This episode announces a strategic shift from attending every available conference in 2024 to a more selective 2025 approach, recognizing that relationship building compounds over years but travel costs significantly impact profits. The Austin dinner event in December drew double the expected attendance with higher-level operators than most large conferences, costing a fraction of typical conference expenses while delivering superior networking value and demonstrating the effectiveness of smaller, local gatherings.
Key Takeaways:
- Conference ROI Compounds Over Years Not Months Relationships built 6 to 12 months ago are just now materializing into opportunities, making it difficult to track short-term value but critical to play the long game for decade-plus partnerships.
- Smaller Local Events Beat Large Conferences for Quality The quarterly Austin dinner format attracts committed operators without structured agendas, costing under $100 versus thousands for conference tickets and travel while maintaining higher average operator quality.
- Dave Denniston’s Unconference Remains the Exception The only large conference worth attending in 2025 features full itineraries from 6am to 10pm with guaranteed hot seats for every business, ensuring at least one immediately implementable takeaway versus hit-or-miss panel formats.
Listen to the full episode for insights on building virtual presence like Pete Reese, leveraging local geography advantages in Texas, and strategically allocating conference budgets for maximum relationship ROI.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hey, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital vacant land funder. So on Sundays, usually trying to approach things in a bit more reflective, mood and, you know, usually that kind of coincides with just, you know, getting, getting the house, in order, you know, with the two year old running around, trying to, make sure the.
house isn’t a complete disaster and setting things up for the week. you know, I, you know, during the time of running through some of these chores and so forth, and, know, kind of minimal, not too intensive bodily movement that that’s all to me, a bit more conducive toward, just reflecting on.
the previous week, kind of setting intentions and coming into the following week with a more energized standpoint and, know, kind of collecting myself and thinking about things a little bit big picture. And so, you know, reflecting on a couple of items, one,
It’s been a bit back and forth within our team the past few months is just trying to figure out an in-person conference schedule. So we went really hardcore throughout all of last year, 2024 and probably the last quarter of 2023, we probably hit.
Basically at every conference that was available, small or large. And the impact was, was indelible from just a longer term relationship building perspective. Sometimes it can be a little difficult in terms of sussing out precisely, you know, from a marketing engine, how much.
you know, short term or even medium term value you might be getting out of some of these events. So to me, it’s more of a bet on the long term, even though, you know, some things did, did come out immediately on the short term, but you know, some of the relationships that it built, you know, even over a year ago, they’re only kind of continuing to compound, you know, six, eight,
12 months later. And even then it’s still a little too early stages. I feel like those of us who are planning on being in this industry for several years, next decade, two decades, three or more decades, it’s really hard to kind of place a finger on where some of these
relationships that we’re starting to build now where they might actually end up being as we kind of continue to grow alongside of each other, whether we’re directly involved in a deal or not, you just, you never know when an opportunity will come to potentially partner. you know, that’s just the facts of business is that the larger you grow inevitably,
capital and resources becomes an issue regardless of how large you are. And so the opportunity to potentially partner, whether from a capital side or from a knowledge side for deals that are more complex and risky becomes all the higher. that’s why, you know, we’re just making ourselves known out there, continuing to learn alongside, see what people are up to.
Because even if we’re not necessarily doing a deal now, maybe we’ll do one next year, maybe we’ll do one in five years, maybe we’ll do one in 10 years. That’s why it’s so difficult to kind of figure out the value inherently in some of these conferences, even if you’re only looking at the last, know, lagging 12 months. But at the end of the day, these things cost…
you know, both time and money and, you know, a significant chunk of it, you know, anything that we spend on, you know, travel related expenses that comes directly out of our profits. So there has to be some type of return to justify our side of the business. So, or, you know, kind of continuing forward. So to me, looking at this year and chatting with a lot of other, you know, higher level operators, I’m
getting a lot of feedback that most, well, I can’t really say most. I don’t know exactly where everybody’s going, but a handful of the folks I’m closer with are pairing back travel schedule to perhaps just like one or two events or maybe one mastermind instead of spreading themselves too thin. I felt similarly.
and trying to push a larger virtual presence versus in-person and probably more of a focus within some of the live events that I’ll go to to be a little bit more locally oriented and smaller, both in terms of amount of people there as well as total time commitment.
Um, like for instance, I tried spinning up this, uh, uh, dinner with, various land investors, higher level folks, um, in Austin last month. And we had a lot of people, um, show up more than double than I was expecting, you know, Monday night random right before the holidays and people from all the Texas triangle cities, the DFW, Houston, San Antonio, they all drove down on a Monday night into Austin. Um,
just because the kind of excitement and perceived value was going to be there based on who was attending the dinner. And these are definitely some higher level operators, but it was more, again, kind of cost and time efficient for all of us, just having a dinner that was extremely productive in terms of the ideas discussed, but it also…
didn’t cost a couple of grand, two or three grand to fly out and attend certain conference hotels and whatnot. I know some of them that drove in Austin, stayed over the night. So that’s going to add a little bit of expense there, but still going to be reduced compared to full ticket prices and everything. And on average, the level of operator there was just higher than a lot of these other conferences, particularly larger ones.
so that’s just something that I’m keeping in mind. We’ll probably keep that at a quarterly pace, quarterly, cadence here, going forward, just cause, know, again, I feel like can learn a bit more. Yeah. It’s not that structured necessarily, but you know, when you have top level, you know, I’ll, I’ll say quote, quote unquote top level folks here because I know all of us have.
plenty of room to grow if we so choose. So I don’t mean to indicate that in an overconfident way. It’s just, know, those of us who are very committed to our businesses and trying to stay focused and reach the next steps, we’re able to kind of sort ourselves out and be able to conduct ourselves. Hey, what’s the most valuable way to spend these few hours together? See, you need less inherent schedule.
for groups like that, which just makes it easier from a planning perspective anyway. All of that in mind, out of the larger conferences within LAND that I’m definitely going to this year, really the only larger one is going to be the on-conference in Minneapolis in August of this year. Again, I’ll…
credit Dave, Dave Doniston and his team for, my opinion, building out the best structure for not only just land conference, but out of any entrepreneurial startup related conference that I’ve ever been to, Dave is a pretty type A like myself and having a full on itinerary from effectively 6 a.m. till, you
tenant night, what have you, they’re going to cover that and have everything kind of ready to go, know, adjustments on the fly as needed like that level of orientation to detail and focus on the value add is very rare in my experience for conferences and plus just the setup of having hot seats for each individual.
business to me is just more advantageous so that you can be assured that you’re going to come away with at least one takeaway that you can immediately implement versus, you know, sometimes the typical conference setup, you’re going to be hearing things that aren’t necessarily as relevant for what you’re pursuing or maybe disagree on how the…
they, kind of take their approach and so forth. So that’s just something to, kind of keep in mind based on my own experience there. But, you know, out of any of these, you know, clearly I’m kind of an unconference veteran been to, one, two, three, four of the events, so far. And we’ll, you know, continue in, including this year too. So, I know there’s already been some marketing for that. You know, Seth sent.
send things out, I think you can go to Unconference.com or it’s pretty easy to find on the Facebook groups, but I would encourage signing up for that one if you are at all interested or you are previous attendee to come out to that one. They’re trying to double the size of attendees this year and it’s not like complete newbies either. I think you have to be making at least six figures in revenue. yeah.
starting to take the training wheels off by that point. But I’ll just mention that as far as how we’re thinking about our conference schedule. Otherwise, just major, major virtual push this year. There’s plenty of people who do that extremely well. Like Pete Reese, for instance, he never goes to anything live, but he’s built up a very sizable business quickly across multiple avenues within the land sphere.
just by having really an outstanding virtual presence. So we’re trying to emulate from that within our own style and set up here while still.
you know, building up more of an ancillary live event presence. And again, it helps being in Texas. That’s where the biggest and generally most qualified real estate operators are across the country. It kind of lends itself both in the size of the state and the opportunity here. So it makes it a little bit easier to put things together locally. But, know, got to take advantage of.
those top opportunities when they’re sitting right in front of you, low-hanging fruit. With that, remember, if you’re looking for funding, serious land up capital, land daily diligence for zero-cost reviews of your land deals on Mondays or Thursdays, or check out landpricer.ai for the most accurate and simplified method to value your land deals across the U.S. Until next time, take care. Bye.
