Why Some Members Fail (LA 719)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:                   Steven and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:                            Hello.

Steven Butala:                   Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.

Jill DeWit:                            And, I’m Jill DeWit broadcasting from sunny Southern California.

Steven Butala:                   Today Jill and I talk about why some members fail. It’s truth week.  [inaudible 00:00:15] about truth investing week here on the Land Academy Show.

Jill DeWit:                            I’m trying to think of some funny things before I get to the real things.

Steven Butala:                   Yeah, failure is not that funny.

Jill DeWit:                            I know, well-

Steven Butala:                   But, it’s necessary. There’s the spoiler alert.

Jill DeWit:                            This is not just fail … why some members fail, not … I took it as not an individual transaction like big time fail, like-

Steven Butala:                   Yeah, they sign up and it doesn’t work.

Jill DeWit:                            Right.

Steven Butala:                   Or, they don’t sign up or they don’t try.

Jill DeWit:                            Right.

Steven Butala:                   The chances are if they’re failing at this they’re failing at something else. Like a lot of stuff.

Jill DeWit:                            Exactly.

Steven Butala:                   Why is that funny … Truthfully funny to you, isn’t it?

Jill DeWit:                            It is.

Steven Butala:                   We’re gonna bring marriage into this at some point.

Jill DeWit:                            Good thing we’re not married.

Steven Butala:                   Before we get into it let’s take a question posted by one of our members on landacademy.com online community, it’s free.

Jill DeWit:                            Okay. Tina asks: I’ve been using a popular CRM for the last couple of months since I started land investing, and while it’s very easy to work with it is also pretty expensive, and I think I’d rather put that money towards actual land deals.

                                                How do you organize all of your leads from initial receiving, to purchasing, to sale? Doing it on Excel seems very daunting to me, unless there are some tricks that I don’t know about to make the information more manageable, and I like the idea of paper records even less. Any recommendations?

Steven Butala:                   May I?

Jill DeWit:                            Please.

Steven Butala:                   For years and years I … We were using a proprietary system that was written in sequel for us long before a Windows environment … a web-enabled Windows environment was popular. You can imagine how long ago that was, and it cost me a quarter of a million dollars. We were running it on a Windows 2003 XP server until very recently, and I bagged it all … drum roll, for what? Excel.  One single Excel spreadsheet.

                                                There are three tabs at the bottom. The first one’s called acquisitions, the second one’s called-

Jill DeWit:                            Engineering.

Steven Butala:                   Engineering, and, the third one’s called sales, and that’s it, and everybody loves it. Now, here’s the thing. When you have a big staff, or staff of more than three, they have to be relatively educated on how to use this because it’s disastrous, they can go in there and wreck the whole thing in 10 minutes.