Joe:  What's going on, guys? Joe McCall, REI in your car.

Joe:  I'm excited about 2026 and very optimistic. You know, this business is whatever you make it. I never believed in the concept of being a self-made man, right? It's a little too much dependent on just us. I believe that God helps us. If any success that we've ever had, it's because of God and His help and the gifts that He's given to us. So, we aren't chiseling out our own statue. But in a certain sense, you know, we are what we make it to be, right. But anyway, what I'm trying to say is, I'm excited about 2026. And when you look back at 2025, are you thinking, man, it was a horrible year? Or was it a great year? Thank you so much, God, for the awesome year it was. If you're blaming last year or complaining that it was a bad year, it's probably your fault, okay? I wanted to just do a quick little podcast here talking about what my plans are for 2026 going forward. And I'm kind of doing it for two reasons, but one of the main reasons is I want you guys to hold me accountable for what I'm saying that I'm going to be doing in 2026. And the other reason I'm doing it is I'm hoping it inspires some of you guys, to aim higher, to try to be more aggressive with your real estate goals. Real good book I'm reading right now for the second time is The Science of Scaling. And in that book, he talks about setting impossible goals and in possible timeframes, setting out a floor for what you want to stop doing and then looking at your ceiling of what you're going to be focusing on like a laser. Focus will make you rich and shiny objects and chasing too many things will make me go blind, right? What I'm going to be focusing is twofold in 2026.

Number one, I'm not going to tell you the specific revenue goals that I have because I admit if you're brand new to the business, you've never done deals before, that might seem like, oh, there's no way. But I'll tell you in general terms, my goal is to triple the revenue and the coaching side of my business. So we do coaching services, software, done for you marketing. We have my dirt flippers course. We do lending on deals to with students and we partner on deals with, with people in the community. So that business I want to triple in 2026, which is very doable. I feel good about that. But then on the deal side of our business, the thing that I specifically wanted to talk about and the thing I want you guys to hold me accountable to, I really want to ramp that business up. I'm hiring an acquisitions manager full-time in the next one to two weeks. And so we're going to be ramping up our marketing. We're going be sending my goals to send about 3,000 postcards a week, which is about 12,000 postcards, a month, which should get us pretty good numbers there as well. Now, a lot of you guys, you're like, I can't even send 100 postcards a week and you're talking about sending 3,00 postcards week. Well, you've got to have a team in place to do that, right? And I do accept for the acquisitions manager piece. So I might need one or two guys. We'll see how it goes, but I'm going to be sending. There's different kinds of postcards you can send. You can send postcards that get a lot of phone calls that maybe aren't very qualified seller leads, or you can sent postcards that are more real clear on what you what you want to do. So we're going to send the postcards that are clear on like, hey, do you want to sell your land and give us a call instead of the more I call it the third notice postcard or the, there's other postcards that you can send that basically don't tell them why you're sending the postcard. It's just, hey, it's important to talk to you about your two acre lot in XYZ County. Call me right away. It's important.

So those kinds of postcards will get more calls, but not as many qualified calls, right? So if I'm going to be sending 3000 postcards a week and I'm gonna be having an acquisitions manager full time handling those leads, just one, those better be more pre-qualified leads that come in. Does that make sense? We should be getting about 2% response rates. So if I'm sending 3,000 a week, we should be getting 50 to 60 calls a week which is a good number to shoot for if you want to make the targets that we've got on our on our site. So my minimum profit target on each deal is going to be $10,000. We're just going to wholesaling everything for the most part. I might be selling some deals on owner financing, I don't know yet, but I want to be just wholesaling everything. We're going to shooting for a minimum target of 10 grand. A minimum of four deals a month. We should be doing more than that, but I feel conservatively, we should be doing four deals a month. We're going to be focusing in on areas where there's a lot of activity. So we're going to be looking back last 90 days, where are the buyers buying in these markets and what are they buying? So I'm not going to be targeting deals where we'll be making a minimum of 20 or $30,000 profit. We're not going to be targeting properties that are just larger subdivides or entitlements or, you know, we're wherever the demand is, where are people in the recent past 90 days or so, where are they buying land right now and what are they buying and that's where we're going to target. I want you to keep me accountable for these goals and I'm going to be updating y'all more. I'm going to also be creating more content on my YouTube channel on this podcast of how things are doing. I'll be doing less interviews and more like just teaching content. I also want to be doing more case studies of deals that we are doing and deals that other folks are doing. I'm seeing a lot of activity in our community, more and more people doing deals, more people getting better response rates with their direct mail, and getting more sellers to say yes. The tricky part is this, because this is what my prediction is for 26, and I'll wrap this up. My prediction for 26 is you're gonna see a lot more motivated sellers responding to your mail than last year and the year before. So you're going to be seeing more people calling on your mail. Well, one of the reasons for that is there's a lot less competition. There are less wholesalers now in the market. It's not as sexy as it was three, four, five years ago. Fewer competitors, fewer wholesalers, houses and land. And the sellers are getting more motivated because the market is softening up. They need the cash. That's a great thing about land. Sellers just don't care. They're not as attached to the land. And because there's less people reaching out to them, you're going to get a higher response rates. But also this, whether there are a few buyers or not, I don't know. And I kind of care right now. Fewer buyers buying land right now, I don't care because I'm just going wherever the buyers are and if you see the buyers in a certain part of the country, then drill down to the state, drill down to the county, drill, down to zip code and you want to make sure you're targeting the specific kinds of properties that these buyers want and you want be hyper focused on that.

So I don't care if they're buying 20 acre lots or 2 acre lots or quarter acre lots. I don't care if their homebuilders or recreational buyers or what. We're just going to focus on who the buyers and what they're buying and where they're buying it. Makes sense? So why did I say that? Because now there's maybe, let's say there's fewer buyers or there's less activity, which I don't even know if that's true, but let's see there's less activity now than there was a year or two ago. I'm fine with that because I know that they're buying right now. And you need to be more aggressive and conservative in your offer. So in other words, if two years ago, a year ago, properties were selling for $50,000 an acre, let say, you need to be selling your properties today at $40,000 an acre, $45,000 a acre. So if you see everything is selling, you know, all these quarter acre lots are selling right now for $30,000, when you're making your offers, you need to be thinking of, all right, I'm going to sell this deal for $28,000. You know, maybe 10, 15% less than what is currently selling for today. And then you base your offer on that. So you subtract what your minimum profit is, you subtract realtors, commissions, closing costs, whatever. And that's where you need be. You need to be more aggressive than ever and conservative on your offers because you're going to be conservative onyou're asking price when you sell the deals. The goal, if you want to succeed in 2026, is selling your deals in one or two months. It's all about the velocity of capital, not trying to get the most amount of profit as possible. If you're going to survive, if we're going into a recession, and I think we are if we aren't already, you need be more so aggressive and on your pricing for your deals. And you need be focused on turning your deals and turning your capital every one to two months and not trying to get top dollar for your property. So if you only make five grand on a deal instead of 10, fine. Once in a while you make 10 or 15 or 20 grand on the deal, that's great. But don't price your property high, aggressive. You want to be aggressive on the low side. And so I see a lot of mistakes that people make is, you know, if a property will sell for 40 to 50 grand, they say, all right, well, I'm going to sell it, I want to price it at 50 and then drop the price if I can't sell it. Don't do that. You want to start it aggressively from the beginning. When you first put it on the market, you want to sell that deal fast. That's your recipe and the key to success.

So, hey, listen, do you want to do this ride, this journey with me? Come on in the car with me. Sit right here, let's go. Let's do some deals. Let's make 2026 the biggest, best year ever. And you want a ride along with me, just keep on joining me on these podcasts, on these videos. Appreciate you guys and we'll see you later. Take care.