This episode examines the critical role of intentional slack time in business operations, particularly for funding businesses where deal flow is unpredictable and speed to lead determines competitive advantage. The decision to scale back Land Daily Diligence from twice weekly to once weekly created algorithmic penalties on Facebook, directly causing lead generation to plateau while simultaneously reducing speed to lead from two days maximum to several days, forcing a strategic reversal back to the twice-weekly schedule.
Key Takeaways:
- Build Intentional Slack Into Operations Your system needs buffer capacity to handle urgent, high-value tasks when they arrive, scheduling every minute prevents rapid response to critical opportunities.
- Speed to Lead Trumps Operational Efficiency Reducing Land Daily Diligence from twice to once weekly saved time but killed lead velocity, waiting several days for property reviews versus maximum two days directly impacts conversion rates.
- Break Overwhelming Projects Into Bite-Sized Chunks Recording a few hundred tutorial videos feels impossible until you knock out 1-2% and realize most videos run one to two minutes, then you can systematically batch produce and leverage team support for backend integration.
Listen to the full episode for the complete breakdown of how building slack time and maintaining consistent marketing cadence directly impacts business growth and deal flow velocity.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital Vacant Land Funding Partner. So today, really was contemplating and reflecting upon just the level of consistency that is needed to fill the slack times within your business.
For us, we have built-in Slack, and this is a concept it picked up on years ago. It was some author with a blog who was just mentioning how you might go into some…
White collar professional office, especially back in the day. you might see secretary, sitting at desk and not, not really doing anything and wondering, what, is this person kind of doing? What, what, what are they being paid for? but there’s purposefully, built Slack within the system so that they’re, you know, speed to lead or speed to,
certain issue that arises in the business or key client related situation, then they can be all hands to cover that. Whereas if you’re trying to schedule out every single last minute, it doesn’t allow you that slack in the system to cover potentially more urgent and crucially important tasks to move the
business forward. and, know, naturally, I think, especially for running a funding business, that that’s important because, you know, you just can’t tell when some very solid deals are going to come in. Oftentimes it’s just in a, a batch. some days are a little bit slower. or even if you do get a certain batch of deals, some will be
higher quality than others or more complex deals requiring extra looks. And some you might be able to diligence within a couple minutes until, this is probably not the best fit. So because there’s so much inherent uncertainty in regard to not knowing what type of deals and how many might be coming in on any given day.
It just pays to have some slack in the system so that our speed believe can be Better than anybody else’s in the industry at the same time If things are a little bit slower and Knowing that you do have more slack time to allow Task to pile up for a little bit later in the day
and once that might be a little bit more routine in terms of, know how and skill set from the team. then you really want to be consistent with. right. What else is going to be driving the business forward? You know, more of the task oriented or, you know, working on the business or product focused.
for instance, and in the case of what we’re trying to do, again, really push out this landpricer software ASAP, the hairiest task related to that associated to me specifically is trying to film all of these various tutorial videos that are going to be attached to certain answers as people use landpricer, because I…
You know, my goal with this software is that, know, anybody who’s entered into the land space, whether, you know, that was years ago or yesterday, has the opportunity to utilize the software and be guided along to avoid all of those various underwriting mistakes. So I’m trying to the best of my ability, cover those,
various avenues, whether that’s via written instructions, video tutorials, and so forth, so that the user experience is as smooth and helpful as possible. That being said, there’s literally, if I were to count up, at least a few hundred videos that need to be recorded here. so that was just a…
larger task where it was not necessarily urgent. But now that the product release is coming up to a deadline, like it is becoming more urgent, but on a day to day basis, because it was just such a headache to manage and such kind of an overwhelming boulder to roll. It was just easier to put off. But particularly last week and this week,
given the kind of ramp up in marketing and acquisitions, having slowed a little bit or just being a little bit more efficient with how we’re managing them internally. I’ve just been more focused about, okay, I’m just gonna knock out a chunk here. I’m not knocking out a certain topic of drafting these videos. And that’s what usually happens that I’m sure you can relate within your own business is, you know, once you do,
Or even knock out like one or two percent of the total project and start realizing What it looks like in bite-sized chunks realize? Yeah, this isn’t you know, this is already something I know how to do I can break it up these videos aren’t as overwhelming as I thought even if there are a few hundred Most of them are no longer than like one to two minutes some can be reused and I can’t you know, how can I leverage my team to?
handle a lot of the backend work to link everything into the part of the engineering script. And so all I need to do is just churn out the videos and not have to do anything else. So that’s been a bigger focus on our end and just realizing again, those harriest tasks and the ones you don’t wanna do.
but are truly necessary for your product or your underlying business. Like you just have to find a way to push through and get them done. It’s not, I’m not really having fun recording these for the most part here. It is a bit of a grind, but I do feel a certain satisfaction knowing that, I set this time aside for myself and actually utilizing it to get something that’s been.
you know, a growing fire, associated with the business that, you know, was just going to continue to irk me until I actually started making progress. And, know, sometimes you need to feel the heat and you feel the deadline to, to actually get things done. just how a lot of humans work. but, yeah, I continued to teach my own, or teach myself, and implement within my team, just the, you know, daily consistent progress.
and all of a sudden even being here an hour here, an hour there, the problem rapidly diminishes just because of that consistent effort. So that’s just something more that we’ve been really focusing on and I’ve been focusing on devoting a lot of energy here. And as I’m recording this in the afternoon, okay, am I gonna get really get more of those videos done? Probably not, but I have some other deals or calls to make.
After this that are just more routine and no I can turn those out still keep the business Moving forward in terms of our inbound related activities and our speed to lead is still Very solid. So just being more strategic realizing. Okay, what do we need to do to get to the next level here? How do I get to 10 million top line and beyond?
I’m just going to have to be more efficient across more areas of the business. With that, SiriusLand.Capital, if you’re looking for funding, we’ve got quite a bit of an uptick even over the last week. So, you know, early marketing efforts might start to be paying off here. Zero cost due diligence at Land Daily Diligence Facebook group or LandPricer.ai for the soon to be released, accurate and simplified.
software for pricing, land deals, and again, the Unconference in early August in Minneapolis. You can just Google search Dave Denniston, Land Unconference, the only large land conference I’m going to this year. If you apply and get in, you can use my last name, Duff, all lowercase, for $200 off your ticket. Hope to see you there. Take care.
