Transcription
All right, hey guys, F Lamers, and I'm really excited to make this video. This video, or these strategies, changed my life honestly, so I'm hopeful that this also helps you in your journey and scaling your land business. The topic of this is: Build a land flipping Empire that runs without you. We build these businesses so that we can get a really good amount of cash flow, build a lot of wealth, make smart investments, and have a vehicle that can make us half a million, a million, two million, three million dollars a year profit, right?
And I'll just show you, like, before I even get into what that looks like, I'm going to show you what that did for me. So when I first started wholesaling real estate, doing land deals, I basically had a well-paying job that would break without me. So I was spending a lot of time on the phone, a lot of time comping properties, a lot of time in my business, just like in my business still, making like really, really good, like top 1% earnings, right? But if I stepped back, if I stepped away, if I went to make a YouTube video, if I wanted to go travel, if I wanted to, it would break without me. And that didn't work for me; that didn't work for me because I knew I wanted to build a business that worked without me. I knew I wanted to be able to build a business that ran, and I'm still able to close deals while I'm doing whatever I'm doing, because there are other things that I wanted to do with my, my life at this time. This was like, I'd say 2022, around that time, so a few years ago now.
Within about six to eight months of just like locking in on these principles and focus, this was me with a high-paying, wealth-creating vehicle that ran without me. This is actually my wife and I in Paris at lunch. We went to Paris a couple of years ago for two weeks straight, and that entire time my business was closing deals. My acquisitions managers were on the phone, transaction coordinators doing what they were supposed to be doing, tracking numbers, checking the Slack—like all of these things were happening while I was in Paris with my wife. I got to enjoy my family; we got to do a lot of cool stuff in Paris and like, still making money, and that was awesome. So me stepping away from my business, me checking Slack at the end of the day, it was fine. All I did was say, okay, cool, looks good, looks good, looks good, and that's it—still making money, business still cash flowing, and that's what you want to create. Because why would we just do this to create well-paying jobs? We want to create vehicles that allow us to take that cash and invest it into the things that we want to do, whether it be building up your investment portfolio, whether it be traveling, whether it be passions that you're interested in having. This is what we created the land flipping business for; that's why, that's why we built this, right? That's why we build these businesses.
So I'm, I'm going to take you guys through the fundamentals of building a land flipping business that runs without you, and that starts with hiring the right people. This is so important. You, you have to be able to hire the right people. I feel like a lot of people are really like fast to hire, especially when they start doing this; they see like, oh, okay, it must be super easy, it's probably super simple, and they try to hire someone, and then that ends up wasting them, I mean, tens of thousands of dollars. I've seen people waste so much money trying to hire people, and they don't do it correctly. So first things first is to hire slowly. So you do want to avoid impulsive hires. Don't just like, okay, I'm gonna hire the first person I see; you don't do that. We go through extensive failing processes that I'm going to explain in order to hire someone at our company. You also want to take some time to define what these roles look like in your business, and I'll go over the key roles that I have in my business so that I can help you. And you want to be able to screen your candidates. So I'll give you an example, just as an example, a job post. What we'll do, we won't just put a job post and just have people blindly apply. In order to apply to our job on any role that I have, I have something like this that'll say, hey, when you've submitted your application, reply to the job posting at the end of this with the answer of six times three. And if they don't reply with 18, then I know that they didn't read the entire job description, so that tells me they weren't paying attention, and I automatically disqualify them from the job posting. These are little tips and tricks that I implement in my business to make sure that people are paying attention, that I'm getting, getting high-quality people.
Now it's also important to use your gut—like how you're feeling about a person when you actually talk to a person. How are you feeling? How do they fit when talking to you? Do you guys gel? Do you like the person? Like, that's a really important thing. Don't just hire someone because you think that they're really qualified for the job and you don't like them, because over the long period of time, if you don't like a person, if you don't like working with someone, if someone's a, someone's an a**, I mean, honestly, I, I don't want to work with that person, so my business is not going to make as much money, just naturally; we won't make as much money. So I would actually prefer a person that is a really like, just a good person and dedicated and nice and listens and doesn't have this big ego about them. I would much prefer them on my team than a person that knows a lot but is not open to learning more and has a really big ego and doesn't want to listen. I would much prefer the person with less experience that is not an a** than the person that has more experience that is an a**. So keep that in mind, because honestly, a person that is open to listening and has less skill can always grow up in your business, right? They can always grow in your business, and they see the room for growth. When employees see room for growth, they stay with you forever, as long as they can see ways for them to grow in your business; they're going to continue to grow, and they're going to continue to want to work with you.
I also ask questions about their personal life, so I'm going to ask them how their relationship is with their parents or their spouse or some friends. What would your best friend say about you? These are the things that I'm asking because I'm also trying to get a gauge on their character. When a person has good character, you're able to tell very clearly through some of these things, some of these questions that you ask them about familial ties and friend ties. Like, I want to know how you are in your personal life. Are you a person that parties sun up to sun down, or are you a person that's disciplined? Because I would much prefer to work with the person that's disciplined, because that's the kind of person I am. So the person, the people that you work with just must fit in line with your culture and what you're doing in your business and what your goals are. If you have party animals as a part of your company and you're not a party animal and they're showing up to work tired, what are we doing? Which is why we have to ask these questions. We need to ask the uncomfortable questions, even though we don't know them that well yet, but it's important to ask these questions because I'm bringing you into my apparatus of success. So if I bring you into this circle, you need to be within line of this, because if you're not in line with this, we'll be able to tell very quickly.
Let's say I was to hire a new acquisitions manager today. If I were to do that, my team, if this person was just, if I didn't ask these questions, let's say I didn't do any of this and their person was not good, my team would know immediately within the first week. Um, yeah, we need to let go of this guy immediately. That's how you build strong culture though. We have to know like, okay, whoever is not in our one sound, one band, one mind of what we're doing, they got to go, and we can feel it immediately. The other thing is having trial periods. You want to have trial periods, and one thing I do as well is for a new hire, I'll even hire two candidates if I need to. I'll hire two candidates at the same time, give them the same training, give them a certain allocation of leads each and see how they perform one over the other. See who's lazy, see who takes advantage, see like, I'm looking at this, see who actually tracks the KPIs—like I'm looking to see if you're doing everything you said you were going to do when we had our first interview. After a couple of months of that, I'm going to keep the best performer. The other thing too is get someone that has hired people before. Get around people that have built teams before. This is something that I also did. I wanted to be around, and I still am. I, I am around the people that have $50 million net a year teams now, right? These are people that I pay to have conversations with because I want to up my game. I'm looking to get to 15, 20, $25 million net profit per year just across all my different businesses. So that is something that is important. You want to be able to go to these masterminds and go to and just connect with people that are doing better than you. I, I'm always looking to make connections with people that are making a lot more money than me, no matter how much money I make; I will always seek to do that, and that's what you need to seek to do when you actually go to some of these masterminds or meetups or Discord groups. There are many different people that are looking for these opportunities, right? There are people that are looking for, hey, I would love to be an acquisition manager, a 20, 21-year-old kid that wants to be an acquisition manager that does exist, so you can also connect with them. It might be a kid that doesn't have as much money that, hey, maybe you, you can come be an acquisition manager for me; you can make 15, 20% on everything you close, and I'll send a mail, I'll do the processes, I'll do all that—that could also work for you. It is important to seek some guidance from people that have done this already; that's one of the most important things. I will tell you a job posting is traffic, so you do need traffic, whether it be LinkedIn, Indeed, onlinejobs.ph. You need to explain the job very clearly with an explainer video and a description. You need to interview, go through the interviewing fields and make sure that in between these two you're qualifying them, and then you onboard them. You either onboard them or you say, yeah, not a fit. Those are the four pillars of hiring someone.
Now specifically with Indeed, Indeed, I've honestly found some of the best candidates I've ever found, and I mean I've hired people from all over the world just in different businesses, but specifically from my land business, I've hired people from all over the world: Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, you name it. I've hired these people by using a VPN, and I use a VPN; I go into Indeed, and I can literally go into whatever job search, whatever country that I want to go into, and it's, it's a cheat code; it's fantastic, and it's actually a lot cheaper, so you're able to arbitrage your money, um, because in Brazil $12 an hour is a lot of money, and you're going to get a really, really, really quality employee for 12 bucks an hour. I also give applicants scores and ratings based upon how good their application was in my internal system, so I'll say like it's a funnel of leads; let's say 40 or 50 leads come in; I'm scoring each one. Okay, this one's a zero because they didn't answer six times three; this one didn't put a specific piece of information that I asked for; this one's just not qualified. These are things that I'm taking out, and then the best five I interview. So anyone that I gave an A, I'm gonna interview. Now this goes back to a little bit of what I was talking about before, but we need to make sure that the core values of our company are in alignment: accountability, extreme ownership, respect, and kindness. These are things that are absolutely non-negotiables for me, because if you don't have a person that takes responsibility for something, you have a team of losers. You need to have people that are extremely accountable for the things that they do, for the things that they say, because when the going gets tough, when things get hard, the people that don't take accountability and don't take responsibility are the first people to mess you up and quit on you and walk away. So you need to make sure that when you're building a team that these core values are very, very, very clear, and there should be a zero tolerance for those core values not being honored, and if those core values are not honored, then you need to take those people off of your team and find new people. I want people who are problem solvers; I don't want people who are complainers. I want people who are going to be proactive with solving problems; that, that's what I want. And honestly, the skills can always be trained; the skills can always be worked on; you can always get better at that, but the core of who a person is has to be within alignment with those principles; have to be the core of solving problems, no matter what, has to be in alignment with how someone thinks and feels, and if they don't feel that way, they can't work with us.
So some benchmarks for hiring full-time: you do want to have anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 liquid from your land business in order to hire full-time. So what I mean is you need to start getting deals under your belt, start making money from the land biz before you hire, so that way you can start to build out some processes; that's what you want to do. Have a lower overhead, take the calls yourself, work the transactions yourself, talk to brokers, make those connections yourself, do all those things yourself. The only thing you shouldn't be doing on your own at first is the answering service. I recommend delegating your answering service from day one, but everything else you need to be doing in your business, and not only do you need to be doing them, but you need to be actually recording them and creating processes around that in your business. So what are the best practices for you? How do you work best? And then create those processes. So, okay, specifically, what does it look like to follow up with the seller? What does a follow-up process look like? How many times did I talk to them before I got this deal done? When I opened escrow, how did the title companies receive me? How can I make them better receive me? How can I make sure that I build rapport and build trust with them so that way anytime I open a deal with them, they're Johnny on the spot, quick to go get the title report? How do I make that happen? When it comes to a broker, how do I talk to a broker to make sure that I'm making a good connection with them and they actually want to list my property? How do I find a good broker? You have to create all processes for this before you start hiring. Once you create these processes, it becomes a lot easier for you to go and hire.
Now this brings me to the key roles that you need to delegate in your land business. So first things first, before we even do everything else, we need to have the answering service to field leads, so that's either Pat Live or AnswerForce. I've used both; both work very well. Now once, now once you're at the point where you've got anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 liquid—really, I would air towards the $100,000 liquid side more than 50, but once you get towards that range from deals that you've actually closed in your land business—you need to hire an acquisition manager; that should be the first hire. An acquisition manager is a person that speaks with sellers, negotiates with them, builds rapport, secures purchase agreements. An acquisition manager is also responsible for lead management and following the acquisitions process that you set. An acquisition manager can add anywhere from $350,000 to $500,000 profit into your business, a good one; a really good acquisition manager can do that, and so it's important to create really good processes for acquisition managers, and I mean I've had acquisition managers that were brand new that I turned into making me 250 grand in a year, and I've also had people that were more experienced that were able to kill it as well. So when it comes to the experience versus non-experienced, it doesn't really matter; it really matters how good your processes are, cuz I take anyone who doesn't know anything about land flipping or talking to sellers, and I can turn them into a person that makes me a million dollars a year. It's just about the skill to do that, right? It's just about the skill in like cultivating a person's strengths. You have to get good at that if you want to be a manager, if you want to run an Empire, then the only way to do that is to get really good at becoming the manager of the Empire. The only way to get good at that is by practicing it, so I've hired and fired so many different people to the point where now I know who I want as a part of my team; I know who I don't want as a part of my team; I know what they look like. This just comes with practice.
So next you need a transaction coordinator. This is someone that oversees the closing process from start to finish, so from the time that a contract comes into the CRM to the time that it's closing day, they oversee this. So they open escrow with title companies; they manage those relationships; they make sure that you know title knows that we're legitimate, all those things they handle this. They check in on the title report; if there is something going on with the property itself, they also handle, okay, let me check the zoning of this; let me check some leans; let me look into property records for this property; they're, they're doing all that, right? Okay, if a property doesn't have access, if we need to find an easement, like these are all things that they're doing. Acquisition manager interchangeably does these things as well, just to make sure that they're equipped to speak with the seller, but most of the time the transaction coordinator is doing all due diligence related things on the back end once we actually have the contract, just to make sure that we're not buying a bad deal. Next is our disposition manager. The disposition manager is a person that handles listings; they also market our properties for sale with brokers and real estate agents, local land-specific brokers, and they're in charge of managing those relationships. So a dispo manager is in charge of managing their relationships and building new relationships with brokers. So I'll get into that a little bit later, but we do have key metrics to manage our relationships with the brokers and find new relationships consistently, and they're also in charge of price drops. So every couple of weeks, if we need a price drop, if a property doesn't have as many views or saves as we like, or there hasn't been a lot of showings, that means that the market's not responding well to our listing, so we'll drop the price, and they're in charge of making sure we drop it 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, so on and so forth.
Now when it comes to managing and running your team so that it can run without you, clarity is extremely important. All of your team members need to be extremely clear on what their task is, what they're supposed to do to lead the team to success, and everyone needs to P-Y-P, play your position. That's one of the things that I actually use in my company: P-Y-P, play your position. Make sure that we're all playing the right position; make sure that everyone's tracking the numbers that need to be tracked, and make sure that we're all being accountable. So our accountability chart and our KPIs tie into one another, but here are some of the KPIs that we do track in our business. So for our acquisition manager, they need to track week-over-week conversations that they actually had, offers that they made, and contracts that were actually signed. When it comes to our disposition manager, they're tracking new brokers that they connected with; we're tracking views and saves for our current listings, and we're tracking showings, so that's those, those three are actually the biggest ones. So with the disposition manager, we're tracking views, saves, showings week over week, and then we're also tracking verbal offers and tangible offers. Now while they're doing this, they're also connecting with new brokers. So I want to see, okay, how many brokers did we speak to this week? It's a little bit less of that today because we're working in the same markets and we kind of have the same brokers already, so I don't really need my dispo manager like continuously having new conversations, but we do want to, like, it's important to me; it's always been important to me to build my Rolodex full of brokers because you just never know; you never know who's going to need something, um, so I, in any market that I'm looking to work in, let's say it's a market that I haven't dominated yet, if it's a market that I'm looking to get into, then we need to be connecting with new brokers in that market. If it's a market where we've done more than 10 deals, then we don't really need to do that because we've already sunk our teeth into that market; we already have the brokers; we already have infrastructure set up there. Now with the transaction coordinator, they're KPIs are to track contract sent to title and the estimated return time on title reports. That's a very important metric, and this is something that I didn't track at first, but then I realized that, hey, I'm still asking, hey, when's the title report coming in? When's the title report coming in? But it's because we weren't tracking it, so I just have my transaction coordinator actually track that, because sometimes in some counties, I mean, they're talking about it's going to take two weeks, right? We just want to know that, and then if we need to put a rush on it, if we need to ask them to put a rush, then we can, but at least we know, hey, Becky at this title company said that it's going to take seven days, seven business days to get the title report in; that's what they're seeing on average, so we always ask, hey, what are you seeing on average for an estimated return time for a title report, especially if it's in a new area that we're working in. Areas that we've already worked in, we're okay, it's probably going to take a few days; it's going to take two days, but new areas we always want to clarify this as well.
When it comes to managing your team, problem-solving is very important. You need to encourage people to take initiative and take ownership for their actions, no matter what. As the owner of the business, I always take ownership and take action. If something went wrong, first of all, I take ownership; I say, you know what, I should have communicated this to you better; I apologize; I'm sorry, but moving forward, let's do this. And my team members also take account of, you know what, I should have listened to that better, or I should have corrected this; my apologies. There's never any, you did this, you did that, you did this. When you point the blame and point fingers at people, they leave; you're not creating good culture with that. We want to get better; we want to grow together; we want to make money together. That's how you build a profitable business that builds you wealth without you even working in it—by growing with people, by allowing people's spaces to grow, by creating solutions, not blaming others; that's how we do that. And, and this is a very simple concept, but it's not easy, because the human mind, on average, I mean, people are always looking to point the blame somewhere else because they don't want to take accountability for the things that they did wrong; that's just a truth, and so you…
Need to be the opposite of that if you want to make millions of dollars over the next few years with the land flipping business. That's very possible for you if you're following these frameworks.
Once you entrust a team member with a role, you've trained them correctly and they're doing it, do not micromanage them. Like, that's one of, "Oh, did you do this? Did you do that?" Like, let them do their job. Make sure that you hired the right person and have confidence that you hired the right person. Point out the things that they do well. I tend to point out the things that my team members do really well. Like, "Hey, great call! Like, we broke down this call on an acquisition, this was fantastic, great job!" Or a transaction, "Hey, you did a great job at speaking to that title company!" "Hey, great job on, you know, sending that report in so quickly!" This is what we're doing right. You have to make people feel good about themselves. It's really important. And this is not something where like, "Oh yeah, I only pay my guy $16 an hour." Like, no, we want our team to feel like, "Wow, I was able to come into this business, make six figures in this business, and I grew here. This allowed me to, like, this changed my life." I have changed lives with my land flipping business; people that otherwise wouldn't have made $100,000 in a year, they otherwise wouldn't have made that, but they did with me. That's what happens when you take extreme ownership; you end up with your business being autonomous.
Now, lastly, is hiring SOPs and tools for your employees and team members as well, which I actually have built out in the LandVerse program in full. I mean, pages and pages and pages of SOPs and tools to help you hire your first employees, make sure you're hiring the right people, make sure you're talking to the right people and management as well. So when it comes to defining their role, what is the role? What should they expect from the role? How much should they expect to make? And also include growth for them, like a growth path for this position, because that's what people want to see. If I'm going to be spending my time on this, what does my growth path look like? Because most people don't want to stay in the same place forever, and I actually don't want to work with anyone that wants to stay in the same place forever. I want to work with someone that wants to go from, "Okay, I made 30k, then I made 50k, then I made 100k, then I made 150k, then I made 300k." Those are the people that I want to work with, that want constant growth, and that's who you should want to work with too, because then those people are going to be motivated to grow your company. They're going to be incentivized because they know that when they do more, when they sharpen their skills, when they start reading more, when they do research outside of the business, that actually helps the company grow. And by helping the company grow, they're going to make more money because they're going to grow. So you need to incentivize them with that. When you can incentivize them with growth, they're going to grow your company without a shadow of a doubt. They're going to do things to improve their skills; they're going to invest in improving their skills because they see where the company can go. And especially if you have a vision for your company, and listen, if the vision for your company is, "Hey, I just want to make a lot of money," then that's fine. If the vision is, "Hey, we want to make a couple million dollars a year," that's fine; there's no problem with that. But make that very clear so that they know, "Okay, this is the vision, this is what we're doing, this is the bigger picture. So let me sharpen up my skills and tighten up my game to make sure that I can grow the company so I can grow myself."
Now, when it comes to actually posting the jobs, the biggest thing that I do is Indeed plus a VPN, and I'll set the, and I'll set the location for where I want to hire. So like I said, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Philippines, Egypt, you name it. You make sure that you have screening questions on there, then you monitor the applications with the scoring system. I also use Upwork. So let's say like for some smaller jobs, you can also use Upwork. There are also acquisition managers, transaction coordinators that are well-rated on Upwork that you could use as well, but I would prefer to use Indeed if you are trying to build a long-lasting culture. Someone on Upwork is going to be like, "Here today, gone tomorrow," whereas someone on Indeed can be someone that, like, works with you for years and years and years. So just think about that. Don't take the lazy approach. Like, Indeed does take more work; Upwork doesn't really take that much work. Just keep in mind those people will probably just want to work with you for a short period of time, and those people are more freelancers than they are a part of your company. And a freelancer is not really going to be invested in your business; they're more invested in their business and what they can do, especially if they're already experienced. There's nothing wrong with that, but that's just not what I personally want to build. I personally want to build culture as a part of my business.
Now, when you screen them, you're looking at their application, reviewing their application, making sure they're checking the boxes when it comes to culture fit, experience, habits. I'm checking for all these things. From there, if they had a good score, like let's say I gave them an A on their score, then we're going to take a meeting, we're going to talk to them, and then I'm going to ask them to do things that are in alignment with their role. So I might ask them to call a seller; I might ask them for a call that they've previously done; I might ask them to break down a call. These are things that I may ask them to do, and usually a good employee that's applying to your job will have these things. So like they'll have call recordings, they'll have examples of them being on the phone, they have all this that you can review, and you should definitely ask for that, because a person could be great on an interview because they're hungry to make money, but then for some reason be terrible on the phone or just be lazy with it. And so we have to make sure that we're nipping that in the butt as much as we can, and it, it won't be perfect, right? I've gotten this to the point where it's very ironclad, and I can spot someone that's BS'ing from someone that's not, but we ask all these questions and we do all these assignments just to make sure that the person's going to be sharp when we let them into our company.
So usually what I do when hiring people is create a competition. So I'm interviewing anywhere from three to four people at one time, and I'm basically picking the best out of those three to four. It's a, it's a very large funnel. So literally, we'll start at the top of like hundreds of applicants, and then we go through these rounds. By the time I'm done building all these people out, I have three to four people. So if you have more than that, if you have like 10 people, seven people, you didn't do it right. So it should be a funnel. Like, there are things to disqualify these people that I've explained in this video, and by the time that you get to the finalist, you should know, "Okay, I'm either one, gonna hire the best person, or I'm gonna hire the best two people and have them compete. And whoever does better, whoever produces more results, whoever works harder, that's what I'm going to go with," because I need to know that when we get in the trenches, when things get difficult in our business, this person is going to work; they work well under pressure. That's what I need to know when you establish that you have a successful land business, because I will tell you this, this business is not all glitters and gold all the time. There are times when things happen, and we got to solve problems just like any other business. And so it's important to have employees and team members that know that, understand that, "Hey, we may not make a million dollars every single day, but can we get 50 deals done this year and average $30,000 profit per deal? Yes, we can. Here's how we're going to do that, right? I'm going to make sure I solve this problem. If a deal is in probate, I'm going to keep following up, keep following up with the seller until they go through that process." No matter what the problem is, we got to be able to solve the problem because that's why we get paid. And as long as your team members understand that, you'll get paid on autopilot, on autopilot.
Now, lastly, when it comes to onboarding your team, you give them the SOPs, you give them the paperwork, you give them tools, give them the CRM, Slack, everything like that. You onboard them in; they're a part of your team now. Now, I set a plan for 30, 60, and 90 days on where they should be, how many conversations they should be having, and what I expect from them within 90 days. And we check in weekly, especially when it's a new hire, weekly, every single week to make sure they're hitting these targets. You need to be a mentor and a point of contact to your new employees and make sure that you are guiding them through and just make sure that you're guiding them through the business, make sure that things are running smoothly, make sure they don't have any questions, make sure that you're extremely clear. As long as you're doing that, you are golden. As you progress through running your team, you can have meetings weekly or bi-weekly. I make sure to have individual check-ins with each team member every two weeks just to make sure they're doing well in life, they're feeling good about things, they feel like they're growing, they're not feeling burned out, checking problems that we have, checking how their performance has been. It's more so like we, we almost, we become friends, really, not even almost, we become friends, right? And I'm really here to cultivate your growth and cultivate the growth of the business. If you grow, the business grows, and that's what you have to understand. If you help your people grow, the business will grow. So these are the key frameworks to build a land flipping empire that runs without you and go from a well-paying job that will break if you don't work in it to a high-paying, wealth-creating vehicle that runs without you, and you can take that cash and do whatever you want to do with your life with it and enjoy your life. That's what this is for; we build these businesses to enjoy our lives and to live life as we see fit. And if that is in alignment with you, if that's what you're trying to do, if you want to build a land flipping business that runs without you, book a strategy call with me below, and I will help you implement the same systems that I have in my business. This has been Feo Lers, and I will see you guys on the next video.