The 6 Unsexy Mistakes That Destroy Land Business When They Scale (And How to fix them)

Most land investors don’t fail because of mailers, data, or markets.
 They fail because of leadership.

In this episode, I break down the six unsexy mistakes that destroy land businesses when they scale — and how to avoid them.

Here’s what we cover:

• Why your culture will make or break your team (and how to actually build it)
• The rookie mistake of scaling out too fast (and how I blew up a department)
• The trap of focusing on the wrong “busy work” instead of revenue
• How weak onboarding kills performance before it even starts
• The simple feedback loops that keep standards high
• The 85/15 Rule I use to stay focused and avoid “priority whiplash”

If you want your business to grow without you holding every single string, this episode is your roadmap.

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👉 https://land-man.kit.com/land-architect-os-framework

📊 LandStats → https://www.land-stats.com/?via=clayton
🌎 LandPortal → https://landportal.com/claytonhepler
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Transcript

Clayton Hepler (00:00)
Everyone loves talking about deals, data, and mailers, but here's the unsexy truth. Most land investors don't break because of the market. They break because the founder can't scale themselves out of the business. The second you step out of a department, your company will fall to the level of its standards. And if those standards are weak, that's where your business dies. My name is Clay Hepler. I started a land business with $30,000.

and scaled it to $3 million in gross profit in under three years. But it wasn't because I was smarter, it was because I learned the hard way. I've made almost every mistake, wrong hires, poor culture, bad onboarding, even losing top talent. And I can tell you what breaks land businesses is always leadership.

In this video, I'll break down the six unsexy mistakes that destroy land businesses when they scale and how to fix them. If you want your company that grows without you holding every single string, this is the roadmap.

So mistake number one is not repeating the miss in the goal, the non negotiables and KPIs nearly enough. Think about why do people work so much harder at Chick-fil-A than at McDonald's? It's the culture. You can hire superstars or you can build a culture that creates superstars. Most land investors can't afford to hire only superstars. Early in my business, I was strapped for cash. I needed a core group of dedicated, hardworking, strong performers.

before I could hire the best of the best. So I had to create a system that rewarded high performance through acknowledgement and structure.

this is not a set it and forget it system. A lot of CEOs, including myself, when we think about building culture, we think about, we now have our core values, we now have our mission, our goals, and we're good, we're done, right? But most people don't even remember what they eaten two or three days ago. And so how can you expect your employees to be the type of people that are gonna remember every core value, your culture, your mission, if you're not repeating them over and over and over

In elementary school, we would put our hands to our chest and recite the Pledge of Allegiance every single day, and most people can't even recite it right now. It's the job of the CEO to reinforce culture through everything that you do. No one will ever be a bigger evangelist for the culture than the CEO by what you do and by what you say. So once you put this into practice, once you actually create your culture, it begins to work.

So here is an example of a mission. 50,000 homes to market by 2030 through scalable team-run capital-efficient real estate systems while being the vessel for personal and professional growth and financial freedom for all the team members and investors. Right? Actionable? Absolutely. Right? Is it something that involves all the team members? Absolutely. That is a mission statement that people can really get behind and they get really excited about. Now here's non-negotiables.

Total ownership, proactive execution, speed is our edge, competitively great. These are the non-negotiables that we have that we repeat and that we reward Every single week. We start every meeting with these. We start department meetings, L10 meetings. We open up by having each team member shout out another person for exemplifying one of those values. So we have our culture, our mission, we have our core values, and we have our goal, right? Underneath our goal is

$20 million in gross profit by 2028. It can't be a pie in the sky. It has to be clearly, clearly built out. So there has to be a clear way that you can see that we can actually achieve this goal. It was interesting, Mr. Wonderful was recently on an interview and he was talking about, you know, of all the most successful founders that I've had, primarily they are women. They set goals that are ⁓ a stretch, but achievable. And this creates momentum in your business. So,

it's cool to have the mission to a terraform Mars like Elon and these crazy non-negotiables, and a big hairy audacious goal. But for land investors and for your team members in general, hitting those goals, whether it's like 80%, 90 % of the time, is actually a really, really positive thing. And if you see the momentum, if everyone sees the momentum of the business, it really improves the morale of the company.

And then after you get these goals, then you create your department KPIs. So you have your company KPIs and then your department KPIs. One of the things you need specifically to do and then underneath the department KPIs are the individual KPIs that you hold your team members accountable for. Now this might seem like really soft stuff, but I can guarantee you that if you take it seriously, you have the core mission, the culture.

the core values, the goals, the department, the individual KPIs. There's nothing really high, really reverse engineering your goal. This is something I do with my private clients. When we onboard, we figure out what's a three year, one year, three month, one month goal and how are we actually tracking towards that. What are the KPIs that we need to be engaging in to hit

Mistake number two is land investors are trying to scale out of their business too quickly and they hire talent that should not be in that position and give them excess responsibilities and they wonder why they fail.

I had really high performing lead manager and this lead manager was eloquent, capable, had what I perceived to be very high functioning intelligence. we saw that sales were slowing and I said, hey, if I could bring you as a lead manager into dispositions, it would be this great opportunity. But I hadn't really built out this department and I mistakenly thought that I could hire someone to help this global talent, this lead manager.

to stand up this department, the entire disposition department. So I was expecting a higher than admin, kind of mid-tier global talent, assisted with a disposition manager who had been doing this very successfully for years to build on an entire department. Build out the strategy, the KPIs, the vision, and do. Now, looking back, it kind of seems a little ridiculous to think of that.

Why would Clay ever do that? I see land business owners do this all the time and we have a lot of confidence that our people want to empower our people and people online tell you can either hire talent or you can build are taken in a vacuum, which is what I did. The reality is in our land business, if we want to stand up a new department, most people require coaches to help them scale their land business.

me included, expect VAs, global talent, people that are not paid on an executive level, our level of pay, to be able to run and scale a department. They just can't do it, right? They can't be a doer and a thinker and a strategist and like a partial CEO. If they were, they'd just go out and start their own land business. this is where I see a lot of land investors go wrong and the mistake that I really learned.

Hey, just wanna interrupt this really quickly. Down below a KPI sheet that we recently released for our six and seven figure private clients. If you wanna get it for free, you can click the link down below and download it really quickly. And back to your video.

And the rule that I learned from this is if you're gonna stand up a department, you need to know it just as good as anyone and then build the systems around the operating procedures of the department itself before you install virtual assistants global talents actually in the department. this will increase the ability for this department to have

the outputs that you're looking to have. And then later on, you can install the global talent to actually run But we're the executive, we're our highest paid employees, and so if this is truly a department that was valuable and important, dispositions, it totally was. Then it was my responsibility as the CEO go in there and build it out, build out the systems, and then bring on this lead manager to run the department. But I made the mistake, created a lot of

turmoil and strife ⁓ with this particular employee and this particular employee is no longer with us because it was just too much stress for her to Our role as a CEO is to attract the top talent, it's to hire and help talent prioritize what to do and what not to do, and it's to maintain the product and execution quality and that specifically is what I'm talking about with us coming into a apartment and building it out.

and here's a final reminder, no one's gonna move as fast as you can. No one decision making capabilities that you can. Don't bring on someone to build out a department unless they've already done it successfully. Learning on the job for a critical function like dispositions was a really bad mistake for me. didn't end well for me. Now I had to go back into the apartment, I had to smooth it out, and that's something that we're currently working on as well in our Many land investors want to scale

fast because of the guru hype, they think a global talent hire will solve it. not gonna solve it unless you have an extraordinary COO that's gonna be able to come in there and actually build this out. This is an executive level task and it requires executive level resources.

So the way I think about it is we are the CEOs of our business. We are responsible to make it work. We need systems that enable a VA or anyone to make good This is the like building your own McDonald's in your business. We do this by first doing the role ourselves, even if it's low impact. But if it's high impact, it's even more important, like dispositions.

We map out what success looks like, then we create an expectation track. I like to have a role clarity document that has three to five key outcomes for the position, the success metrics, indicators to show what this position is required to execute on, the decision authority, the escalation triggers, like when they involve others, resource access, tools, budget support.

The core learning is don't scale too fast and don't expect global hires no matter how high paid to build a department for Mistake number three is poor focus on revenue. Focusing too little time on revenue producing activities. We get paid when we acquire and we sell. But as CEOs, we spend time on websites, SOPs, organizing tools, and literally anything other than making more money. They'll say, hey, we'll hire, call us out later.

That's like giving your money to a Northwestern mutual advisor. They charge high and your net isn't better than you actually doing it. As a CEO, you're paid and proportionate to how well you allocate your time, people, and capital. If you want to get better as a CEO, you need to do this better. And you get better by actually doing, and you make more money by actually doing the activities that produce revenue. When we make a decision in our company, we assign a dollar value to that decision. Both time,

⁓ organizational as terms of people and software costs. Once I see it in dollar, in cents, these low ROI decisions like updating the website deprioritized fast. in order for us to go human nature of procrastinating, I always speak with my coaching students about

assigning actual financial inputs to tasks like how much time is this going to take? How many team members is it going to involve? What's our additional cost for this? And very quickly, they'll see that some of their most important priorities become not priorities whatsoever because they're not actually going to get the return on it on their time, their return on the investment they thought they were originally going to do when they're sitting there and thinking about it and not actually putting it.

pen to paper. Number four is expecting full utilization without full onboarding. You know how good someone is in two weeks, but they don't get your business until six months later. If you're hiring and your team feels chaotic afterwards, it's not your people, it is your onboarding. A McKinsey research study showed that good onboarding increased retention by 82 % and 60 % of productivity. Yet most companies

Most land investment businesses skip this opportunity entirely a lot of land investment businesses run really lean six ten fifteen people and if you're not Onboarding properly if you're not setting those right expectations it really affects your employee productivity a work class Onboarding system isn't just a checklist and logins. It's a launchpad It's built to move someone from day one to day 90 with clarity connection and

The key components of a good onboarding that we found is personalization, generic onboarding really leads to disengagement, technology that actually works, getting them onboarding with the right tech quickly, ongoing development, structured learning paths. this is a specific, if you're hiring an executive assistant, it might be good for them to get productivity learnings and other kind of executive assistant related learnings, just how to be a better knowledge worker.

structured learnings and continuous learning is going to take that person from who they are on the day of onboarding to continue to get sharper and sharper throughout their tenure. Mentorship and coaching, Your type of one-on-one coaching as a CEO, the one-on-ones serve as a mentorship and feedback to this person so they can continuously getting better. Of course, having the right culture, the right connection and a skill gap assessment, right?

Where is this person? Where do they need to be as your organization continues to evolve? Is it worth putting your time energy effort in? Again, this is another allocation of resource calculation that we spoke about in the previous mistake. You want to onboarding as your single greatest talent multiplier. If you build it right, you don't just get a better, employees. You get a better company.

Mistake number five is no feedback loops. One of the biggest breakdowns I've had in leadership is assuming that once expectations are set, people will maintain the standard without feedback, and that's just not true. We use something called instant performance feedback in our company, which essentially is when something happens that is not up to your expectations, you set the standard again, you observe the deviation, so you could say something like,

The salesperson is not putting in the correct notes in the CRM, right? So you set the standard, hey, it's an expectation that after you leave a contact in the CRM, you put in your notes and you always have a next action step. This week, I observed that there were five leads that you did not put the next action steps. You've missed this, that's a problem. What happened?

So you wanna deliver it fast as soon as you see it. ⁓ It doesn't have to be perfect. And then you coach, you don't there something that we can do as an organization in order to ensure that you are coached correctly if this has been a recurring seam? What is actually preventing you from doing this? What needs to shift? And then you loop back with ownership,

We have weekly one-on-ones. We have monthly briefs, which is we do a performance brief. It's not optional, it's not fluff, it's every single department, every individual that's underneath me. We talk about wins, struggles, metrics, learnings, team shout-outs, alignment checks, and you can just build out with ChatGPT monthly brief with this, and you'll really be able to improve your ability to lead and increase performance in your team.

those are just really small things, those feedback loops, weekly one-on-ones, insert performance feedback, and monthly briefs that will take your business and performance of your team members to the next level. Mistake number six is priority Constantly shifting priorities is something that I see so many of my clients do, my private coaching clients, and people in general.

they leave problems in their business to chase new For example, I was planning this past quarter and I had a long list. New development opportunities, notion upgrades, hiring, the list goes on and on. I was super excited, but nothing was a sure bet to hit our gross profit target. Meanwhile, we did have a gross bet. If we dropped our cash conversion cycle by were gonna make more money. If we targeted

high-intent landowners, we would make more money. If we offered on more people, we would make more money. If we called sellers faster, we would make more money. That's exactly where land investors fail. They hear about gurus making money on five-hour work weeks or entitlement deals or survey hacking or some other variation, and they ship their entire business. It's a whiplash for the team. So here is a rule that I created internally.

and time 85-15 rule. 85 % goes to core business activities, mowing the grass, keeping the business going, and 15 % goes to new experimental stuff. A lot of times, the new experimental stuff that you wanna add this quarter ends up being the experimental stuff that you didn't finish last quarter,

the 85 % is our buffer from us being impulsive entrepreneurs and the 15 % is the interesting projects and tasks that we need to do in order to continue to keep our business competitive. As a business owner, you might be 70-30.

I know at Google they used to say 70-20-10, which is 70 % is mowing the grass day to day, 20 % is new, and 10 % was moonshots or something like

This keeps us ⁓ focused on what actually matters, which is doing the things that have gotten us, that has kept us in business, keeping going, right? Those are the most important things that we need to continue to do. is the real language and systems that you need in order to continue to grow your land business. You want to reinforce your mission, your non-negotiable KPIs until they stick.

You wanna operate as an orchestra conductor, not assume global hires can manage your entire business. You wanna allocate 15 % to your core business, 15 % to new opportunities. You wanna onboard deliberately, you don't wanna skip these steps. You wanna execute daily feedback loops with IPF, weekly and monthly briefs, and you wanna eliminate priority whiplash. The reason you are not scaling isn't the market, it's within your control.

It's your leadership. It's your ability to prioritize the right things. if you like this, please hit the subscribe button. Leave a comment down below. I check those comments and I do respond to them. If you got benefit from this video, if you have any follow up questions, and below, I had a little bonus for you, a little KPI sheet that you can download that,

We'll show you our internal KPIs that we use with six figure, seven figure private clients you can take and there'll be a little video in there that'll show you how to implement it in your business completely free.