This episode documents the strategic decision to increase minimum deal size from $20K to $50K purchase price, with preference for $150K+ deals. This shift from volume-based growth to concentrated higher-value transactions aimed to break through the mid-seven-figure revenue plateau by working with more sophisticated operators who bring consistent deal flow rather than one-off smaller transactions.
Key Takeaways:
- Clear Positioning Attracts Aligned Deals Immediately after updating all marketing materials to advertise $50K minimum and $150K+ preference, deal flow quality improved with multiple six-figure opportunities from reliable operators appearing within days.
- Volatile Clients Create Volatile Business The land investing space has high operator churn, and focusing on smaller $20K-$50K deals meant working with less-capitalized investors who lacked staying power, creating inconsistent revenue despite volume efforts.
- Smaller Deals Get Less Scrutiny by Default The psychological reality is that $20K deals unconsciously receive less rigorous diligence than $200K deals despite similar effort requirements, increasing mistake risk on smaller transactions where attention naturally drifts.
The shift acknowledges leaving money on the table is inevitable—focusing upmarket on fewer, larger deals with experienced operators creates better long-term growth potential than chasing volume with inconsistent smaller players.
(Podcast transcript below)
Welcome to get serious today. I wanted to do a brief note on really getting clear within your business and how that can start transforming your results and just kind of greater clarity on what you’re pursuing and getting back from your efforts and how that can happen just very quickly. Okay. To boil this down a little bit more.
I realized that was probably a pretty vague statement. So, you know, since we’ve been in the land space, well, I mean, over five years at this point, but since we switched exclusively to funding deals in early 2023, you know, just, I really wanted as much volume as possible.
And just, you know, I’d want to work with as many operators as we can and, know, just build revenue. You know, ideally we could find folks who wanted to work with us more, more routinely. And that did happen a good chunk of the time, but, you know, plenty of folks were, you know, more one-offs and, you know, getting the land space, which is a lot of churn, a lot of volatility. People come and go in this industry all the time. And especially in more tricky markets where,
You know, folks are just finding it tricky to find any properties that they might want to purchase, regardless of whether they’re seeking funding or not and whether it’s going to be accepted by a funder. And we probably accept, you know, one to 2 % of all deals that were sent our way. you know, over the last 12 to 18 months, roughly, like there’s a really high threshold for,
you know, kind of getting any type of deals accepted. And so that’s how I was just like, okay, volume, volume, volume. And we built out our branding a lot and we grew really, really quickly, right? Into, you know, mid seven figure ish business, you know, within, you know, 18 months of starting our funding.
business, but then, you know, things just kind of plateaued from a revenue perspective heading into 2025. Well, at least the Q1, you know, I was just really, again, really trying to grow really quickly. Could we do, you know, three X growth year after year after year? And we were trending for that in Q1 of 2025. And then, you know, it really started to get difficult. I think a lot of businesses were just struggling more by Q2 of 2025.
Not everybody, but the overall sentiment was more akin to that. And, a lot of shifts within the real estate market and difficulties in the macro economy, et cetera, and still a lot of disconnect with lining up sellers for appropriate purchase prices. And then also just, you know, heavy buyers markets, just tough to dispo things as well. you know, it,
a tougher environment to grow in regardless. And, I just really had to see, okay, yeah, there’s a lot of volatility in this space with the operators that we’re working with. And just finding the consistency and the deals that we’re actually going to do on a routine basis. And, you know, that’s just kind of a core axiom is that volatile customers or clients in our case lead to a volatile business. like, we have
volatility in our business because of the underlying volatility of the people that we serve. So he’s like, okay, I really need to start going up market more to work with operators who have more staying power in this industry and also work with more incentivized realtors who are more knowledgeable about the areas that they serve. And it’s just, you know, higher value deals can lead to larger businesses because
You know, even though we were doing 20K minimum purchase price deals, again, always looking for roughly a 2X margin on deals and a preference of 50K plus, it was hard to grow beyond like the 3 million top line revenue mark, or at least that’s what I was finding, kind of getting stuck in that swamp. Like, uh, Hormozzi always talks about, and, regardless of more hours in and so forth, um, I had to figure out, okay, in order for us to get to that 10 million mark and beyond.
We need to go up market here more strategically. Otherwise, we’re probably going to be treading water with what we’re doing, which is fine if you’re trying to build more lifestyle businesses. It’s just not what our goal is internally. And so as we started heading in this direction, first we were trying to get some liquidity back from a lot of deals sitting in our portfolio. Fortunately, a lot of them are.
have either exited or on their way to being exited fully under contract ready to sell, you know, even some large ones, even in a matter of days, in this couple of weeks here, like a huge profit month for us during July and early August. So it’s like, okay, with this liquidity coming back, we’ve stabilized within this kind of new macro economy. We have a better idea for our risk alignment and assessment here. Where can we start putting more of this money to work?
wanted to do okay larger deals where we can continue to get you know the same or better margins of at least 2x gross margin and also just realizing okay like we I shouldn’t necessarily continue to spend my time reviewing smaller deals or have my team do that just because it’s not it’s not driving enough of the underlying business forward
to continue to work on them. And we know that there’s just gonna be less consistency with the operators bringing deals like that. So, you know, we just jumped up to, okay, 50K minimum purchase price deals, which is already where we were trending. And anytime I was starting to do deals that were closer to that 20K mark or below 50, like some of them really worked out for us even this year, like it’s gonna bring in some solid, consistent profit, but.
uh, uh, again, like the paradigm is, that regardless of the size of your business or the size of the deal, um, in terms of, you know, just monetary size, like most of the steps are, are, are the same or similar and you’re going to put in, you know, basically the same level of effort into those, in, in, into whatever size deal that there is. And that’s the thing again, in this market, like you can’t
can’t really screw around either, even with small deals, because you can get caught really quickly. And that’s also what happened to us, like within the subconscious, like, okay, this is just, you know, a tinier amount of capital in the deal. And you know, some things slipped in diligence and we got ourselves in some nasty little issues. Fortunately, all of them either worked out in our way, one with, you know, relatively,
Low loss. mean 10k loss. I got still hurts but it was like low capital investment relative relative deal that again, I would just like Never make a mistake again like that too But I know for those some of those higher price deals. We just had that extra level of eyes on them To ensure that we were really locked in from a diligent side that there was just less inherent
risk for things slipping because we knew the pressure was higher. I know it’s kind of like counterintuitive where sometimes even these smaller deals are more risky because there’s such huge variation in the deals that we’re working on that like naturally you’re just going to gravitate to things where more is on the line from a monetary side. So I wanted to collapse that down more so I could focus the team in and myself.
to have a lower risk of mistakes when we’re dealing with just larger properties as a whole. Anyway, they’re gonna require more scrutiny. So, bump that minimum price up to 50K and just realize, like, okay, we’re gonna be leaving some money on the table. But again, that’s another hormones you think too. It’s like, you’re always leaving money on the table somewhere or another. It’s just if you focus in, you can probably have the chance to earn even more money over the longterm because you are just that much more focused. And that’s taken me.
forever. I’m still learning that as an entrepreneur. I left extraordinary amounts of money on the table, unrealized gains, and just turning the losses, like millions of dollars. Story for another time. But that is a lesson I’ve had to learn painfully many times over. And again, still learning that. And even this is like, it’s taken us longer to jump up the value chain than
I probably should have jumped up even quicker, but you it is what it is, right? And we really are preferring 150 K plus purchase price deals at this point too. It’s like, okay, if we really want to three X our business again, push past that plateau, we’re just, we’re going to have to move up market here. We have the liquidity, we have the knowledge, we have the track record to do this. so let’s just go ahead and make that shift.
And, we switched all of our marketing materials, even over the last week to do this, started advertising it more directly in a lot of our communications and, you know, pretty much instantaneously, like, you know, would it, would it have happened either way maybe, but like, we started getting some, you know, much more interesting deals when things were like more twist, know, topsy turvy week by week, less reliability and the
and the amount of leads coming in. But then all of sudden it’s like, okay, wow, we’re getting some really solid stuff, you know, multi six figure deals that are from reliable operators that we could certainly start pursuing here. Now that we put our again, we updated our marketing, we’re making our message more clear on exactly what we are looking for. And that’s going to bring you the results. Because like if you don’t
express what you want in life. it’s maybe you’ll get lucky and have have some things come back to you that you really want. unless you really can kind of make that concerted effort, here’s what I want, what I’m going to accept that has a way of kind of orienting, you know, external processes to be a little bit more in your favor, because, know, you’re telling people what what you want there. And this is again, I want to avoid more of like
I know some people might believe in like the secret and I forget who that author even is. I don’t believe in that. We’re just like putting energy out in the universe and having things come back to me. If people want to believe that, Potentially it’s worked in whatever favor for some folks. To me, I don’t rely on that. It’s just what actions am I taking to bring things back to me? But again, I think I’ve remarked on this before is that…
for any action, you need to start with a thought, right? So, but to me, I’m always connecting the thought to the action on what’s coming back, not just from my thoughts by itself, because that’s like, it doesn’t make sense to me in that regard to the results that I’m getting there. So I wanna make that distinction. But again, this directional focus to larger deals had to start as a thought.
in my mind, chatting with partners, updating our advertising and our marketing, aligning my team, just the type of communications I was having with people bringing us deals, what type of folks and operators we were looking out for, which relationships I was starting to build more. Like all of that even could have been subconsciously,
defined and just, you know, okay, letting some folks go that just like weren’t necessarily the best fit anymore. Maybe there’ll be a better fit later on as they continue to grow. So, um, that’s kind of the distinction that I wanted to make. It’s like, get really, really clear on where your business, where you want it to head and figure out, okay, what do we need to adjust here so that we can reach those goals? And so then you’re just not stuck in this hodgepodge and starting to resent.
even leads that are coming into you that aren’t like the best customer fits anymore. Like figure that out, make it clear and make that change. And if you need to change back, fine. But you got to test things out and see how it works prior to.
you know, kind of sticking with the old pattern that you have been doing before that was, you know, getting you plateaued or even losing business. So hopefully this one is helpful today. Something I’ve been thinking a lot about and just, you know, feeling pretty optimistic based on the results we’ve been getting over the last week. Serious land dot capital for any of your funding needs, you know, based on what I said here today. Zero cost review of your land deals at Land Daily Diligence Facebook group.
and landpricer.ai for the most reliable land pricing tool on the market. Subscribe and share everybody. I will talk to you next time. Bye.
