In this episode, the real estate industry is shifting, and manual workflows are the bottleneck. We discuss why we are pausing aggressive marketing to solve the “core constraint” of AI integration, even if it means flat revenue growth for the year.
Key Takeaways:
- Efficiency Moat: Our 41% operating margins are protected by operational efficiency, not just deal flow; bloat kills land businesses.
- The “Vibe Coding” Threat: Competitors using custom agents (via tools like Claude) can replicate a year of engineering work in an hour—you cannot out-hire this.
- Automated Content: We are using Claude projects to automate podcast headlines and thumbnails, freeing up high-level creative time.
Listen to the full episode to understand why “tech debt” is the most dangerous liability in your business for 2026.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious. We’re at Serious Land Capital. We’ve funded over $6 million worth of land deals with industry leading 41 % operating margins. So today I really wanted to just go over some additional AI strategic and tactical planning for our business here. Um, and
really kind of relating it in relation to, you know, what I’ve talked about before, what Hormozi always talks about is, you know, what’s your number one constraint within the business and how are you going to solve it? So for us, like I keep coming back to this where, I, you know, recording this at, you know, the start of 2026, you know, again, I’ve written
Often now in the past few weeks of serious news, a whole bunch of other newsletters, podcasts, et cetera, it was like more reflective in content and where I think everybody naturally is gonna be determining, do I make this year better than the last one? Anybody who’s even remotely optimistic is gonna be thinking about that. And, you
so many of us had become business owners and entrepreneurs because we imagined a life of greater freedom for ourselves and then realized, you know, probably fairly quickly on to, you know, actually running a business is that it can be all consuming and last the rest of your life without ever, you know, gaining back or, you know, even giving, getting even kind of a hint of that.
freedom that you might have, you know, initially really oriented yourself around obtaining, or at least that was kind of the core goal. I think pretty much any entrepreneur has that dream. I don’t know anybody who’s like, I just want to, you know, do this business because I want to just be locked in forever. Yeah, we should do something and do something that.
You can show up every single day. I want to be in this business for like the next several decades at least. but have the option to, not have to show up and grind every single day. If I have to like that ability to have the choice, I think is, is the freedom that we’re all looking for. And so then it just kind of relieves some of the pressure on yourself so that you can think about the bigger goals without having to worry about the day to day all the time.
Um, so this is just talked about ad nauseam, but it’s like constantly a, um, point of focus that most of us never figure out. And so I, again, I think like at the start of each year, it’s like, okay, how am I going to make this year better than last? And how many years have I just, you know, continued to grind day in day out, even as the business is growing, we hit certain plateaus, breakthrough them, et cetera. Um, and you know, if, if I’m
looking at what our next 12 years of the business or the next 12 months of the business is going to look like. Like, what do I have to do on a daily basis to ensure that I’m not sitting here a year from now with the exact same outlook? Where it’s just, okay, I just, have to be constantly wrapped in it. You know, even during the holidays, like there’s, if I’m not, you know, somewhat involved,
or deeply involved and like, know, the business is just ground to a halt. So I keep coming back to this where, you know, everybody AI, AI, like the current discourse, you know, industry wide and I’m using industry as far as like, you all US business, maybe even globally.
has really kind of centered in around where consumers are very happy with the current AI tools, use your chat GPT, et cetera. Like I was even using that, my daughter unfortunately had to stay home today, thought she had pink eye, maybe, immediately just like uploading pictures, trying to figure out, okay, what’s going on. I think that’s an excellent use case for that, but fully integrating enterprise workflows, that has been a trickier
paradigm to breach. And obviously some businesses are doing better than others. We obviously get coached by Callan on Uncommon Business Group. You know, have made a lot of progress there. But nevertheless, like there’s still so much that we could be doing better. So many other businesses could be doing better. So it’s like, okay, you know, but in order to build these AI workflows and really start to lay brick by brick to transform your business into something that will be
you know, dramatically different in terms of your day to day after another 12 months. like it just requires constant input and focus in order to be kind like that. That has to be the core constraint that you solve. And like, just keep coming back to that. like, man, any spare moment that’s outside of kind of the general reactivity of our business and keeping deal flow and the disposed and the acquisitions, cetera. yeah, that, that, that’s the lifeblood of, of the business. gotta keep.
revenue moving, got to get those reps in, but anything outside of that, like we have to solve this core constraint, even at the cost of pushing additional marketing or sales efforts, et cetera, to increase lead flow. like if we don’t build this infrastructure, we’re going to be running the same rat race again and again and again, or, and, or I should say our competitors,
do a better job at that to where even if we discontinue the grind, the grind, the grind all the time, our human capabilities and the talent that we have within our core business won’t actually be able to keep up with the folks who are making bigger strides within AI doing things that are simply impossible for any size human team to do. So, you have to account for that.
risk as well in addition to just the general annui of just having to come back to the grind of day-to-day business. And again, these tools are just getting so much better. know so many of us take a step back, deservedly so for the most part, in the US workaholic culture.
glad most of us, outside of probably folks in retail or healthcare for the most part, are able to take roughly two weeks step back to kind of reflect and gather ourselves before just going hard again for another 50 weeks straight. So, I was still seeing that the bigger…
AI and the tech firms, they were still discontinuing to push progress. just seeing some of these updates here, even as I was reading over the past week or so, there was a very high level Google engineer who was just, they were almost distraught on posting on X of just saying, they’d been working on a specific project within Gemini for close to the past year, but they were trying to replicate what they wanted to get done with
certain agent, agent pathways within Claude code and Claude was able to solve it within an hour. they’re like, yeah, our competitors just built a better setup for us at the mo, for like our own needs at the moment. Like Gemini, we have, have to catch up. and that’s remarkable. Like these are some of the best developers in the world. you know, working on one of the other top systems like Gemini is no joke. use it more routinely.
over the past month or so since Gemini 3 had come out as well. And, you know, they’re falling behind the curve and just realizing, oh my gosh, these tools are just remarkably good where you’re getting, you know, a year’s worth of work from one of the best engineering teams, again, in the world, that their work’s being replicated within an hour from a competitor’s product, really, really remarkable, hard to wrap your mind around, or, you know, just other type of, you know, this is also from Claude, but, you know, was seeing
someone recommend a, I think that they’re called Claude skills, but you can kind of connect different softwares into Claude in order to replicate certain pathways. It’s almost like an agentic pathway as well. And for this one, it was just ensuring that any content you build out onto YouTube will have top performing thumbnails.
And it just gave you a pathway to figure out, know, for certain topics, like, I think you could even automate, okay, figure out who, you know, what videos were performing the best for this certain topic set, you know, getting the most views, whatever engagement. And then you can just copy those thumbnails in the design of your own branding.
and then be able to replicate and pump out those type of thumbnails for your content to try to, you know, game the algorithm for better views. And that can all just be done, you know, automatically here, like really, really cool pathways that, uh, you know, again, you could put a lot of human effort into, but if you can solve some of those workflows, like again, one of the only ways to stand out in the future here is just as brand building through proper
content production here and still stay ahead of the curve enough to where you’re not sounding like everybody else, which is the common denominator that most folks will default to just through a lack of creativity or effort. just like stuff like that is just gonna be routinely possible. it’s just like, yeah, I have to just keep, just note down these ideas and pathways to take advantage of within our notion. okay, these are the workflows we need to nail.
because even within our team, still the amount of human effort required to just post content routinely. And we have so much AI help with us, prepping reels and podcast headlines and descriptions and so forth. We have really, really good quad projects built around that, but it still takes like a significant manual effort. And we’re like, we’re still not even scratching the surface in terms of the reach that we think we have the potential to.
to achieve here. So it’s like, we have to put these pieces in place, especially as my team and myself continues to spread more thin as we grow as a business here. So, you know, all of this goes to say, again, I’m just, more and more convinced that the core constraint needed to solve is like, if I’m gonna do one thing this year, I need to figure out these AI workflows.
even if it’s at the cost of additional revenue or profit generation over the course of this year, because I know I don’t want to be running the same race again and again and again for the rest of my life. And even if I was okay with that, the chance that I’m going to be out competed by somebody who does take advantage of these AI workflows is too high that I just can’t ignore it. Like you have, this is the new status quo that you even need to utilize just to stay relevant in today’s industry. Like the pressure is just, it’s enormous.
very hard to grasp. you know, few, few people can, again, even the best operators, the best engineers in the world are like stunned by, by what’s changing on daily to weekly basis. So, to me, just makes logical sense that, okay, yeah, this is the core constraint to solve. cause once we start understanding and getting these workflows into place, everything else.
can flow from there. I know I can get the capital for various deals. I know we can continue to just run our revenue engine and just continue to underwrite deals strategically, but I need to free up my team and myself more so that we aren’t distracted by some of these other workflows and also set up a system to where we can bring more talent into our organization without it being so piecemeal and difficult to align.
the human talent involved here. So glad I talked through this as well too, cause it’s just like, you know, it’s like the day everybody’s kind of like really getting back to work and it’s just, man, I think everybody’s super reactive today. But as soon as I finished some of that reactivity and it’s like, man, okay, yeah, we have to get back to the AI space and start laying down those bricks because
All of sudden you have T minus 360 odd days left before another year has passed and you haven’t made the progress that is going to be required. with that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your land funding needs, 50K minimum purchase price. Looking forward to the next one. Subscribe and share everybody. Take care now.
