This episode uses persistent 512 area code scam calls offering fake “Google voice search registration” to illustrate how even fraudulent operations set a baseline for legitimate business comparison.
Key Takeaways:
- Scammers Lack Basic Business Infrastructure The fake “voice network” company had no website, no reviews, phone-only operations, and hung up when pressed for verification—yet somehow sustained call center operations with human employees.
- Low Bars Still Matter Most US businesses fail within one year, with seven attempts needed for 50%+ survival odds—on worst entrepreneurial days, clearing the “better than active fraud” threshold provides minimum viable validation.
- Morale Requires Plausible Legitimacy Even scam operations probably can’t recruit teams with “help me defraud people” pitches—they must construct some perceived value story, suggesting internal cognitive dissonance about their activities.
Listen to the full episode for perspective on entrepreneurial self-doubt and business baseline comparisons.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to Get Serious, kind of a fun episode here to spur the moment recording this one. So, you know, I would just want to preface in that it’s so easy to feel like, you you might be falling behind or just never where your peers are.
You know, that you don’t have the knowledge base or the skill set to, um, you know, be as successful as you would like to be in business and, know, just the comparison factors and et cetera, et cetera. Um, and like that never really goes away, right? Uh, you know, when you’re running your, your own company and, know, it’s just kind of the nature of, uh, entrepreneurship. Um,
And, you know, cause again, like you just compare, you know, I was, you know, the five year ago version of me, if, you know, it’s all the business we had built today, it’d be like, my gosh, like that’s just, you know, so much more killer. You guys have really done well. but you know, as soon as you’re exposed to a new level, then it’s like, okay, that comparison factor changes. And you realize that there’s just.
so much more else that you can be doing and improving upon. yeah, and it’s like, at least for me, I can find myself just feeling, man, this is just, I’m just feeling behind and why am I not moving? excuse me, as quickly. Let’s see if that makes it in the edit. You know, not moving as quickly.
as the other businesses in my sector and the market is just tough and just feeling stressed about your ability to make it. What is that ability to make it? Or rather, what does make it even mean?
Sometimes at least you can reassure yourself by, you know, understanding, okay, you can definitely be better than some of the businesses out there. Again, like most businesses fail within a year of being incorporated. Like I remember the stats and this was a few years ago. It might even be tougher now, maybe easier. I don’t know, probably not much of a change where, you know, just to be in business.
a US business from the year or a year after incorporation. On average, it takes seven tries of just starting a business to stay in business for just a year to even have better than a 50 % chance of being in business. And who knows what that even means, right? Does that mean the all-seas still open?
Like I mean you could just be losing cash etc. Like I’m not sure if there’s you know zombie businesses But like that’s such a low bar to hit, know open up a business and all I need to do is stay open for 365 days and on average that takes seven times to have better than than a coin flip chance like that’s such a low bar to to hit and yet like that that’s the reality of the statistics and then when you look around sometimes I’m kind of reminded of
you know why that might be the case here or so many people chasing shortcuts. So not to bury the lead here, but now I’m getting, you know, okay. You kind of have a backdrop on what, you know, I might’ve been thinking about or some of my, you know, mindset. And it’s more recently, like it’s just been much bigger problems in the businesses, that I’ve just been feeling more stressed and down and, and kind of, paralyzed about.
harder to maintain that forward momentum, then sometimes I’m like, okay, I know I can be better than some of these businesses. I was getting some of these calls from local 512 number on our open phone account. And just like most both private citizens and business owners in this country, it’s like a lot of spam calls.
that come in. But you know, occasionally I’ll answer these just like, okay, what’s, what might be the possible service here? It might actually be like a title company, something, I don’t know, or it could just be like an open lead. So I’ll try answering occasionally. And so after missing a couple of calls from different 512 numbers today, so I answered one and…
the, it kind of gave two options. So it was like, if you want to show up in Google voice search, you know, press zero or whatever. If you don’t care about that, like press nine, something like that. So I actually, I, I’ve selected that because we, had started a new, Google, business profile after many attempts to get that done. So I go, okay, they’re probably picking us up from that. Let’s just see what this is.
probably not Google calling. Again, 512, it’s very rare that Google will actually call. I have gotten a call from Google before, usually for account security things. So there is a scam about that too. That’s the closest I’ve been. Near fooled by a possible scam, and I’m sure you might be seeing this too. It’s like, your Google account’s compromised, and you have to call whatever number here.
because that’s actually the way that Google has done that. I’ve had a legitimate one where there was security and so, yeah, there’s scam companies that are trying to replicate that and they’ve even had like Google show up on the caller ID. Like it’s a really sophisticated scam. So, again, be careful out there folks. But nevertheless, so I thought, okay, something related to Google voice search and so I hit the, let’s check this out.
And you could tell it was somebody in some type of call center or a lot of noise in the background. And, know, they’re just like into their pitch immediately. And it’s like, Hey, know, but you’re serious land capital, right? Like you’re not showing up and Alexa and Google voice search, et cetera. People will say that. And, you know, they. Tried to voice search your name 27 times in whatever week or whatever. And who knows that that actually could be legitimate. and.
Like to me, I also just have a curiosity for other businesses and like, okay, how are they operating? what’s the play here? Cause you know, I try to market out myself too and what we do. and, so I’m like, yeah, serious sign capital. but I, you again, my hackles were kind of raised here. like, are you from Google? Like what’s, what’s the name of your company here? And they
Little defensive they’re like, yeah, no Google doesn’t ever call anyone. I’m like, well, that’s a flag because they they do in certain circumstances call you so it doesn’t quite ring true here and they were saying they were like from voice something voice network, but it’s a little hard to to make out so I’m on my MacBook and you’re trying to search for them as I’m talking to them and again, it’s like just instant pitch and they’re like, okay
you know, we want to make sure that you’re showing up here. So when people, you know, we can get you registered. you’re, the, you know, if people search or voice search for your name, like the hours and, location, whatever will, will show up, which again, it’s like a little curious. I haven’t, you know, I don’t routinely use voice search, but it’s like, okay, if you’re, if you have a Google business profile,
Like, why would you need to register with a third party service to just have like base info that, you know, shows up on a search engine? so I didn’t really make sense there, right? nevertheless, like a little bit curious, at least continue forward in a couple more sentences. And again, like you, it’s, it’s interesting to hear like the pitch,
You know, I almost applaud the directness of just like trying to work a sale, even if it is like more scam oriented, which we’ll get to where they’re like, okay, do you want so serious land capital? That’s that’s the name you want to register, right? So it’s like already leading into, okay, yeah, this is the pathway we want you to follow. This is why you’re on the phone right now, right? To get to get this registered.
But I’m like still backing up and I’m like, I’m again, big confused here. Can you guys like, can you name the name of your company here? And if you have a website, can I check some reviews? Like, I’m not going to put money down until I can see. then, and I had to kind of interrupt because it was like just, you know, they’re, really trying to stick with their script and their pitch. so I kind of had to override even to get my voice in there.
which isn’t like the best customer experience, right? And they’re like, no, we only have a phone service, we don’t have a website. We don’t have any type of reviews available, which, okay, reviews are one thing, plenty of online businesses might not have that set up, and like even Google Business Profile, technically, if you don’t have…
physical location services, you’re not even supposed to be on Google Business Profile, like we had to kind of work around that a little bit to get on there. So sometimes I can understand, like any business nowadays, like they have to have a website, right? Like maybe the only ones that don’t are, I don’t know, maybe occasional like home services companies or restaurants sometimes.
But you any tech service like you got to have a website and it’s just only go alarm balls alarm bells going off right away, and So I point you hey, you guys don’t have a website reviews You know, I’m not gonna put money down for You know something unless I can really review and they kind of Were again backtracking a bit. Yeah, no where we only handle all of our business services over the phone
And as soon as like I was saying, yeah, I’m going to pay without being able to see that they, hung up on me, you know, the, outreach to, to me here as the potential customer. like, any of you listening to this? Yeah, it’s like, seems some type of scam oriented thing. They might be able to hook a few folks in for some bogus voice search network that you have to pay a monthly fee. And like, you have no idea if you’re getting any type of legitimate service, probably not by the sounds of it.
And then they were like routinely caught like, you know calling different 512 numbers every like 10 to 15 minutes So like it triggered More of the activity like it’s okay mea culpa for me to have answered that but yeah, you know sometimes like natural curiosity and Sometimes there can be a fine line between legitimacy versus versus not
You know, there’s some sophisticated scams out there. And then I got like another, another call from a Houston area code number. So I answered that one too. And, and then they, they also offer a, a number that you have to call to opt out of being, of being called. And so after probably like five or six of these calls, I’m like, okay, let me, let me call this number. You know, maybe that is like the fact that, that you have to.
call a separate number just to opt out of getting routine calls to your own line. That’s such a bad customer experience here. And so I tried calling that number and it was like, hey, no, this phone number is not available in the area that you’re calling from. So it’s a dead end to even handle that. So then you just have to routinely block these numbers.
Like there’s no other way to really get off of it. And hopefully they just go away after a while. So all of this to say, cause I just like, I was just laughing about like how like it’s just funny where again, people will search for these shortcuts to just try to try to get some cash in the door and just like run these scams. it like, it’s nevertheless even, you know,
what can be perceived as a scam. I wonder the people who are running scams, they, again, like the, when you look at like stories, does the villain ever consider themselves a villain? Like, dude, does people running scams, do they ever really consider that? Or is it like, no, I just have like a very gray business. I can get people to sign up. And it’s like, I don’t know what’s in the mindset of these, you know, quote unquote business owners.
But clearly they have some people working for them, call centers and stuff. So like there has to be some type of cashflow coming in. it’s like, do you even tell your team, like this person answering the phone, I could tell that they were human. Like imagine the morale there. Like, yeah, I’m just like showing up for 10, 12 hours a day. Like I’m helping run a scam here. I don’t think they can pull that off. Like they must have some other, you know.
kind of perceive legitimacy, built into that. and so all of this is kind of getting to my conclusion here, or it’s like, okay, even if you really feel like you’re struggling in business or you just feel like you’re always behind and there’s just other folks that seemingly are just doing better and, know, tough market and crazy AI progress, et cetera. And like, and just never feel fully caught up.
just know that compared to some of these quote unquote businesses that are glorified scams here, you can definitely do better than that. There is a low bar, very, very low bar that even if you get above that, on your worst days, you can consider, I’m doing something right here compared to just atrocities. Those are just corporate.
atrocities. There’s no other way to describe it. Those people should be ashamed of themselves. Imagine again, if you were the business owner there, how could you really feel good about yourself? Maybe you could just block off everything if you’re just making money and scamming people and you have no, there’s just like no internal moral repercussions. I could not do that.
you’re not providing any value from that perspective here. So I think it’s a rare breed of folks who would even want to operate that way anyway. So again, just know that on your worst days, you can at least outperform businesses like that. And if you can do that, then you know that you can just do a little bit better.
than the previous day and the day before that and continue to put one foot in front of the other because at least you’re not the very worst out there. So sometimes that’s all you need to keep moving forward. Hopefully you found that story a bit funny. I’m sure you’ve all experienced something like that routinely, probably.
So with that in mind, SeriousLand.Capital for any of your funding needs, 50K minimum purchase price deals, Land Daily Diligence Facebook group for zero cost review land deals and landpricer.ai for the most reliable land pricing tool on the market. With that, subscribe and share everybody. I will talk to you all next time. Bye.
