How My Team Locked Up $872,000 Last Week

Most land investors are flailing.

They’re sending random mail, chasing shiny objects, and wondering why deals aren’t closing.

Meanwhile, Clay’s 25-person team just locked up $872,000 in profit—in one week.

In this episode, Clay reveals the 13 pillars that built this machine from the ground up. Whether you're a solo operator or scaling fast, these are the exact systems, mindsets, and tactical plays Clay and his team use to dominate the off-market land game.

You’ll learn:

• Why “velocity > volume” is the hidden key to compounding returns
• How to build a lead gen engine that runs without you
• The real reason most land investors never scale
• The underestimated power of tight scripts, scorecards, and SOPs
• How to move from freelancer to CEO—and finally build an asset

If you're tired of winging it and want a real blueprint to scale your land business in 2025, this episode is for you.

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Transcript

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Last week alone, my 25 person team locked up over $872,000 worth of profit. I'm gonna show you the 13 provided the foundation for us to do this and how you can implement them even if you're starting from scratch in 2025.

Imagine this, it's the end of 2025, your acquisition manager shoots you a text that you locked up another 100k this month or 200k this month. Compare that to the majority of land investors who are posting on Facebook or I see posting commenting on other posts and saying the land investing is dead. They're sending out mass marketing, they're not targeted, they're not stacking lists, they're not building a team, they don't have a system, they don't track their KPIs and they have no idea

what's going on in their land business.

Here's exactly how we generated $872,000 worth of profit over the last week.

I call this the 13 pillars of off-market land dominance.

And this is the same system that my 25 person team uses every single day.

So pillar number one is build a marketing advantage. What most people do is they hear something on a podcast and they say, okay, I'm gonna try texting, I'm gonna try cold calling, I'm gonna try mailing. And they don't do enough of it to get enough feedback on how they can actually build a pillar of consistent opportunities. Now, the reality is people come to me all the time to help them scale their business. And one of the things that we fix immediately is

getting consistency in their business. And the way that we do this a lot of times is asking the opposite question. I learned about inversion from Charlie Munger who says invert, always invert. So if we have a problem that we want to have consistent 25 leads per week, we would ask ourselves the question, what should I do in order to absolutely guarantee that I don't get 25 leads per week or 50 leads per week or whatever you're going after? And then you do the opposite of those things.

So in order to build lead generation and marketing machine is you wouldn't track your KPIs, you wouldn't look at your data, you wouldn't stay consistent in a single marketing channel. You wouldn't do all the things that would make you successful. And so what I always talk about with my clients and in general,

is you want to focus on one specific channel and to a million dollars. Whatever that channel is, you want to absolutely dominate it and understand it through and through order to get to a million dollars in top line profit and then from there you can start to layer on additional ⁓ revenue channels.

Pillar number two is plan the buyer before you buy. One of the things that Amazon does incredibly well is if you notice, they'll actually look and see what the best performing categories and within those categories, the subcategories, maybe it's a painting set, and they see some independent sellers are crushing it with this specific type of painting set. And so what they'll do is they'll then bring on an Amazon

basics and cut the price by 20 to 30 % lower. They knew that the market already needed this specific type of painting set. And what they did is they came in and they cut it down. And that as land investors, that's what we do. We come in, we add liquidity to the market, and we bring a product to a market at a lower price than the competition, the eyeballs on the market. And that allows us to scale quickly.

that allows us to know that we can lock a lot of deals up because we have a good backend disposition process because we know the markets that we're going into need and require the type of product that we're bringing to the market.

Pillar number three is what I call the script multiplication So I recently had three new acquisition managers come into my business and about a week in they noted how strict I am with strict script adherence. And the reason why is because a lot of salespeople think that they're natural born and you're not as charismatic or you can't be as ⁓ playful or whatever.

Adjective or a word of acting that you want to put in install by following a script reality is scripts give us structure in a foundation for how we can consistently ⁓ Produce the same outcomes. So for a lot of people that come into my organization, I'm listening to their calls I'm reading over those scripts and we have managers

that are now doing that in our outbound team and other teams and we have a way of operating a checklist, a script, a framework for everything. But specifically in our sales process, which early on, if you want to be very successful, you want to be able to have a very scripted, reliable and consistent sales process. Because the reason why people really fail and why we've been able to be so successful is we follow a process. Every single time we get on a call, we know what that call is gonna look like. ⁓

appointment center, lead manager call, and then we have a closer call. And so over time, our closers or our appointment centers get used to the same objections, the same conversation, the same resistance, the same expectations that sellers have on each of these calls. And so we know how to handle them. We can almost predict and anticipate what the seller is going to say before they even say it. And so that type of consistent process allows us to scale

scale our acquisition team and lock up $872,000 worth of deal in a week with only three people, three acquisition managers. It's because of our strict script adherence to the script. If you want to using the inversion tactic like we spoke about earlier, if you want to guarantee failure in being a better salesperson and locking up deals, you wouldn't follow a script, you wouldn't be consistent, you wouldn't call the sellers back when you said you were going to call them.

You would basically talk about anything the seller talked about and you wouldn't guide the conversation. You wouldn't be able to have hard conversations.

script serves as a structure for every one of our conversations with sellers and allows us to produce consistent and outsized returns over our competition.

Pillar number four is a precise valuation strategy. Where I a lot of people mess this up is they go into a sales conversation and they might have a funder for this, a funder for this, private money for this. And so really they can't create a machine. A scale is about being able to predict profit, right? And so they have an unpredictable, unpredictable,

⁓ valuation method. So if they're bringing on team members, the team members don't know how to use a value calculator or calculator to have a predictable outcome because sometimes you use this funder and other times you use this person and it creates a lot of confusion. And if you can tell by these individual pillars, we're thinking about a consistent process throughout this entire land business. Scaling a business is not complicated. It's not easy though. The reason why it's not easy is because we need to create rules and boundaries and structure

in order to scale. so scaling means finding a consistent funding source. My first year and a half, I used a one specific funder who served as a consultant and as a funder. So find that funder, find that person that will allow you to scale. And in the short term, you might say, well, I'm giving up maybe a little bit of equity, but I'm learning a lot in return. And for a lot of people, that's actually how you scale, right? And if you're one of the people that's saying, hey, why am I not scaling, right?

You have to look at your circumstances and look at your business and say, there's probably too many things that I'm doing. Because scaling is simple. It's a series of inputs that reach an output. But if you have variable inputs, specifically in your pricing and your valuation methodology, you can't teach it to someone, right? So you can't scale out of that part of your

and it produces inconsistent results. And so you can't scale with your capital stack, so you can't scale with your disposition stack, so you can't increase your velocity of capital, so you cannot bring on more people. And so you have this consistent process of inconsistency. You're gonna hear about me talk about that a lot, but that's the reality.

So Pillar 5, is, Pillar 5 is the lead volume engine, so I was having a conversation with someone the other day and he sent me this text, it was hilarious, his private coaching client. He said, hey Clay, I can't believe the quality of candidates that I have now because I've increased my, scale. And I said, well, if you're bringing on people,

I used the example of I recently hired a director of revenue who's an incredibly talented individual, but we're paying him six figures. And the difference between an $80,000 employee and a $140,000 employee is night and day. difference is also in the global talent force, right? So you might pay someone $8 versus 12 and you get a completely different individual, right? Or $12 versus 15 or whatever it is,

A lot of people specifically early on would hold on. They want to pay the least or not pay it all. And so how we create a lead volume engine is we hire hoos. We hire people to come into our process. So we're not taking every any call. We're hiring the right person to help us buy back our time to help us focus on the highest dollar, highest production value tasks. And that's how we succeed. That's actually how we scale. And that's how

we were able to lock up $872,000 of profit last week. I didn't make a single call. I didn't have a single conversation. But I have a team of incredible team members that create this volume engine, this lead volume engine, and it works when I'm not

So, pillar number six is the contract control method. What a lot of people do is put a bunch of earnest money down or try to get a deal on their contract and they negotiate horrible terms because they want to get a deal on their contract, right? We want to control the deal. He who controls the land controls the profit, or she. ⁓ And so, what we want to do is one more. In these negotiations, we always want to have

control terms, right? Price is a little less important to us as you realize, but terms, longer inspection contingencies, ways to get out of the contract so we can bring in new opportunities, more opportunities into our business, but all the while, those new opportunities ⁓ are ones that we have the opportunity to potentially get creative financing on, ⁓ potentially have assignable contracts so we can sell deals before close.

Our goal is to scale here. Our goal is to get to consistent revenue and the way we do that is we have control over our contracts.

is your land inventory costs you money. Velocity over profit. This might sound a little bit contradictory to what I earlier said, but the reality is we scale through bringing capital in, reducing our cash conversion cycle. And if we can reduce, for example, our cash conversion cycle by 20, 30%, but our profit reduces by...

10 % or 15 % of what we projected or maybe 20%. Our net net is better because we're able to move our money faster. If I can decrease my time to flip a deal by ⁓ three months, and I might reduce some of my profit, but the opportunity is moving faster, my absolute return on my money is normally higher, right? And so,

What I recommend specifically for new investors, and this is how we look at it, we want to drop really, really quickly, right? And we don't want to price it at the top of the market. I was talking a little bit about earlier about finding the right buyer for your land. Well, pricing it for the right buyer is super important. So an agent might say, well, comps in this area are at $100,000. We don't want to price it at 100. We want people to gobble it up right away.

Price it at 90, price it at 95, maybe at 87, depending on what stage you are in your business, to reduce our days of market. Velocity matters more than volume of profit, specifically as you are scaling this business at the beginning. You want proof of concept and you want consistent profit so that you can scale and you can predict the time that it takes for your inventory to move through your system. Because when we think about it, our business really is a conveyor belt. One side of the conveyor belt is

market selection, data, sales, dispositions, pulling it through the conveyor belt. The faster we can compress the time in the conveyor belt, the faster we can scale. So we might give up a little bit of profit for velocity.

Point number eight, the consistency compound. Daily actions beat big swings. Most people will get super excited. They'll say, go lead manager, let's have a huge week. And they'll call maybe for a day. The lead manager makes 120, 130 calls. Next day they make 60. Next day they may make 20. Next day they make 50. Next day and they make 10. I see this all the time in new coaching students that they don't have consistency.

They don't track the metrics. Consistency matters more than volume. You must be consistent before you can be high sure that you have a series of KPI trackers, specifically when we're talking about marketing and sales, because our business is 90 % marketing and sales. And so if you want to get the 80-20 of that, the 20 % of things that move 80 % of the results is you focus on creating those calling quotas.

the conversation quotas, the talk time quotas, the offer quotas, the qualification quotas, the texts, the calls, the direct mail sent quotas, all those things in the front end, that consistency compounds and creates a scalable business.

number nine, the biggest opportunity is in your problems. Early on in my business, when I really struggled to scale was when I focused on 95 % of my time on opportunities versus problems. What's the difference between an opportunity and a problem? An opportunity is something that you haven't already done, you heard about on a podcast, and you go out and you do the thing and you say, wow, I'm adding entitlement, I'm adding subdividing, I'm adding distress acquisition, I'm adding...

InfoLots and you have a core part of your business, let's say it's for recreational or let's say it's And you're like, I'm gonna add this to help me versus I'm gonna solve the problems in my business to help me scale. Now it's easier, it's more fun, easier at the beginning, it's more fun, more novelty you get feedback loops faster if you go out and try to solve opportunities, you try to attack opportunities.

But the way we scale is not through going and trying a bunch of different things, hearing about a new marketing channel on a podcast. It's about solving the problems that are within your business. So over the next quarter, can you ask yourself, hey, if I solve this problem in my business, it will increase my profit per deal by 20%. A perfect example is, I need to increase my ⁓ profit per deal, right? You can either say, well, I'm gonna go and add a subdividing

in target specific subdivides. And that's what I'm to do. Or I'm going to add entitling land. Or you could say, I'm going to increase my average profit per deal by $20,000. So I get $50,000 profit per deal. ⁓ And that will make me 50 % more profitable without having to build out an entirely new infrastructure to target these specific types of problem or properties,

You could do both of those things. What would be easier, there's a matrix ice, impact confidence ease. The impact of this would be great, it would increase your profitability. Maybe you do it through a series of selecting different types of land. The confidence is, if you do that, it will happen. If you target bigger pieces of land, you will make more money per piece of land. The ease is basically just changing your market selection versus I have to build out a project management system, infrastructure, broker relationships.

target different types of markets, create different marketing pieces, have different conversations, improve my sales process, understand transaction management for a larger deal, understand how to dispose this deal, increase my timeline to sell, all those things if you go after an entitlement opportunity versus just increasing your profit per deal by $20,000.

Clayton Hepler (17:09)
this is actually pillar number nine. It's the velocity principle. The person who can get the offer underwritten for the right number and offer faster wins. Earlier in my business, what we used to do is we would underwrite a deal and take us, you know, we'd have to underwrite it with a lead manager, we underwrite it with the acquisition manager, we'd call a broker, and it ended up taking us 40, 48, 72 hours, maybe a whole week to actually get back to the seller. And when we decreased our time to

put together evaluation, we increased our ability to get more closeable deals under contract, because we're competing with other people and the faster we're able to get deals under, you know, offer on deals, the faster we're able to get them under contract, the faster we're able to close, the faster we're able to get money back through the door, the faster we're able to scale, the fast, the more money we're able to put into our systems to get faster. And it's this flywheel, right? And so the velocity principle really, where I see a lot of new land investors fall down,

is they do not offer on deals fast enough. And what I spoke about earlier with the contract, the ability to own the contract and own the terms in your contract, if you have that control, you're able to go back to the sales say, you know, I missed something in underwriting and not doing it unethically, but being able to have that flexibility to get deals on a contract and go back to the sales say something changed, you know, not that you should do that on every deal. And we don't, we rarely go back to the seller and renegotiate to be fair.

but it does give us the out, it does give us the ability to go back and say, hey, this is a part of our inspection period and we need to ⁓ change the price because it's something that you didn't disclose to us or we found in our due diligence. And this is common in everything, buying a business, buying ⁓ multi-family self-stores, land, anything. So it's not unusual to do this, but our ability to offer on deals fast really increases our ability to scale this business.

Pillar number 10 is the CRM advantage. so many of my private clients when they're first starting out, their CRM looks like an absolute rat's nest. Have you ever seen like a movie where someone's like looking through like Mission Impossible movie or something like that and they're looking through like a box and they're trying to like, like an electrical box and trying to like put a, you know, get the lights back on and put one.

wire with another and you have like thousands of wires like all interconnected and it doesn't make sense and it's not clean. A simple clean CRM that makes sense that your lead manager is acquisition managers and you are gonna use is way better than the most automated AI based CRM that's incredibly fancy and incredibly expensive. Google Sheets works and then the most automated Salesforce AI based CRM works as well.

But making sure that you have a CRM that fits the maturity of your business and has all the right follow-up processes and the reminders so that salespeople who never like to put notes in CRMs have the amount of ⁓ organizational and structural empowerment to do the things that you want them to do is a complete advantage. I think so many people don't actually pay enough attention to this and so they'll either try to soup it up and make it unusable even though it's incredibly expensive.

and powered up CRM or they have a CRM that's so basic that it's not allowing them to do basic follow up and bring more deals into back alive or make sure that they're following up with people or they're tracking the right thing. And so the CRM advantage is something that we're really, really good at internally. It allows us to lock up $872,000 in a week because we know how to follow up with sellers. We have a specific process that we use and our CRM supports that completely.

number 11 is master the art of problem solving. Things happen.

I see nationwide and with my private clients that investors close anywhere between 60 to 70 % of the deals that they get under contract. Now you might say, wow, that's a ton that people are dropping. Well, access issues, problems, easement, miscalculations of valuations all lead to these problems. Now this is a specific part of our process that if we analyze, if we can go from 60 to 70 % close rate or 70 to 75 % close weight,

That could change our businesses profitability by an extra 100, 200, $300,000 and not add any additional marketing, not adding more people, not adding more systems, not adding more software. And so if we can get good at solving problems, not only can we expand our ability to take more deals down, like we had a deal that we purchased, it was a 46 acre tract. In front of it was a two acre, basically non-buildable tract that was purchased

at a tax sale a couple of years ago. And we knew that if we purchased the property and went through an Action for Quiet title, that we would be able to gain access to the back of the back parcel. We were buying the back parcel for a really good rate, but we negotiated with the seller, these are two different sellers, that we would close the back parcel when we went through the Action for Quiet title for the front parcel. Sometimes sellers are flexible like this, other times they're not.

So we went through a nine month process. We spent about $25,000 buying that front parcel and going through the actual legal process ⁓ to go through the action for quiet title. Most land investors wouldn't have done that. Most land investors wouldn't have had the skill to solve the problem, the back seller's problem. And we were able to paint a picture ⁓ good enough that when we purchased that back parcel, we ended up purchasing it all in for about hundred thousand and our exit is going to be close to 300,000. Right? So it's an incredible deal.

But most land investors would have said, hey, this is a tax deed property. There's no way I'm able to purchase this because I can't get title insurance. We had the ⁓ availability, we had the funds, and we had the problem solving ⁓ capability to take on this deal and the risk appetite. And we're end up making $180,000 because we're able to do this, maybe 170 after ⁓ cost of capital and things like that. So we took a problem and made $170,000 in net.

because of it.

I learned this pillar, pillar number 11, directly from Dan Martell. I copy from him absolutely ruthlessly, unapologetically, is ⁓ conducting a time audit. Now, this has been popularized from a ton of gurus, but I wanna give credit where credit is due. And so I have my clients do this every single time that they start with

Right, and so we conduct a time audit and we look at the $10, $5, $15 an hour tasks that are taking you away from producing the highest value for your business and we remove them. We hire those people to fulfill those tasks. A lot of times people hire someone based on what they hear on a podcast or what they think they should do, whereas they should be pulling themselves hiring to buy back their time, right? That scales your business.

A lot of times I find, especially with my private clients or people just interacting on social media, they wanna do the dirtiest jobs, right? They either wanna do the dirtiest jobs or they wanna completely scale out their business. I think both of those philosophies are helpful but also flawed. We want to hire based on what the business needs. Not necessarily on what we want, but a lot of times we, as the highest paying employee, the entrepreneur, need to focus on what we do best and that's what the business needs. And so the business gives us the opportunity

for us to do what we do best. Now of course there's gonna be what Jeff Bezos calls overhead, things that for the business, that are what we need to do in terms of our production quadrant, but not things that we necessarily love. And that's okay, that's what a part of being a business owner is. But the reason why I've been able to scale and lock up $872,000 in a week is not because I'm working any harder, it's because I've found the right people.

by buying back my time through conducting things like a time audit and knowing the hiring ladder. Which brings me to pillar number

So pillar number 12 is a scorecard, right? So many people come to me and they have absolutely no idea what's going on in their business, none. They don't know the right time to, they don't know their cost per lead, their cost per deal, their cost per contract, their cash conversion cycle. They know no data about the inside of their business. They don't know what profit's gonna be coming in over the next 30, 60, 90 days. They don't know how much cash they have in their bank account.

And building out a scorecard that can encapsulate all the most important pertinent data to allow you to make better business decisions is a life or death thing. And most people just do not have this. I started this business, I flew blind for a year, a year and half, and all of sudden, when I started to implement a scorecard and focus on,

using the data from the scorecard to make decisions, my business started to improve. It's crazy. So having a scorecard, a KPI sheet, tracking your key KPIs is the difference between a business that knows the direction that it's going in and a business that's not. if you're just putting money in your marketing machine, what ends up happening when you don't have KPIs is this. Some months you have the best months ever and you increase your marketing.

⁓ that exact month and then you have to decrease it again in three months and then you do the same thing on and off and on and off and you have this this cyclical business. Some months are crazy. Other months you have to drop your marketing because you're so much in the red. And the reality is as a land developer, we do have cyclical months, but when we use KPIs to make decisions about hiring, firing, marketing, onboarding, systems, software, CRM, data,

skip tracing, ⁓ marketing, it allows us to better predict our cash and better predict our ability to scale this business. even though for those visionaries out there, which I am a visionary, ⁓ that are not necessarily ⁓ mathematically inclined, it is the life or death of your business. It's the difference between having headlights in a misty night and having no headlights at all driving in the night.

When you have your headlights, you know what the direction that you're going in and you can ⁓ chart a course to your business success. And one of the things we do right away ⁓ when people join me for a private coaching is we go through their yearly goals, their 12 month goals or three year goals and we build a plan using KPIs as the foundational key ⁓ element of the conversation. plan, if you wanna make a million dollars,

next year, like what do we actually need to do? What are the KPIs, the inputs that we need to put together? And then we have the scorecard as the backdrop in order for these people to make sure that they know, are they on the course or are they off? And what do they need to do to get back on?

So the last pillar is the asset versus income mindset. A lot of land investors are glorified freelancers. They do everything in their business and everything, all problems, all monkeys, all challenges, all barriers to growth come to them versus building an asset. And we build an asset in our land investment business. We become a CEO. We go from a hustler to a CEO.

when we start to document processes, build SOPs, build procedures, hire based on outputs. And so the question is, are you the type of entrepreneur, land investor that is a income based land investor or are you building an actual asset? That's why we were able to pull in $872,000 of profit last week, not because of anything special.

because we build an asset, we build a machine, we build an engine, and the way that you do that is systematically go through your process and build out SOPs, procedures.

in a business infrastructure that builds your life's infrastructure.

Look, I just gave you 13 pillars that generated $872,000 of profit week.

But here's the harsh reality, most people will listen to this video, they'll get excited, they might implement one pillar, maybe not. They'll bookmark this, they'll take some notes down, and they really won't do anything. Are you gonna be that person, are you gonna be the person that actually takes this information, distills it down, and implements it right away? If you want my scorecard that I use with all of my private clients, you can click the link down below and download it.

This is for someone who's committed. This is for someone who wants to implement. This is for someone who wants to scale and build a seven-figure land investing business. And as always, please, if you love this rate review, comment below. out all the comments and subscribe. Until next week.