This episode explains Serious Land Capital’s decision to delay $500K+ deals until Q4 2025 despite multiple opportunities and institutional capital interest. The strategic patience stems from prioritizing the successful exit of a Louisiana minor subdivide with significant investor involvement, recognizing that forcing growth through over-leverage risks business survival, and understanding that multi-eight-figure capital deployment requires proving execution first.
Key Takeaways:
- Prove Before Scaling Institutional investors with multi-eight-figure capital commitments are waiting for Louisiana deal results before deploying through Serious Land Capital, making that single project the unlock.
- Rush Kills Businesses Forcing immediate growth by over-levering for larger deals sacrifices long-term reputation and partnership quality for short-term top-line expansion.
- Honesty Builds Trust Telling operators “we’re not ready yet, let’s reconnect Q4” maintains high-level relationships because sophisticated players understand multi-year partnership value.
- Every Business Reaches $100M Hormozi’s framework that any business can reach $100M enterprise value (roughly $10M profit) emphasizes consistent, sustainable growth over aggressive scaling.
Listen to understand when saying no to opportunities protects long-term business viability and partnership quality.
(Podcast transcript below)
Hi, Chris Duff over at Serious Land Capital, vacant land funding partner. Today I wanted to talk about avoiding rush. know it’s just something that a hormones even marks on often and it’s come up within our business, especially over the last. Couple of years. again, I like to focus more on the mindset or perspective type of topic on Sundays as we kind of set ourselves for the coming week. And.
I know I remarked last Sunday about having or kind of dealing with some of the inherent disappointment of like thinking that, we were on track to be hitting these numbers. You know, based on the Q4 of last year and Q1 of this year where things are tracking market shifted. You know, how do you balance going from, you know, really offense?
aggressive mindset to a more defensive focus to think about the business more long term, not like we ever didn’t think about the business long term. Again, I want to be in this industry for years, decades to come. I think we have a real advantage and a value add that we’re bringing in a day and day out basis that’s only continuing to get stronger. So I don’t want to
sacrifice that for any, you know, shorter term leverage that might put us more at risk. And that’s something my business partner brought up even over the last year or so like, Hey, we don’t, it doesn’t need to be, you know, growth at all costs mindset, you know, land again, as I remark oftentimes too, and we remark internally, like it’s an inherently risky asset. I know I bring this up all the time. Like there’s a reason the margins are high whenever you find
uh, assets where there is significant alpha, like there’s just inherent risk. Otherwise that advantage would be, um, you know, taken up by, uh, you know, mainstream investors and packaged into, you know, more routine, uh, deals with less alpha on the table. Um, but because it, you know, flipping land properly requires such intricate
systems and a high degree of confidence in taking certain calculated risks within particular localities. Like it is a hard thing to scale up in outside of very particular geographies, just given how many variables are involved and the chance that you’re just left sitting on a non cash flowing asset.
that is not a need to have by 99 % of buyers when you’re considering your dispo process. So like that alone should always just remind you that yes, this is an inherently difficult type of market to just nail
routinely at a very de-risked perspective. Yeah, you want to nail your numbers and everything and like, oh yeah, you just buy it 30%. But you know, getting those right deals and getting them right all the time, I don’t know anybody who’s ever done that fully. Like anybody who’s been in this business long enough, like deals go sideways. It’s just rules of business, right? There’s always problems to solve. So I really try to remind myself of that, you know.
no need to rush here and you know, being extra conservative as needed. Like for instance, you know, we’re I think on the cusp of some really significant growth going after much higher value deals more routinely based on how this one child parcel, you know, minor subdivide goes in central Louisiana with significant
investor involvement, many of which are, you know, effectively institutional or have considerable connections to institutional capital, like multi-eight figures that they even know on certain terms indicated, hey, they want to run that capital through a serious land capital, you know, pending results on this Louisiana deal. That’s why I’m so, so focused on
getting that one right and doing everything in my power to ensure we’re getting as favorable a result as possible, even within this market. But if we get a favorable result here within this type of macro like that is incredibly encouraging. And I know I’ve mentioned over the past few weeks, I think even yesterday too, it’s like we’re getting more routine outreach from…
uh, land investors who are working on bigger projects, you know, 500 K plus type of purchase price deals that might take upwards of a year to move sometimes longer. Um, you know, it’s just the nature, usually the larger the deal, smaller, the buyer pool, more complexity involved with it, but you know, your absolute dollars can go up a bit higher, um, on average.
But with that in mind, I don’t try to mislead people as they’re reaching out. If I was just offense minded all the time and just like, okay, grow, grow, grow, rush mentality, I would just be saying yes and just trying to figure out, where can I get these dollars to work and just force a way through, maybe over-lever myself, take out additional personal loans, even if serious land capital wasn’t doing it. I’m just like, okay, I wanna move these deals forward ASAP, but having the…
Patience and the wherewithal to be telling these folks and you know, have to have some level of humility too because you know Saying okay. We’re not ready to do this at the moment. Here’s the situation We have this big deal with significant investor involvement pending that Result like there is a lot more money that wants to flow through us. So how about we stay in touch and Reconnect and some of these type of deals
you know, anticipating Q4 roughly of 2025 and beyond here. And, you know, unfortunately that means they’re not going to be able to participate in the deal that you have at the table. No guarantee that there will be others in the future here, but that’s just the situation that we’re in. And, um, you know, that honesty has, you know, just worked in spades with us so far. None of these land investors have just, you know, blown us off or just saying, Hey, now come on.
like you guys have money, let’s just move on this thing now. Because I think these higher level players, they all understand, yes, this is a long term game here. We’re building real partnerships, figuring out financing within the land space and tight capital market environment. Like you always want to have those connections available. We’re trying to be a very reputable and reliable partner for again, years and decades to come. So when we’re trying to line up
timelines that aren’t immediate, even though, you know, I could, again, force some of these deals down and just like, okay, can we get the money out the door and try to close on some of these sooner? Like, let’s just ratchet up our anticipated top line and everything even faster and faster and faster. That is a rush mentality that leads to a much higher risk of just making a mistake and potentially blowing up and going out of business.
So that’s what I’m trying to avoid at all possible cost here and just being more realistic about, here’s like the next step we need to arrive at. Maybe there’s some hiccups that come during it. There’s no guarantee things are gonna work, but like I need to solve this problem first in order to open up all of these opportunities that are going to be there for us down the road.
Like we have made steady and steady growth each and every year roughly every you know, two quarters I would say we take you know, even another leap forward in terms of our business operations and just how smart we are on the type of deals that were evolving or evaluating rather that we just have to stay consistent because And that’s another thing I pulled from her mozi too. It’s like, you know
Every single business can get to a hundred million dollar enterprise value, which is like, I mean, every industry is differently, but different, but you know, could be roughly 10 million, $10 million of profit. so like, you know, that is just, it’s definitely not outside of reach and you know, I have the intention of, you know, going much, you know, even further beyond that, but it’s like, okay, what, what are these bite size steps in order to
uh, you know, continuing to grow the business in a sustainable fashion. By the time you hit like certain levels and all of a sudden, you know, problems change, circumstances change, and then you have to reassess anyway. So what I might be thinking now is not necessarily what I’d be thinking in the future. mean, look at your own career as an entrepreneur or like what you thought, you know, six months ago, a year ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, it’s probably wildly different. Um, or at least, you know, significantly updated with, uh, different contexts than what you thought.
previously. So I’m you know, dead set certain on what my future self is going to be thinking about. You know what, what I might be considering at the moment here. So that’s why I like, I always, you know, it’s that strong opinions weekly held, right? Like the way that I’m feeling in a certain week, and I just like flip on that change in a day within, you know, over the next week here. I just, I don’t mind ever kind of just
backing off depending on how the circumstances change and the new problems that arise because you know, environments always changing things. You know, there’s a quick pace. You got to be adaptable to circumstances and understand when to, you know, pivot and push in certain directions based on, know, updated info. So just wanted to share that. Um, cause I think all of us, again, there’s just like offense, my offense, my, how do I just grow, grow, grow, grow, grow.
For the sake of growing or like comparison with others. I don’t know who you’re comparing yourself to, you know, some iteration of yourself, um, other peers running their own business that could be, you know, significantly different than yours. If you actually saw their internal structure, what their actual goals are. Um, and who know who knows how many might actually be there in the future, uh, as well too. You don’t really know, um, what’s going on beneath the hood of everybody else. So
You have to kind of like understand that and again, like try to pick out people who are, you know, a hundred steps ahead in order to figure out, what, what the end vision might be. and I’m not even sure. Like we’re, we’re still in like a newer industry where it wasn’t even possible to run a business necessarily like this even 10 years ago, like the technology wasn’t there. So there’s not necessarily like somebody who is like a hundred steps ahead.
Completely because we’re you trailblazing a new path So that’s something I think about as well In regard to this industry and notwithstanding like all the effects AI can have on you know all knowledge workers, so Just have to be mindful of all that too But hopefully this helps you as you navigate additional challenges and growth within your own business and how to Hopefully avoid rush and just stay focused
solving the problems at hand, staying patient, staying diligent and conscientious. With that, Serious Land Capital for any of your funding needs, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group, Zero Cost Review of your land deals, and LandPricer.ai for the most simple and accurate way to price land. Looking forward to chatting with you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye.
