Mastering Land Investing: Strategies from Entrepreneur

Stephen S. (00:02.19)
Welcome back to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs Welcome to the show if you’re joining us for the first time and welcome back if you’re joining us for the second third or hundredth time It’s your host Stephen Schmidt and I’m here with my new friend Justin and I forgot to ask again I’m known at this point for not asking how to say last names. Is it peach?

Justin Piche (00:19.61)
Ha ha ha.

Justin Piche (00:23.92)
It’s Piche, Piche. There you go. man, I’ve heard so many variations of my last name in the years that I’ve been alive. The only place to ever get it right consistently is Louisiana. People in Louisiana just, they know it, they got it.

Stephen S. (00:25.432)
PACHE! Of course, it’s exactly like I would think it is for my classic latin background.

Stephen S. (00:40.276)
No kidding. It almost is a very Louisiana last name too. Piche. Like that sounds like some Louisiana stuff in my opinion that occasion.

Justin Piche (00:50.16)
Yeah, I’m not from Louisiana. went I went to LSU. I’m not from Louisiana, but they knew it. They knew it when I I was lived there.

Stephen S. (00:55.138)
Yeah It’s all the french people that are that have ran down in the culture there from from overtime so justin, justin’s been in real estate for a whole long time has a wonderful and colorful career that we’ll probably dive into A little bit here as well and his whole thing is land So before we get into the conversation just remember at investor fuel we help real estate investors service providers and real estate entrepreneurs

Justin Piche (01:02.48)
That’s exactly right.

Stephen S. (01:22.872)
two to five extra businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. With that being said, Justin, welcome to the show.

Justin Piche (01:32.336)
Thanks Stephen, good to be here.

Stephen S. (01:33.954)
Yeah, happy to have this conversation with you, my friend. for all of our sake, can you just give us a little bit of a context as to how you got started and how you’ve gotten to where you’re at today?

Justin Piche (01:47.057)
Yeah. I mean, I definitely did not have any kind of background in real estate investing before just doing it. Like I would say the majority of people. I grew up in Houston. I went to Louisiana State University. I was a chemical engineer there and I actually joined the Navy while I was in college. So I graduated, commissioned and then served in the Navy for five years on submarines. And then when I was getting out of the Navy,

started working at Amazon for a little bit in supply chain. And then my wife and I moved back to Houston. We were in Washington state and I got a job at Exxon Mobil in their supply chain, working at chemical plants and at the headquarters in Houston. And that was great. I mean, honestly, it was a well paying kind of engineer, college educated engineer type, type salary, pretty typical of the Houston area or maybe a traditional trajectory of somebody who majors in chemical engineering. But

My daughter was born in 2019, my oldest. I have three kids. I was born in 2019 and right at the beginning of 2020 obviously COVID hit and we had so much time to be at home and spend with family. It was incredible. It was just beautiful to lose the commute, you know, and like be able to kind of be the master of my time a little bit more. Obviously I still had to produce for the company, but I had a little more leeway to spend time as I saw fit and

Stephen S. (03:05.922)
Hmm.

Justin Piche (03:15.632)
Then returned to work, you know, it was fine. I moved, I changed jobs to work at a refinery that was, or a chemical manufacturing plant rather, that was maybe an hour commute away from my house. And I got a little brutal. And then my second kid was born in September of 2021. And my wife and I were in a position of having to hire somebody to click a nanny, basically to wake our kids up, pick them up from daycare. And it just was, it was untenable at that point. so.

Stephen S. (03:25.656)
Mm.

Justin Piche (03:42.809)
I had started buying single family houses, know, listen to every freaking bigger pockets podcast there was up until that point back in like 2017, 2018. So 2019, I started buying single family houses, doing the BRRR method. And I started wholesaling houses, I sent out a bunch of mail, got a few contracts, flipped a few contracts, bought one deal and sold it relatively quickly. And about that time, a good friend of mine had started investing in land and he was buying

I don’t know, you buy like 20 acres in Colorado for 15 grand and sell it for 50 grand or buy, you know, buy 10 acres here and double triple his money. And I was going after houses that I’d be buying for 100, 150 K or at least get a contract for 100, 150 K to hope to make 10 to 15 thousand on an assignment or some sort of flip. And he was making more margin on a tenth of the investment up front or the tenth of the contract price than I was. I was like, man.

Stephen S. (04:40.494)
Hmm.

Justin Piche (04:41.39)
It seems like a pretty like a risk adjusted, like a much better risk adjusted return. How do I do that? So I took profits from wholesaling. I bought a course in kind of coaching and land and it took about six months before I quit my job and just went all in on growing and scaling a land business.

Stephen S. (05:02.286)
Now obviously like you had a very good paying job so to be able to like quit that within six months of doing it What was that like when you were in that six month process? Was that because the margins were just so high and you didn’t have to do a ton of deals or were you just hustling for those six months?

Justin Piche (05:07.63)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (05:17.359)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (05:21.412)
Yeah, was, I mean, it was a tough time, I would say, in my life because I was working full-time for Exxon Mobil and I just had a new baby, my second. And so my wife was on maternity leave, thankfully, during this time. But then she went back to work and it was just chaotic at that moment. So I basically work a full-time job, know, hang out with my family and then I’d work another full-time job, scaling a business in the evening. Now I had a couple of advantages. One,

I was, you I’d been working for 10 years professionally in relatively high paying roles for a while. So I had money, I had cash, I had some investments, some real estate investments that had played out already. And so I had a lot of money to buy inventory and spend on operations, spend on marketing. So I just was committed to replacing my income as quickly as possible. So I initially started sending out about 15,000 mailers a month. That was like kind of my first.

I just started and boom sending out those kind of mailers and back then in 2021 timeframe mail performed really well in the vacant land space. I would send out 10 or 15,000 and get six, seven, eight contracts from it that all were producing 15 to $100,000 of gross profit. And so that period of time was fantastic. I got a lot of contracts lined up, a lot of deals, closed a few.

Stephen S. (06:27.223)
Hmm.

Stephen S. (06:40.438)
Bye.

Justin Piche (06:46.52)
saw the potential and then it was more of a calculation of, I’m making a solid salary at Exxon as a kind of mid-level supervisor, manager, person, but my time value is much higher in this entrepreneur role where I can invest the same amount of time and instead turn it into many more dollars than just working for a paycheck at ExxonMobil.

Stephen S. (07:10.252)
Right. Now you said something that was interesting that I gathered from the last piece you said there was it worked really well a few years ago. What changed with your, your mailers between then to now and why are you not getting the same results or do you not know?

Justin Piche (07:29.84)
Yeah, no, I do. You know, like any kind of industry, real estate specifically, everybody has seen this flow of competition. Right. And five years ago, land investing was like just a super small niche. mean, nobody really thought about it. Nobody talked about it. Yeah. I mean, listening to Bigger Pockets back then in 2017, 2018, I think I heard one guy.

Stephen S. (07:48.054)
Nobody really knew about it, talked about it. I didn’t hear about it. Yeah.

Justin Piche (07:57.689)
across like hundreds of podcasts talk about land investing. Everybody else is talking about houses, house flipping, the BRRR method. Short-term, that’s when kind of short-term rental kind of stuff started to blow up too. Like everybody was going after those niches and land was just the wild wild west. It was really easy for folks to send out mail. There’s a lot more competition now, right? There’s just, there’s a lot more people that have entered the market. A lot more people sending mail, sending marketing. And so your marketing just performs not as well because people get

multiple letters for their property. I think information is also improved, know, Zillow comp, like Zillow valuations and it’s a lot easier for people to look up what their property might be worth as well. So the information arbitrage advantage that someone who was well versed in an area may have had before they don’t have quite as much anymore. Yeah, those are some of the some of the main reasons I think.

Stephen S. (08:51.042)
Yeah, yeah, that totally makes sense. Do you feel like…

Justin Piche (08:53.296)
And now that’s not to say real quick, that’s not to say that mail doesn’t perform. It still performs. It’s just you’re not getting 10 contracts on a 10,000 piece mailer.

Stephen S. (08:59.756)
Right. Yeah, it’s like back when we used to be able to text everybody before A2P started cracking down on things and the carriers and stuff. It’s like, we don’t have to necessarily cold call a thousand dials to get a deal. We can send out a thousand texts. And out of that, people were getting way better responses. And then something comes in and creates that to no longer be the case for you to be able to do it, right?

So it’s just about the ebbs and the flows of the market and other factors that aren’t there. Am I wrong there?

Justin Piche (09:34.265)
No, that’s right. I mean, that’s one of the things about kind of out cold, cold marketing in general is that there’s so many different ways to do it. And I feel like each each kind of way to do it appeals to a certain type of person, you know, the same person who’s going to respond to your mailer may not ever look at their phone for a text or may think every phone text from somebody who a number they don’t know a scam, a spam or whatever. And same thing with cold call. Some people love answering the phone. They just want to talk on the phone. They will never answer to a text.

Stephen S. (09:41.902)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (10:02.736)
They’re going to throw away all mail like it was junk, but they’ll answer the phone. Some people don’t want anyone to reach out to them. They just want to see a link when they’re on their Facebook or on Google or whatever and they click on it and they’re like, oh yeah, I’ve been thinking about selling my land. And then, you know, do a PPC type thing. You got to, I think it’s, it’s worthwhile to be across all of them, but again, you have to be able to adjust when things change. with texting, texting got pretty much shut down. And for me in October of 2022, it was like,

just turned off. And I was like, no, no more. no. We had to pivot to cold calling is what we pivoted to.

Stephen S. (10:33.003)
No more.

Stephen S. (10:40.206)
Right, yeah, 100%. So now one of the things that you mentioned in your bio, Justin, is that you’ve sold over 1,100 acres in 2024, and you’ve got a team of 24 people, if not more, in case you’ve hired another one or two. So I mean, you’re obviously like, you’ve got a really large scale operation, really. So what…

Justin Piche (10:55.076)
No, that’s right. That’s accurate as of now. No, no, not yet.

Stephen S. (11:07.918)
What would you say has led to where you’re at right now in terms of building that team? What are some of those challenges that you faced in growing to that? And what’s next for you? Are you at the peak or what’s like the 18 month vision?

Justin Piche (11:21.508)
Yeah, good question. Well, in my professional career before starting this business, I had pretty much always been in some sort of a leadership position. I always had a team working for me and it was one of the things that I really enjoyed was being able to break down barriers, empower people to make decisions, equip team members to actually produce results for the company, build a good culture. And so

Stephen S. (11:34.798)
Hmm.

Justin Piche (11:50.961)
And for me, when I was in the Navy, that was incredibly life-giving in a way that is hard to describe. There was a purpose for the work that I was doing that was beyond just a job, maybe if that makes sense. And then when I went into the corporate world and working for Exxon or Amazon, it was great. I got paid well. That was fantastic. But I just was a cog in a machine. I didn’t feel like there was any real impact that I had or was making.

Stephen S. (12:05.708)
Hmm. Sure.

Justin Piche (12:20.654)
I led teams of people, we had objectives, but it was just not the same. so starting a business, it’s much more like what it felt like in the Navy, right? Where I can make a lot of difference in a lot of folks’ lives, the folks that work for me, that I just didn’t have that same ability working in the corporate world. And so that’s kind of led me down the path of, I want to scale an operation and I want to grow a team and I want to build a culture.

like high powered individuals working towards a common goal. And then the other was just a time constraint, right? I mentioned, I don’t know, maybe it’s not considered going that hard, but it felt like going pretty hard right off the bat, sending 15,000 mailers a month and dealing with all those leads alone and while working a full-time job and having multiple kids and wanting to be healthy and work, do all the things that you have to do to be a normal human being. It was just, it was too much. And so there were clear gaps that I needed to fill.

Stephen S. (13:06.158)
sure.

Stephen S. (13:13.294)
Yeah

Justin Piche (13:20.558)
And so I just started filling them. know, like the first, the first main issue I had was transactions and dispositions. So like I was great on the phone. It was great at closing. It was pretty easy for me to put together mailers and send out mailers and that kind of thing. finding time to call the leads back. I didn’t have a ton of trouble with that. I would just use little gaps in my day to call them back and start negotiations. But once we had something under contract, actually communicating with them, following up the title company, getting surveys, getting whatever other things we needed done.

That’s just like a lot of consistent work that needs to be done every single day. And I just didn’t have the bandwidth to keep doing that. So I brought in a transaction coordinator who’s still with me today, three and a half, almost four years later, my longest serving employee. And then I brought in a dispo, somebody who can list properties on Facebook and just communicate with buyers on the properties that we’re selling and tee them up for offers that I could negotiate and close. And then it was…

Stephen S. (13:59.663)
Sure.

Stephen S. (14:04.898)
awesome.

Justin Piche (14:16.912)
You know, it just kept kind of snowballing from there where we just keep building key roles. And as the operation scaled, then we needed a layer of I needed I say we because I’m talking about the team, but I needed a layer of kind of driving oversight in there, not necessarily like a manager kind of class, but people who owned results and actually improve the business for the business rather than me driving all the improvements from the top. And so that’s led to kind of.

an acquisitions team with an operations head and a couple of managers over smaller teams inside of that business. And then same thing with the sales operations, a a Dispo manager who’s over the operations and then a sales assistants that work to do different tasks in the dispositions team. then project management to fill in an executive assistant to help kind of coordinate a ton of things like closings and payroll and other things that come with scaling a team. Yeah, that’s kind of been the evolution.

of the team and what’s next? think was the other part of that question. You know, I focus pretty hard on building a business that I don’t want to say runs without me because it doesn’t necessarily run without me in order. I necessarily wanted to like I like I like the role that I’m in. I like coaching my team. I like setting big picture objectives. I love seeing the results and celebrating the team as they produce. I’ve been able to though through hiring the right people in the right spot.

focus on a lot of larger, higher potential deals. And so that’s really what I’m spending a lot of time doing now is deals that require big. Yeah, we utilize the OS. Yes, that’s exactly how we kind of run the general meeting cadence and planning of the business. Yeah.

Stephen S. (15:49.73)
Are you implementing EOS?

Stephen S. (15:54.669)
Nice.

Stephen S. (16:00.686)
Sure. Okay. I interrupted you but that was because when you said that piece that’s what sparked. finish out your thought there too.

Justin Piche (16:03.843)
you’re good. You’re good.

Justin Piche (16:08.354)
Yeah, no, just the things I’m working on now are kind of larger scale, multimillion dollar developments, building roads, funds, raising money from from LPs, managing three to five year projects. And that’s something that, you know, it’s hard for me to like hire somebody to do right. There’s a whole lot of different aspects to that than just scaling a kind of a land flipping and small subdivision type type business. The bigger projects require.

Stephen S. (16:35.916)
hard but possible.

Justin Piche (16:37.892)
Yeah, hard but possible. It’s kind of been a very logical kind of process of going into different verticals, maybe within the real estate or land investing space.

Stephen S. (16:50.434)
So who is, after all that, who is the best leader that you ever worked for and what did you take away from working underneath them that you now implement into your own business?

Justin Piche (17:01.84)
man, that is such a good question. The best leader I’ve had, I’ve had two really exceptional leaders that I’ve worked under. So let me just like quick aside. A lot of people leave the military service and they just, they really, they didn’t enjoy it. And I think most of the time it’s because they had really bad commanding officers or junior officers or whatever that were in charge of them. And it just,

Stephen S. (17:09.006)
Okay, me both. Tell me both of them. Yeah.

Justin Piche (17:31.973)
It wasn’t a good experience. I had the incredible benefit and blessing of having two really, really caring and exceptional commanding officers on my submarine. And yeah, mean, they were both just fantastic. The first one, his name is Bill. was just like set the example and tone in a way that he, man, it’s just hard to describe.

He led by example and was an incredible mentor. Like I think he saw his role obviously as ultimate responsibility, but he didn’t lead with fear. He didn’t lead with, you know, my way or the highway. He led through example and through mentorship and he was very, like very well respected by the crew, very well respected by his superiors, set an incredible command culture for our submarine that made really challenging deployments.

feel a whole lot better than they otherwise could have. And then my second commanding officer, his name was Kelly Lang, and he was the epitome of a servant leader. Here’s just like a perfect example. He was super fit, like super fit, super into fitness, and he had a personal goal of not letting any sailor ever beat him on the physical fitness test for the military. And he’s in his mid-40s.

And some of the sailors coming in are 18, 19, like 20, 21, peak, you know, health wise of a, a per peak physical. Yeah. yeah. He would, yeah. I mean, he’d do 150 pushups and he’d like, he, would, he could do like 50 pull ups. He was like, he reminded me of, my God, what’s that guy’s name? But, he’s, he’s always running everywhere. gosh. He was.

Stephen S. (19:06.36)
peak physical, piece physical timeframe, and they’re getting their ass kicked by a 40 year old.

Stephen S. (19:26.786)
Forest Scout.

Justin Piche (19:28.182)
No, no, no, no, no. It’ll come to me. He’s the guy. We don’t even go there. I’m not going to cuss on the on the podcast.

Stephen S. (19:37.182)
You’re good. You’re good.

Justin Piche (19:40.292)
No, Yeah, but he was just, he always, he just set the example, servant leader, never did, never had anybody do anything that he wouldn’t do. Yeah, he was just there, present.

Stephen S. (19:54.349)
And so from Bill and Kelly, what do you implement that you took from them into your own company with your team?

Justin Piche (20:03.674)
I think one of the lessons I learned on the submarine was how much impact you have over your team, your division, your guys. Like when I worked on the, one of the things that was the biggest deal was after deployment, you we’ve been gone and even before deployment, both of these, after and before, before an employment, we are on the ship all day.

every day for like the month before and then the month after we get back from deployment to get the ship ready for another crew to then come on and take it out. All the maintenance, all the workups, everything that needs to be fixed and changed and set up differently, whatever it might be. deployment, obviously we’re gone completely. Like we’re totally, we’re totally gone. People cannot see their family. There’s no FaceTime. It’s not like a service ship where you can get internet and FaceTime your family. Like there’s nothing. You might get an email every couple of weeks. That’s like a couple of lines.

as that’s all the data we can get, we’re totally gone, black hole. So when in that month before deployment, when everybody’s working 20 hour days, 15 hour days, whatever on the boat, trying to get their maintenance done, as the division officer, as a junior officer, you have a ton of power to make sure your team is set up for all the maintenance and tasks that they need to do so that they are out as early as possible. So that while they’re still in port, they can go home and see their families at a reasonable time, go have dinner with their families. And if you’re a bad…

junior officer or bad division leader, you don’t do those things. And your team is there until 10 PM every night because you have not set them up properly for success. And so that type of

Breaking down barriers and making sure everybody could do what they needed to do to spend time with their family, which is what everyone wants to do. mean, most people don’t live to work, right? They work to live. And the live part is pretty important, right? And so that’s just kind of a philosophy I’ve adapted for my team. And breaking down barriers, making sure they’re set up for success, having kind of an open line of communication. I’ve got a link that anybody on the team can book a call with me to talk about any issue that’s happening.

Justin Piche (22:06.084)
Nobody abuses it, thankfully, but they can if there’s some issue that needs they need help solving or help thinking through. I always make sure I’m available to be there for them.

Stephen S. (22:17.646)
When with your journey and what you’re doing now, when will you feel like you’ve made it?

Justin Piche (22:28.752)
God, that’s a hard question to answer. You know, I feel like I have made it in the sense that before starting a business and before kind of any success in that business, I always felt like I want to fire. Like everybody knows about fire, right? Financial independence, retire early. I was like, yeah, I just want to, I want to fire. I want to retire early. But I had no idea what that actually.

Stephen S. (22:32.908)
I know.

Justin Piche (22:57.968)
looked like. didn’t know. I didn’t have like a clear vision. Yeah, I remit. didn’t have a clear vision for what will my life look like when I’m fired? What am I going to do with my time? Am I going to just be leisurely and like go travel the world and you know, and as I’ve had what I’m yeah, exactly. And so as I’ve got a little older, I’m like, I’m 35. Not that old, but I’ve got three kids things. I got a little older.

Stephen S. (22:59.52)
or meant, yeah.

Stephen S. (23:06.253)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (23:11.51)
Right. What am I going to do at 1 p.m. on Tuesdays?

Stephen S. (23:21.486)
Get a little older. He’s got like a third. You’re only a third of the way through your life so far

Justin Piche (23:29.296)
Yeah, oh God, I hope you’re right. I really do. I hope I live to 105. That’d be amazing. But priorities have just shifted, right? My priorities are more involved around like, how am I raising my kids? Like, how much time do I get to spend with them? What am I doing in my community? How am I fostering friendships and relationships that are gonna last my whole life? How much time am I spending with my parents? And my current job, my current…

company allows me to think about those things and structure a life that’s really enjoyable. And yeah, it’s busy. And I think maybe my wife would have a different answer than I do, but I feel really fulfilled with the work that I’m doing. And it’s just fun being able to work on complicated projects and see the results directly from your input. That was kind of one of the things that was frustrating working in a W-2 where you’re kind of beholden to

company with very limited upside. It doesn’t necessarily matter how much work I put in. I may get a 10 % raise. Beautiful. Like that’s the high that’s like the limit, you know, maybe some some stock options that vest and three to five years, but that’s the limit incrementally on a year to year basis. But when you start a company, there’s not really a limit. I mean, you can do whatever you want to do. And if you can make it work. Go ahead, please.

Stephen S. (24:48.238)
Because even on the company, right? Because even on the company path, you know, to your exact point there, it’s like the only thing you have to look forward to is maybe, like if you were all the way up the chain to the CEO, right? Like maybe make 50 million bucks in your lifetime, but give 40 years of your life away for it, right? And then be old and ready to retire. Yeah, I mean.

Justin Piche (25:11.822)
Yeah. And I mean, that’s a ton of money. Like, let’s be real. That’s an incredible amount of money, but it’s a, it’s a huge sacrifice.

Stephen S. (25:17.038)
But there’s a lot of what ifs there too, right? Like that’s like you’re all the way up the chain, you know? Most people I think they don’t realize like they look at it and it’s like 10 million, you know what I mean? Which is still a nominal amount of money compared to the average person. One of the things that you said was you said most people, and I think how you phrased it was most people live to, they,

work to live versus live to work. think most people actually do live to work because they haven’t cracked the code.

on how to break out of that. And I think some people are okay with that. And I think there’s others that are struggling. And then there’s the others that, you know, and I think it all comes down to mindset. But like, you know, one of the things that I can see someone that’s listening to this episode, having an objection would and thinking, well, maybe that’s not in it for me is because they weren’t a college educated person who served in the Navy under great leaders and all these other things, and they don’t have money. So like, what would you tell that that person that’s just trying to keep it all afloat?

Justin Piche (25:49.381)
Mmm.

Stephen S. (26:18.89)
maybe they’ve got a family, you what would you tell to that person if they were wanting to get started and do real estate?

Justin Piche (26:22.948)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, to be fully transparent, there’s been lot of advantages that I have. mean, there’s no question, Having the blessing of going to… No, it’s certainly not. It’s certainly not. No, that’s a great question.

Stephen S. (26:35.15)
Sure. Which is not a bad thing, for the record. I’m just playing devil’s advocate of like that guy that’s listening that’s like, Justin, I don’t have all these things, man. I don’t have this background. I made bad decisions and wasted half my 20s. You know what I mean? Like I’m thinking for that guy. That’s like, dude, like I was still working at McDonald’s thinking I was gonna be a rock star at 30, bro. Like I’m just trying to live free now.

Justin Piche (26:50.554)
Hahaha

Justin Piche (26:54.725)
Yeah.

Justin Piche (27:00.154)
There’s that’s great. There’s literally nothing, nothing that I’ve done in real estate that required anything that I did before starting to do real estate. Even money, I would say. Okay. I had the luxury of just being able to delay finding other people’s money to invest in deals for a period of time to establish a track record, which meant I just didn’t have to give up as much equity on the front end as I would have otherwise had to do if I was going out to raise money from people day one, deal one.

Stephen S. (27:10.082)
Mm.

Justin Piche (27:30.127)
Right. was able to take a lot of personal risk that on myself without raising money from other people, hold onto more of that equity, establish track record. And now I’m going out to other people to raise quite a bit of money. so I guess to anybody who’s saying, I don’t have this background, I don’t have this cash. You can learn the skills required to close people. Like you can learn the skills required to find and identify deals. You don’t have to enter in at a certain scale or a certain amount of production.

Stephen S. (27:47.256)
Right.

Justin Piche (28:00.132)
All you need is that first deal to understand how the process works and then get your second deal and then start thinking about processes and then thinking about the people that you need to execute on those processes so that you’re not doing all the work. And it’s an iterative approach to growth. It’s not it’s not like you just jump in and you’ve got it all. like somebody always says overnight successes take 10 years. say whatever the however the saying goes. And that’s so true. mean yeah there’s you hear those stories and people you know people put on a good face on podcasts and they

Stephen S. (28:12.972)
Right.

Stephen S. (28:21.486)
Right? Yeah.

Justin Piche (28:30.064)
show all the success they’re having. I’ll be the first to say like, it has not been always easy. I mean, there’s been the no joke months where I’m like, I have $4,000 in my business bank account right now. Like, how am gonna make payroll? I’ve been waiting on these 10 properties to sell and every single one of them has been delayed. And these three contracts fell out and I’ve got investors to pay. You know, it’s like, there’s a whole lot of stress and coordination that has occurred. It’s not all been rainbows and butterflies. Obviously we’ve had more success than not, which is why we’re still

rowing and scaling, but it’s been tumultuous to say the least.

Stephen S. (29:10.146)
Great answer. I love that. That was a great answer. Learn. Basically, learn. Go take action. Fall on your face a little bit. Don’t do it too bad. And then just keep doing it. Rinse and repeat and find ways to buy back your time. I mean, that’s the whole like that’s there’s the system, folks. You heard it here first. Justin just taught you how to go be a billionaire in real estate. Go do it.

Justin Piche (29:35.907)
You can, mean, anybody, anybody listening can literally, if they have a cell phone, can start cold calling folks and finding data and skip tracing and whatnot. It’s not hard. You can, you can find people’s phone numbers for free. You just can’t do it in bulk and mass and get a huge list of phone numbers. And, but you can still do that. So if you’ve, it’s going to take longer, right? But it’s, it’s, that’s not a very high cost for you to just go and start calling people. And the most

Stephen S. (29:52.352)
Right. It’s going to take longer. Right.

Stephen S. (30:00.684)
Right. But 15 grand once every four months is still more than you make at McDonald’s. Right.

Justin Piche (30:09.71)
Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. Yeah, I mean, all that to say to get started, you literally have to take action. And that honestly is the hardest part. I mean, for me, I probably listened to, I don’t know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of podcasts before I actually did something. I was like, how do I make this perfect business? How do I figure this out? And the answer is there isn’t a way to do it. You just have to freaking do it and learn and you iterate and you get better.

and you see what works and you make mistakes and you lose money and that hurts. And then you’re like, okay, well, I’m not gonna do that again. So how do I get better at this thing that lost me money?

Stephen S. (30:48.226)
You heard it here first folks, Justin Piche. If anybody wants to connect with you more, if I don’t stop us now, we’re gonna end up talking for like three hours. if anyone wants to connect with you, learn more about you, Justin, where should they go for

Justin Piche (31:04.506)
Yeah, I have a land specific kind of a higher level land specific podcast called the ground game podcast me and my friend clay talk about like the business side of it. Not necessarily. What’s the right marketing technique like? Well, you know what’s that’s the I don’t know. It’s not like a interview show. We just it’s me and him looking introspectively about our businesses and our operations how we scaled what we’ve learned how we manage teams how we hire how we fire and fun funny stories share you know whatever so.

If anybody wants to learn more, can go to the… Yeah.

Stephen S. (31:34.582)
all the nerdy business stuff that people like me will enjoy listening to that’ll actually make you more money.

Justin Piche (31:39.106)
Yeah, yeah. Yep. So you can go to the ground game.io. I have a little website that’s justinpiche.com and then I’m somewhat active on X. I’m on Facebook. I’m on Instagram. I think the handle is scouting the number four land at scouting for land on most of those platforms.

Stephen S. (31:59.086)
Scouting for land go check out his site follow his podcast if you want to learn how to make more money and I level up so Justin Thanks for being here everyone. I hope you enjoyed today’s show and we will see you on the next episode