Best Decisions You Can Make in Land Business (LA 1052)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Steven Butala: Welcome to The Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And Jill DeWitt, broadcasting from sunny Southern California.
Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about the best decisions you can make in your land business. You were feverishly scribbling.
Jill DeWit: I do.
Steven Butala: Sometimes she scribbles before the show. Sometimes there's just like eh.
Jill DeWit: There's a lot of thought.
Steven Butala: It's the Steve show.
Jill DeWit: Sometimes there's no thought. Yep. And sometimes I just say, "Yeah, I'll interview you."
Steven Butala: Kidding aside, we've been doing this now almost 25 years. And I tell you, there's two or three things that I... There's some... I can save you a bunch of time, I think. And I'm interested. We never share each other's opinions about what the show's about. So let's see if they're the same.
Jill DeWit: Right. It'll be fun. I have my ideas. You have yours, so we'll see.
Steven Butala: Exactly. Before we get into it, though, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free.
Jill DeWit: Kevin shares, he's one of our moderators. I went a whole year answering my own phone. You can do it, but you have to be available. People don't like to leave voicemails. They want to talk to a person. The best decision I've made in this business-
Steven Butala: All right. Here we go.
Jill DeWit: ... was getting an answering service. I don't answer any calls. They all go through the answering service. Then I call back the ones I need to speak with. Huge time saver and this came from a... This was actually a response to a question that someone was putting in. They're like, "Hey, how important is this kind of a thing?" And that was Kevin's response, which of course, ties into our show today. I love it and I totally agree. And I know we're on the same page on this. In the beginning, it's good to get a feel for it. If you can answer your own calls, answer them all. If you have a missed call, call them back and call them back fast. If you have a day job and you can't quite can't do it, at all, then I would try to hire that out. Even if it's somebody that you know, inexpensively, because it's so important to get a voice on the other end when these people get your offers and they call back. After that, they might not take your call, lose interest, and you miss some stuff.
Steven Butala: It's imperative. Excuse me, it's imperative to answer your phone. What I love about Kevin's statement here is that he did it for a year for himself. And then he made a decision because now he understands what goes on with these calls and the types of calls that come in and the concerns that the sellers have. So he spent a year collecting information, mentally, before he tasked himself to sub it out. And I think, even now, we just hired a new transaction coordinator, which was our original boots on the ground. He is in the process of answering these calls himself, which is tedious-
Jill DeWit: It's eye-opening.
Steven Butala: Tedious. Eye-opening is a great way to describe it. Tedious and time consuming and, at first glance, it's this is a waste of time but-
Jill DeWit: Valuable.
Steven Butala: It's a real solid experience.
Jill DeWit: It is. You need to know where these guys are coming from.
