The Roadmap to Land Investing Success: Starting With The End in Mind

In this conversation, Clayton Hepler shares his insights on achieving success in land investing by emphasizing the importance of starting with a clear vision of one's goals. He discusses various paths to profitability, the necessity of building a structured roadmap, and the critical role of clarity in decision-making. He also outlines actionable steps for aspiring land investors and highlights common pitfalls to avoid in their journey.

Takeaways:

Most people jump into land investing completely backwards.
Focus on your 'why' before your 'how'.
There are three paths to six figures in land investing.
Clarity in your goals leads to better decisions.
Define your time investment and financial resources.
Consistency in marketing budget is crucial.
Set clear benchmarks and KPIs for success.
Avoid vague goals and copying others' strategies.
Track your time and actions against your KPIs.
Feedback is essential to avoid giving up.

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Transcript

Clayton Hepelr (00:00)
Hello, my name is Clay Hepler. And if you don't know who I am, I own and operate a multiple seven figure land flipping and development business and the fastest growing land investment specific newsletter on the internet, as well as the top program for land investing in America. Now today I'm going to share something with you that completely changed my land investing game. And it's probably not what you're expecting. Now here's the thing.

Most people jump into land investing. They jump in and they're doing it completely backwards. They're focusing on the how without ever figuring out their why. Now in the next few minutes, I'm going to show you the exact framework I use to build a multiple seven figure land investing business. But here's a twist. We're not going to start with marketing. We're not going to start with deals. And we're not going to start with markets. We're starting with the end

Now, let me paint a picture that you might recognize. You're doing everything right. You're sending thousands of mailers monthly. You're making dozens of calls daily. You're analyzing every deal that comes in. You're working 60 plus hours a week, yet the results aren't matching with the effort. Why is that? Because you're playing a game without knowing what winning looks like. Now, let me show you something really interesting. Here are three different paths.

to six figures in land and estate. Now, the first path, the volume play, is the path that most people take. Now, for example, the volume play could be two deals per month at $25,000 in profit each. This requires maybe 10,000, maybe eight, maybe 12,000 mailers per month. We're gonna go into these a little bit later. The time investment for the volume game is the most, right? You are in the trenches every single day and you're having a lot of conversations with people.

That could be a 40 hour per week job. It also could be, depending on how you set your business up, much less than that. Now, your annual profit at $25,000, two deals per month at $25,000 in profit each is $600,000. Pretty damn good. And let's say you have a bunch of software and marketing, and your marketing budget comes out to be somewhere in the $10,000 per month range.

Your key focus and the volume plays really just quick flips, infill lots, rural recreational land, quick flips for either one of those. Now, path number two is the high ticket focus. It is maybe doing one deal every two to three months. They're all subdivide deals. They're much larger deals and you make $100,000 in profit for each of these deals. Now, this requires a more specialized marketing approach.

to larger and more sophisticated landowners. So it's not gonna be the same type of marketing that you're using for your volume play. But for something like this, your time investment could be much lower, because you're gonna be talking to a lot fewer leads. They're gonna be higher quality leads, but they're gonna be a lot fewer. Your annual profit for this could be $600,000. It could be much more than that, or it could be less if you're not doing as much and sending out as much marketing. Your marketing budget is gonna be a similar type of range.

depending on exactly what you're trying to focus on with these types of larger assets. Now the third path is sort of the hybrid approach. This is what everyone thinks that they should do, right? They should do a couple of smaller deals when they start their business and a couple of larger deals. So say you do a couple of smaller deals at 15 a month and maybe one deal a quarter at $75,000 or $150,000.

your annual profit's gonna be in that same range, but what happens is when you split your focus, especially at the beginning, and if you're running this business by yourself, which is what a lot of the people in the land man profit accelerator, maybe they have a couple of VAs, but a lot of land investors in general, you get overwhelmed, right? And so you can't large approach well or the right? So how do we

Start with the end in mind and not have to work harder but work with more clarity so we can achieve Let's build a roadmap. So here's what you need to decide when you build a roadmap when you're building your land flipping business. Number one, your time investment. Are you full time available? Are you like a lot of land investors, a lot of people in the land profit accelerator that are maybe 15 to 20

Or are you even lower? You have minimum time, but you have team support five to ten For your financial resources, how much money do you have to spend per month? For most of the people that join the land profit accelerator, I always say, hey, you need, for most of the people that join the land profit accelerator, always say, hey, three to $5,000 per month for the first six months and actually be able to do that, right? A lot of times that, we're gonna talk about clarity here in a little bit more in the second, but people,

Well say, hey, yeah, can do 5,000 a month, but in month four, maybe they're getting the results they want or they're not getting the results that they want and they want to either jack it up or they want to pull it down they haven't closed on as many deals as they originally or they're the reality is you got to stay consistent to hit your goals and that means a consistent allocation of money every single month. And the last thing is the business model. Like a lot of people...

started out as a solar operator and they wanna scale their way out of this business. But if you scale your way out of the business, your profit also gets scaled out of your business. And a lot of times, because we are in the business that we have to outlay a lot of cash and a lot of marketing to get money back in, people think that, I'm gonna invest in a team member and it's gonna implac me in 30 days. No, it's three months, four months, six months out.

before a team member can really impact your team. So that's why having this type of clarity is so critical in order to build a thriving successful business in year one or So let's break down what I just talked about in real life. So say you wanna hit a $25,000 per month goal.

your average profit per deal is $12,500. So you need two deals per month to hit that. And we know in the we close about 65 to 70 % of the deals. So that means, hey, I need to basically lock up three deals per month On average, depending on what you're targeting, let's say it takes 40 leads for, let's say we're using

Using easy math, that means we need about 80 leads and with a 1 % response rate, that's about 8,000 mailers monthly, which is about a $4,800 So you see how we're really breaking these things down with the clarity. It's not just like I need to send out these amount of mailers or I just need to work harder, work my leads harder. There's a predictable in land. This is a direct marketing business. There is a predictable...

amount of marketing that you send in order to get feedback. Now, it could deviate from one quarter to the next, but as a general rule, you can expect a certain response from your marketing for direct mail, anywhere between 0.5 to 1%. So you can build that out and say, if I know my average profit per

This is the amount of marketing it takes to get these amount of people in to get my profit deal. I can build out a business with the end But this is where people mess up. Working harder isn't the first step. It's clarity. When you know exactly where you are going, your decisions become clear. Your actions become more focused. Your results become predictable. Now I remember when I was starting, I sent out 15,000 mailers and I did not get a single

deal. I only spent in software and mailers and my course was even more than that. And what happened was I really took a step back and I said, dude, like this is not going to get me to my goals. If anyone knows me that year, my wife actually lost her job right before Thanksgiving and I had to make a lot of money really, And so there wasn't any time for feeling sorry for myself or not already committing. I had to keep pushing that boulder.

up the hill. So I got crystal clear on my goals. I knew the amount of time that I had to allocate through this. It was my full-time job at that point. I just went all in. I knew what I needed to make in order to hit that. And so I went around and talked with a bunch of people in the industry and said, hey, what can I expect? What's my average cash convergence? How long does it take for me to Who do I need on my team to hit

how many mailers do I need to send, what's wrong with my mailers? I got really, really clear and then set up benchmark so I started to get deals after I set up benchmark KPIs. It was the same actions, but there were different results, all because I knew exactly what I was building. So let's make this actionable to you. Here's your step-by-step plan. Number one, write out your 12-month income goal.

Define your ideally weekly schedule. Is it 20 hours a week? Is it 40 Enlist your available resources, primarily financial resources. How much money do you have to allocate to actually building out this business over a four to six Pick your strategy. I always recommend people starting out in maybe rural info lots or our info lots or rural recreational lots.

They're just kind of more, they have a better feedback loop. You're gonna get more feedback quicker versus larger subdivide properties. And the reason why a lot of people fail in this business is not because they're not capable, it's because they give up. And people give up because they're not getting the feedback from, I sent out this marketing, So after you define your resources, then you can define your marketing budget.

then you can define your system, you can define your lead what marketing channels you're using, so that you can have clarity on what it takes to succeed. And when you're, something's,

going wrong or maybe your marketing responses are dipping or going up, you can still keep the path steady in order to hit your So here's a couple of common before we end this video. So people set a lot of vague goals. Hey, I'm just going to make, I want to make more money or I want to send out X That's not going to work, right? That's not going give you the clarity that you need in order to follow a plan in order to be successful. Number two, people just copy other people's strategies.

Hey, I'm gonna copy this strategy that I heard on some guy on a podcast and I'm just gonna implement it into my business without actually looking at the KPIs, looking at the current processes that you have or looking at the learning, maybe took a course or program and you just can implement something and throw it in your

People think that that's easy to do at early on stages of their business. Well, I can just add this as an extra-dispos strategy or it's an extra-acquisition strategy, but adding that type of stuff that's not within the plan, the clarity plan that we just talked about you creating is gonna create a lot of friction and it's gonna really prevent you from hitting your goals, because you're Another thing is not tracking your own time, saying, hey, what am I doing? What are the actions that I need to take in agreeing?

with my KPIs in order to be successful. So here's what I want you to do right now. Pause this video, write down your ideal monthly profit, calculate how many deals that requires. You can be a little bit more conservative. For me, it's about $26,000 per month, but that fluctuates greatly every month. You could say maybe, depending on the properties you're going after, 15,000 to be conservative, and calculate how many deals that that requires. Comment below with your gross profit number.

the deals that that requires and your average profit per deal that you're thinking that you need in order to hit If you want to take this a little further, I guide. This is what we actually use in our business to say, hey, this is the industry for cold calling, for texting, for RVM, for direct mail, for response rates. So I can actually predict, I have this amount of money I can allocate it towards this channel.

and get this type of feedback so I know, hey, I want to make X amount of money this year and I could just plug and play in this guide. So you can download the again, don't forget, if you got any benefit rate, review and because I'm going to be bringing a lot more of this content for you every single week. Remember, if you don't know where you're going.

any road is going to take you there. But when you start with the end in mind, success becomes inevitable. The land investing game win aren't just working harder, they're working with clarity and

So apply this, build out your clarity, and we'll see you