiculous. A profit's a profit, and then, you know, so then they try to complicate it there. They try to complicate it with, like, even the deeds. The deeds are very simple, Right. And we've made it Even simpler in LG Pass, fill in the blanks. LGPass creates the deed, send the deed to the customer, let them notarize it, come it back to you, and then start marking the heck out of this thing. It's very. It's a very simple concept. And I know you got to go through the process one time to get it down, but don't overthink it. And I think that's what happens to people is they start to, like, overthink things, and they start to lock up. They focus on the minute detail because they're scared. Don't. What is there to be scared about?

Right?

Like, you're buying a piece of land probably for $700,000, maybe $2,000. I hate to tell you this, and I don't want anybody to lose money. I'm not trying to say this, but the worst case scenario here, which has never happened to me, worst case scenario is you lose the money.

Right.

I was talking to Tate the other day and we were talking about how, yeah, we've made mistakes in due diligence, right? Like, oh, we messed that up. I bought a property. I bought a property. Where? It's in Colorado. I didn't know any better at the time. And Colorado is tenants in common, unless it's specified joint tenants, rights of survivorship, husband and wife. The wife dies, I bought it from the husband. Guess what? Me and the passed away wife are on the deed together. Okay, well, I paid, I think I paid $900 for the property. Guess what? I got that $900 property and I just have it in my inventory. It's just sitting there right now. I haven't sold it. I haven't done anything with it. I realize there's a problem because the tax bill comes and it's me and the deceased wife. Now I can go try to fix that cost. Might cost me a few hundred couple thousand bucks maybe to fix it. Am I going to go do it? I don't know. I might. What's 900 bucks, right? Like, I can just write it off or I could just hold it and maybe I learned something along the way that I can go fix it. It's not a deal breaker. Just keep moving on. Because there's so much profit margin in this business that the mistakes, like if you make one mistake out of every 50 you buy, guess what? It's absorbed. It's not that big of a deal. And it's really easy to overthink those things as opposed to just saying, I might make a mistake on a deal, it's gonna cost me a thousand bucks. That's the way it is. I'm just gonna keep on moving.

Yeah, I think that's a really good roundtable topic as well, is like, what has been our worst mistakes? I mean, we always joke about, you know, at Bootcamp Mimi sending out those offers of $0 and still getting deals. And, you know, Eric just recently did a bunch of offers for $0. He sent him, I think, 100 to just Scott Bossman. I'm not sure if it was a prank or not, but I think Scott got the gist of it. Like, hey, Eric's making an offer and it's low. But the beautiful thing about this niche is that we're not talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars at risk like you might in single family or millions of dollars like we would say in commercial or multifamily. In this niche, a $900 mistake is easily absorbed, even $5,000. I mean, not that I'd want to lose $5,000, but I could recover from it as opposed to having to go BK on a commercial deal or even on a housing deal. So we are now at that point in the podcast where we get to ask Mimi the Terrorist Hunter for her tip of the week. But before we go to the tip of the week, we have to talk about our sponsor and this week it's flight school. Learn how 16 weeks can transform your life. Go up that mountain of land investing a one time sale, passive incomes every single month. No renters, no rehabs, no renovations, no roads. Have Scott Todd be your Sherpa up that mountain. You have to do is schedule a quick call with Dude Buddy Nightcap OG Scott Bossman or the Zen master Mike zano. Go to Langeek.com training and schedule that call. Also, we don't talk about it enough. The new website is up and if you want to start automating the front end and the back end of your business, geek pay and LGPass are both available first month free. Just to play with it, just go to landgeek.com Mimi Schmidt what is your tip of the week?

So this is tips from a couple different articles. So the link that is below that you can mark will make available doesn't have all of it. Facebook is changing their desktop interface. You'll notice all of us that keep Facebook analytics that you can no longer see the views and the number of messages that each of your marketplace ads is getting. So that's going to make it tough for us to know if the ads are productive and if we want to renew them. Right. We can't see how many people have viewed them. That's a new issue. You can still see the comments, but you have to count them manually. It'll say below the each ad how many messages there are. We have to click it and click it and click it to get to see how many there are. So that's not very effective use of time, honestly. So it's interesting. But there is a desktop redesign. It was made available. You can look at it March 19th and you can go into your settings and flip between the new view and the old view at this point. But eventually, as the year rolls on, they will Go to the new view. Facebook is pushing less of the news feed and trying to push their events in their groups. So you will see a push for people to use groups more. So it's interesting to see where they're going with all of it.

But.

I'll let you know if I find.

Do you think this is going to affect us with our sales?

No, I don't think it'll affect us with our sales. We may start to use groups more, the marketplace, and it just makes it harder for us to know if our marketplace ads are productive because not being able to see the views and the messages easily, it used to give the us on the right side used to give us both numbers. Now it gives us neither.

Interesting, interesting. Eric Peterson, what do you think?

It's a great tip.

Yeah.

I mean, Facebook is one of those things. It's always going to be changing, just like Craigslist algorithms. And we need to stay up to date with it if we want to continue to use those platforms.

Yeah. Mimi, as of today, are you still loving Facebook as a platform for selling?

Oh, definitely. Now I have a Craigslist strategy that's much stronger than it ever was before. But yeah, most, the majority of my stills, my sales are still on Facebook. Just they used to all be Facebook. Now it's about 60, 40 Facebook, Craigslist.

Wow.

Scott Bossman, what about you? What's your ratio?

We're doing well on Facebook. I'd say 80% Facebook, 20% other. So.

Huh.

Eric, what about you?

We're probably still, we do better on Craigslist, but it's getting closer to a 50, 50 split.

No kidding. Zen Master.

Much higher on the Facebook. Probably in line with Scott Boston.

80, 20 Tate.

Yeah, I don't know. We still rely quite heavily on Craigslist. We just sold the property on there today. So I don't know, 60, 40. We do a lot on Facebook, but I still am true to my roots and that's Craigslist.

Scott Todd.

Yeah, most of, I don't know, it's probably 60, 40, 60 being Craigslist, 40 being Facebook, you know, to build the pipeline there. But maybe not even Facebook's. Maybe it's not even 40. Maybe it's more like 30. We get a lot, a lot more leads from Facebook, but not, not necessarily that many sales. The sales come from. Sales come from Craigslist and they also come from Land Moto. Right. Because Lanmoto has its own marketing initiative out there that's driving more leads back to Lanmoto. So we pick up a lot of Stuff from Lanmoto, too.

All right, fantastic. Well, I want to thank all of you for being on the roundtable podcast and putting up with my shenanigans, as always. You know, sometimes the jokes land, sometimes they don't. You know, I'm trying to improve the ratio, but you got to put them out there, right? Absolutely. And if I offend a young child with a last name Peterson, I offend them. But eventually, one day, they'll appreciate the humor in it. Anyways, if you're getting value from the Roundtable podcasts, the best compliment you can give us is if you do us three little things. You gotta subscribe, you gotta rate, you gotta review the podcast. Podcast. Send us a screenshot to supporthelandgeek.com we're going to send you for free the $97 wholetailing course. All right, are we ready to do this? 1, 2, 3. Let freedom, freedom bring. Not bad.

And wash your hands.

It. Well, yeah, of course. And wash your hands. Absolutely. So, Eric, am I in trouble? No, I thought.

I don't think my mom listens anymore. You got nothing to worry about.

I thought the marshmallow joke really was funny. No. Can't. Can't really go after the kids, can you? There's like a line.

It's kind of like, you can't have a favorite kid, you know?

Yeah, no, I know, but let's be honest. Everyone kind of does, right? You know, in a weird way, like, I heard Russell Peters was talking about this. You don't know. Russell Peters is. He's like, the biggest comedian in the world besides the United States. He's Canadian. He's really funny. But he said that, you know, everyone. No one, no parent admits they have a favorite kid. He's like, but the litmus test is when your kid falls down. What's your reaction? Because one kid's like, oh, no, are you okay? The other one's like, oh, God, what happened now? Like, so if you're a parent, you. You get that joke. If you're not, you're like, you people are terrible. So I don't know. Scott. Todd. We're tired, aren't we?

Yeah, Matt, it's slaving away over here.

Yeah.

Where did Bossman go?

Boston's like, if you're gonna start talking about kids, I'm off.

Like, I think he was tired.

Yeah.

You might have been thinking, this is where you were gonna come back, Adam.

Scott.

And you didn't want to hang around for it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's okay. It's all right.

Yeah. Am I the only one doing intermittent fasting? Our Boston and I are the only ones doing that. Is anyone else doing it? Mimi, you're doing it.

I never bought into that. No.

Yeah, I do it.

How many days a week? And what's your schedule every day?

It's just easier for me to make myself two meals than three. It's really about efficiency, use of my time.

Really. I think I heard somewhere you're only supposed to do it five days a week. No.

Good to know.

Okay. I don't know. All right. Well, thanks, everybody, and see everybody next week.

See ya.

Ya.