Podcast appearances and mentions of steve welcome

"First we mine, then we craft. LET'S MINECRAFT!" - Steve   Welcome to episode 224! Infinity Bros Isaac and Jarret are here to break down the Minecraft Movie with a full SPOILER review, and chat the big Switch 2 news! We also get into Marvel Rivals season 2, and the...*ahem* controversial new character! Isaac ponders the phenomenon of Jack Black revisionism, while Jarret geeks out about his favorite characters potentially coming to Marvel Rivals. It's a full SPOILER episode, so make sure you've watched 'A Minecraft Movie' before listening!   Join us for a fantastic, fun-filled conversation!   Check out the Infinity Bros Patreon for EXCLUSIVE content, including unedited episodes, exclusive podcasts, and more!   Infinity Bro Robbie has gone SOLO with his MTG career! Check out his new profile here: Robert Red Beard MTG   Want to connect with the Infinity Bros Universe? Click this link --> https://linktr.ee/infinitybros   Listen to our review of season 2 of 'Severance' on episode 223 of the Infinity Bros Podcast HERE!   Hear our review of 'Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man' on episode 221 of the Infinity Bros Podcast HERE!   Check out our 'Captain America: Brave New World' review on episode 220 of the Infinity Bros Podcast HERE!   Listen to our 2024 StanLee Awards show where we ranked our Top 6 Movies and TV Shows of 2024 HERE!   Check out our review of 'Skeleton Crew' on episode 217 of the Infinity Bros Podcast HERE!   Hear our review of 'The Penguin' on episode 214 of the Infinity Bros Podcast HERE!   Get some delicious coffee or tea from Many Worlds Tavern here, and get 10% off by using code THEINFINITYBROS!   Order your favorite character's Funko Pop at Entertainment Earth here, and get 10% off by using code INFINITY!   Check out all of RIPT Apparel's awesome t-shirt designs here!   Cover Art Artist: Jack Baumert (@Jack_baumertart on Instagram)

With Stewart Howden

With Stewart Howden

With Stewart Howden

We sit down with Steve and learn more about his life, including attending the University of Utah as both a child and a young adult, serving two missions, and building a family over 25 years of marriage. [Note: there is a fair amount of background noise from a fan but hopefully you'll still hear everything said ok]

Welcome back to another exciting episode of The Cashflow Project! In today's episode, we have a special guest, Chris Long, joining us to discuss his innovative business model in the real estate sector. Chris is the mastermind behind Longyards, a company based in Florida that utilizes industrial-zoned space to cater to larger storage needs. In our conversation, we dive deep into Chris's journey as a CEO and business owner, exploring the valuable advice he has to offer. We'll also touch upon the challenges he faced, the lessons learned from bankruptcy, and how he managed to bounce back and rebuild his wealth in just three years. Chris emphasizes the importance of having clear checklists, achievable goals, and the relentless pursuit of action, perseverance, sacrifice, and resourcefulness. This episode will inspire you to take charge of your financial freedom journey and equip you with practical strategies to navigate the business landscape. Steve: Welcome to The Cashflow Project, I'm your host, Steve Fierros, with Tri-City Equity Group. Today we have Chris Long on the show. Chris Long is the founder and operator of Longyards Storage. After nearly a decade as a carpenter and business owner of Conrad Construction, Chris ventured full-time in the realm of self-storage. Having created the very first Longyards Storage in his hometown of Ottawa, ON, Canada, he emigrated to the United States to pursue the international buildout of the company. He is responsible for the construction, stabilization, and management of assets. [00:01:33] Long Yard solves gap in marketplace by providing yards for small businesses. [00:05:51] Entrepreneurial spirit leads to fearless persistence and success. [00:07:39] Importance of mindset in entrepreneurship and overcoming fear. [00:11:46] CEO learning curve, building team, acquisition challenge [00:13:43] The humility of business owners is crucial. Growing pains are inevitable. Tweak and dial in as you go. Challenges are part of the journey. Focus on specific areas or operate on both fronts. [00:17:35] Seeking wholesalers for industrial and commercial land. Multiple layers of filtering and zoning codes. Looking for four to six acres of industrial land near highways and good demographics. Innovating a U-Haul model for land acquisition. Join venture with landowners through franchising, joint ventures, or leasing. [00:22:19] Unique model, high cash flow, strong partnerships. [00:24:47] Florida offers awesome opportunities for investors. [00:28:03] Identifying opportunity in red ocean, creating blue ocean. [00:33:41] Achieving financial freedom: Clear goals and perseverance. [00:36:27] "Awesome interview, great business advice for entrepreneurs." Connect with Chris Long •   Website •   LinkedIn •   YouTube •   Facebook •   Instagram

How to Make a Million Dollars a Year is the Career Path Number 5 Number One Request (LA 1875) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the natural springs area of Arkansas. Yes, Eureka Springs right now and we are loving it. Steve: Can't say enough positive stuff about this area, with the state and the country. Jill: You know what's funny, we had a day this last week where it was like, started off, it got sunny but it started off kind of dark and weird and it rained a little bit and it was, you know the show the Ozarks, how we all know it has that funky tint. They make the, there's like a filter on the cameras or something and make it kind of a dark, interesting blue? Would you call it blue background kind of thing? I swear it felt like that. Steve: It was that color. Jill: I was running around taking pictures, I'm like, "That's real." Now I get the Ozarks show and I always thought, why do they make it look so dark? But by the way, right now we're sitting in a beautiful, sunny day. Blue sky, it's gorgeous so it's not always like that, but I get it. It was really cool. Steve: Today Jill and I are going to talk about how making a million dollars a year is the number one discussion point and request for this new career path class. Jill: There's kind of two things that came up because I want to share, to tell you, there's one other thing that everybody asks for. So it's important to know. I want leave a little teaser here. So when we went around the room the other day, everybody brought up two things and one is the money and I'll tell you the other one in a minute. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It's free. And last year a ton of people came to us, came to Jill and I requesting for help getting their first mailer out or just getting consistency in doing mailers or mailer type stuff. Well enough people came to us. Jill and I decided to turn over our own mailer department to our employees to allow them to do that. So we call it concierge data and now it's called concierge data plus, you can completely and entirely outsource doing a mailer to this department and it's a subdepartment of offers2owners.com. Or if you're having trouble getting the first one out, check it out. It's very, very efficient. And now we process a ton of orders, more and more every single month. Jill: All right, Chief wrote, "As a seller, how do you ask a buyer, how do you ask a buyer close, as a seller how do you ask a buyer to close through your selected title company? Or is it just customary for the seller to choose? It's a little late for me to be inquiring about this, but I've been letting, or should I say making the buyer's agent find one. Now that I say it out loud pretty sure I'm doing it completely wrong. I need to be sending them somewhere specific, right? My thought was it doesn't really matter to me and it's all about the same price so let them have it in case they have people they like to close through. It was one less thing I had to set up. Now I see why all the buyer's agents attitude seemed to change a little bit after their clients have signed. I'm making them do my job accidentally but sure enough, they'd sign and I'd been letting them take it from there. I'd been asking them where they want to close and wait for an email. How messy. This must be what Jack means by being able to, by doing it all wrong and still being able to pull it off. Embarrassing but enlightening." All right, so let me back up here. Steve: Embarrassing but enlightening. Jill: So here's what I do, Chief, and this, I'm going to make it easy. This will be make it easy for you actually, because I bet you putting it on them could slow you down too. I want you to stay in control for the whole transaction. Steve: Yeah,

How to Make a Million Dollars a Year is the Career Path Number 5 Number One Request (LA 1875) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the natural springs area of Arkansas. Yes, Eureka Springs right now and we are loving it. Steve: Can't say enough positive stuff about this area, with the state and the country. Jill: You know what's funny, we had a day this last week where it was like, started off, it got sunny but it started off kind of dark and weird and it rained a little bit and it was, you know the show the Ozarks, how we all know it has that funky tint. They make the, there's like a filter on the cameras or something and make it kind of a dark, interesting blue? Would you call it blue background kind of thing? I swear it felt like that. Steve: It was that color. Jill: I was running around taking pictures, I'm like, "That's real." Now I get the Ozarks show and I always thought, why do they make it look so dark? But by the way, right now we're sitting in a beautiful, sunny day. Blue sky, it's gorgeous so it's not always like that, but I get it. It was really cool. Steve: Today Jill and I are going to talk about how making a million dollars a year is the number one discussion point and request for this new career path class. Jill: There's kind of two things that came up because I want to share, to tell you, there's one other thing that everybody asks for. So it's important to know. I want leave a little teaser here. So when we went around the room the other day, everybody brought up two things and one is the money and I'll tell you the other one in a minute. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It's free. And last year a ton of people came to us, came to Jill and I requesting for help getting their first mailer out or just getting consistency in doing mailers or mailer type stuff. Well enough people came to us. Jill and I decided to turn over our own mailer department to our employees to allow them to do that. So we call it concierge data and now it's called concierge data plus, you can completely and entirely outsource doing a mailer to this department and it's a subdepartment of offers2owners.com. Or if you're having trouble getting the first one out, check it out. It's very, very efficient. And now we process a ton of orders, more and more every single month. Jill: All right, Chief wrote, "As a seller, how do you ask a buyer, how do you ask a buyer close, as a seller how do you ask a buyer to close through your selected title company? Or is it just customary for the seller to choose? It's a little late for me to be inquiring about this, but I've been letting, or should I say making the buyer's agent find one. Now that I say it out loud pretty sure I'm doing it completely wrong. I need to be sending them somewhere specific, right? My thought was it doesn't really matter to me and it's all about the same price so let them have it in case they have people they like to close through. It was one less thing I had to set up. Now I see why all the buyer's agents attitude seemed to change a little bit after their clients have signed. I'm making them do my job accidentally but sure enough, they'd sign and I'd been letting them take it from there. I'd been asking them where they want to close and wait for an email. How messy. This must be what Jack means by being able to, by doing it all wrong and still being able to pull it off. Embarrassing but enlightening." All right, so let me back up here. Steve: Embarrassing but enlightening. Jill: So here's what I do, Chief, and this, I'm going to make it easy. This will be make it easy for you actually, because I bet you putting it on them could slow you down too. I want you to stay in control for the whole transaction. Steve: Yeah,

How to Make a Million Dollars a Year is the Career Path Number 5 Number One Request (LA 1875) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the natural springs area of Arkansas. Yes, Eureka Springs right now and we are loving it. Steve: Can't say enough positive stuff about this area, with the state and the country. Jill: You know what's funny, we had a day this last week where it was like, started off, it got sunny but it started off kind of dark and weird and it rained a little bit and it was, you know the show the Ozarks, how we all know it has that funky tint. They make the, there's like a filter on the cameras or something and make it kind of a dark, interesting blue? Would you call it blue background kind of thing? I swear it felt like that. Steve: It was that color. Jill: I was running around taking pictures, I'm like, "That's real." Now I get the Ozarks show and I always thought, why do they make it look so dark? But by the way, right now we're sitting in a beautiful, sunny day. Blue sky, it's gorgeous so it's not always like that, but I get it. It was really cool. Steve: Today Jill and I are going to talk about how making a million dollars a year is the number one discussion point and request for this new career path class. Jill: There's kind of two things that came up because I want to share, to tell you, there's one other thing that everybody asks for. So it's important to know. I want leave a little teaser here. So when we went around the room the other day, everybody brought up two things and one is the money and I'll tell you the other one in a minute. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the land investors.com online community. It's free. And last year a ton of people came to us, came to Jill and I requesting for help getting their first mailer out or just getting consistency in doing mailers or mailer type stuff. Well enough people came to us. Jill and I decided to turn over our own mailer department to our employees to allow them to do that. So we call it concierge data and now it's called concierge data plus, you can completely and entirely outsource doing a mailer to this department and it's a subdepartment of offers2owners.com. Or if you're having trouble getting the first one out, check it out. It's very, very efficient. And now we process a ton of orders, more and more every single month. Jill: All right, Chief wrote, "As a seller, how do you ask a buyer, how do you ask a buyer close, as a seller how do you ask a buyer to close through your selected title company? Or is it just customary for the seller to choose? It's a little late for me to be inquiring about this, but I've been letting, or should I say making the buyer's agent find one. Now that I say it out loud pretty sure I'm doing it completely wrong. I need to be sending them somewhere specific, right? My thought was it doesn't really matter to me and it's all about the same price so let them have it in case they have people they like to close through. It was one less thing I had to set up. Now I see why all the buyer's agents attitude seemed to change a little bit after their clients have signed. I'm making them do my job accidentally but sure enough, they'd sign and I'd been letting them take it from there. I'd been asking them where they want to close and wait for an email. How messy. This must be what Jack means by being able to, by doing it all wrong and still being able to pull it off. Embarrassing but enlightening." All right, so let me back up here. Steve: Embarrassing but enlightening. Jill: So here's what I do, Chief, and this, I'm going to make it easy. This will be make it easy for you actually, because I bet you putting it on them could slow you down too. I want you to stay in control for the whole transaction. Steve: Yeah,

Jill Friday - Taking Due Diligence with a Grain of Salt (LA 1872) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewit coming to you from the home of the 1925. Can you believe it's almost a hundred years. Grand Old Opry. Steve: Nashville. Jill DeWit: Yep. Nashville, Tennessee. Steve: Neither one of us feel like we're going to leave here anytime soon. Jill DeWit: Nope. Steve: Spent about one day in Ohio. That was good enough. Jill DeWit: That was good enough. We saw it. Steve: Tennessee's a blast. I wish we would've stopped in Kentucky. Jill DeWit: Yes. We'll go back. We have lots of things we're going to go back and see. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And I hope you know by now hope- Jill DeWit: Hope. Steve: ... Hope. Like yesterday. That we have solved phase one due diligence with a product called parcelfact.com. You quite simply put in the state, the county, and the assessor parcel number. The property in question pops up anywhere in the country and all the stuff that we think is important to complete phase one due diligence, the six As that we talk about in the program, is at your fingertips within seconds. Check it out. Parcel fact, F-A-C-T .com. Jill DeWit: Evan wrote, how does one... Oh, I'm testing this. How does one feel about mailing the counties that was hit by the hurricane in Florida? Steve: I put this in your show for a reason. Jill DeWit: I don't feel good about that. If I already sent the mail out already... I would explain. I didn't mean to do that. Who knew? I mean, this one out a week ago or a month ago, whatever it was. It was planned out before the hurricane. But now specifically targeting that community, I'm not a fan. Sure, there's people that would be loving the cash. I can see positive things to it, but the negative that could be taken from it, it is too great. Steve: Yeah. I think it's an outrage. I think you're directly kicking people when they're down and taking advantage of them. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Like Jill said, every time there's a forest fire in the Southwest, we get this question. We got a ton of these questions during Katrina. So no, I don't think this is okay at all. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: At all. The only way it's okay is if you sent the mailer out. Actually we were in this situation where we sent the mailer out- Jill DeWit: And then a fire came. Steve: ... Something happened, a fire came and then people are calling us back saying, What kind of person are you that, you know? Jill DeWit: Check the date, Look at the date on the letter. Steve: Over and over again. Jill DeWit: Who knew. Steve: We're so sorry. We buy property in the area. You can only explain that so many times. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steve: Please don't do this. Not joking around. It's not okay. Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about taking due diligence with a grain salt. This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: So as I sit here in this bug infested bubble. Steve: There's nothing bubble about it. Jill DeWit: There's like a spider here. I don't know what that was over there. This here. I've got two mosquito things on, but we're having a ball. Steve: Yeah. Jill DeWit: We really love it here. Oh, my goodness. I want to talk about this today for just a few minutes because I wanted to make sure everyone's really clear on what's really needed. How much time you should be spending on due diligence. Because I think sometimes people do due diligence overkill. And I get it, but there's some things that are reliable, some things are not. And that's where the grain of salt comes in. So let me back up here. What are we talking about? A deal comes back, I send out the mail. Purchase agreement comes back. Now I'm looking at the deal online. I'm like, Oh,

Jill Friday - Taking Due Diligence with a Grain of Salt (LA 1872) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewit coming to you from the home of the 1925. Can you believe it's almost a hundred years. Grand Old Opry. Steve: Nashville. Jill DeWit: Yep. Nashville, Tennessee. Steve: Neither one of us feel like we're going to leave here anytime soon. Jill DeWit: Nope. Steve: Spent about one day in Ohio. That was good enough. Jill DeWit: That was good enough. We saw it. Steve: Tennessee's a blast. I wish we would've stopped in Kentucky. Jill DeWit: Yes. We'll go back. We have lots of things we're going to go back and see. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And I hope you know by now hope- Jill DeWit: Hope. Steve: ... Hope. Like yesterday. That we have solved phase one due diligence with a product called parcelfact.com. You quite simply put in the state, the county, and the assessor parcel number. The property in question pops up anywhere in the country and all the stuff that we think is important to complete phase one due diligence, the six As that we talk about in the program, is at your fingertips within seconds. Check it out. Parcel fact, F-A-C-T .com. Jill DeWit: Evan wrote, how does one... Oh, I'm testing this. How does one feel about mailing the counties that was hit by the hurricane in Florida? Steve: I put this in your show for a reason. Jill DeWit: I don't feel good about that. If I already sent the mail out already... I would explain. I didn't mean to do that. Who knew? I mean, this one out a week ago or a month ago, whatever it was. It was planned out before the hurricane. But now specifically targeting that community, I'm not a fan. Sure, there's people that would be loving the cash. I can see positive things to it, but the negative that could be taken from it, it is too great. Steve: Yeah. I think it's an outrage. I think you're directly kicking people when they're down and taking advantage of them. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Like Jill said, every time there's a forest fire in the Southwest, we get this question. We got a ton of these questions during Katrina. So no, I don't think this is okay at all. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: At all. The only way it's okay is if you sent the mailer out. Actually we were in this situation where we sent the mailer out- Jill DeWit: And then a fire came. Steve: ... Something happened, a fire came and then people are calling us back saying, What kind of person are you that, you know? Jill DeWit: Check the date, Look at the date on the letter. Steve: Over and over again. Jill DeWit: Who knew. Steve: We're so sorry. We buy property in the area. You can only explain that so many times. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steve: Please don't do this. Not joking around. It's not okay. Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about taking due diligence with a grain salt. This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: So as I sit here in this bug infested bubble. Steve: There's nothing bubble about it. Jill DeWit: There's like a spider here. I don't know what that was over there. This here. I've got two mosquito things on, but we're having a ball. Steve: Yeah. Jill DeWit: We really love it here. Oh, my goodness. I want to talk about this today for just a few minutes because I wanted to make sure everyone's really clear on what's really needed. How much time you should be spending on due diligence. Because I think sometimes people do due diligence overkill. And I get it, but there's some things that are reliable, some things are not. And that's where the grain of salt comes in. So let me back up here. What are we talking about? A deal comes back, I send out the mail. Purchase agreement comes back. Now I'm looking at the deal online. I'm like, Oh,

Jill Friday - Taking Due Diligence with a Grain of Salt (LA 1872) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill Dewit coming to you from the home of the 1925. Can you believe it's almost a hundred years. Grand Old Opry. Steve: Nashville. Jill DeWit: Yep. Nashville, Tennessee. Steve: Neither one of us feel like we're going to leave here anytime soon. Jill DeWit: Nope. Steve: Spent about one day in Ohio. That was good enough. Jill DeWit: That was good enough. We saw it. Steve: Tennessee's a blast. I wish we would've stopped in Kentucky. Jill DeWit: Yes. We'll go back. We have lots of things we're going to go back and see. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And I hope you know by now hope- Jill DeWit: Hope. Steve: ... Hope. Like yesterday. That we have solved phase one due diligence with a product called parcelfact.com. You quite simply put in the state, the county, and the assessor parcel number. The property in question pops up anywhere in the country and all the stuff that we think is important to complete phase one due diligence, the six As that we talk about in the program, is at your fingertips within seconds. Check it out. Parcel fact, F-A-C-T .com. Jill DeWit: Evan wrote, how does one... Oh, I'm testing this. How does one feel about mailing the counties that was hit by the hurricane in Florida? Steve: I put this in your show for a reason. Jill DeWit: I don't feel good about that. If I already sent the mail out already... I would explain. I didn't mean to do that. Who knew? I mean, this one out a week ago or a month ago, whatever it was. It was planned out before the hurricane. But now specifically targeting that community, I'm not a fan. Sure, there's people that would be loving the cash. I can see positive things to it, but the negative that could be taken from it, it is too great. Steve: Yeah. I think it's an outrage. I think you're directly kicking people when they're down and taking advantage of them. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Like Jill said, every time there's a forest fire in the Southwest, we get this question. We got a ton of these questions during Katrina. So no, I don't think this is okay at all. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: At all. The only way it's okay is if you sent the mailer out. Actually we were in this situation where we sent the mailer out- Jill DeWit: And then a fire came. Steve: ... Something happened, a fire came and then people are calling us back saying, What kind of person are you that, you know? Jill DeWit: Check the date, Look at the date on the letter. Steve: Over and over again. Jill DeWit: Who knew. Steve: We're so sorry. We buy property in the area. You can only explain that so many times. Jill DeWit: Exactly. Steve: Please don't do this. Not joking around. It's not okay. Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about taking due diligence with a grain salt. This is the meat of the show. Jill DeWit: So as I sit here in this bug infested bubble. Steve: There's nothing bubble about it. Jill DeWit: There's like a spider here. I don't know what that was over there. This here. I've got two mosquito things on, but we're having a ball. Steve: Yeah. Jill DeWit: We really love it here. Oh, my goodness. I want to talk about this today for just a few minutes because I wanted to make sure everyone's really clear on what's really needed. How much time you should be spending on due diligence. Because I think sometimes people do due diligence overkill. And I get it, but there's some things that are reliable, some things are not. And that's where the grain of salt comes in. So let me back up here. What are we talking about? A deal comes back, I send out the mail. Purchase agreement comes back. Now I'm looking at the deal online. I'm like, Oh,

Jill Friday - I Love Everything about Your Land But the Price (LA 1867) Transcript: Steve: Video - three, two. Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the still amazingly nice weather, sweet Detroit, Michigan. Why did I just call it Sweet Detroit, Michigan? If you have not been downtown lately, Detroit, let me tell you, it's changed and it's awesome. Steve: Really is. Jill: Fancy restaurants and walking down the street, having a good time and shopping and yeah. Steve: Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about - I'm quoting her now. "I love everything about the land deal, except the price." Happens all the time. If you buy and sell a lot of property, you know this happens. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you're still in the beginning stages of your career here, get ready for it. Jill: Yep. Steve: Deal's awesome, too expensive. Jill: Yep. And as a side note for yesterday, the Happiness Lab is still existing, so that was kind of funny. Clearly Jack does not listen to that. Steve: No. Nor have I been invited to be on the show. Jill: No, no, that's okay. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our land investors, one of our members of the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and I hope you know that we have a site now and we've had it for several years called parcelfact.com. It allows you to look up an assessor's parcel number and find the property and all the things that we think as land investors, you need to know about to make a real quick first, phase one due diligence decision. Jill: Uhuh. Steve: Check it out. Parcelfact.com. Jill: Exactly. Okay. "Can someone with Land Academy experience, give me some advice on PATLive? I'm new to Land Academy and have the ability to answer my own calls from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM central standard time. I've been in sales for 40 plus years, so answering the phone is the easy part for me. However, if I'm on the phone, it will go to a vendor voicemail, which I want to avoid. I'm starting with a five to 6,000 unit mailer month and I'm going to wrap up to 10,000 plus units a month as the business income grows. My budget's tight, so I'm trying to get a price range on what your average spend is for a 10,000 unit mailer. Thanks in advance for your help." Steve: I think you're setting yourself up for serious success here. If you're going to answer the phone between seven and seven, it's 12 hours a day. I think that's a great start. I really would highly recommend, Jill, this is more your area than mine, to have yourself with an account with PATLive or whatever, so that if you do miss calls, which nobody wants; but it happens, especially in the beginning part of a mailer, then- Jill: They could roll over to PATLive. Or for whatever reason, you're not available every single day from seven to seven, you could just flip a switch and have them go to PATLive. Steve: No, I think you thought this out perfectly well. I love your five to 6,000 mailers a month and ramping up to 10,000. You're going to be successful. Jill: And taking the initial calls, you're just going to learn so much about this and sellers and develop your own script and tweak what you want PATLive to do for you and your business. I think it's awesome. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Don't change a thing. I know it might be a bit in the beginning, but just do it. And there's always waves when the mail hits; you know it. There's a couple crazy days, that's fine. And then it starts to trickle off. You're like, "ah, you know what? I can handle this." You'll be - you could do it because you're a professional - Sid, you could handle it. Steve: Yeah. Yes. Answer the phone. Seven hours a day is huge. Jill: Ten - Steve: What do you think - Jill: 12. Yeah. Steve: What do you think [inaudible 00:03:41], he's asking at the end here, for 10,000 units. Jill: Oh,

Jill Friday - I Love Everything about Your Land But the Price (LA 1867) Transcript: Steve: Video - three, two. Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the still amazingly nice weather, sweet Detroit, Michigan. Why did I just call it Sweet Detroit, Michigan? If you have not been downtown lately, Detroit, let me tell you, it's changed and it's awesome. Steve: Really is. Jill: Fancy restaurants and walking down the street, having a good time and shopping and yeah. Steve: Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about - I'm quoting her now. "I love everything about the land deal, except the price." Happens all the time. If you buy and sell a lot of property, you know this happens. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you're still in the beginning stages of your career here, get ready for it. Jill: Yep. Steve: Deal's awesome, too expensive. Jill: Yep. And as a side note for yesterday, the Happiness Lab is still existing, so that was kind of funny. Clearly Jack does not listen to that. Steve: No. Nor have I been invited to be on the show. Jill: No, no, that's okay. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our land investors, one of our members of the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and I hope you know that we have a site now and we've had it for several years called parcelfact.com. It allows you to look up an assessor's parcel number and find the property and all the things that we think as land investors, you need to know about to make a real quick first, phase one due diligence decision. Jill: Uhuh. Steve: Check it out. Parcelfact.com. Jill: Exactly. Okay. "Can someone with Land Academy experience, give me some advice on PATLive? I'm new to Land Academy and have the ability to answer my own calls from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM central standard time. I've been in sales for 40 plus years, so answering the phone is the easy part for me. However, if I'm on the phone, it will go to a vendor voicemail, which I want to avoid. I'm starting with a five to 6,000 unit mailer month and I'm going to wrap up to 10,000 plus units a month as the business income grows. My budget's tight, so I'm trying to get a price range on what your average spend is for a 10,000 unit mailer. Thanks in advance for your help." Steve: I think you're setting yourself up for serious success here. If you're going to answer the phone between seven and seven, it's 12 hours a day. I think that's a great start. I really would highly recommend, Jill, this is more your area than mine, to have yourself with an account with PATLive or whatever, so that if you do miss calls, which nobody wants; but it happens, especially in the beginning part of a mailer, then- Jill: They could roll over to PATLive. Or for whatever reason, you're not available every single day from seven to seven, you could just flip a switch and have them go to PATLive. Steve: No, I think you thought this out perfectly well. I love your five to 6,000 mailers a month and ramping up to 10,000. You're going to be successful. Jill: And taking the initial calls, you're just going to learn so much about this and sellers and develop your own script and tweak what you want PATLive to do for you and your business. I think it's awesome. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Don't change a thing. I know it might be a bit in the beginning, but just do it. And there's always waves when the mail hits; you know it. There's a couple crazy days, that's fine. And then it starts to trickle off. You're like, "ah, you know what? I can handle this." You'll be - you could do it because you're a professional - Sid, you could handle it. Steve: Yeah. Yes. Answer the phone. Seven hours a day is huge. Jill: Ten - Steve: What do you think - Jill: 12. Yeah. Steve: What do you think [inaudible 00:03:41], he's asking at the end here, for 10,000 units. Jill: Oh,

Jill Friday - I Love Everything about Your Land But the Price (LA 1867) Transcript: Steve: Video - three, two. Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the still amazingly nice weather, sweet Detroit, Michigan. Why did I just call it Sweet Detroit, Michigan? If you have not been downtown lately, Detroit, let me tell you, it's changed and it's awesome. Steve: Really is. Jill: Fancy restaurants and walking down the street, having a good time and shopping and yeah. Steve: Today's Jill Friday. She's going to talk about - I'm quoting her now. "I love everything about the land deal, except the price." Happens all the time. If you buy and sell a lot of property, you know this happens. Jill: Yep. Steve: If you're still in the beginning stages of your career here, get ready for it. Jill: Yep. Steve: Deal's awesome, too expensive. Jill: Yep. And as a side note for yesterday, the Happiness Lab is still existing, so that was kind of funny. Clearly Jack does not listen to that. Steve: No. Nor have I been invited to be on the show. Jill: No, no, that's okay. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our land investors, one of our members of the landinvestors.com online community. It's free and I hope you know that we have a site now and we've had it for several years called parcelfact.com. It allows you to look up an assessor's parcel number and find the property and all the things that we think as land investors, you need to know about to make a real quick first, phase one due diligence decision. Jill: Uhuh. Steve: Check it out. Parcelfact.com. Jill: Exactly. Okay. "Can someone with Land Academy experience, give me some advice on PATLive? I'm new to Land Academy and have the ability to answer my own calls from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM central standard time. I've been in sales for 40 plus years, so answering the phone is the easy part for me. However, if I'm on the phone, it will go to a vendor voicemail, which I want to avoid. I'm starting with a five to 6,000 unit mailer month and I'm going to wrap up to 10,000 plus units a month as the business income grows. My budget's tight, so I'm trying to get a price range on what your average spend is for a 10,000 unit mailer. Thanks in advance for your help." Steve: I think you're setting yourself up for serious success here. If you're going to answer the phone between seven and seven, it's 12 hours a day. I think that's a great start. I really would highly recommend, Jill, this is more your area than mine, to have yourself with an account with PATLive or whatever, so that if you do miss calls, which nobody wants; but it happens, especially in the beginning part of a mailer, then- Jill: They could roll over to PATLive. Or for whatever reason, you're not available every single day from seven to seven, you could just flip a switch and have them go to PATLive. Steve: No, I think you thought this out perfectly well. I love your five to 6,000 mailers a month and ramping up to 10,000. You're going to be successful. Jill: And taking the initial calls, you're just going to learn so much about this and sellers and develop your own script and tweak what you want PATLive to do for you and your business. I think it's awesome. Steve: Yeah. Jill: Don't change a thing. I know it might be a bit in the beginning, but just do it. And there's always waves when the mail hits; you know it. There's a couple crazy days, that's fine. And then it starts to trickle off. You're like, "ah, you know what? I can handle this." You'll be - you could do it because you're a professional - Sid, you could handle it. Steve: Yeah. Yes. Answer the phone. Seven hours a day is huge. Jill: Ten - Steve: What do you think - Jill: 12. Yeah. Steve: What do you think [inaudible 00:03:41], he's asking at the end here, for 10,000 units. Jill: Oh,

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Jay and Steve Welcome back Dr. Dan Evering to talk about the shocking events of Christian Eriksen's collapse in the UEFA Euro 2020 tournament. Then they briefly discuss Kyrie Irving's ankle injury.

What is HOA and Why it Matters in Land Investing (LA 1430) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about what is an HOA, and why does it matter in land investing? I hate them. Who doesn't? Jill: I know. Who wants more people involved telling you what you can and cannot do with the property that you own. By the way, they don't own it, you do. So I have a lot to say about this. Steve: I do, too. I have to tell you, I've always had this weird fascination with somehow requesting that clinical psychiatrists or psychologists do a dissertation on certain topics. And this has always been one of them. What psychologically makes someone choose, forget about the money, [crosstalk 00:01:02] make someone choose to start an HOA? Which I get, because you make some money. But more importantly, why do you seek out to live in an HOA or seek out some type of a land where there's more rules, not less? Is it better that we have more laws in life or less laws? Jill: I was just thinking that. Working at an HOA has got to be like the IRS. There's really no reason anyone's going to call you happy. They're calling you to find out what's the stupid rule, or why did I get fined? Steve: What's that movie, when the kids were little? It was a cartoon about the bunch of animals are living in the back of the woods, and they in they're all hibernating. And they woke up out of hibernation and there this massive subdivision where they used to live? Jill: Yep. Steve: What's it called? Hedge ... Jill: I forgot, and they went through the fence. Steve: Over the Hedge. Jill: That's right. Steve: Over the Hedge. Yeah. Jill: Okay. Steve: And there was this character in there, this woman who was the classic real estate agent/president of the HOA. And they took it to extremities where she would measure the length of everybody's lawn and then send them notes. Do you remember that? Jill: No. I mean, I do remember that movie, but I don't remember it in that level of detail that you have. I do not recall. That is so flipping funny. I love it. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Kristen wrote topic idea. Why do responding sellers have property with no physical access, or in a flood plain, and what to do about it? Oh, why do responding sellers have property with no physical hazards or a flood plan? What to do about it? I know new sellers shouldn't be buying these, but it's pretty much all I'm getting. Yeah. I like that. That's a good idea. Can we do that one day and really dive deep into it? Steve: Yeah, we can dive deep. I can give you the 32nd overview here, too, if you want. Jill: Go for it. Steve: Sellers almost always don't know about their property. They've inherited it. They've never seen it. I mean, back me up here or correct, Jill, probably 80% of the time, they have no idea about the property. Sometimes they live adjacent to it and that's a different story, so they don't know. No physical access can be remedied. It's not that complicated. You just need to get the right people involved and make sure that there's a ton of profit margin on it, because it takes a while. And if there's a process, then it's possible. The floodplain scenario, they're not going to know. It's only relatively new to land ownership that we can click on these FEMA maps at places like Neighbors Scoop, and just within seconds, see if the property is in a flood plain. Jill: Right. Steve: So even two years ago ... I mean, even now, if you go on to fema.gov and try to find out if a property ... it's a big, huge, massive process. So, that's not their fault at all. And what do you do about it? You just work through these things where you adjust the price.

Transcript Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit broadcasting from awesome, Southern... Are we southern or central area? Steve: Central? Jill: Excuse me. Awesome, Central Arizona. [inaudible 00:00:16] I have got to figure that out. Steve: Our elevation's 1500 here. In California, we were at elevation number... Like one foot. Jill: There we go. Steve: You know how you obsess on- Jill: I do obsess on that. Steve: On the weather and stuff? Jill: And GPS and all that. Steve: I have elevation issues. I put elevation in every single one of our land postings. Jill: [inaudible 00:00:38] you remember, you used to have that thing... And it was dialed into satellite stuff? Steve: Yeah, the weather... Jill: Yeah. And it would tell you all kinds of cool... The barometric pressure and things like that. I'm going to get one of those again for the new house. Steve: I think that you can get... I like the one that goes on the roof, where you don't need the internet. Jill: This one didn't need the internet too. Steve: So you install a little thing that goes... You ever see those little... Jill: A little gyro thing? Steve: Yeah. Jill: Oh, well you can do that if you want. I don't need that. Steve: [inaudible 00:01:09] Jill's out, if you have to install anything now. Jill: Exactly. Steve: Do you ever notice how girl products are just like open it and plug it in? And it's clean and pretty and simple and you don't really get any real information or the meat of anything? But- Jill: Why is this a bad thing? Steve: They're happy. Jill: It should work. I should open up and plug it in. Steve: I think I just described Apple computer. Jill: It's like a bathroom scale and should be able to just do it quickly. Not have to program the whole thing. Steve: Before Jill starts to talk about women's weight. Today, Jill and I talk about introducing Land Academy accountability and women's groups. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're already a member, please join us on Discord. Jill: Okay. James wrote, "Hello. When filling in the red, yellow, and green tests in the equity planner, which filters are used for land and farm to get land postings and Redfin [inaudible 00:02:09] data?" Assume on Redfin for [inaudible 00:02:13] data, you only select land for the last three months. And for land and farm, no houses and undeveloped land. However, the numbers from these filters are very different than the numbers in the example Jack uses for the equity planner. And I want to make sure I'm doing this right. Steve: You're doing it right. James, I can tell you haven't filled this out before and by this question, you are going to be wildly successful at this. Whenever I get questions about equity planner, data scrubbing. Like yesterday, the school district thing yesterday was nothing short of amazing. I didn't make enough of a big deal about how positive that is like Jill did. So I'm doing it now. The answer is this. When you have a lot of data available, i.e. You have an urban county or a zip code that you're sending it to, then use it all in from one source, probably Redfin. You're not going to get the data that you need in realtor, all of it. And you're not going to get all of the data that you need in Zillow. You are going to get it in Redfin. The bad news is that Redfin's coverage doesn't... Rural counties are not a priority for them. So you're doing it right. I can tell. In three months is great, that's actually what I use. It's interesting that you say three months, because that just made sense to you and that makes sense to me. Jill likes 30 days, but there's not enough data. You can do it back three years if you want on Redfin, that's, that's not apples to apples. Because real estate market was not the same thre...

Introducing Land Academy Accountability and Women's Groups (LA 1425) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hi. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit broadcasting from awesome, Southern... Are we southern or central area? Steve: Central? Jill: Excuse me. Awesome, Central Arizona. [inaudible 00:00:16] I have got to figure that out. Steve: Our elevation's 1500 here. In California, we were at elevation number... Like one foot. Jill: There we go. Steve: You know how you obsess on- Jill: I do obsess on that. Steve: On the weather and stuff? Jill: And GPS and all that. Steve: I have elevation issues. I put elevation in every single one of our land postings. Jill: [inaudible 00:00:38] you remember, you used to have that thing... And it was dialed into satellite stuff? Steve: Yeah, the weather... Jill: Yeah. And it would tell you all kinds of cool... The barometric pressure and things like that. I'm going to get one of those again for the new house. Steve: I think that you can get... I like the one that goes on the roof, where you don't need the internet. Jill: This one didn't need the internet too. Steve: So you install a little thing that goes... You ever see those little... Jill: A little gyro thing? Steve: Yeah. Jill: Oh, well you can do that if you want. I don't need that. Steve: [inaudible 00:01:09] Jill's out, if you have to install anything now. Jill: Exactly. Steve: Do you ever notice how girl products are just like open it and plug it in? And it's clean and pretty and simple and you don't really get any real information or the meat of anything? But- Jill: Why is this a bad thing? Steve: They're happy. Jill: It should work. I should open up and plug it in. Steve: I think I just described Apple computer. Jill: It's like a bathroom scale and should be able to just do it quickly. Not have to program the whole thing. Steve: Before Jill starts to talk about women's weight. Today, Jill and I talk about introducing Land Academy accountability and women's groups. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're already a member, please join us on Discord. Jill: Okay. James wrote, "Hello. When filling in the red, yellow, and green tests in the equity planner, which filters are used for land and farm to get land postings and Redfin [inaudible 00:02:09] data?" Assume on Redfin for [inaudible 00:02:13] data, you only select land for the last three months. And for land and farm, no houses and undeveloped land. However, the numbers from these filters are very different than the numbers in the example Jack uses for the equity planner. And I want to make sure I'm doing this right. Steve: You're doing it right. James, I can tell you haven't filled this out before and by this question, you are going to be wildly successful at this. Whenever I get questions about equity planner, data scrubbing. Like yesterday, the school district thing yesterday was nothing short of amazing. I didn't make enough of a big deal about how positive that is like Jill did. So I'm doing it now. The answer is this. When you have a lot of data available, i.e. You have an urban county or a zip code that you're sending it to, then use it all in from one source, probably Redfin. You're not going to get the data that you need in realtor, all of it. And you're not going to get all of the data that you need in Zillow. You are going to get it in Redfin. The bad news is that Redfin's coverage doesn't... Rural counties are not a priority for them. So you're doing it right. I can tell. In three months is great, that's actually what I use. It's interesting that you say three months, because that just made sense to you and that makes sense to me. Jill likes 30 days, but there's not enough data. You can do it back three years if you want on Redfin, that's,

Land Academy 1000 Free Record a Month Giveaway (LA 1424) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from awesome, cool Arizona. Steve: Rainy Arizona today. Jill DeWit: It is, a little bit. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about Land Academy's 1000 Free Record-a-Month Giveaway. I was just informed, it's not a giveaway at all. Jill DeWit: It's not a giveaway. It's a new thing. It's not like it's a special thing right now. It's the way we roll, and I'll explain it. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're a Land Academy member already, please check us out or join us on Discord. Jill DeWit: David wrote, "My latest mailer had sites zip code- Steve: Situs. Jill DeWit: Situs, excuse me. It was not spelled the right- Steve: I know. It's not you. Jill DeWit: Okay, got it. Steve: It's David. Jill DeWit: S-I-T-U-S zip code for about half of the 1000 records I downloaded. I got those all priced by zip code. Then there's the other 4000, and I don't know where they are in the county, unless I put them into ParcelFact. Pricing by zip code or subdivisions, always how I do it, but on this other half of the [inaudible 00:01:15], that that doesn't seem to have those. How would you price them? I have them priced by school district right now, which looks to be a reliable data set for the properties. But I haven't sent them out. My gut is that this won't be perfect, but the county's good enough that I think I'm willing to risk my mailer costs on pricing that may not be exact. Take it away, Jack. Steve: It's never perfect. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Jill and I went to a dinner with a bunch of our years and years friends last night. And one guy's a government contractor. And he owns a manufacturing company. They do all kinds of stuff, from jet engine parts to whatever. And we're going down the path, starting a company with him, which we will market some very specialty items that he will manufacture. And there was a guy there that has been in that business for a lot of years, but he's never been an entrepreneur. He's been a friend of mine for 25 years. And so, I started down the path with the entrepreneur buddy. And the guy who's a former CEO of a company, a government contracting company, couldn't keep up and didn't understand us. And I love these guys. I love them equally. But there's entrepreneurs who just won't take no for an answer. And then, there's former CEOs or former W2 employees that have never been truly through a startup, so they don't get it. So on my left, is this guy saying, "We're going to do this and we're going to probably fail at it 50 times before we get it right," which I'm saying, "Exactly. Is there another way?" And my former CEO buddy's just horrified. And he doesn't understand why. So look, so my point is here, yeah, it's not going to be perfect. The mailers I do are not perfect. I'm going to talk about failing all this week. Because we have a lot of new people, and there's a material percentage of these people... I'm not sure if David is one or not. I don't think so. He's not actually, now that I'm thinking about it, that haven't wrapped their head around the fact that they're going to fail a few times. Jill DeWit: What do you think about his thought process here? I think that was scrappy. Steve: I do too. Jill DeWit: I'm really impressed. You're like, "Okay, what else can I use?" Steve: That's geographic specific. Jill DeWit: School district is great. Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Jill DeWit: That's a great way to do this. I love it. Steve: Here's what I'd do- Jill DeWit: I'd love to... you can't... what David said in the beginning, I'm just going to explain real quick. There's no way, nor should anyone ever sit and one-by-one look up things.

Land Academy 1000 Free Record a Month Giveaway (LA 1424) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill DeWit: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill DeWit: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from awesome, cool Arizona. Steve: Rainy Arizona today. Jill DeWit: It is, a little bit. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about Land Academy's 1000 Free Record-a-Month Giveaway. I was just informed, it's not a giveaway at all. Jill DeWit: It's not a giveaway. It's a new thing. It's not like it's a special thing right now. It's the way we roll, and I'll explain it. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. And if you're a Land Academy member already, please check us out or join us on Discord. Jill DeWit: David wrote, "My latest mailer had sites zip code- Steve: Situs. Jill DeWit: Situs, excuse me. It was not spelled the right- Steve: I know. It's not you. Jill DeWit: Okay, got it. Steve: It's David. Jill DeWit: S-I-T-U-S zip code for about half of the 1000 records I downloaded. I got those all priced by zip code. Then there's the other 4000, and I don't know where they are in the county, unless I put them into ParcelFact. Pricing by zip code or subdivisions, always how I do it, but on this other half of the [inaudible 00:01:15], that that doesn't seem to have those. How would you price them? I have them priced by school district right now, which looks to be a reliable data set for the properties. But I haven't sent them out. My gut is that this won't be perfect, but the county's good enough that I think I'm willing to risk my mailer costs on pricing that may not be exact. Take it away, Jack. Steve: It's never perfect. Jill DeWit: Yeah. Steve: Jill and I went to a dinner with a bunch of our years and years friends last night. And one guy's a government contractor. And he owns a manufacturing company. They do all kinds of stuff, from jet engine parts to whatever. And we're going down the path, starting a company with him, which we will market some very specialty items that he will manufacture. And there was a guy there that has been in that business for a lot of years, but he's never been an entrepreneur. He's been a friend of mine for 25 years. And so, I started down the path with the entrepreneur buddy. And the guy who's a former CEO of a company, a government contracting company, couldn't keep up and didn't understand us. And I love these guys. I love them equally. But there's entrepreneurs who just won't take no for an answer. And then, there's former CEOs or former W2 employees that have never been truly through a startup, so they don't get it. So on my left, is this guy saying, "We're going to do this and we're going to probably fail at it 50 times before we get it right," which I'm saying, "Exactly. Is there another way?" And my former CEO buddy's just horrified. And he doesn't understand why. So look, so my point is here, yeah, it's not going to be perfect. The mailers I do are not perfect. I'm going to talk about failing all this week. Because we have a lot of new people, and there's a material percentage of these people... I'm not sure if David is one or not. I don't think so. He's not actually, now that I'm thinking about it, that haven't wrapped their head around the fact that they're going to fail a few times. Jill DeWit: What do you think about his thought process here? I think that was scrappy. Steve: I do too. Jill DeWit: I'm really impressed. You're like, "Okay, what else can I use?" Steve: That's geographic specific. Jill DeWit: School district is great. Steve: Yeah. Yeah. Jill DeWit: That's a great way to do this. I love it. Steve: Here's what I'd do- Jill DeWit: I'd love to... you can't... what David said in the beginning, I'm just going to explain real quick. There's no way, nor should anyone ever sit and one-by-one look up things.

How Land Academy Deal Funding Works (LA 1380) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hallo. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. Jill: And I'm Jill. And I am broadcasting from Sunny Southern California. Steve: I'm actually in Sunny Central Scottsdale, Arizona. Today Jill and I talk about how Land Academy Deal Funding works. We get these show topics from our customer service, Volume. And so these are many. Many people were asking about this last week, so we decided to do yet another show on how Deal Funding works. But before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Thomas wrote, I've got a couple of thousand mailers out and looking for my first deal. An investor friend of mine who flips houses recommended Blueprint Title. They are an online title company. I called them and they said the only thing they cannot do with land transactions is the new deed and its recording. Isn't that the only thing we really kinda need, but we won't go there. Steve: I put this in here for you. Jill: This is hilarious. Steve: Just when you think it can't get any worse, they say, "Oh no, we can't do the deed." Why would they do that? Jill: I'm gonna start a company like this, it's hilarious. [inaudible 00:01:23] can handle is you give me a check and I'll make sure it gets to them. And then everything else you got to do. Steve: Which is Escrow, that's the definition of Escrow. It's not- Jill: What the heck? Steve: It's classic. I would run away from this. Go ahead. Jill: This is so funny. This made me ask the question. If I close a deal through a conventional title company, like First American, do they take care of the new deed and then the recording? Thanks. Oh yes, heck they do. Oh my goodness. Okay, let's back up right now, everyone. First of all, every real title slash Escrow, it's the same thing, Escrow company out there is online. I'm gonna just say it right now. Everything you can do with a phone call and submitting documents with DocuSign, except for the majority of the states that wanna wet signature on a deed, okay. We got that. So how do you get around that? No big deal, it's called a mobile notary. And they come to your house, they come to your office. If you're the person who's buying it, they'll come to your house, [inaudible 00:02:38] office, whatever they prefer, know that's very, very easy and that's it. So nobody has to walk into a title company and do all that anymore, it'd be right there. This whole notion of not doing, I can't believe they even call themselves a title company when they say, "I'll take care of the money, but am not gonna put the deed in the recording." For a renter, that's why you're paying them to do the deed. I mean, maybe they're just saying... maybe they're doing money and title policy, but man, that's only getting me 50% of the way there. I need the other 50%. So I don't know who that is, but I would pick up the phone and call somebody else. And then, don't even have to go with a biggie, Thomas. Don't think that you have to, that it's only a first American or something like that can do a big close like that. There's a lot of great mom and pop title companies. I would argue they're even better, 'cause I would argue they care more. That can do the whole thing for you. And what I do is an attorney too by the way. There's a lot of attorneys out there that can do every title, that can do it cheaper and faster. So call around. I have two questions for title people, and this is what I do. How fast can we do it? How much do you cost? And I'm looking for an investor rate, because if this works out between the two of us, as you talking to them, Thomas, you're gonna do ten more maybe this month or this year, 'cause you just blasted that area to try and find someone with a good relationship. And you wanna tell them that. Steve: This is like taking your [inaudible 00:04:24] o...

"I'm going to fight it, but I'll let it live. What about my dynamite?" - Steve Welcome to Episode 12 of Psychosocial Cinema! In today's episode I take a reflective dive with fellow creative, Danfinity, into the whacky, and oddly poignant, depths of Wes Anderon's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Our conversation surrounding the Life Aquatic is as eclectic as the crew who comprise The Belefonte. Where we could have stayed to the shallow end, Dan and I venture to the deep end of life and share some personal experiences that nicely tie into some of the beats encountered within the film.  With that being said, if I could afford some diving gear I would supply you with it, but unfortunately all of our grant money has been revoked...I kid. Thankfully I am not Steve Zissou and this is not the final voyage of this podcast. To that end, strap in, grab some dynamite (please don't), and for all that is pure and wonderful in the ocean, don't blow up any Jaguar Sharks.  Here is a handy link that will connect you with all of Danfinity's current projects, including his Twitch channel where he routinely offers up good times and help to his viewers: https://linktr.ee/Danfinity Please connect with us between episodes on social media and feel free to follow us here: Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/psychosocialcinema Twitter: https://twitter.com/PsychosocialC Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/psychosocialcinema/ I am utilizing PATREON as a unique vehicle for monthly support. Not only will this platform provide a launch pad for growth, but it will make subsequent episodes and the production costs sustainable on a number of different levels. For more information about the perks you get by being a Patron, please click the link below; thank you: Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PsychoSocialCinema The Life Aquatic - Criterion Bluray:  https://amzn.to/33UB57Z As always, if you enjoyed the intro and outro music for this episode, please look up my friend, Porcelain Backsplash's musical work at this link: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2CKDIOIjtRpoTkeXk9XAjt?si=I6vfrvRkQ7ygE-ugg_0fTg

So You Made 100K on a Land Deal Now What (LA 1302) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hey. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala Jill: And I'm Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California Steve: Today Jill and I talk about, so you made a hundred grand on that last land deal, now what? Jill: I know what. Steve: Well. Jill: Do it again. Steve: Celebrate. Yes, first you need to take 10 minutes and celebrate. Maybe do shot of tequila or something. Jill: Yeah, tens good. Ten minutes is good. Steve: Whatever works for you. Eat a piece of chocolate cake, I don't know whatever works for you. Jill: What is yours? Steve: And that's the whole show. Jill: Quick. You want to celebrate? What? Can I have a budget? I made a hundred thousand dollars. How much money can I spend from my separation? Steve: You know, Jill and I made a huge amount of money one time on a real estate deal. You know what we did? Bought new computers. Jill: Yeah. It went to the business and it made us more effective and it, and I was just so happy. Yep. All right. Quick, you give yourself $500. What are you going to do? Steve: God, I haven't thought about something like this in a long time. Because usually I just go do whatever I want. Jill: I know but- Steve: For 500 bucks, what would I do? You know what I would do? Call up my buddies, probably bring you and your friends, girlfriends, and just pay for everybody's night out. Jill: That's very sweet. Well, now I feel like a little bit like a heel because mine's different. Mine is I call no one. Steve: Oh my God. Is this a spa day at that MZ diamond acquisitions? Jill: No because I have $500, it's just a spa day. That's it. I call no one, I turn off my phone, I leave it in the car and I'm gone for several hours. That's how I celebrate. Steve: Jill, I speak frankly, here. You should be doing that once a week anyway. Jill: I know. I should but spa's are kind of closed right now. Steve: Why don't you schedule that? Jill: Because the spa's are closed right now. That's, trust me, don't you, don't think I'm not, that's not on my list. Steve: Can't you have like a masseuse come to the house? Jill: I haven't really tried that hard but I could probably work on that. So, but thank you, that's not what this show's about. Thank you. Steve: Yes it is. This is about a hundred grand. It's totally about this. Jill: Okay, I guess so. Okay, yes because I just learned, I didn't know of any that would come to the house. And I just heard from somebody recently that they know someone. So that's in the works. But do you know what? I still don't want to do it in my own house. I have to go somewhere because I don't want to have to hide. And you know, I want to just, I'd like to go and be treated. Steve: You want to go somewhere and do that? Huh? What if I leave the house? And then- Jill: It's still not that great. I want to go be treated. Steve: This is interesting. Jill: You know what I want to do? Steve: You learn new stuff about your mate every day. Jill: I want to go to Terranea, or something equivalent, and just really have a nice, nice time. Thank you. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. Mohad wrote, I've been practicing using Real Quest Pro to pull data in an area I'm looking to send my first mailer. Once I enter all the criteria and submit, it seems like a lot of the data I pull has some sort of housing on it. I'm entering in zero to 0% improvement and I'm still getting many buildings slash houses. I don't want to waste money on records with houses. I've gone through each land use to figure out which is pulling the records with the houses, but it looks like they are just blended in with several uses. Any suggestions on how to get rid of the houses, to be sure I'm doing something wrong? Steve:

So You Made 100K on a Land Deal Now What (LA 1302) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hey. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala Jill: And I'm Jill Dewitt broadcasting from sunny Southern California Steve: Today Jill and I talk about, so you made a hundred grand on that last land deal, now what? Jill: I know what. Steve: Well. Jill: Do it again. Steve: Celebrate. Yes, first you need to take 10 minutes and celebrate. Maybe do shot of tequila or something. Jill: Yeah, tens good. Ten minutes is good. Steve: Whatever works for you. Eat a piece of chocolate cake, I don't know whatever works for you. Jill: What is yours? Steve: And that's the whole show. Jill: Quick. You want to celebrate? What? Can I have a budget? I made a hundred thousand dollars. How much money can I spend from my separation? Steve: You know, Jill and I made a huge amount of money one time on a real estate deal. You know what we did? Bought new computers. Jill: Yeah. It went to the business and it made us more effective and it, and I was just so happy. Yep. All right. Quick, you give yourself $500. What are you going to do? Steve: God, I haven't thought about something like this in a long time. Because usually I just go do whatever I want. Jill: I know but- Steve: For 500 bucks, what would I do? You know what I would do? Call up my buddies, probably bring you and your friends, girlfriends, and just pay for everybody's night out. Jill: That's very sweet. Well, now I feel like a little bit like a heel because mine's different. Mine is I call no one. Steve: Oh my God. Is this a spa day at that MZ diamond acquisitions? Jill: No because I have $500, it's just a spa day. That's it. I call no one, I turn off my phone, I leave it in the car and I'm gone for several hours. That's how I celebrate. Steve: Jill, I speak frankly, here. You should be doing that once a week anyway. Jill: I know. I should but spa's are kind of closed right now. Steve: Why don't you schedule that? Jill: Because the spa's are closed right now. That's, trust me, don't you, don't think I'm not, that's not on my list. Steve: Can't you have like a masseuse come to the house? Jill: I haven't really tried that hard but I could probably work on that. So, but thank you, that's not what this show's about. Thank you. Steve: Yes it is. This is about a hundred grand. It's totally about this. Jill: Okay, I guess so. Okay, yes because I just learned, I didn't know of any that would come to the house. And I just heard from somebody recently that they know someone. So that's in the works. But do you know what? I still don't want to do it in my own house. I have to go somewhere because I don't want to have to hide. And you know, I want to just, I'd like to go and be treated. Steve: You want to go somewhere and do that? Huh? What if I leave the house? And then- Jill: It's still not that great. I want to go be treated. Steve: This is interesting. Jill: You know what I want to do? Steve: You learn new stuff about your mate every day. Jill: I want to go to Terranea, or something equivalent, and just really have a nice, nice time. Thank you. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. Mohad wrote, I've been practicing using Real Quest Pro to pull data in an area I'm looking to send my first mailer. Once I enter all the criteria and submit, it seems like a lot of the data I pull has some sort of housing on it. I'm entering in zero to 0% improvement and I'm still getting many buildings slash houses. I don't want to waste money on records with houses. I've gone through each land use to figure out which is pulling the records with the houses, but it looks like they are just blended in with several uses. Any suggestions on how to get rid of the houses, to be sure I'm doing something wrong? Steve:

Working with Your Spouse without Tragedy (LA 1301) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to The Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, playing with my hair, and I'm broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about working with your spouse without tragedy. I'm sure Jill has a lot to say about this. Sure of it. Jill: Let's define tragedy. Just kidding. Steve: We can show you what a tragedy looks like on this episode, actually. Jill: I guess we could. Steve: We can give a great example of tragedy. Jill: So, divorce papers? Or just getting into it? Steve: Yesterday, and I bit the inside of my lip, we were talking about when to leave your job and I'm thinking like, "We should be talking about when to leave your relationship." Jill: Oh, that's sad. Don't say that. Steve: Sometimes you've got to leave. Jill: No, I mean, come on. Don't leave let's... careful. Steve: All right. Jill: All right. Let's be cool here. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. Rebecca wrote, "Hi, Land Academy. Quick question on filtering and pricing lots. The last list I sent out for four to six acre lots/parcels, I filtered out the higher priced lots over 75,000, but kept the lowered valued lots. I filtered them out." So, she didn't keep them. Okay. "I received about eight signed contracts from people who I sent offers to for eight to $10,000 when their lots were worth less than $10,000. Should I price by zip code or filter out the lots assessed under 10K or both? Thoughts please." Steve: You should price by zip code, for sure. No doubt about it based on the information that we have, the level of information we now have specifically because of Zillow. So yes, you should price by zip code, for sure. Should you remove any of the top end or the bottom end data? I call it like a bell curve. I keep it all in. We send out offer prices at a million plus now, and we get some of them signed back because you just never know. Over and over and over again what I hear from our advanced group at our live events, is send out more mail. Send out more mail and see what happens. You put yourself in such a position of control when you send out just hoards of mail. So yeah, maybe some of it's overpriced, maybe some of it's under priced, to this day I over and underprice property sometimes, but I'll tell you, when you're staring at a pile of purchase agreements that are signed, let's say 10 of them, you're going to pick the best three. If you have five purchase agreements signed and you're going to pick the best three, it's not as good of a situation to be in as 10, pick three. But yeah, you've got to price by zip code now. Jill: Well, I like what you said too, careful, don't limit yourself too much because you never, like you said, you never know what's going to come back. And if you're really, really deathly afraid of anything over $100,000, I can understand that, that's over your threshold. I would download the data. You're famous for saying the data is cheap, the mail's expensive and that's true. So, I would download the data just to have it and play with it and think about it too, but go for some bigger numbers anyway because you can afford to do this. Why? Because we'll fund your deals and people in our community will fund your deals. You might find something spectacular, Rebecca, that you're buying it for $83,000 and holy cow, it's worth 400, that just comes across your desk. And I want you to be able to look at those and see those and act on them. Adding a zero or a couple zeros is not nuts. Steve: This group is packed full of people that would love to write you an $83,000 check. Jill: Right. My other thing is too, I think what may have happened is sometimes how counties assess properties.

Working with Your Spouse without Tragedy (LA 1301) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to The Land Academy Show entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: I'm Jill DeWit, playing with my hair, and I'm broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about working with your spouse without tragedy. I'm sure Jill has a lot to say about this. Sure of it. Jill: Let's define tragedy. Just kidding. Steve: We can show you what a tragedy looks like on this episode, actually. Jill: I guess we could. Steve: We can give a great example of tragedy. Jill: So, divorce papers? Or just getting into it? Steve: Yesterday, and I bit the inside of my lip, we were talking about when to leave your job and I'm thinking like, "We should be talking about when to leave your relationship." Jill: Oh, that's sad. Don't say that. Steve: Sometimes you've got to leave. Jill: No, I mean, come on. Don't leave let's... careful. Steve: All right. Jill: All right. Let's be cool here. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. Rebecca wrote, "Hi, Land Academy. Quick question on filtering and pricing lots. The last list I sent out for four to six acre lots/parcels, I filtered out the higher priced lots over 75,000, but kept the lowered valued lots. I filtered them out." So, she didn't keep them. Okay. "I received about eight signed contracts from people who I sent offers to for eight to $10,000 when their lots were worth less than $10,000. Should I price by zip code or filter out the lots assessed under 10K or both? Thoughts please." Steve: You should price by zip code, for sure. No doubt about it based on the information that we have, the level of information we now have specifically because of Zillow. So yes, you should price by zip code, for sure. Should you remove any of the top end or the bottom end data? I call it like a bell curve. I keep it all in. We send out offer prices at a million plus now, and we get some of them signed back because you just never know. Over and over and over again what I hear from our advanced group at our live events, is send out more mail. Send out more mail and see what happens. You put yourself in such a position of control when you send out just hoards of mail. So yeah, maybe some of it's overpriced, maybe some of it's under priced, to this day I over and underprice property sometimes, but I'll tell you, when you're staring at a pile of purchase agreements that are signed, let's say 10 of them, you're going to pick the best three. If you have five purchase agreements signed and you're going to pick the best three, it's not as good of a situation to be in as 10, pick three. But yeah, you've got to price by zip code now. Jill: Well, I like what you said too, careful, don't limit yourself too much because you never, like you said, you never know what's going to come back. And if you're really, really deathly afraid of anything over $100,000, I can understand that, that's over your threshold. I would download the data. You're famous for saying the data is cheap, the mail's expensive and that's true. So, I would download the data just to have it and play with it and think about it too, but go for some bigger numbers anyway because you can afford to do this. Why? Because we'll fund your deals and people in our community will fund your deals. You might find something spectacular, Rebecca, that you're buying it for $83,000 and holy cow, it's worth 400, that just comes across your desk. And I want you to be able to look at those and see those and act on them. Adding a zero or a couple zeros is not nuts. Steve: This group is packed full of people that would love to write you an $83,000 check. Jill: Right. My other thing is too, I think what may have happened is sometimes how counties assess properties.

Quick Land Sale vs. Retail Price (LA 1300) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Jill: Oops. Steve: Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about a quick land sale versus retail price. Jill: Right. Steve: You want to explain that title? Because it's kind of your title. Jill: Oh, is it? Okay. It's kind of like, think about the kind of person you want to be. A quick land sale is for me, just how we operate. I used to say I'm a wholesaler, but that even gets confused. I don't want people to ... People have negative thoughts sometimes- Steve: Yeah, it became a negative term. Jill: It did, and it's so silly because I think people see a wholesaler as someone who doesn't acquire property, all they do is assign a- Steve: Get in the way. Jill: ... property. Exactly. Assign it versus yeah, virtually get in the way. I am with you. And the way we do it, which is still wholesaling. People don't, I don't know why it got all garbled. We buy the property. I will seek out the property. I will buy the property. I will pay the full price for the property. We own it. We close escrow, it's in our name. Now I'm going to turn around, mark it up and sell it. So I can choose to quickly double my money and get out or I can, Hm, I can mark it up and some people do this, they get a little greedy and they think about retail. Why would I sell a property, Jill, that I paid $20,000 for? Why would I sell it for $45,000 tomorrow when I can sit and wait and get seventy for it. Because that's really what it's worth. And my question is, why wouldn't you? I mean, do you really want to sit and babysit the property and talk to all the people who want to go drive on it and roll around on it and camp on it and love on it? Have a virtual thing of what their tiny home's going to look like on it and see their family running through the field on it. Dream it up. And waste all that time. I'm kind of getting into the show, but that's describing it and we'll talk more. Steve: The undertone or between the lines here is, the ethics of what we do. That's what I want to get into. Jill: Oh, really? Steve: Yeah, because I haven't heard it recently, but I've heard people in the past, give me a hard time about what we do for a living. We haven't brought this up. Jill: I haven't heard this in a while. Okay, good we'll talk about that. Steve: We haven't brought this up in a long time, but I think it's worth talking about. Jill: I love it. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. Gina wrote, "Hello. My name is Gina. I've been doing land investing for a few years now and I guess I'm here to try and see if I can improve my workflow. I send out about 2000 letters a month, but I'd like to make that close to 5000." Thank you, Kevin. One of our moderators. Yep. Steve: Thank you, Kevin, by the way from me. Jill: Yeah. "Any tips, tools tricks you use to scale? I currently work a full time job and simply don't have the time to sort through all the sites and piece together that many records. 2000 sites would be my max without going crazy. Any help from experienced members, such as yourself, would be much appreciated." Cool. So I'm wondering what sites she's going through to piece together records. I'm thinking if she's a member, you're not piecing anything together, you're just- Steve: She's a member. Jill: Okay. So you should be using Real Quest Pro, having an idea before you go into there to download the data, you've spent a lot of time picking the areas, picking the County and getting it all from there. You're holding back. Go. Steve: In the interest of education, I'm going to be very plain speaking here. I don't see the difference between processing 2000 or 5000 at all. In fact,

Quick Land Sale vs. Retail Price (LA 1300) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show. Jill: Oops. Steve: Entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about a quick land sale versus retail price. Jill: Right. Steve: You want to explain that title? Because it's kind of your title. Jill: Oh, is it? Okay. It's kind of like, think about the kind of person you want to be. A quick land sale is for me, just how we operate. I used to say I'm a wholesaler, but that even gets confused. I don't want people to ... People have negative thoughts sometimes- Steve: Yeah, it became a negative term. Jill: It did, and it's so silly because I think people see a wholesaler as someone who doesn't acquire property, all they do is assign a- Steve: Get in the way. Jill: ... property. Exactly. Assign it versus yeah, virtually get in the way. I am with you. And the way we do it, which is still wholesaling. People don't, I don't know why it got all garbled. We buy the property. I will seek out the property. I will buy the property. I will pay the full price for the property. We own it. We close escrow, it's in our name. Now I'm going to turn around, mark it up and sell it. So I can choose to quickly double my money and get out or I can, Hm, I can mark it up and some people do this, they get a little greedy and they think about retail. Why would I sell a property, Jill, that I paid $20,000 for? Why would I sell it for $45,000 tomorrow when I can sit and wait and get seventy for it. Because that's really what it's worth. And my question is, why wouldn't you? I mean, do you really want to sit and babysit the property and talk to all the people who want to go drive on it and roll around on it and camp on it and love on it? Have a virtual thing of what their tiny home's going to look like on it and see their family running through the field on it. Dream it up. And waste all that time. I'm kind of getting into the show, but that's describing it and we'll talk more. Steve: The undertone or between the lines here is, the ethics of what we do. That's what I want to get into. Jill: Oh, really? Steve: Yeah, because I haven't heard it recently, but I've heard people in the past, give me a hard time about what we do for a living. We haven't brought this up. Jill: I haven't heard this in a while. Okay, good we'll talk about that. Steve: We haven't brought this up in a long time, but I think it's worth talking about. Jill: I love it. Steve: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. Gina wrote, "Hello. My name is Gina. I've been doing land investing for a few years now and I guess I'm here to try and see if I can improve my workflow. I send out about 2000 letters a month, but I'd like to make that close to 5000." Thank you, Kevin. One of our moderators. Yep. Steve: Thank you, Kevin, by the way from me. Jill: Yeah. "Any tips, tools tricks you use to scale? I currently work a full time job and simply don't have the time to sort through all the sites and piece together that many records. 2000 sites would be my max without going crazy. Any help from experienced members, such as yourself, would be much appreciated." Cool. So I'm wondering what sites she's going through to piece together records. I'm thinking if she's a member, you're not piecing anything together, you're just- Steve: She's a member. Jill: Okay. So you should be using Real Quest Pro, having an idea before you go into there to download the data, you've spent a lot of time picking the areas, picking the County and getting it all from there. You're holding back. Go. Steve: In the interest of education, I'm going to be very plain speaking here. I don't see the difference between processing 2000 or 5000 at all. In fact,

Real Definition of Homestead (LA 1299) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land, investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWitt broadcasting from sunny, Southern California. Steve: Today Jill and I talk about, well, really, I talk about, the real definition of the word homestead. Jill: Why is it only you? This came up because of a call that I had it. And this guy was nutty. Well, I'll explain it. But this nutty seller was explaining to me how he got this property. He's the first one to get the property. It was never properly, what was the word he said, what did he call it? Divided. It wasn't subdivided. He said staked out or something like that. And I'm going along like a homestead and he's telling me no. So we talked about it. Now we're going to try to clear this up. Steve: That's interesting. Because I chose this topic because I was reading a stream, an extremely lengthy stream in our Facebook. Jill: So they're talking about it too. Steve: Yeah. It's all over the internet man. And it's so wrong. I have to be real straight here. There's some really bad information about the word homestead. And I know why, because homestead means four or five things to different people. So I'm going to try to clear it up. Jill: It's funny. Steve: And not in a boring way. Jill: [inaudible 00:01:22]. By the way. Steve: That's okay. Jill: Okay, good. I got to say usually we're recording this a few days before. Now pretty much today we're recording on the day. This tells you a little bit about our weekend. Steve: We were late because of our social life interfered with our professional life recently. Jill: You should not let that happen. And we did, "Well, we can record tomorrow." I'll just record tomorrow, or we can record tomorrow. And then here, we're like, Oh, you can't. We have no more tomorrows. Steve: Remember back when we first started out, not with the Atlanta Academy, but just working together. And we were there every day and working hard and all into it. And now it's just a lapse [crosstalk 00:00:02:03]. Jill: [crosstalk 00:02:06] I guess so. Don't do that. Steve: I hear radio radio switches clicking off all over the place right now. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. So Austin wrote, "Hello. After a somewhat successful first round mailer, I have a handful of recorded deeds from the County," as you should. This is great. "I haven't sold anything so far. I focus in Northern Arizona and have five acre plus desert properties that I'm hoping to sell in the 2,500 to $3,000 range. For this price point, is it appropriate to hire a photo company such as WeGoLook. There's others like that too, to shoot photos and or video, or should I use stock photos from the region and those will be adequate?" Thanks, Austin. And we put those in there for [inaudible 00:02:59] people. That's one of the things- Steve: There's 10,000 pictures in the original program of Northern Arizona. Jill: That we shared. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:08] 10,000, maybe 8,000. Jill: When I say we, I mean, somebody else that worked for us or you. Steve: What do you think about this topic? Jill: I would, you know what? I think that back in the day, it was hard to get people and hard to tell them where to go. And for them to find properties, it was difficult for us alone telling photographer. But nowadays you could get a guy for 50 to 75 bucks off these companies or Craigslist, and you can give them GPS coordinates that they can pop in their phone and they can drive right there. So I think not hiring it I think there's no reason nowadays to not hire a photographer, to go out there, hopefully see a couple... And you've got how many properties? Steve: A handful. Jill: Is there a way... Do all of them at the same time. Have your photographer pick the first sunny day w...

Real Definition of Homestead (LA 1299) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Hello. Steve: Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land, investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWitt broadcasting from sunny, Southern California. Steve: Today Jill and I talk about, well, really, I talk about, the real definition of the word homestead. Jill: Why is it only you? This came up because of a call that I had it. And this guy was nutty. Well, I'll explain it. But this nutty seller was explaining to me how he got this property. He's the first one to get the property. It was never properly, what was the word he said, what did he call it? Divided. It wasn't subdivided. He said staked out or something like that. And I'm going along like a homestead and he's telling me no. So we talked about it. Now we're going to try to clear this up. Steve: That's interesting. Because I chose this topic because I was reading a stream, an extremely lengthy stream in our Facebook. Jill: So they're talking about it too. Steve: Yeah. It's all over the internet man. And it's so wrong. I have to be real straight here. There's some really bad information about the word homestead. And I know why, because homestead means four or five things to different people. So I'm going to try to clear it up. Jill: It's funny. Steve: And not in a boring way. Jill: [inaudible 00:01:22]. By the way. Steve: That's okay. Jill: Okay, good. I got to say usually we're recording this a few days before. Now pretty much today we're recording on the day. This tells you a little bit about our weekend. Steve: We were late because of our social life interfered with our professional life recently. Jill: You should not let that happen. And we did, "Well, we can record tomorrow." I'll just record tomorrow, or we can record tomorrow. And then here, we're like, Oh, you can't. We have no more tomorrows. Steve: Remember back when we first started out, not with the Atlanta Academy, but just working together. And we were there every day and working hard and all into it. And now it's just a lapse [crosstalk 00:00:02:03]. Jill: [crosstalk 00:02:06] I guess so. Don't do that. Steve: I hear radio radio switches clicking off all over the place right now. Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill: Okay. So Austin wrote, "Hello. After a somewhat successful first round mailer, I have a handful of recorded deeds from the County," as you should. This is great. "I haven't sold anything so far. I focus in Northern Arizona and have five acre plus desert properties that I'm hoping to sell in the 2,500 to $3,000 range. For this price point, is it appropriate to hire a photo company such as WeGoLook. There's others like that too, to shoot photos and or video, or should I use stock photos from the region and those will be adequate?" Thanks, Austin. And we put those in there for [inaudible 00:02:59] people. That's one of the things- Steve: There's 10,000 pictures in the original program of Northern Arizona. Jill: That we shared. Steve: [crosstalk 00:03:08] 10,000, maybe 8,000. Jill: When I say we, I mean, somebody else that worked for us or you. Steve: What do you think about this topic? Jill: I would, you know what? I think that back in the day, it was hard to get people and hard to tell them where to go. And for them to find properties, it was difficult for us alone telling photographer. But nowadays you could get a guy for 50 to 75 bucks off these companies or Craigslist, and you can give them GPS coordinates that they can pop in their phone and they can drive right there. So I think not hiring it I think there's no reason nowadays to not hire a photographer, to go out there, hopefully see a couple... And you've got how many properties? Steve: A handful. Jill: Is there a way... Do all of them at the same time. Have your photographer pick the first sunny day w...

Thin Line Between Insulting a Seller and Pricing to Buy (LA 1295) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny northern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about the line between insulting a seller and actually buying a piece of property. This is a topic that's very fresh in how we're buying and selling land, and it's something that we all deal with. It's one of the top five- Jill: It happens. Steve: -or eight questions that we get from new people or really even experienced real estate people, like, "What do you mean you send offers out for 20% of what the property's actually worth?" Jill: Exactly. Steve: How do you deal with that? There truly is a line between... There's a thin line between offering $25 for a piece of property, which I personally think is ridiculous. Some people do it with success. Jill: Right. Steve: We'll talk about all that. Jill: Thank you. Steve: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community, it's free. Jill: I would like to add on the LandInvestors.com online community, it's free. Steve: Oh, yes. You'll get there. Jill: It's okay. Steve: You'll get there both ways. Jill: That's true. Lucas wrote, "Hi, everyone. Lucas here from Greenville, South Carolina. For some reason, I'm extremely nervous and excited at the same time. After reading the book-" Steve: Are you crying? Crying on the inside. Jill: That's daily. That's kind of how I wake up, nervous and excited. You're not alone, Lucas. Steve: Crying on the inside and laughing on the outside. That's how I wake up. Jill: "That's right. After reading your ebook, listening to the podcasts and watching YouTube interviews, I have become convinced that I want to do this and I could be good at this. I love data. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "I'm part of a manufacturing engineering group, and my colleagues call me the data guy because I so enjoy statistics and deep diving into the metrics." This is all really good. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "And I love land. This is good. I have a dream of starting a homestead with my wife and children someday, so for the last several years, I've been scouring GIS maps and Google Earth, trying to find a hidden gem for our homestead. I have long believed that there are incredible deals out there, just waiting to be found, and I couldn't process the data in a way that was efficient. After spending hours examining attributes of parcels in numerous states, I just couldn't figure out how to get the truly amazing deal. When I saw this community, it was like a lightning bolt turning on. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a potential business. I have been focused on upstate South Carolina, western North Carolina, upstate New York and all of Vermont, my home state. Steve: Excellent. Vermont's a great choice. Jill: "Someday, I want to leave properties for my children, and I want them to have business savvy. I feel like I have a knack for this stuff. I just need some direction. My biggest challenge will be managing this endeavor with the time constraints of my full-time job and my life as a parent. I'm so determined, though. If I can make some success with my initial mailer and my first purchase, I know there'll be enough momentum to really change my career. I'm looking forward to meeting some of you and collaborating and sharing ideas. Thank you, Steve and Jill." Awww, that's so cool. Steve: I'm going to turn this over to you right now, just the initial part of it, anyway, because I know that you talked to people constantly in the exact same boat. Jill: There's no question. I'm looking to see. He's just kind of sharing his experiences, right? Steve: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jill: Am I missing something? Steve: I think he joined. Jill:

Thin Line Between Insulting a Seller and Pricing to Buy (LA 1295) Transcript: Steve: Steve and Jill here. Jill: Howdy. Steve: Welcome to Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill: And I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny northern California. Steve: Today, Jill and I talk about the line between insulting a seller and actually buying a piece of property. This is a topic that's very fresh in how we're buying and selling land, and it's something that we all deal with. It's one of the top five- Jill: It happens. Steve: -or eight questions that we get from new people or really even experienced real estate people, like, "What do you mean you send offers out for 20% of what the property's actually worth?" Jill: Exactly. Steve: How do you deal with that? There truly is a line between... There's a thin line between offering $25 for a piece of property, which I personally think is ridiculous. Some people do it with success. Jill: Right. Steve: We'll talk about all that. Jill: Thank you. Steve: Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the LandAcademy.com online community, it's free. Jill: I would like to add on the LandInvestors.com online community, it's free. Steve: Oh, yes. You'll get there. Jill: It's okay. Steve: You'll get there both ways. Jill: That's true. Lucas wrote, "Hi, everyone. Lucas here from Greenville, South Carolina. For some reason, I'm extremely nervous and excited at the same time. After reading the book-" Steve: Are you crying? Crying on the inside. Jill: That's daily. That's kind of how I wake up, nervous and excited. You're not alone, Lucas. Steve: Crying on the inside and laughing on the outside. That's how I wake up. Jill: "That's right. After reading your ebook, listening to the podcasts and watching YouTube interviews, I have become convinced that I want to do this and I could be good at this. I love data. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "I'm part of a manufacturing engineering group, and my colleagues call me the data guy because I so enjoy statistics and deep diving into the metrics." This is all really good. Steve: Excellent. Jill: "And I love land. This is good. I have a dream of starting a homestead with my wife and children someday, so for the last several years, I've been scouring GIS maps and Google Earth, trying to find a hidden gem for our homestead. I have long believed that there are incredible deals out there, just waiting to be found, and I couldn't process the data in a way that was efficient. After spending hours examining attributes of parcels in numerous states, I just couldn't figure out how to get the truly amazing deal. When I saw this community, it was like a lightning bolt turning on. It hadn't even occurred to me that this could be a potential business. I have been focused on upstate South Carolina, western North Carolina, upstate New York and all of Vermont, my home state. Steve: Excellent. Vermont's a great choice. Jill: "Someday, I want to leave properties for my children, and I want them to have business savvy. I feel like I have a knack for this stuff. I just need some direction. My biggest challenge will be managing this endeavor with the time constraints of my full-time job and my life as a parent. I'm so determined, though. If I can make some success with my initial mailer and my first purchase, I know there'll be enough momentum to really change my career. I'm looking forward to meeting some of you and collaborating and sharing ideas. Thank you, Steve and Jill." Awww, that's so cool. Steve: I'm going to turn this over to you right now, just the initial part of it, anyway, because I know that you talked to people constantly in the exact same boat. Jill: There's no question. I'm looking to see. He's just kind of sharing his experiences, right? Steve: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Jill: Am I missing something? Steve: I think he joined. Jill:

Welcome! Good morning, everybody. I was on with Steve Fornier this morning who was sitting in for Jim Polito. We discussed what the James Dyson Foundation is providing to families to interest their kids in Engineering and what the Business world will look like post-COVID. So, here we go with Steve Fornier For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com ---  Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Craig So what we did is we took the opportunity with her to say, Okay, well, let's do it. Let's make here's a recipe with feeds four people. So now we need to feed six people. So at the age of about five or six, she was doing fractions in her head. Hey, we went through a few more tips this morning. And Mr. Jim Polito is out. So Steve Fornier is sitting in for him. And I managed to work murder Hornets into this morning's interview, so here we go. Steve Welcome back to the Jim Polito show. It is Steve Fornier here in Springfield in for Jim this morning. And again, I a guy that I think is just such a valuable resource at a time like this. Craig Peterson joins us, our tech talk guru Craig. Good morning. How are you doing, sir? Craig Good morning, doing well. Steve First of all, Craig, I want to say thank you for your contributions, and I know that you also gave our radio stations a bunch of tech talk tips that we can use that we can run here on the stations. And I think that's so valuable. So I want to say thank you for providing us with that stuff. Craig Oh, you're welcome. Yeah, it took a long time. Those little features are about a minute and a half to two minutes long talking about the tech stuff. Steve How do you boil it down to just something that's just a minute or two long? That's my entire job, Craig is spitting 40 seconds worth of stuff into a 30-second spot. So I hear you that. Craig Today is National Teacher Appreciation Day, which I think is so important. And you have some cool resources for parents to help the kids out. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Craig Yeah, this one is just totally cool. I don't know if you know, but my wife and I have eight kids, and we homeschooled them. Steve Your baseball team. Craig Yeah, yeah, right. Oh, you know from Canada, so it's closer to a hockey team. But anyway, the whole time up to college in fact, now they've gone on to get advanced degrees. But what you have to do with your kids is look at their interests. We had a young daughter, I think she was about five or six years old, and she loved to cook she loves to bake. And so what we did is we took the opportunity with her to say, Okay, well, let's do it. Let's make here's a recipe with seeds for people. So now we need to feed six people. So at the age of about five or six, she was doing fractions in her head. She was multiplying fractions dividing fractions because she loved to cook—somebody like you, Steve, who loves sports. If you have a little boy or girl that's interested in baseball, teach them how to figure out the statistics. And which stats are better? Is it better to bat a 300 or 400? And what does that mean? You take those opportunities, and that's what Dyson has come up with James Dyson's foundation. He is the guy that makes those vacuum cleaners that are kind of cool some high tech fans and other things. His foundation has put together this list of about two dozen different challenges for kids. And the idea behind it is to get them interested and expose them to engineering concepts. You know, they have some simple things like can you skewer a balloon that's inflated without poping it? How about taking a nail electroplating it? How can you cover it in copper? Well, how would you do that? And then a classic I remember when I was a little kid is plugging a clock into a potato making a potato battery. So all of these things are designed as challenges specifically for kids. They're ideal in the home or the classroom. And the whole idea is to get kids excited about engineering. Steve Yeah, into just give them something to do right to let them put down the fortnight controller and, and be productive. You know, while we're all sitting around. Craig Yeah, I think that might be a difficult one for some people because so many of these video games are very, very addicting, and the whole science behind them is fascinating. But this is great. So I'm going to we'll get them outside. They'll get them in the kitchen. They'll get them doing some things. So just search online right now you'll be able to find it. It's the James Dyson Foundation spelled D Y S O N. Steve By the way, I learned Craig thanks to Final Jeopardy earlier this week. Maybe that Dyson also invented the wheelbarrow. So how about that? What is who is Dyson? Cool there? We're talking with Greg Peterson, and I do have sort of an off the radar question. I wanted to fire at you towards the end. So stay on alert for that, Greg, but can you tell us a little bit about telecommuting. Post COVID-19, it's going to be a little different. How can you tell us out? Craig Yeah, we're seeing some fascinating numbers starting to come out right now most businesses have got some sort of telecommuting in place now. Many of them have been looking at how do I secure it now? How do I make it more efficient, make it faster for people? What we're starting to see from these C-levels and the executive offices, who are trying to figure out what's it going to look like, is that they are serious about moving out of the big cities. So I think you're going to see a lot of the businesses moving from a Boston, for instance. Closer to Western or Springfield, smaller cities, and even smaller towns, some of these corporate buildings in Chicago are already emptying. We've seen the same thing in Detroit for many years. So post COVID-19, we're going to see that many of their employees have ten times more than pre-COVID-19. Ten times more employees about 40% or maybe more will be working from home on a long term basis. Steve Whether or not they want to. I mean, like yes, some people don't want to be stuck in the house all day with their family and some businesses. Craig Some businesses still have their people getting together? What I'm thinking is that we are going to see more people working from home, but it's not going to be five days a week. They may be working from home four days a week or three days a week and going into the office once or twice, but that's going to happen. It is going to have a devastating impact on real estate, the business real estate out there, frankly. But we're going to see just a dramatic a giant increase from January and people working from home on Craigslist, anything. Steve Like I don't know how to say this is the impact that COVID-19 is having in the big cities? Is that a part of it too, because it just seems like, you know, the cities that are being hit the hardest. New York City, Boston, you know, major metropolitan cities, is that a part of it too, just keeping your employees safe, and, you know, understanding the threat that there isn't a big city. Craig So that's a massive part of it. Most of the major corporations are not planning any sort of travel even until the probably next year 2021. And when you're looking at the big cities, it is a considerable risk. You know, as a business, we can't afford to lose some of our best talents, and when Many companies have been placed strategies that say hey listen, you guys cannot be on the same airplane traveling somewhere you cannot be in this location together. And because of what we've seen with COVID-19, there are a lot of businesses that are being Steve all just a whole lot more cautious about having people in one place. I talk to business people who are saying that for them in reality. It has been a big wake up call because having everyone in the office but spreading these germs, even for the flu for instance, but when you've got something like this virus we have today where we don't know what's going to happen, having them all in one office and sharing it the big problem. I have a client who is an HVAC contractor, and they are starting to install air handling units that have ultraviolet light inside of them. They have heavy HEPA filters that put into them all in an effort for businesses to be able to keep the offices safe so that they are not spreading disease in the office. It's going to be a whole new world. Steve Yeah, sure is. We're talking with Craig Peterson, our tech guru and Craig, I do have a question sort of out of the left-field that I think you can help with solve security questions. It is today's world from the eyes of a hacker, these security questions, just don't cut it for me, like, what is your dad's but what is your mom's maiden name? Like? I feel like that's very easy to find on the internet. If you're a hacker, what you know what street did you grow up on? Well, we can figure that out pretty easily on the Yellow Pages calm. Um, I'm to the point now where it's I'm answering questions like, you know, what's your dog's name and I'm answering like purple because I Hope they will get it. Is that the best approach to just sort of lie on all these questions? Craig Yeah, it is, you know, in this day and age of murder Hornets, we have to be extra cautious. But yeah, what I've done for the last 30-40 years. I got my first job ever. I wrote some computer software used for magazine distribution stuff. I came to realize that hey, they are tracking us. So always since then, I have been making up the answers to all of those questions, just wholly random words. And I have been using one password, which is a password manager, to a great one. It's the one I recommend to everybody. There are other password managers out there, but it'll generate passwords for you. It'll store notes securely, etc. So you're doing the right thing, Steve, every website that I go to, that's asking those security Questions. I have it either one password randomly pick words for me, or I just make up something that's completely nonsensical. And sometimes, when you get on with the tech support or PII or help desk people, and they ask one of those questions, they chuckle. They ask, what's that? What's that all about? Now, there is a line. You cannot erase the lease not supposed to lie on certain types of applications. So if it's financial information, if it's government-related stuff, you can undoubtedly make top answers to those recovery questions. But you can't just totally lie about who you are. But I have dozens and dozens of identities, Steve that I use on just random websites. They don't need to know who I am. So I only use some made-up identity, and sometimes I'm a guy, sometimes I'm female, you know, different ages, everything else because they don't need to know that. I don't want the hacker To be able to examine my life on LinkedIn or my website or Facebook and come up with the answers. Steve Yeah, no, that that was my thought is how simple it is. Especially if you have if you're not like a private thing, if you don't have a personal Twitter or a private Facebook, you know, you're opening yourself up to getting that information, the hackers getting that information, and then then you know, they're in. So very interesting. I appreciate that. I have been fighting that battle with the security question thing now. Craig Well, that's not right. Now that's a $15 billion industry, sending out those phishing emails and trying to figure out what someone's information is and using that to do spearfishing. It's all part of business email compromise, which the FBI says I'm more than $15 billion industry right now. Steve Wow. That's crazy. Craig, this is excellent stuff, folks. And if you want more from Craig, you can do that. We'll go with the name, Jim, for consistency, but you can do text, the name Jim, to this number. Craig to 855 385 5553. So let's just text and Jim to 855 385 5553. Steve And as always good stuff, Craig, if you want more information on those different activities for the kids, again, you will find it at Dyson is the name of the company. Likewise, if you get in touch with Craig, he's more than willing to help out. And like I said, Craig, we appreciate you, especially this time. It's valuable stuff. And we understand it. So thanks again. Craig All right, take care. Bye-Bye, guys. Steve Thank you. Thank you. There goes everybody, Craig Peterson. And great stuff. Craig I've been sort of mulling over the security question thing for a while that just like what street did you grow up on? That's specific information to come up with if you're a hacker, it's just to me it just seems way too easy. So yeah, what street did you grow up on honeysuckle? It's not honeysuckle, but that's what I'm, you know, whatever. You're right. Just make sure you write them all down somewhere. And then I'll use the one password it can have secure notes. Don't forget it. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for reaching out to me yesterday. Text Me Me at Craig Peterson dot com. I appreciate that. I got a couple of excellent comments. I think I might be onto something here through something that's going to help you guys out. So anyhow, have a great day. I expect I'll be back tomorrow if I have a decent interview on WGAN as well. Bye-bye Transcribed by https://otter.ai ---  More stories and tech updates at: www.craigpeterson.com Don't miss an episode from Craig. Subscribe and give us a rating: www.craigpeterson.com/itunes Follow me on Twitter for the latest in tech at: www.twitter.com/craigpeterson For questions, call or text: 855-385-5553

Land Academy Members Self Start Accountability Metric to Insure Success (LA 1097) Transcript: Steve:                   Steve and Jill here. Jill:                          Hi. Steve:                   Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill:                          And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve:                   Today Jill and I talk about how Land Academy members have self-started an accountability metric to ensure their own success. Jill:                          I love it. Steve:                   Who the heck wrote that title? Jill:                          Wasn't me, because the word metric was in it. Steve:                   What does it mean? What it means is some smart person in our group started a Facebook group called accountability, Land Academy accountability. And the people that join it, you know it's an invite only or it's like requests only, how that works. Jill:                          It's a secret group. Steve:                   And they- Jill:                          It's not secret now, sorry. Steve:                   It's not secret anymore. When certain people start off on stuff like this, everybody knows this. It's hard to stay on track. Stuff happens. Like you got to pick up your kids from school or whatever. Your job gets in the way. So this is an accountability group to make sure that if you commit to sending out, it's kind of like Weight Watchers, you are going to get weighed in ... I don't even know how the Weight Watchers works. Jill:                          I can tell you. Steve:                   How does Weight Watchers work? Jill:                          There is a weekly weigh in. It's true. It's actually funny. Steve:                   I'm choking myself laughing. Jill:                          Why Weight Watchers came from, but okay. Steve:                   So what happens in Weight Watchers? Do you say I'm going to lose a pound or I'm going to stay on this diet? Is it like, let's see how this goes next week on the scale or I have a goal in losing a pound? Jill:                          Well you have a goal. Well, in the old days when I did Weight Watchers way back when, like you kept track, it wasn't on our phones back then and you kept track of it, you had points and you could eat so many points a day. And then once we could go to meeting and you'd weigh in and meet with your person, they say yay and you'd sit down and someone would talk and then you go home with a bunch of recipes. Steve:                   So does everybody like not eat the day before? Jill:                          Oh, I'm sure. Oh yeah. And they like drink a lot of coffee. Try to get things going before you go to the meeting. And like were your thinnest, lightest weight clothes, like don't wear a sweatshirt that might weigh something. It's so funny. Take your shoes off. Steve:                   So I don't, I'm not a member of this group. I think you are though. Jill:                          Oh, I was. Weight Watchers way back when. Steve:                   No, no. This accountability group. Sorry, I changed gear. Jill:                          No, no. Steven. I am actually not currently a Weight Watchers member. I do however support, always support Weight Watchers. I am not a Weight Watchers member at the time. Are you telling me I should? Steve:                   No. It has nothing do do with- Jill:                          Is this about the chump? Steve:                   No. Yeah. You don't ever want to talk about any woman's weight. Jill:                          That should be the stump the chump, like do you bring up Weight Watchers with a woman? Steve:                   Sitting next to a woman on your own show, do you even bring up Weight Watchers. What kind of idiot would bring up Weight Watchers? Jill:                          And then ask me questions about it. Like,

How Much We Really Need to Be On the Phone (1088) Transcript: Steve:                   Steve and Jill here. Jill:                          Hi. Steve:                   Welcome to the Land Academy show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill:                          I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve:                   Today Jill and I talk about how much do we really actually all need to be on the phone in this business. Jill:                          A lot. Steve:                   What are you looking at back here? Jill:                          I don't know. I thought I was ... I'm expecting people to walk by that we might recognize and so I was just kind of keeping an eye out. Steve:                   Why isn't that, Jill? Jill:                          I don't know. Anyway ... Steve:                   Before we get into the topic, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill:                          Kyler asks, "Does anyone have experience with quiet titling a property in Texas? There are no other persons claiming ownership. There's just a cloud in the title because the property was owned in a DBA. Debt Doing Business As of a husband that is deceased. The title company instructed us to quite title the property into the wife's name. Never done this before and would love specific input and steps on how to take the process." Thank you. I love that. [crosstalk 00:01:11]. Steve:                   Kevin answers this perfectly. Kevin, our moderator on land investors and then I'll have a couple of comments right after. Jill:                          Thank you for sharing. Steve:                   What does that mean? Jill:                          I don't know. I just think silly. Steve:                   What does that mean? Jill:                          I don't know. Steve:                   Thank you for sharing. This is what the show is. I share some stuff. You share some stuff. Jill:                          Just the way you interjected there. I thought it was funny. Kevin, our moderator is going to answer this perfectly and we're going to get right back to you in a moment. Steve:                   You know why I said it that way? I had to get it in there quickly because I think you're ready to just jump in. Jill:                          I was. That's usually what I do. Steve:                   Sometimes Kevin answers. Sometimes not. Sometimes Kevin answers perfect. Perfectly, and I just throw it in here. You were about to go off the teleprompter again. Jill:                          No, I wasn't. I was continuing to read. I can [inaudible 00:02:01]. Steve:                   Jill's famous for going off script. Jill:                          Really? Steve:                   Yeah. Jill:                          I don't think it's me. Steve:                   Famously. Jill:                          All right. Anyway, Kyler, I would not pay for quiet title and put the property in the wife's name. You could lose control of it. This is good advice. She might sell it to your friend after you've paid for the quiet title. Quiet title can take about three months and will cost some money, maybe two to $3,000. if you go this route, you can get an attorney to help you make the agreement with the wife to accept the purchase amount and make no claim on the quiet title. Bottom line is talk to an attorney on this one if it's worth it. That's such good advice. Steve:                   It's great advice and what he's talking about. What this whole topic is is called equitable title. It's everywhere in the whole country. Equitable title means you don't own the property but you have an interest in it. This is what actually foreclosing on a tax lien is. You have a an interest in the property because you own that tax lien. Let's say you bought the tax lien from the country.

How to Make a Good Land Posting (LA 1082) Transcript: Steve:                   Steve and Jill here. Jill:                          Good day. Steve:                   Welcome to The Land Academy Show, Entertaining Land Investment Talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill:                          And I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California. Steve:                   Today, Jill and I talk about how a good- how to make a good land posting. Sorry. I got a little confused there for a second. Jill:                          Okay. What is a good land posting? Steve:                   What is a land posting? Jill:                          What? Steve:                   What's a land posting? Jill:                          Wait a minute. Steve:                   Wait, don't I just call my real estate agent and say, "Hey, I've got a piece of property. How about you sell it?" Jill:                          Can I just put a for sale sign on it, and just walk away? Put my phone number? Steve:                   This has got off to a good start. Jill:                          Oh, good. Steve:                   Because that's what I think the whole world thinks. Jill:                          I want to think. Okay, let's think of all the things you would just [inaudible 00:00:43] like. Steve:                   My sister in-law is a real estate agent [inaudible] last Christmas she was talking about a piece of land that this she looked at. Let's call her. Jill:                          Yeah. Steve:                   Shell get solved, it'll be fine. Jill:                          Well, how about the girl that we bought our house from? Let's just call her. Steve:                   So it turns out it 21st century, almost a quarter of the way through the 21st century, we are think about that and the internet and how we do stuff with computers is so dramatically changed. This industry since it was kind of the whole concept of it, the modern day real estate industry was started in the forties and fifties 1940s and fifties for some reason there's lingering real estate agents still. Jill:                          Yep. Steve:                   If you want the answer to that question, go see who the number two lobbyist group is in Washington for the last 35 years. Jill:                          That's interesting. Steve:                   It's the national association of realtors anyway. Jill:                          Who are they? Who are they behind? I hate to guess, does it start with an N? Jill:                          [inaudible 00:01:41]. Jill:                          Is it? is it, is is number one the, is it the NRA is number one? Steve:                   NRA, up there, it's top five. Jill:                          Okay, I would guess. Steve:                   That's a good question. Jill:                          We should look this up. Steve:                   I only ever looked. I look up, I obsess on this stuff. Jill:                          I know. Steve:                   And all five of them or if you just, they're propping themselves up, falsely. Like it removes ironically removes the raw supply and demand of capitalism. But wow that went sideways fast. Steve:                   Turns out... Jill:                          You're getting a lecture from dad right now or professor Steve pick one. Steve:                   Jill and I are in the pre development of a show called the Jack and Jill show about relationships and working together and you know, kind of like couples therapy and, and a non real estate show for is what Jill wants to do and I and I completely agree with her. Jill:                          It's going to happen. Steve:                   So what we're practicing that was a... [Inaudible 00:02:42]. Jill:                          There we go. Perfect. Thank you. Professor Butala. Steve:                   It'll launch out in October and I'm sure it'll fail.

Planning for Your Family Legacy Like Saras Farm (LA 1035) Transcript: Steve:                   Steve and Jill here. Jill:                          Good day. Steve:                   Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Steve:                   and I'm Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California. Jill:                          Today. Jill and I talk about planning for your family legacy, like Sarah's farm. Steve:                   Who The heck is Sarah? Jill:                          Sarah is our niece and this is because of a story that I heard, and I was talking to your sister yesterday and she was sharing with me Sarah's farm, one of their properties that they purchased, and I thought this was really, really cool and I want to talk about it more. Steve:                   If you're a regular listener, you know this, but my middle sister is... It lives in Trevor City, Michigan, and she's extremely successful residential real estate agent. She's actually the single only residential real estate agent that I enjoy spending time with. Jill:                          That is true, well hey wait, there's two. Steve:                   Oh yeah. Jill:                          Well we have two, we have one more local. Steve:                   Yeah, and so she's been accumulating property. She pours a lot of her money, the commission money that she earns ,into buying properties, and I think she's up to what, 20 or 30 or something? Jill:                          20 doors. Steve:                   And so one of them is Sarah's farm, which I think... Tell the story. Oh no, okay wait... Jill:                          We'll save it for the show. Steve:                   Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill:                          Mike L. asks, "Hi Steve and Jill, I recently sent out a mailer and have been getting calls back. It's exciting, but everyone wants more than we are offering. I'm okay with that, but I'm having trouble properly assessing the true market value against the land flippers on LandWatch who are properly following your advice and to price less than the cheapest listed seller to move land fast. We have no seller lists yet and we have priced well enough it seems, but we can't move much higher if I'm basing the sales price off the lowest seller. I can find... The lowest one I can find on LandWatch. Have you or others had any experience with this? Is it worth acquiring with the expectation that the sales price will fall more towards the average low? Steve:                   Yes. Jill:                          Usually other flippers or the one or two that are viciously low. Please help. I've got an example below if my question didn't make sense. Steve:                   It makes complete sense. Jill:                          I'm sorry. I'm going to say what he put in here too? This is so cute. Oh, this is a good... hey, good way to do this. This is how you get on this show. He put hashtag podcast question, hashtag love the show hashtag. I'll put whatever I have to put here to get on this show, hashtag you just told us to do something like this to get your question on the show. Mike. Hashtag Mike, you did great. Steve:                   That was hilarious, Actually. Jill:                          Perfect. Steve:                   I didn't even realize that when I put this question in here. Jill:                          That was so good. Alright. Do you want me to read the example? Steve:                   He says, "For example, we listed a property for $750 and they made an offer for $750 and the guy wants four grants. So the cheapest on LandWatch is 2,500 everybody else falls into the four to $5,000 range for the same property that's in a planned urban development. That's east coast, east coast speak for mash plan community.

Finance Friday with Steven Butala, Jill DeWit & Justin Sliva (LA 903) Transcript: Steve:                   Steve and Jill here with Justin. Jill:                          Hello. Steve:                   Welcome to the Land Academy Show on this Friday, it's a special Friday. I think this is the first time all three of us are doing it. Jill:                          I think so. Justin:                   It is, it is. Steve:                   Here at tending Land Investment Talk, I'm Steven Jack [Butella 00:00:15], with guests, Justin [Slieva 00:00:17], and Jill [DeWitt 00:00:17], broadcasting from sunny Southern California and Dallas-Forth Worth. Today, Justin and I talk about Finance Friday with special guest, Jill, which is a little bit strange. Jill:                          Thank you. Steve:                   I can't even read it, it's so strange. Jill:                          You a little confused right now? I kind of like this. I just get to sit back and coast, Justin:                   And relax. Jill:                          And comment now and then. Yeah, this is awesome. Steve:                   I'm gonna say some revealing stuff about Jill. Jill:                          Oh, great. Justin:                   Okay. Steve:                   Jill loves to be the only girl. Like, wherever we're just with a bunch of guys, she's like, "Yeah, I like being the only girl." Jill:                          Actually, it is nice. I understand the dialog. I understand, yeah I get it. It's good. Steve:                   Before we get into the show today and I find out the deals that Justin's doing and the stuff that Jill's doing, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the Landinvestors.com online community, it's free. Jill:                          Do you want me to add? Steve:                   Sure. Jill:                          Travis asked, "Has anyone successfully used the CoreLogic API to fetch their data from RealQuest Pro instead of the GUI?" Steve:                   User interface. Jill:                          Oh, the new user interface. Got it. "What would be a quick and helpful way to get the number lots in a given area if that's possible? Faster than searching county by county on their website, any ideas? Steve:                   Yeah, so the RealQuest API is literally the backend. CoreLogic API of parcel facts. Actually, yeah. I have a lot of experience using that. This will be solved, what you're trying to accomplish when we release DataTree, access to DataTree. The searching function and the parcel checking function based on geography, even map searching it, is instantaneous. It's leaps and bounds above what we use for RealQuest. However, the real value in RealQuest is it has, I think, a superior search function for land. Actually, Justin, go ahead and comment. I know you have experience with both too. Justin:                   Yeah. DataTree is ton of better on houses. It just leaps and bounds better on houses; but, when you get into RealQuest, they're actually getting their lots down. It's way, way easier to use than RealQuest. For someone who may have less than half the price on what the data is, it's worth it for me to pay more on data in RealQuest, because it's so much easier to manipulate with land. It works out for us a lot better. Steve:                   Same exact experience here. Exactly. So, with House Academy, which is just a couple of months away from release? Jill:                          A couple months. Steve:                   The subscription to DataTree will be included much like RealQuest prop. Jill:                          Because, I personally would like to have a life. So, that's why House Academy's going to be not next week. A month or two. Justin:                   Are you missing date night? Jill:                          What's that? I don't know what that is. Justin:                   We literally have a meeting after we're done r...

Selling on Amazon has become a popular hustle but building a seven-figure brand is no easy feat. On this episode, Steve’s special guest is Liran Hirschkorn. Liran has been in the online marketing space for the last 10 years and has built not one but two seven-figure brands on Amazon. He also helped built Amazing Freedom together with Andy and Nathan Slamans. Here are more valuable takeaways on today’s episode: Personal development as an intellectual equity. The key to success from Liran’s perspective. Liran’s prediction on the future of E-commerce and Amazon as a selling channel. So listen to today’s episode and learn more about E-commerce and building a successful Amazon brand. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time, money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 1:15 (Steve introduces today’s guest, Liran Hirschkorn.) Steve: This is episode number 38 of the Awesomers.com Podcast and as the tradition has become clear for those avid listeners, all you have to do is go to Awesomers.com/38, that's Awesomers.com/38 to find relevant show notes and details. Now today my special guest is Liran Hirschkorn and he's been in the online marketing space for the last 10 years, that's a long time in the internet space. Before building brands on Amazon, Liran was a pioneer in selling life insurance online. We're going to talk a little bit about that in today's episode. Over the last four years, he successfully built not one but two seven-figure brands on Amazon by creating products that add more value to the customer and understanding keywords, search optimization, sponsored ads and all the little things that go into making an online business work on Amazon. Liran is also a partner with Amazing Freedom and The Amazing Seller Podcast, which provides training and services for Amazon brand owners. You can learn more about all of these great resources and ideas that Liran is involved in in today's episode. Steve: Welcome back awesomers. Here we are again, Steve Simonson bringing you another podcast and I'm pleased to report today Liran Hirschkorn is joining me today. How did I do on the pronunciation? Liran: Did great, thank you. Thanks for having me on. Steve: Yes, I'm betting about 50% and in baseball I'd be a genius, but when it comes to pronouncing names it's really, it’s not that good, so thank you for that. And thank you for joining us. I definitely - I have already kind of read the intro and kind of the bio to the folks so they know a little bit about you, but I always like to have the guest put in their own words kind of what they do today on a day-to-day basis and help everybody kind of hear from them directly. What can you tell us?

Your personal why is what gives you motivation. It really is an extraordinary opportunity for you to find yourself empowered to go on and take on the world. For today’s Awesomer Insights episode, Steve talks about the importance of finding out your personal whys. Here are more gold nuggets on today’s episode: What you need to establish your personal why. The different phases of building a company and why knowing your whys can help you make decisions that are aligned to your goals. Why you need to write your own eulogy and think about how you want to be remembered and more. So put on your headphones and be inspired to take action in knowing your personal why. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 1.15 (Steve introduces today’s topic - establishing your personal why.) Steve: Welcome again to the Awesomers.com podcast everybody. My name is Steve Simonson and I'm thrilled to have you with us today today we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics and that is the idea of establishing your personal why. Now there's been recent discussion the past couple years by an author. Turns out he's a great author and thought leader named Simon Sinek and he talks about finding your why and that book is a great book and we'll probably talk about it later on a an episode of our book of the week but that's more about finding a company why and why a brand should exist and what a brand stands for. And what I'd like to talk to you today about is the idea that you need to understand your own personal why. Why are you doing this, well you know whatever it is you do, why are you doing it? And what's the point of it and it goes far beyond the day-to-day I need to put food on the table or my kids need a new pair of shoes. It's really about what drives your fulfillment and your satisfaction in the long run and I can't stress this enough. So you're listening to episode number 26 of the Awesomers.com podcast you as always can go to Awesomers.com/26 to find the show notes and details. That's Awesomers.com/26 so as we embark on this journey today talking about the mission of finding a person why, I want to really articulate why I believe it's important when you understand your why and the why really should be broken down into two or three sentences that really resonate. And I'll come back and we'll talk about that later as I go through some of the process but today we're going to talk about that exact process and we're going to give you some of the tips and hints and on the show notes pages, we'll probably even give you a worksheet to kind of help you work through it as well. I truly believe in this process. It is really important and it doesn't matter whether you

What if you can make your business operate without you day to day? On today’s podcast, Steve Simonson introduces us to another book of the week episode, Built to Sell by John Warrillow. John made a story instead of a long checklist that addresses this particular question. Here are more gold nuggets on today’s episode: The main philosophy behind Built to Sell. How to engineer your desired outcomes. Why you should align your people with your objectives. And the number one mistake most entrepreneurs make according to John Warrillow. So let’s get to know more about our Book of the Week and find out how you too can put your business on autopilot. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit SymoGlobal.com to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 1:11 (Steve introduces today’s book, Built to Sell by John Warrillow.) Steve: Welcome back Awesomers, this is Steve Simonson and today we are recording episode number 25 for the Awesomers.com podcast series. You can always go to Awesomers.com/25 to find the relevant show notes, details and perhaps a link or two that we might mention along the way. So this is another book of the week episode and today my book is Built to Sell and I'm not sure I pronounce his last name but John Warrillow, is how I'm going to give it a go. And John's written a nice book and that is in a parable format right. He's made a story instead of like a long checklist that talks about some of the lessons that need to be learned from his perspective in this particular book. So first let's let's fly up to the 30,000 foot level. The idea of Built to Sell would be that you’re engineering some outcome like running a business and that you're building it to sell. Now this is a very important concept, even if you're not preparing to because you want to build it in such a way that it has value. And regularly I talk about this idea of equity, you're building equity. So sometimes we're building intellectual equity, we do that by reading books and learning in general but other times you're building financial equity. And when you're starting a company, you’re building a company, may be part of your objective is to sell that company and get a financial reward. So if you're building the company to sell that's okay, that's something that people do and in fact it's a very good outcome if you plan for it. So one of the key concepts here and I think that this is

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: What are the keys to being a more effective leader? On this episode, Steve introduces the Awesomers Book of the Week, Strengths Based Leadership written by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie. The book is based on Gallup’s StrengthsFinder program that has been instrumental in many of his organizations. Here are more gold nuggets you will learn from this episode: The Barrier Labels of strengths and how it relates to determining your full leadership potential. Steve’s five leadership strengths: responsibility, self assurance, relator, ideation, and learner. How to identify bucket strength themes to become a more effective leader and more. So listen to today’s episode and find out how you too can use your unique leadership strengths towards becoming a better leader. Welcome to the Awesomers.com podcast. If you love to learn and if you're motivated to expand your mind and heck if you desire to break through those traditional paradigms and find your own version of success, you are in the right place. Awesomers around the world are on a journey to improve their lives and the lives of those around them. We believe in paying it forward and we fundamentally try to live up to the great Zig Ziglar quote where he said, "You can have everything in your life you want if you help enough other people get what they want." It doesn't matter where you came from. It only matters where you're going. My name is Steve Simonson and I hope that you will join me on this Awesomer journey. SPONSOR ADVERTISEMENT If you're launching a new product manufactured in China, you will need professional high-resolution Amazon ready photographs. Because Symo Global has a team of professionals in China, you will oftentimes receive your listing photographs before your product even leaves the country. This streamlined process will save you the time money and energy needed to concentrate on marketing and other creative content strategies before your item is in stock and ready for sale. Visit Symo Global to learn more. Because a picture should be worth one thousand keywords. You're listening to the Awesomers podcast. 01:15 (Steve Simonson introduces today’s Book of the Week episode.) Steve: Welcome back to the Awesomers podcast everybody. This is episode number 18 and as always, you can find show notes and details available at Awesomers.com/18. That's Awesomers.com/18. Now this is a book of the week episode and you'll find that we don't always space these out exactly seven days in between episodes, based on schedules of guests and so forth, but our objective is to encourage you and to suggest that maybe reading a book a week is a good idea. And internalizing those lessons in some of those books and so that you can improve your own you know knowledge and potentially help your organization. This week is about a very important book and something that it goes far beyond just a simple read. As some of our books are great simple informative reads, this one is a powerhouse. So without further ado let's get right to it. Steve: So today's book is called Strengths Based Leadership and this is a book that has been instrumental in many of my organizations for all these many years. Probably well over I don't know 10 or 15 years. I really don't know the exact count, but we definitely believe in the philosophy that is put forward by strengths based leadership. And we're going to talk about what that philosophy is and why we think it's particularly important to pay attention to. One of the most important aspects of this is the fact that it's based on research, it's based on science. And what we know is that patterns and behaviors within human beings are consistent. Somebody who has a particular pattern of behavior, they found

Steve: Welcome to all of our Becoming Your Best podcast listeners, where ever you might be in the world today. This is your host Steve Shallenberger and we have a very special guest and friend on our show today and I am as excited as I've ever been to have somebody here. He's wonderful. He’s a one of a kind individual with a life of inspiring others, including me, and helping people all over the world to reach their fullest potential and dreams. Welcome Denis Waitley.   Denis:  Hey Stephen! Great to be with you. It's a real honor and a privilege to be on your podcast and I hope we can shed some more light to your audience which you do so well on Becoming Your Best.   Steve: Well thank you so much. Well yes we'll just go ahead and get right into it and before we get going I'd like to just give a little background of some of the things that Denis has done and generally his nature which is amazing. He is inspired, informed, challenged and entertained audiences for over thirty five years. I know that because in 1983 and 1984  in one of my first companies where we had 700 sales reps that were going all over the world - Denis was one of the individuals that we invited to speak to and train all of these young sales reps. There were going all over, and they were energetic of full of energy but Denis and along with the number of his friends Zig Ziglar, Earl Nightingale, Ira Hayes -  I mean these are some really cool people who changed our lives and Denis was one of those. And so we're just part of that but he has done that all over the entire world. He's spent many years in China , hopefully will have the chance to have them tell us a little about that experience, in India, United States. Recently he was voted business speaker the year by the Sales and Marketing Executives Association and the by Toastmasters international and inducted into the international speakers hall of fame. He's had over ten million audio programs sold in fourteen different languages. This is just great! I actually pulled Denis a number of your books off my bookshelf again this morning. I've read that many times -  The Psychology of Winning, The Seeds Of Greatness and it goes on. His audio album The Psychology of Winning is the all time best selling program on self mastery. He's a graduate of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis and a former navy pilot. He holds a doctoral degree in human behaviour. Denis we’re so excited to have you with us!   Denis: Well thank you Steve. It's really great to be with you. You know it's been a wonderful journey. I'm still out there. You know people say,  Well, you’re long past retirement age and I said well retire - by its very definition means to go to bed or tired for the last time. If you're retired it seems tired again. So  I'm re inspired and retried instead of retired and I think that's one of the secrets that we all learn from people like Billy Graham and people like you know George Burns. You can name them and they seem to live longer because they're engaged in learning and they have the curiosity of a child that doesn't end when you finally stop earning. So I think you're yearning should and learning should continue regardless of your no longer earning.   Steve: Well that is a great way to put it. All of a sudden,  that great voice a Denis Waitley is coming back and we just kinda lean forward to listen to all those great quotes that you have. That's an inspiration for me , like I'm already past retirement ,but I am no where compared - I think Denis is like a 184 at least. Denis: It seems like it. You know, Steve, I've been doing eulogies for all of my contemporaries and that’s not, of course something that you look forward to. So, I did the eulogy for my friend, Jim Rone, Eulogy for my friends Zig Ziglar, for Wayne Dyer, Eulogy for my friend Steven Covey and even for Robert Schuller and Billy Graham was a friend of mine. I don't like to drop names like that but as I look at it them, I say to myself, “Wow, I'm so fortunate to still be out here.” But I have a cousin in England, Jack Reynolds ,who's 106 and he holds the Guinness Book of Records for the highest, longest, zip line journey for the oldest person. And it shows him at 106,  shouting and yelling as he's going down this is a blind over the mountain in England and I asked him how do you live so long and he said,” I look forward to being a 107.”   Steve: Well that's great you know just recently Denis I've had the opportunity in just the last few months to be with the number of longevity in health doctors just on a retreat or different circumstances - one in Singapore there. Dr Oz was one of them. Another, Dr Mao is his name and then the third Dr Foruhy - they're amazing but they talk about, and there among the world's leaders on health and longevity. They all reflected a number of things in common that we can do to extend healthy living: stay fit,  get adequate sleep. One of the ones I like the Dr Oz said was your heart needs to have a reason to keep beating.   Denis:  Well that's good, that's a very good.  That's when I have learned that too because I studied Prisoners Of War for my doctoral dissertation and I found that no American prisoner escaped during the Korean War from a minimum security camp but many of them escape from maximum security camp and that's because leaders always want to get home, or get to where they're going and people who feel that they're victimized and have no way out or no way forward, then don't live as long and that's what happens to many service people and coaches when they retire . If they retire and do nothing and have nothing really going on, you know we all say why don't we just play golf and fish. Well I like to eat what I catch and I don't like to kill fish necessarily but I do like taste of a fresh fish and I don't play golf anymore because why would I run my self esteem on a want like that.   Steve: That’s great. Well there's so much we can talk about that I think today let's start talking and I hope you don't mind and for the benefit of our audience, I'd like to start off talking about The Psychology Of Winning. This is a wonderful book and I am going to read just a small portion out of it. It’s an introduction and then perhaps Denis can tell us about what inspired him, what led to him write The Psychology Of Winning, and how was it been impactful in your life and others? So let me read this clip first. This is where he talks about true winning. True winning however is no more than one's own personal pursuit of individual excellence. You don't have to get lucky to win at life nor do you have to knock out other people down or gain at the expense of others. Winning is taking the talent or potential you were born with and have since developed and using it fully towards a goal or purpose it makes you happy. Winning is becoming the dream of yourself that would fulfill you as a person with high esteem. And winning is giving and getting in an atmosphere of love, cooperation, social concern and responsibility and that is why I've been so inspired about Denis because not only does he set it out there but then he's he says now here are some things that we need to do the will help us realize those dreams. So how did it all happen? What led to The Psychology Of Winning.   Denis:  Well, that you know, of course a long journey, but as things always start in childhood - so as a little boy, I grew up during World War II - a dysfunctional family. My father left home when I think I was 9 years old when he left but he went to war and then he and my mother broke up and my mother became very bitter because they weren't spending his checks home and so she became disillusioned with life and was fairly negative it and as a way of combating that disillusionment I rode my bike about ten miles over to my grandmother's house every Saturday because she was an inspiration. So she and I planted a victory garden and she taught me about the seeds of greatness. She said whatever you put in the soil and nurture will come up and be fruitful and I said, “But how come weeds don't need water?” And she said, “Well weeds are like negative thoughts. They blow in on the wind and they don't need any water and they just need people to repeat them.” So we did this victory garden and she inspired me when I was little and in a dysfunctional family where your father maybe is an alcoholic and your mother's a negative for perhaps all of the right reasons, I found that by reading biographies of people who'd overcome enormous obstacles to become successful - I found that these people had problems that I never even dreamed about and yet they seem to be fulfilled and happy. So I read a lot and then I began to try to be a leader in my school to overcome feelings of inadequacy and feelings of abandonment perhaps by my father and to make a long story short,  going to the Naval Academy during the Korean War, I learned a lot about discipline and target seeking and I became a navy pilot which meant that I had to visualize, internalize, I had to fantasize but I had to be goal oriented and I think as a surfer in southern California who finally became disciplined enough to be a carrier pilot, these things went together but I never wanted to destroy people in war-  I want to defend my country but I had a calling that I wanted to develop the potential within people because I was struggling myself and to make a really long story short ,during the worst time in my life, when I had custody of my 4 little children, I was divorced and had no income I wrote The Psychology of Winning at the worst of times. Now people, you know Tony Robbins and some of my friends would say, “Well usually, you write a book about your success!” And I said “Well I wrote the book for myself, so that I could learn from what I was not doing to do the things I know I should be doing. And so at the worst of my time, I wrote my best work so to speak, and so I think writing it for myself, giving myself the encouragement to do things that were a little more difficult but took a little more habit, a little more discipline, a little more effort; I put together these principles and I use POW because I had been a rehab facilitator for the returning Vietnam prisoners of war and I use that as a metaphor-  POW means either Prince Of Wales, putting on weight, power of women or psychology of winning and it's a perception through the eye of the beholder. So my premise is it's not so much what happens to you that counts, it's how you take it and what you make of it so what's your response to the daily life ; your anticipation of the future and the way you treat failure as fertilizer. Failure is the fertilizer of success. My grandmother used to say as we were fertilizing our plants, she said “We just take all the stuff and mulch and up and it grows green plants,” and I said “So that's what you do with failure huh? She said you don't lay in it wallow in it. You use it as a learning experience. So I would say that my grandmother who immigrated from England and going through World War 2 and the Korean War -  I thought we'd always be at war because that's all I knew growing up, and so I was so gratified to realize that the war is finally ended but POW, does really mean for me psychology of winning rather than a prisoner of war.   Steve: Wonderful! Boy, what we're great comments and thanks for the background. Talk about seeds! There are so many nuggets of what you just shared of and your grandma must've been some lady!   Denis:  Well I think about every day I have a mahogany butterfly that she always wanted that I finally made enough money with my paper out to buy it for is the only gift that I wanted from her life but it's in my kitchen and I look at it every day and we have a little silent conversation but she was definitely the role model and inspiration in my life and that I'll always be grateful for having her. She would say “You mow the bass line I've ever seen.” and I would ride my bike 10 miles just to get that kind of recognition from her and that good feeling of you're a good boy and you can do good things and the seeds of greatness and I  always ask her “Will the Japanese win?” And she said “No ,you always get out what you put in.” So you get the harvest of the seeds that you sell sow - she said they will not win because their premise for doing what they did was not good and honest. I said “Wow.” She said, “So model yourself after people who've given service but not necessary are celebrities,” and I've always felt that the most successful people will never be known in the media because they're not celebrities, they are so busy living life and doing good they don't get covered by the media.   Steve: Great insights! if you wouldn't mind, you said something that caught my attention. You said in the middle of all this you had to you know this wonderful influence and contrast of experiences as a young man but the influence of your grandma on talking about planting the right seeds and in in the middle of all this where you're feeling “a bit like a failure,” because of some of the things that had happened , you said just mention that you felt a calling to help others develop their potential and you included yourself in that group. Would you mind talking about that feeling you had? This calling you felt that you needed to address and respond to and how big of a deal was that for you?   Denis: What was really a big deal see because at the Naval Academy is Episcopalian and growing up the only religious training I had was my grandma reading some really great proverbs and things out of the good book. So I went to Sunday school because the Presbyterians have better uniforms on the softball team and so I went through all these religious experiences and finally and later Billy Graham said to me, “So you've got all these experiences what denomination are you? and I said, “Sir I was hoping you might give me a suggestion.” And  he said, “You know you're on your journey .” So the truth of the matter is when I would hear Handel's messiah at Christmas time , there was this inner tingling and this feeling that there was something internal and I think I was becoming acquainted with my soul and yet not having any formal religious training, it was definitely an inner inspiration so I felt that perhaps I had made a lot of mistakes in my apprenticeship in life so that I might be able to learn to do the right things. And much of what I've written about are certainly repetitions of the scriptures and the Old and the New Testament and all the great books that have been written so there's no question that I'm not an original. I'm someone who's leaned from reading and experiencing and traveling about these things and I think that it was at that bad time of not having income, having my four children wanting to come back home  to San Diego or to California and I was in Pittsburgh in their worst winter and I had just sold the Jonas Salk Foundation to the Mellon Foundation back in Pittsburgh and I found myself divorced with custody of four children who didn't want to be with me in Pittsburgh in the winter. They wanted to come home. It's almost like saying  “Come on we've always been a team!” And they said ‘We want to go home, dad.” I said,” I know but you're with your dad.’ They said “Yeah I know but we want to go home,” and I think that was the turning point where you put your head out the window and say, I'm fed up with myself. I'm not going to take it anymore but which meant I'm not going to do this to myself. So I went into this program of self analysis, self awareness and found that I was not doing the very things that I had read about and I was only superficially scratching the surface. I was only skin deep and so I got into it very deeply and that became that book for The Psychology Of Winning which became an audio program first and then a book, was really a diary of what I needed to learn myself and the only regret I have Steve, is that at the time that I wrote it, OJ Simpson was running through airports for Hertz Rent-A- Car and had suffered rickets as a child and had bold legs and he became this NFL superstar and I included him in my book and I've been trying to remove him from the book ever since. But you can't pick winners in all of the so called role models. He certainly isn’t a role model but so in other words by I learned these principles for me so that I would do them and I began to do them and I went from being somebody who was always late, which is perfect for my name, “Waitley,” - wait for me and so I should have changed my name to swiftly or rushly but I became Waitley but I became first to the gate Waitley. I became someone who was always on time and I did that because I am an absolute believer in the creation of habit and I've learned so much about good and bad habits and healthy and unhealthy and about ninety percent of our daily activities are habitual we do them autonomically without even thinking and so I've spent most of my life trying to help people not break habits - but you don't break a habit. You re write it ,you overcome it, you change it but you don't break it. You know habits are like submarines there silent and deep. They're like comfortable beds easy to get into but difficult to get out of and habits are just this knit pattern of thought that becomes automatic after a while and so I think working with the Olympics, I was really lucky as you know, Bill Simon was president of the Olympics and he appointed be as the first chairman of Psychology for United States Olympics in 1980 and through that experience, I watch these amazing young people get into the habit of winning. And they became they did within what they were doing without and they simulated and they rehearse and they practiced, on and off the field and finally watching the skiers go through the visualization at the top of the run before they hit the first gate and watching swimmers go through the meat ,watching figure skaters backstage going to their routines and not falling during the Triple Axel. I saw all of this and I said you know in addition to being emotionally inspired there definitely is a way to do this if you can control your thinking and if you can fill your thoughts which I call “Psycho Linguistics,” because thoughts are traffic and the brain is either a cul de sac construction zone or freeway. And you can create a freeway in your brain by controlling the traffic that flows through your brain and it actually makes a new highway toward your goal is like a GPS system but instead of a goal positioning satellite or a positioning satellite, it’s a goal positioning system in your brain that you can train to have a target so specific and so emotional that your brain will allow very little distraction to get you there so fortunately through the years neuroscience has proven that positive thinking is more than just the placebo effect. It actually are creators internal pharmacy that really helps optimism become the biology of hope as well as the psychology of hope.   Steve: These are some really extraordinarily inspirational ideas and I'm just thinking I know that so many of our listeners including me and I'd expect all of them have this feeling of something special that they can do in life and then it takes going through thinking about their own unique talents in this introspection that you describe saying how do I address that and how do I concretely move forward and so, these things that you're sharing are so important , so inspirational. I know that they're covered in your books. As you think about this the book Psychology Of Winning, you've been talking about on some of the key parts that are really important for us to realize our goals.   Denis: Well that's a very good question. I think the first one is realizing that your intrinsic worth. I think that worth internalized is better than worth externalized and I think you have to feel deserving of success before you'll really experience it, which really means that if love is not inside of you ,then how can you give away something you don't possess? So love must be there in the first place and I'm not talking about narcissistic self love. It’s the kind of thing that say given my parents and my background given who I am, how I look ,what age I am my ethnicity my religious beliefs ,I'm kind of glad I am me! And in fact I'd rather be me than anyone else in the world live in at any other time, in fact that's who I am. I'm as good as the best but not necessarily better than the rest so I don't compare myself favorably or unfavorably with other people although the Olympics do that with the standard of excellence but that's just to be an Olympian and to compete with world class standards -doesn't mean you're necessarily trying to knock and beat the other person. You're just trying to be your best against world class standards. So I think the most important thing is to believe in your potential because only then will you invest in yourself. if you don't feel worth investing and then you won't invest in it you'll live your life as a spectator - happy to be in the stands and I am happy to be in the stands as well watching tremendous performances but it's much more fun to be in the arena however small and participating. So I think intrinsic self worth, believing in your dream when that's all you have to hang on to is the single most important quality. And then the second one is to always give more in value than you expect to receive in payment, because it seems to be that you really do have an unfailing boomerang. People always called the law of attraction or the law of cause and effect but I found when I am truly interested in helping other people genuinely not to get something for me ,but if I get out of me and into them and transmit whatever value I have in the way of service or advice, that in that way I don't expect a return on the investment but I usually get it ten fold. So I've always believed that if you give more in value than you receive in payment you'll be truly rich in every sense and then of course there is the idea of expectation, optimism, the world revolves around optimism and people who believe in solutions rather than are just complaining about the problems and we have so many critics and so many tweets and so much Twitter as so many instagrams and so much Facebook and so many selfies. You know I'd like to be unselfish in a selfie world and I'd like to instead of being skin deep, I'd like to be soul deep and I'd like to measure diversity not based on how you look on the outside but the experiences you've had as you've been growing up . In other words we all bring a diversity of experience, why do our eyes have to tell us what we should believe or why the war years and our eyes have to be the ones that are the megaphone and also that the block? So I believe that in expecting the best ,that optimism, Harvard does have a new school of placebo and they have found that even people who have after stopping the surgery if you have the sham surgery which you agree to and they just do a little incision and sew it up, the chances of your recovery and feeling good are almost as well as if you have the real surgery which shows that God has given us this incredible ability to believe in something that we really want and is valuable and gives us the pharmacological influence to do it in other words: the endorphins and the harbingers of peace and happiness. So I believe also that happiness is the decision that you make and I train the Olympians above all I've decided to be happy and I think happiness is a decision, not a results and if you wait for a result to make you happy, you'll probably be for ever hung in that suspense of wondering when it's going to happen.   Steve: Well I'll just tell you, Denis, for all of us who are working on becoming our best, which literally creates a fulfilment of light, a happiness within us that goes out and radiates and touches everybody. These things that you're teaching us and sharing with us today are the very things that create that light and I've been taking good notes today. I thank you for that and I'm always shocked at how fast time goes like we're done.   Denis: I know we are! I spent a lot of my time talking to uber drivers and I said you know you have this incredible mechanism and they say, “You being my little GPS that I have up here on my dashboard so I can take,” I said yes first you must know where you are and then you crank in where you want to go and if you know where you are and where you want to go it's much easier to get there because that's called focus and specificity. And they go, wow,  thanks for the info doc! Do I get to I get a tip? Anyway Steve it's been a real thrill, a real honor for me to be with you.  I just keep wanting to plant apple seeds like Johnny Appleseed and I don't know how many of them will get in the soil and take but doesn't matter if you just keep throwing them out - one or two and all I want to do is make a difference in one or two lives and that's enough for me. Plant shade trees under which I myself will never sit.   Steve: Thank you. I can tell you for sure of one person and I know it's countless people where that seed that has fallen and grown and continues to do so. So I personally thank you!   Denis: Well thanks, Steve. I hope we connect again we will. When you're this way and I'm that way let's really do have a reunion. That’s important - friends who haven't seen each other but are still friends for a long time.   Stev: You bet, you can count on that. Now we can't end this podcast without this question and the question is, if you're giving in a parting shot to your family or your friends and brothers or sisters across the world ,what would it be it would be?   Denis: It would be that time is the only equal opportunity employer and please don't rush to your life trying to get wealthy only to find yourself too old to do the things that you save the money to do and remember the one most important thing; the values you leave in your children are much more priceless than the valuables you leave them in your estate. My children have never thanked me for all the money that I've spent on them but we always talk and laugh and cry over the time we spent together. So make sure you spend time with those you love, not just tweets and that just instagrams and not just text .   Steve:  Thats great advice.  Denis how can people find out more about what you're doing? How can they have access to your book , your materials or whatever?   Denis:  I think you know just going to DenisWaitley.com and I have that funny one n  in my nameand I what I'm trying to do is create a library and most of it free. So I'm not trying to get people to go to my website so I'll make money off them. I'm trying to go so that they'll be able to get NFL locker room style pep talks for free which would mean that the music the lyrics, if you will the quotes and the best of what I've done. I'd rather give it to them free then try to sell them something on a subscription so hopefully they'll get more free than trying to surf around the store.   Steve: Wonderful, thank you Denis for being part of the show today. It’s been amazing! We wish our friends that are listening today all the best as well as you continue making a huge difference in the world I'm Steve Shallenberger with becoming your best global leadership wishing you a great day. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Less Stuff More Life with Courtney Carver https://www.becomingyourbest.com/less-stuff-life-courtney-carver/ Steve: Welcome to all our, Becoming Your Best Podcast listeners, wherever you might be in the world today! This is your host, Steve Shallenberger. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

STEVE: Welcome, everyone. Today I have a very special guest. I'm very excited. I actually have only met her only two weeks ago. It was pretty cool actually. I felt an immediate connection. Anyway, this is Jennifer Goodwin. How you doing? JEN: Good. How are you? STEVE: Fantastic. I'm doing really, really well. I was scrolling through Facebook, it was about two weeks ago, and ... I don't know if I've told you this yet, but I was scrolling through Facebook, and I saw an ad that you had out. It was ad for vets. I can't remember exactly what the ad was saying, but it said something like, "Hey, here is a way for vets to launch their businesses online." I immediately was like, "Whoa, this is so cool. Someone's going for this market?" I didn't know anyone who's been going for that. It's such a needed thing, being in the military myself. How did you even get into that? JEN: Absolutely. I grew up very patriotic. I didn't realize until this year that the veterans were my ideal client. How it happened was, I was always trying to help veterans that were, military guys and gals that needed help with the internet marketing and getting themselves to the next level. Most recently, I was volunteering at a local homeless veteran shelter where some guys and gals were in transition. I said ... Well, a little back story. Three years ago I was on a motorcycle, my first ride, and I was life-flighted off the highway. STEVE: Oh, my gosh. Three years ago? JEN: Three years ago. Twenty-five, 30 minutes into my first ride with a friend on Highway 95. We were set at 70 miles per hour. Road debris came out of everywhere. An 18-wheeler had blown his tire, and we couldn't avoid one of the pieces. It flattened the back tire. Needless to say, I took a nice, pricey helicopter ride to the trauma center, so I actually lost my business. I was down for a lot of time. Financially, physically, emotionally, I had to go through that trauma. I had a lot of time to think through in recovery, and I made a few decisions about my business when I got back to it, which I really just got back to it full-time this past January. I decided that I was going to partner with the right people and never sit on my ideas and make sure that I was launching all the things that I had written down in a book and that were collecting dust. One of the other pieces was that I was going to give back. Even though I was sort of starting over, I knew what I was doing. I had 15 years in the business. I was relaunching, but I still wanted volunteering and giving back to be part of that. I was literally driving to a veteran center in Jacksonville, Florida and just camping out in the chow hall every Thursday and saying, "Whatever you have, just bring it to me. Just bring me your website needs. Bring me your resume needs. You got a new computer and you need to know how to run it? Just bring it to me." Even some of the staff there who weren't veterans would say, "Hey, I'm going for this other job interview," and so I just made myself available every Thursday. It didn't feel like work. Then fast forward a couple months. A friend of mine that's pretty well-known in the veteran space, he's on the History Channel and got quite a following on social media, said, "I've got four veterans that need, like, yesterday." Just working through those clients, it just didn't feel like work. It just felt so easy, because they're so loyal. They're so grateful. Usually what they're inventing, we're writing about, is something I believe in, so I re-branded my business to be all about serving veterans. STEVE: That's incredible. I love that. I've noticed that a lot of the people that I interview, they never ask permission to go do something like that. You just showed up. You just sit down and every Thursday ... How long did you do that before you went to that re-brand? JEN: I only did that for a couple months, because I actually ended up moving out of the area and haven't found a new local shelter to go help with. Let me see. I believe I started ... January, February, March. Probably about two and a half months into that I re-branded. I was also talking with some coaches. Actually, one of the coaches I was speaking with, a female coach, she was a veteran ... or she is a veteran. She said, "Jen, I got my start helping my fellow Army soldiers, starting their businesses when they got out." I said, "This is my ideal client, the more I think about it." I said, "Is it that easy?" She said, "Yeah." Literally, within 24 hours ... I couldn't even wait to re-brand everything. I went to the team and to the social media images, and I started changing it all up. The first batch was a little bit rough and amateur. I just wanted to get camouflage in there. STEVE: Yeah. Yeah. JEN: That's probably one of the ones you saw or maybe one of the newer ones. Yeah, it was pretty quick. STEVE: Yeah. That's incredible. It's interesting that that's the way it worked out. I remember when I went through basic ... I'm obviously business-minded. I really enjoy it. It's my obsession a little bit. I was going through basic training, and it's hard at certain points. One of the things that kept me going mentally and emotionally was talking about business ideas with all these other guys. I ended up having it, and all these guys that would sit around, and we would just talk about some different strategies. To this day, I still talk to some of them, and they're trying to do business stuff. It's definitely clearly an awesome market. A lot of them are go-getters. Anyways, that's super cool. That's fantastic. JEN: Yep. STEVE: One of the things I've noticed too, though, is that immediately ... You were doing the same thing with me. I was blown away with that, "Hey, do you need help with this? Do you have VAs for this? I have teams for this." You are an absolute master with VAs. How did you get that way? JEN: Thank you for saying that. I love helping people. They ask me, what's my agenda sometimes, very few, but I say, "I just like getting a break from the paying clients, who are so demanding." It's like a break to just pull away and just go help people for free with no expectations, so thank you for that. I have been an entrepreneur my whole life. My father was an entrepreneur, made some money in the door and window business. Very early on ... Well, not too early. I guess my late 20's, because I went and got an architectural degree, a drafting degree, from 26 to 28, but as soon as I came out of that, I worked for someone else for six months, and that was it. I had worked for people previously, from 16 to 28, but I knew at that moment I did not want to work for somebody else, and I couldn't work for somebody else. It just felt like my soul was in jail. STEVE: Yeah. I like that. JEN: I left the corporate world, and I was working for an engineering company, and I co-advertised. I didn't even think you could do this, but I rented an exhibitor space at the kitchen and bath show in Orlando, Florida, way back when, and shared it with one of my competitors. I was turning away 95% of my lead. I was so lucky, because what I was providing was CAD drawings and artist renderings to interior designers and kitchen designers. They didn't have anybody that was serving them. Usually people that were drafts people were going to work for architects and engineers, and so the designer industry was left hanging. I filled that void. I was turning away so much business, I knew back then that I had to learn how to scale my business and learn how to use the software that was out there that was going to help me scale my business by leveraging the tools and the people. Very early on I started to outsource to other drafters and just caught the bug of outsourcing and marking up the work and being the middle man really. I was outsourcing right away. I ran with the CAD services for about four or five years. After teaching myself everything on the internet, everything that I could at that time ... The internet was much smaller then. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: It was easier to master. I re-branded into Internet Girl Friday, and I've been doing that ever since. Again, I did lose my business for about two and a half years, but I've been back at it now, and I have virtual assistants and developers. It's great, because in my mind that's the only way to scale your business, is to have a team to support you. That's what we're doing. STEVE: Yeah, and you clearly have that. It's so fascinating, though. I wish I could pull up the text real quick that you sent me. It was a long list of stuff that you were asking me if I needed help with. I was like, "Man, she's got the hook-ups." JEN: Yeah, I would say, if it touches the web, we can do it and mean it. People come to me and say, "Well ..." I have friends that, you know how the friends and family never know what you're doing with the internet, and they don't get it. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: I have a friend that called me. I said, "Listen, I've got 20 minutes to talk. What's up?" He said, "Sounds like you're too busy and you can't take on my work." I said, "No, I have a team for that. I can do it. We can do it." I'm hiring people all the time. There's no shortage of people out there that want to work, whether they're US-based or they're offshore. There's hundreds of thousands of workers out there that ... You can go to Fiverr. You can go to so many different sites and get people to help you in your business, and I take advantage of that. STEVE: That's amazing. When I was in college, that's really when I started getting the bug for this. Well, that's when I started getting traction, I should say. I always had the bug. I went and I started hiring these different VAs. My buddy and I, we were building this Smartphone insurance business, and we went and we hired out this guy. He was just like, he wasn't very good. We paid him $500 to build this really small thing. It wasn't big at all, and we got it back and it was awful, like, "What the heck?" That's why I started using click funnels, so I could do it on my own. Then another time came up and another time came up. I was like, "Man, I'm really striking out with these VAs." I'm curious how it is that you actually go find good ones, because that's a skill in and of itself that I don't think people realize you need to have. Not all VAs obviously are built the same. What process are you taking up? What are you having them do? How are you vetting the VAs for your vets? JEN: There's a couple different ways. I hate to say this, but I don't like the big outsourcing sites. I think it's really hard to find that needle in the haystack, and you have to spend a lot of time sorting through people that are really just looking at the dollars per hour; right? They're like, "No, I can't make anything less than $8 an hour." They overbid. I just don't like those sites. I never had great luck with them ever. STEVE: That's totally the opposite than what everyone else says, so that's interesting. JEN: I've done it for 15 years. If I had an army of 100 virtual assistants, do you know how much money I'd be making? If it was that easy, I would have just hired a team of people from there, but I've spoken to people for 15 years from those big sites. What I find works for me is I enter a couple of virtual assistant groups on Facebook. Whenever I have a need for somebody, I post the job on my blog post, and I'll send a link out to the virtual assistant groups and say, "Hey, by the way, this week I'm looking to talk to people that have skills in ..." whatever skill I'm looking for that week. That's worked out well, because I only get a handful. I might get 10, 15, 20 applicants. It's totally manageable. I have a forum on the blog post. I'm not going to field emails or phone calls or be scattered. I want them to just dump their info into a form, and then I can go back and look at, and I can say, "All right. I'd love to talk to these three out of 10 on Skype," or somehow. They say, "Hire two and fire one." Try a couple people out just on a small ... I work through baby steps when it comes to hiring a virtual assistant. Let's take one tiny task, not, "Oh, I found you. Here's all my money. Here's all my tasks. Talk to you in a week." That will just go wrong every time. You want to start with, "Can you contact me on Skype," because that's a requirement. That's my office. If they tell me they don't have Skype, they're out. It's that simple. You have to work my way in my company with my tools. I'm flexible, but you have to show up in my time zone. You have to speak my language. We start at the very beginning and make sure that those pieces are there before moving on to, "Okay, here's how you get into my project management system, and here's where you find your first task." I work closely alongside them and say, "Stay with me right here on Skype. Tell me, 'Jennifer, I'm starting Task A right now, and I plan to be done in 15 minutes, and I'll ping you back when I'm done, so you can review it.'" It's really micromanaged in the first week. As you get more comfortable and as they're trained a little bit more, then they can work on their own time. I literally do that every morning for about two hours, Monday through Friday, from, roughly, 9 to 11 every day, which is a lot of time when you think about it. I'm also mentoring virtual assistants, so I'm not paying the ones that I mentor that I identify in the group as being really smart and might have come from 15, 20 years of past corporate experience, so they have skills. They just don't realize how to translate them to the internet. Again, I love helping people, so I say, "Come on in as an apprentice. You can follow along. You can invite your friends to sit in your house and watch. It doesn't matter." I've hired people from that group as well. STEVE: Wow. That's fascinating. If the person is good, they might have friends that are good. Might as well bring the friends along and train them too. JEN: Yeah. I tell them, "Listen, I'm looking to build teams, so if you already know someone ..." I had this conversation just last night with one of Filipino VAs. She's amazing. I said, "I'm about to hire a few more, so if you know anybody ..." She's like, "Well, actually, I do have three assistants, and they work in my house with me. It's my goal to help these single moms that need some more income to get going." I said, "Great. Let's ramp them up." Yeah. STEVE: Awesome. That's fantastic. That's amazing. Eventually, what started happening was I was like, man, I literally have spent thousands and thousands of dollars on VAs for stuff that was not very good work. I was not happy with it. I started going through, not the same process at all. That's genius. I'm going to have to ... That's absolutely incredible. I'm going to have to think more about that and try and figure out how I can do that too, or I'll just ask you, hire you to do it. Do you have a particular freelance or VA site, I guess, that you like more than others, Fiver, Freelancer, Upwork? JEN: I love Fiverr. Actually, this morning before this podcast, I was looking on Fiverr for a virtual assistant but only because in the virtual assistant groups that I'm in on Facebook, I saw someone saying, "I'm not getting any traction as a VA on Fiverr. What am I doing wrong?" I clicked on the link which took me to their Fiverr account, and I said, "I'm willing to try you out. Contact me on Skype." Again, that's my first requirement. I use Fiverr for other services. If my dev team is too busy with some bigger projects, and I need to knock out some quick keyword research or a quick image, I can go to Fiverr and I can find it. It's just like any other service where you can see the ratings, but for some reason they have, they've made their user interface so easy to navigate and quickly see, "Oh, wow, they've had 200 projects. They're five stars on all the reviews for all those projects. I'm pretty sure they're returning good work, and it's dollars." Who can't lose $5; right? We spend that on a coffee sometimes. It's different from going to the big sites like Upwork and saying, you have to put your whole job description. You have to say, this is 30 hours a month or 30 hours a week, whether it's permanent. They make you jump through so many hoops before you even find someone. Then you might get a thousand applicants, and you have to sort through all that. It's too much work, where you can go to Fiverr and just browse really quickly and click on someone. You don't even have to click on someone and contact them, but you can just put your mouse over their little portfolio image, and it shows you how many jobs, how many stars. Very quickly you can jump into having an assistant or a vendor. I know there's a lot of controversy with using offshore vendors versus keeping it in the USA, and I do keep most of my work, 99% of my work, in the USA. Even my Indian development team is in the USA, strangely. When you're restarting, which is the mode I'm in now after the accident, you need that payroll break; right? You want to have assistants so you can scale your business, but you can't go out and afford the $25-an-hour United States VA, so it does help to go offshore. I do like the Filipino virtual assistants. They are super-smart, super-talented. Their English is perfect. They are very friendly and very accommodating. There's no language barrier like I've experienced with other countries. They're extremely affordable. Here's a little trick that I've done. I've gone to Wikipedia and typed up, "Countries with the lowest hourly rate," and it's mind-blowing and scary that there's some countries or areas of their countries where 50-cents-per-hour is the minimum wage. STEVE: Oh, man. JEN: That's not saying you can just go there and find a virtual assistant. Virtual assistants have to be a booming industry in a certain country for it to be valuable to you, but the Philippines are great. STEVE: That's incredible. There's a workaround that I have found that helps. I did a whole podcast on this actually earlier, because it's a frustrating thing to go through. The biggest things I've learned from Russell, you got to have people. The biggest things I've learned from my own things, you've got to have people. Otherwise, you as the entrepreneur get bogged down. You can't handle all of the tasks. This is definitely valuable information to hear. There was a workaround that I, to using VAs that I was figuring out too. Do you use Freelancer.com much? JEN: I have, but, again, I didn't use it much. STEVE: Yeah. It's a little bit challenging. There was one feature that saved my butt on a lot of different things, and it was the fact that you can post contests. That's actually pretty cool. I needed all these different images made, or I needed a tee-shirt design. I basically said, "Hey, I really want to motivate people, so here's the prize is $100 and everyone submit your work. I'm just going to choose one guy." It was fantastic. I got 80 or 90 submissions, and the whole week during the contest, I could talk back to them and say, "This looks good but change this." "This looks good but change this." I could rate all of their work, which was public to everyone else. All the work, the freelancers started pushing towards a different path as they watched my comments to other people. That's really the only trick I have for VAs. I haven't done anything else that you do with it. It kind of works, but what you do is a lot cooler, actually. JEN: I don't know. The contests sound pretty cool. I remember seeing them on Topcoder years ago when I was looking to build a software, and someone said, "If you don't have unlimited budget to build the software, present it as a contest." I thought that was fascinating, where they have a contest for one part of the software and a contest for another part. Then they have a contest at the end to put all the parts together. I thought that was fascinating. STEVE: That's incredible. Hey, there's a lot of people obviously who are trying to get into this space who want to do what you're doing. I know you alluded to it before, but what would be the first step to getting a good VA? JEN: I would definitely check out the virtual assistant groups in Facebook. It's a close-knit community. People can vouch for other people. There's some names at the top that know a lot of the VAs in the industry, so they actually have requests for proposal boards that you could sign up to and submit your work. Then you know you're getting a qualified VA, or you can find me and I'll point you in the right direction. I would check sites like FreeeUp. That's with three E's, F-R-E-E-E-U-P.com. STEVE: I've never heard of it. Awesome. JEN: It's new. It's getting a face-lift. The site is only about eight months old, I think. They've got some big plans. Nathan Hirsch, who's out of Orlando, Florida, he's doing very well with it. You can get VAs as low as $5 and up to $50 per hour, depending on what skillset you require. Check out the Filipino ... I can't remember the domain names off the top of my head, but there are a lot of Filipino virtual assistant sites out there that you can just Google it up, and it will pull up some of the top ones. They really are a great crowd for your everyday administrative stuff. I'm literally teaching my VAs now how to set up some of the beginning integrations of click funnel. STEVE: That's awesome. JEN: I have a checklist, and they can go through and connect the SMTP and the domain and do some of the basic setup. Then I can take it from there and build a funnel. STEVE: Fantastic. Just because you mentioned it, how are you using it with click funnels? I went through and looked at your site, and it looks fantastic. It's very clean. HowToGoVirtual; right? Dot-net? JEN: That's the academy site that we're launching. The services site, where all of our clients go through is InternetGirlFriday.com, and we're just like any other entrepreneur. We have multiple different sites. What happened was, I needed to get all of this information into other people's hands. I've got 15-plus years on the internet. Of course, you want to package that up and provide it online as a video course or some type of academy environment. I created a class to teach people the four steps of getting your business website launched, because you know how customers get confused about the internet. The internet is so big now, and there's so many steps, and the algorithms. They get approached by so many vendors. "What should I be paying for," and I said, "I've got to find a way to simplify this." Back in 2010, I think it was, I came up with a 12-step plan. Just a way to categorize everything you do on the internet came to 12 categories. That's it. I just wanted to show people, "Okay, Step 1 is your research and your keyword research and your competitive analysis. Step 12, at the end, is analytics." Everything falls somewhere in between, so that they had something that they could follow along. Not that every strategy goes in order, but the first four I call, "The foundation." You've got to do your keyword research if you're going to launch a website, and your competitive analysis, and you have to know what people are looking for, what your target market is looking for. Step 1. Step 2, building your website in a blueprint first. I think that's so important, because you need to get the SEO and the keywords that were revealed in the first step into your website. If you just hand your website over to someone, they might make it beautiful for the humans, but they're neglecting what robots need to see through Google. STEVE: Right. JEN: That's Step 2, build the blueprint. Step 3, build the website. Step 4, connect it to the search engines and some directories. Now you've got your foundation to go offsite and do all your marketing with whatever strategy you're deploying. I package that up into a course. I'm glad that I had the time off that I did, because when I came back to it, there was click funnel, and it was like, "Ah." Finally there; right? The funnel isn't new. The strategy isn't new. It's a little different, because, again, the internet is bigger and more complicated, but a sales funnel is still a sales funnel; right? We didn't reinvent the funnel. We just put the software together in one place, like Russell. All the steps that you used to have to do, you used to have to literally build a landing page, usually in HTML, because you needed it to be a certain way. If you needed a green check-mark versus a red check-mark, it was all piecework. Then you'd have to go to the next step, and you'd have to connect your email responder. Everything was daisy-chained together. It was so overwhelming, that most people didn't launch, because there was so much work. Even me, who has a team, knew how to do it for so many years, I could never launch, because it was overwhelming. STEVE: Yeah. JEN: ClickFunnels comes on the scene and it's all in one place. I don't use the term, "All-in-one" lightly. I don't give credit to many softwares. It's not an all-in-one where you're billing and all your other things are in there, but for the funnel it's all in one. Everything is literally in one place, and it's been so exciting to set up and to get going and to see that now I can literally wake up at 3 am, have an idea, and within two hours, have it going and some ads going, and it's launched. That's the exciting part. My clients are excited about it to. STEVE: That's so cool. That's so awesome. I remember when I first started putting things together for ... It was an artist actually that built the first site/funnel four or five years ago. I remember spending two hours ... No, it was two days, two full days, trying to make WordPress act like a squeeze page. JEN: I know. STEVE: It was the most hellish thing. It was awful. I remember just settling with something. I can't remember what it was. Neither of us liked it. I'm not a coder or programmer. I can read it. I can edit it, but I'm not at all a programmer, at all. I was like, "This is terrible." I almost gave up on the internet a little bit, because it was so hard. Then when click funnels came around, I remember I saw the presentation that Russell gave mine. I probably shouldn't have done this, but I didn't talk to my wife about it. I immediately bought it, and I started using it and building for other people. I was like, "This is the craziest thing." Now I dream in funnel editor. It's the funniest thing. JEN: Same thing, yeah, because back when you were creating your old landing page, which, again, is just one tiny piece of the whole funnel, I often went back and forth to, "Gees, I've got to hire a developer just to create a landing page page template in my WordPress?" Then that never got done. Then you go over to the third-party platforms that are providing fully landing pages. You're like, "I don't want to spend another $50 a month just to do this one piece, because by the time I'm done with the whole funnel, I'm spending a thousand dollars a month just to get it all connected. Yeah, it's been such a blessing, and I'm so excited. STEVE: I think my record so far with sitting here next to Mr. Russell Brunson, I think the fastest we put a funnel out is 45 minutes or something like that, a full one. It's like there's no way. He and I will still sit back and be like, "I can't believe we have this software," and he's the CEO of it. We'll be like, "Man, look what we just did. Look what we pulled off." He's like, "This little change used to cost me 10 grand. We're going to do it in 30 minutes." JEN: I remember testing my first webinar funnel, and I didn't have it completely set up, but at some point I got my reminder email, and I said, "Oh, look, how cool is that? I'm already getting the emails automatically." I didn't even set up the email, and I clicked on the link inside that said, "Your webinar is starting now." I clicked it 20 minutes late. When I did click it, it went right into the webinar that was playing, at the 20-minute mark. I said, "This is magic." STEVE: Yeah. So cool. I know I said we'd keep it to 30 minutes. You are amazing. I can't believe all the stuff you're pulling off is incredible, manager and builder of teams. I'm looking at all these sites right now. It's absolutely incredible and just crazy impressive. Where should people go if they want to follow you, learn more about you, even obviously use some of your services. JEN: Yeah. If you go to InternetGirlFriday.com, then you can find my social media, which is everywhere. We have Periscope and Instagram and YouTube and all that, and follow me on any of those. We're very active there. InternetGirlFriday.com is the service's site. You can contact me there. You can say, "Hey, I don't need to hire you, but I have a question," and I'll be glad to help. STEVE: Awesome. I appreciate it so much. Thanks. This is spur-of-the-moment, but this has been awesome. JEN: Sure. Thank you. STEVE: All right. Hey, we'll talk to you later. JEN: Okay. Bye-bye.   Thanks for listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Please remember to subscribe and leave feedback. Want to get one of today's best internet sales funnels for free? Go to SalesFunnelBroker.com/FreeFunnels to download your pre-built sales funnel today.  

This the guys talk election and politicd with a DC insider.

In episode 21 Dave and Steve Welcome special guest Mireika Edwards, who is an MMA Ring Girl for the Tuff-N-Uff promotion, a Model currently vying for the position of Maxim’s new Hometown Hottie, and a Las Vegas-Based Nursing student. The crew discusses MMA, Mireika’s new bid for the title of Maxim’s 2015 Hometown Hottie, their […]