In this episode, a request to share a paid course seat sparked deep reflection on business ethics and the spectrum of ethical decision-making beyond simple right-and-wrong scenarios.
Key Takeaways:
- Ethics Exists on a Spectrum Warren Buffett’s “three legs on the stool” (competence, work ethic, ethics) becomes more challenging at higher business levels, where most operators assume they’ve peaked ethically when further growth is possible.
- Ignorance Doesn’t Eliminate Consequences Early mistakes like self-closing a property without proper heirship procedures created ethical violations despite honest intentions, highlighting that ignorance still carries responsibility.
- The Gut Check Wins When someone offered $2,500 to split an $8,000 course seat meant for team members only, the immediate rationalization (tough economy, easy money) was overridden by slowing down and recognizing it violated the program’s intent.
Listen to the full episode to hear how protecting a colleague’s business model became a case study in choosing long-term reputation over short-term gain.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. I’m trying to orient where my face is supposed to be on screen because every time that I’m having my team chop up for reels, it seems to be cutting off a bit. So trying to figure out where that placement is. Experiment. Hopefully this one today isn’t fully, fully off screen when I try.
this side here. So I had a whole podcast lined up for today on additional market updates. Obviously, I’ve been writing about that in the newsletter. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been pulling some other land investors, getting a mix of responses here. So I’m going to actually save that till tomorrow. Some pretty interesting findings on that. And more because I wanted to talk about
Ethics actually, and so I think it’s probably a topic that is not discussed enough. So to kind of set the scene here, I know I’ve mentioned, you know, all these AI pushes been making lately, which again, has just been tremendous and been feeling less burnt out, just by knowing and already starting to experience some of the potential and workflow, updates that are just helping out a ton.
so I had joined that automate to accelerate with Callan and no Callan personally spent a lot of time in person together. have no affiliate relationship or anything. just think she’s does incredible work and it’s getting very, very well rewarded for her dedication. and focus within that space. I always want to learn from people who are on the cutting edge of.
areas that I think are only going to serve our business. So I’m more than happy to, you know, pay, pay to play when, it matters with, people I think are, really delivering, exceptional value. so, you know, it’s just charging. It depends on you. If you’re on a payment plan or upfront, like roughly 7,500, eight grand for the 10 week course. And somebody reached out to me.
I don’t know how they might’ve suspected. they were just blindly reaching out to everybody in a Kellyn’s Facebook group. They’re like, cause the way Kellyn set it up is, you, you basically buy your seat within her program for your business. And then there’s two additional slots for free that you can bring on, you know, two other members of your business. So everybody can kind of,
learn the techniques and build the business forward, then you can also buy additional seats for your business if you want more people to attend. So this person reached out and I only had one core business member that I felt was appropriate to bring along here. So it’s like, okay, I’m not gonna use this other seat available, at least at the moment. And somebody reached out and like, hey, do you have another seat available? And I thought they were reaching out, like, okay, they were looking.
to bring on another team member. already used their other two seats and didn’t want to pay the extra like 500 bucks or whatever for bringing on extra team member. I didn’t think that much about it. So I just responded, from a like, I’m not sure yet, but I might have an extra seat. But then this person was like, wow, cool. Yeah, I’d love to buy one off you.
you know, I, I just, I can’t justify paying the full price of the program. And that took me a back a bit, because. You know, the, the, understanding here was that, you know, these extra seats were available for other members of your business and that, you know, all of these various AI programs that we were getting the assistance from.
Callan’s team, it was going to be like one per business, like one brand manager and so forth. But all of a sudden, like if you have some shenanigans going on behind the scenes where people are splitting seats, but they’re all different businesses, then you’re all of sudden getting like, you know, two for the price of one, three for the price of one, which I don’t think was the intention of the program.
So that just, it didn’t feel right for me. Like ethically, it kind of rocked me. I think every person, they have different parts of their brain just immediately think like part of me is just like a numbers guy, just always capitalized thinking, or it’s like, somebody’s looking for a seat, chop down price, 2,500 bucks through, it’s a tough economy. And you start rationalizing down these pathways.
Just like automatically it’s just but you know, you don’t always have to believe all the thoughts going in you is just you know thoughts flow Whatever they don’t have to be good bad Whatever you don’t need to shame yourself from what what’s going through your mind saying like okay You can have multiple parallel tracks, but like the overwhelming one was wait a second this This is not right here. Once you get enter into
What’s the Daniel Kahneman? Ways of thinking there’s a Type 1 brain type 2 I’m probably butchering it but I think it’s type 2 brains where you slow Thinking fast and slow. So what you know, you want to be thinking slower here in a situation like that So like my brain settled in for a second and like okay that this is not right you know, Calvin’s a friend of mine, especially too and I Would not feel comfortable at all entertaining this
further in the remotest. And that was like a, it didn’t take me long to arrive at that conclusion, you know, within like a minute of actually thinking about the implications. But it’s not that often that you’re like put into a more ethical dilemma for most business owners, I think.
you know, fortunately we try to keep things above board as much as possible and we’re not like routinely put in positions where, hey, you actually have to think through a specific scenario like this, or at least not as much on our side. Currently, probably the bigger you get, the more you have to encounter these, but maybe even the opposite actually. I don’t know, I’d have to think a bit more about that.
Um, but nevertheless, uh, not a routine thing that comes up into our daily line of work. um, again, I trusted, no, Cal and a lot. uh, you know, I, just, I had sent her over a text and I’m like, Hey, you know, just FYI people were some, someone was, and I’m not mentioning any names here, not throwing anyone under the bus. You know, they haven’t done anything wrong. Um, in, in hard facts, you know, they’re, they’re asking, they’re trying to figure stuff out. So, okay, this person, um, reached out to me who sniffing around for a seat.
not feel good ethically here, like maybe your team, this is a suggestion, you know, might want to audit the seats, make sure like, yeah, everybody signing up are, you know, all within the same business and, you know, calendar credit, like right away was, yeah, I appreciate this and I’m going to add like an extra legal clause to ensure it’s all the same businesses and, you know, that was the appropriate way to, to handle it. Like that’s gonna, you know,
let me sleep better at night and just move on from that scenario. And that one probably is like, it’s like easier, right? There was like a pretty clear right and wrong there, but you still, a decision was needed to be made. And I think it was a Warren Buffett quote where it’s like three legs on the stool, you know, for anybody in business, you know, take
competence, ability to work hard, ethics, and pick two at most, and you’ll be lucky to find even one is the extra caveat there. And I try to think about that quote a lot. And I think especially for competence and hard working, all those three, like everybody listening to this, like, I should be able to fit all three of those, why only pick two.
or even just like pick one. But I think like the higher levels within business that you get to, especially on competence and hard working, it’s like, oh wow, I thought I was competent in this area, but the deeper I get in the higher levels, get like, wow, I was not nearly as well-informed as I thought. Or even on like the hard working side, it’s like, yeah, I thought, you know, it’s putting on all these hours and so forth, but I was not levering myself properly and…
actually not working nearly as hard as other people at a different level here. those things like you can accept if you really want to succeed and get to that next step along your career. Whereas ethics, that one I think it’s more people would have like a instant reaction of feeling offended if they…
we’re looking at other operators and seeing, seeing like there was extra levels to being ethical. Where, you know, a lot of people think it’s like, you know, just like black or white in terms of, know, are you ethical or not? But I think it’s also that there’s a spectrum to it, just like, you know, being competent or, or hardworking, like, can you be an even more ethical operator? And are people playing at a higher level than you? And is that something you can accept?
So that’s another question I try to ask myself a lot too. And sometimes ethics can be explained away with ignorance as too. There have to be consequences for ignorance. Like if you accidentally murder somebody on an extreme case, you have to face the consequences of that, whether you intended to or not. And same with areas within business. Like when we were…
very early on within our land investing career. mean, it’s a very small property as you know, like the thousand dollar type of flips like way, way earlier on and we were self closing these and self, self marketing, you know, taking care of the title docs, you know, directly to the county clerk and so forth. And
You know, there was one that was, there was errors involved and so forth that we did not understand the process for how to like properly run a whole affidavit of airship type situation. and you know, we only realized once we actually got more experience in the company and like actually working with title companies and so forth that, Hey, wow, we, actually acquired this property and then sold it when we technically didn’t even own it. We didn’t realize it at the time. Like it was an ignorant situation.
Um, and again, you know, may a culpable on our side, fortunately, it was like a very inexpensive, um, property there. Uh, but you know, that technically was not an ethical, um, thing to do, but, know, it can also be explained by, you know, that was, it was admittedly an honest mistake. And if we were repeating that knowingly going forward, which, you know, we have not, um, FYI, uh,
you know, that would be a much bigger black mark on our reputation, right? But it’s still something I think that I don’t feel good about that even happening, even though it was just from like flat out, we did not know what we were doing and assumed we did. So that’s just like kind of an example of where.
you know, you can learn from your mistakes, but then how do you operate at an even higher level the next time around? And you know, can you possibly rectify some of those past mistakes even better? I don’t know, I’m getting a little too metaphysical here at the end, but I think that’s the nature of ethics. I know this.
Paws getting a little long here, but you know, just wanted to share that example from today and how it made me think that third leg on the stool again and how, you know, maybe you can reflect on your own side. Like, can you accept that maybe you’re not at a peak ethical level? Is there just another, you know, another level in the game to reach to? I think that way as well.
Even though we think we have yeah, we have an excellent reputation. We try to treat people right and not BS anybody Follow the letters to the law but you know, there’s always gray areas sometimes whether you encounter them via ignorance or not or You know desperation within the business trying to stay alive tough economy, etc Like you had a lot of factors that that way on there and you know, sometimes you’re gonna encounter certain situations where you really have to think hard about
Which way you want to come come out of it and and what’s going to allow you to sleep sleep more at night. So Hopefully this is helpful as you consider other situations that might come up on a day-to-day basis for yourself this one is kind of fun to Fun to think about outside of just kind of the raw numbers might do something more along this line to Let me know if you want to hear more on on these type of topics with that serious land dot capital for any of your funding needs
Zero-cost review of your land deals at land daily diligence Facebook group Mondays and Thursdays and then landpricer.ai We are cruising the drawer engineering process More to come here shortly subscribe and share If you haven’t already or you can share again, that would be much appreciated Looking forward to tomorrow. Thanks so much. Bye
