🚀 The #1 Reason Land Investors Stay Broke (And How to Fix It)

Hi, my name is Klay Hepler. I run, at this point, a 23-person team that did over seven figures of profit in my second year of land investing. But let me tell you something: most land investors never make it past $200,000 or $300,000 a year. And it's not because they're not smart; it's not because they don't work hard; it's because they actually just scale the wrong way.

I got off a call with an investor last Friday who was stuck at around $200,000. He was getting inconsistent results. He's hustling; he's making offers; he's closing deals. But he's also chasing too many strategies, hiring the wrong people, wasting a lot of his marketing spend, and he's completely flying blind on his numbers. This is a big reason why most land investors actually fail to scale. I've been there, and if you are feeling stuck at that mark, here is why and how to fix it.

The number one thing is: stop chasing everything. When I got started, I got caught up in subdivides, infill lots, entitlement plays. Uh, I think I went through four CRMs in my first year. I did SMS, RVM, direct mail, cold calling—everything, right? Does this sound familiar? You got to stop this, right? Most investors overcomplicate growth. They jump from one shiny tactic to the next. Instead, look at your business: what's working? Do more of it. Find the biggest bottleneck in that specific thing and fix it. Scaling, I found in my business, is more about focus, not complexity. And a lot of times, what happens is you might start a new marketing channel, and it takes 3 to 6 months to actually get off the ground, and you're not really getting traction until that point. But you're looking around; you're hearing, "Hey, this person's doing really well in this marketing channel," whether it's SMS or RVM or direct mail or whatever. And the reality is, it really takes a lot of time and a lot of effort, and you don't know what's going on in that person's business. They might not actually know their numbers. Even a guru online might not know their numbers.

Which brings me to point number two: you are not tracking KPIs. Now, a lot of people reach out to me on social media and say, "Hey, I just need a mentor; I just need help scaling," or whatever. And sometimes I work with people, private clients, on a one-on-one basis; sometimes I just connect with people offline. And I would say 90% of people are not properly tracking KPIs. And when I first started, I'm a visionary type, and so getting into Excel, actually physically tracking KPIs to me, is like the worst thing in the world. But I was making offers blind; I wasn't knowing how much offers I was making; I wasn't knowing what my cost per lead, my cost per contract, my response rate was. If you do not track your KPIs, you're gambling, right? You're not actually running a business, and that's a really important distinction. And as soon as I realized that, I started actually tracking them internally: like how many leads are we getting every month; of those leads, how many are quality; of those quality leads, how many are we having conversations with; of those conversations, how many offers; what's our cost per deal; what's our offer acceptance; what's our time to close; what's our cash conversion cycle? Before you try anything new, like the first one, ask yourself: what do my KPIs say? What are my KPIs actually telling me? From there, you can make a decision. If you are not tracking, start now. Start below. I'm going to include a master KPI tracker in the YouTube comments; you can grab that and start tracking your KPIs now and put you in a much better position than where you are before watching this video.

Number three is hiring the wrong people at the wrong times. Hiring the wrong people at the wrong time can set you back 6 to 12 months. Early on, I made a mistake of hiring an acquisition manager when really I needed to hire someone that's a little more operational. I find in a lot of businesses that people will hire a sales task, like a closing task, specifically in the land business, really early, and they shouldn't, because no one's going to sell—be as tenacious, as persistent, as the principal, as you, the CEO, the owner. And so I hired this person, and he—he was a skilled salesperson for sure—um, but I should have hired an operations person and paid the operations person the salary that I was paying this person, because that person would have allowed me to focus on what I do well, and what a lot of people in this business do well, which is actually uh selling. In addition, people hire the wrong people for the role; they hire someone for tasks; they do not hire someone for attributes. So they say, "This person has experience; I should hire them," right? A lot of times, people hire based on, "This person is experienced doing X; I should hire them." If you want to scale your business beyond just a mom-and-pop, you doing everything and 80-hour work weeks, you need to find people that exemplify the characteristics of someone that you actually want to hire, not someone that's just a task completer. Of course, in an administrative role, it makes sense, right? You—you could have someone in an administrative role that's just, you know, someone that's good at completing tasks. But if you want to actually scale, you want to have really good candidates that have the ability to continue to learn and grow. What I've learned is very simply: the right hiring process gives you the right candidates; the right timing gives you momentum, not stagnation; and the right person gives you absolutely exponential leverage. So most investors I see, land investors, build mismatched teams that slow them down; they don't have a good hiring process, so they have bad people; they hire the wrong people at the wrong time, so they have stagnation, not momentum; and they don't really know even how to find the right person because their hiring process is so basic. If you get that right, you will build a team that will grow with you, not against you. But I see a lot of people are manning these—these businesses—of a bunch of people that are just task completers in their business and not end-state completers. They're not saying what is success in this position; they're just hammering away, and that really prevents you from scaling.

Which goes into the next point, which is number four: it's wasting data. Most investors will buy a list; they'll mail it once, or they'll text them once, or call it once, and then they'll toss it. That's insane, right? If someone else is closing deals in a specific county, this is what I always thought: why can't I? Maybe I'm not targeting them right; maybe it's not the right timing. But if—if you just buy a list of data, you market to it once. So this is the way that most gurus teach us how to do it; it's not the right way to do it. You got to retarget that list multiple times; you got to recycle the data; you got to track your best-performing list; you re—you retarget; you follow up with the lists that are working and figure out different ways to target the lists that are not working. That'll enable you to scale; that'll allow you to be more profitable because you're more discerning about what your expenses are as you scale. Doing this—like recycling my lists, retargeting people—it lowered my cost per lead; it increased my profitability; it increased my conversion; it allowed us to do more with less. And for a lot of early entrepreneurs in that low $100,000, mid-$100,000 range, it's going to allow you to do more with—with less.

Number five is market selection; market selection; market analysis paralysis. I see it all the time: people will try to reinvent the wheel in any step of the process, but particularly with market selection. They're trying to figure out new ways to market to these or new different types of—of lists and data. Uh, as a general rule, if you want to go from inconsistency to consistency, you have to have a consistent market selection process, which is just about executing a simple, correct strategy consistently. It is not about reinventing the wheel every single time and trying to create alchemy with your market selection. When we're talking about consistency, you'll see that that's a big part of these top seven things that keep people from scaling.

And the sixth one is non-reliable marketing and sales systems. I see this literally all the time, and to be fair, it happened—it's happened to me, and it continues to happen. So you'll—you'll—you'll hit a snag in your business, and most people never get it to be reliable. But when they do, they think that's a static thing: "I'm finally tracking my KPIs in my marketing stack; I'm finally tracking my KPIs in my sales; my marketing is going well." All of a sudden, something happens; something shifts, and they go back to—off the tracks; the train is off the tracks. And—and really having reliability in our marketing, sales—we're—we're in a marketing sales business—and having reliability in that specific part of your business is crucial. If you do not have reliability, consistent lead flow coming through your business, you're not going to have a business. What I hear most investors say is, "I send some mail; I get some leads; I close some deals." What they should be saying is, "I have a predictable lead flow system; I have reliable sales processes; I have a consistent follow-up process." Those are very different, and all it takes is a mindset shift and a commitment to consistent sending out mail, consistently marketing, consistently looking at your data, consistently following up with sellers, consistently using the same script and coaching to the same script. And then when you hire people and bring people on, this is where it kind of falls down for a lot of people: you have to imbue in them the expectation that this is how we do things here, and then you manage for that. Like a lot of times I see people mess up is because they will create a sales and marketing system that works for them as the entrepreneur, as the principal, and then as soon as they hire people, it goes to shambles, right? Because they have high accountability as self, but they don't know how to manage and communicate that accountability to others. I know that because I've had a—a—a very difficult time doing that, and it's a different skill set that has to be learned. But we just think we'll just hammer away, or "Why doesn't this person know how to do this?" In reality, we don't have the systems, the processes, the SOPs to support them. And so, in some figure, investors have consistent, reliable systems; they have a system for predictable lead flow, follow-up sequences, and reliable sales processes. And when you fix this, scaling becomes that much easier.

Number seven is inconsistent funding. Remember when I got started in the land business, my first year, it's about 4 months in, and everyone was telling me, "Hey, Clay, you know this is the—you got to offer 50% of market value or 45% of market value to get a deal done." And to me, that felt like a really crappy heuristic because um, I came from the house wholesaling, flipping world, and you know you do uh after repair value times 75 uh minus repair cost minus um your—your—your wholesale fee to get your price. Basically, it was like this really easy heuristic. And so what I see a lot of land investors doing is they're sort of like—they'll just throw out an offer and they won't really know how to know if it's a good offer or not. And that was me, my first 6 months. And then what I did is I—I found a—a funding partner that basically I ran all my deals through, so I knew my profit share, my JV profit share, and this person helped me take my business to the next level, helped me do some subdivides, a lot of flips in my first year and—and second year, and they were my primary person, right? What happened was I was using uh friends and family money; I was raising at a lower interest rate; I was using any kind of money that I could get—really hard money lenders that would charge me outrageous fees—and it really made it so that my offering was—was inconsistent, and especially when you're scaling, it was really hard for me to predict revenue, cash flow, profit, and—and the ability to offer. And so I couldn't even teach my team members how to come up with an offer. And so this underwriting became a bottleneck. And so when you have a consistent funding funnel, it became that much easier, right? I knew what my uh funding partner is looking for, just like you know—like you know that, for example, a hard money lender is going to lend up to X loan-to-value or loan-to-cost at this interest rate in these points, etc. It's the same exact thing with funders, but I was so inconsistent in my early days, and it just created more drag. You're seeing all these things just create drag, and they—and they prevent you from scaling as quickly as you can. If you can streamline, even though money might be a little more expensive, there's a way to offset the expense through the expertise of the funder. But man, it—it was much easier to scale, and I could focus on different tasks, higher dollar value tasks, if I had my funding solutions consistently put together. And I felt that was like an inflection point for me in—in year one, and some—it gave me predictability in my offers; it gave me more time to focus on my business; and it gave me confidence in my deals. So I fixed this, and I was able to scale quicker, able to get more offers out with more confidence, able to communicate this to my lead manager so that he could filter better with pricing. There's so many things that—that we were able to do to just streamline when we got our funding down pat.

Number eight is—is shiny object syndrome. We all deal with it; I deal with it every single day: shiny object syndrome. And—and—and really success in a—in a land investing business, any business—business in general—it's right about this like very unique balance between old and new things. Just kidding—most of the time you should be doing old things: what works well, what works better. There's this great concept about, you know, problems versus opportunities. And a lot of times, the growth in your business is already in your business; it's already rooted in the problems that you solve versus the opportunities of going out like—um, a lot of people are leaving land right now, or some people are leaving land to go into distress acquisition or wholesaling or something else. And the reality is, you—you might get over a problem in there; you know, you might get a quick win, and then you're going to have the same problems that are in your business. And so shiny object syndrome is an immaturity. I had this early on in my business—um, like I—I was tweeting my first year, even though it helped me get investors; I was tweeting in my first year. I was like, "Why am I tweeting in my first year? I should be focusing on my business." Social media is also a shiny object—um, I say as I—as I do social media—but I have a specific purpose because we have uh we fund a lot of investors' deals, and we raise a lot of capital through this. And—and at this point in my business, I have a—a team that runs the day-to-day of my business, so I can get out and focus on the next greatest opportunity. But specifically when you're scaling, you know, you're going from $300,000 to $800,000, it's a really different relationship, and—and that's what I was focusing on: "Hey, can I add this revenue stream?" instead of focusing on solving the problems, right? A—as Steve Jobs has said, "Focus means saying no to 100 good ideas." Your quality of your focus is not about the amount of nos that you say; it's about the nos that you say for really good ideas that like are painful in your gut. That's when you know you're practicing this, and it just feels uncomfortable, but it does allow you to focus on the most important things in your business: double down on what's actually working; stick to what makes you money. This is what I did in my first year; it was able to allow me to X my revenue from year one, you know, to year two, take on more capital partners, raise more money, do a lot more partnership opportunities because I was focusing on building the business and doing it well—um—and—and I realized that scale really comes from simplicity; it doesn't come from complexity and new revenue channels. So if you get benefit from this, give a comment below; tell me where you're the biggest one that you're—that you're dealing with. Subscribe; hit the subscribe button; like if you're getting benefit from this. This channel is really dedicated to helping you scale the business—your scale—at this point, helping take you from $100,000, right, to a million plus in revenue, and then helping you get your—your funding solutions really dialed in to help you take that business to the next level, whether it's capturing bigger deals, getting bigger deals under contract, or getting your funding dialed in for your regular flip so you can scale faster. If you like the—the video, the podcast—um, leave a comment below, and we will see you next week.