Clay Hepler

Daily Speed. Yearly Patience. Sprint every day and know it’s going to take decades. Build a massive active income engine. Dump it into low headache commercial real estate. Get tax write offs. Repeat.

Never listen to doomers. You’re never more than 90 days from a new identity. 6 months from a new bank account. 3 years from a new life. You’re in control. Act like it.

I've bought and sold 250+ parcels. Below is every step, tool and number I'd use if I started from zero today. Long post. Save it.

Saw a woman in our community buy one parcel of land for $67,000. Subdivided it into 6 lots in less than 1 month. Sold them for just under $300,000. She made 4X the average American’s salary in a year in one deal and provided affordable housing for 6 months. Six months later she’d hired over 3 employees and spent time growing her business. She doesn’t deal with tenants, contractors or termites. Why aren’t more people doing this!?

10 lessons for 20-year-old Clay (from a guy who almost went broke three times) I turned 30 in August. I struggled with an addiction, almost lost my business three times, nearly went bankrupt three times in six years, and built a company that’s done 200+ deals in 25+ states anyway. Every one of those near-misses had the same cause. Not the market. Not the strategy. Not the people around me. Me. 10 lessons for 20-year-old Clay: 1. Get in the right boat. In 1985, Warren Buffett shut down the textile mill Berkshire was built on after 20 years of trying to save it. His lesson: which boat you’re in matters more than how hard you row. I learned it by sinking. I ran the rental playbook as hard as it can be run. Buy, rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. 85 doors in 12 months, most of it on refinanced equity and floating-rate debt. Every new door felt like freedom. It was leverage. Then 2023 came. Rates up, rents and values down, refinances dead. 85 doors with the equity draining out. I got clobbered. Same guy. Same hours. Same work ethic. The land business I’d started on the side kept working the whole time. Every other real estate asset class stops somewhere. A house flip tops out at the house. You rehab it, sell it, and start over at zero with the same skills and the same ceiling. An online business tops out the day a kid with a laptop and AI copies it in a weekend, and he will. Land stair-steps. Buy an infill lot and make $5,000. Buy rural acreage and make $50,000. Subdivide a tract and make $500,000. Entitle a parcel and make $5,000,000. Same three skills on every step: find it, price it, sell it. Bigger dirt. I wasn’t rowing badly. I was patching leaks. If you’re working hard and still stuck, you’re not lazy. Ask the harder question: is it the rowing, or the boat? 2. Buy assets, not identities. I bought a $1M+ house in Grand Lake, Colorado. $150K down, $10K a month in interest, $3K utility bills in the winter. We never ran the real numbers. We didn’t want a cash-flowing asset. We wanted to be the young couple with the mountain house. That identity cost us years of sleepless nights. Every purchase is either an asset or a costume. An asset pays you. A costume charges you monthly to look like someone you’re not yet. Most of the financial pain in my twenties came from costumes. The leveraged portfolio. The house. Even the courses, because buying one let me feel like an investor without making an offer. Wealth is not for show. It’s for freedom. If a purchase doesn’t move you toward freedom, you’re buying an identity, and identities don’t appreciate. 3. Money is the easiest part. At 27 I thought capital was the bottleneck. I had $30K in checking and no idea what to do with it, so I assumed the problem was that $30K wasn’t enough. Wrong. I had enough money and no skills. Market selection, who to call, how to price, how to sell. None of them in order. I lost eight grand on 15,000 mailers proving it. Here’s the truck test. If I sold you a truck for half of what it’s worth, you’d wire me the money by text. No credit check. A deal at 50% of value funds itself. A deal at 90% of value doesn’t, and no amount of capital fixes a bad buy. Today, for investors, money is the easiest part. Capital is never the hard part once you have deal flow and a reputation for closing. Investors fund my deals and I fund other operators’ deals. None of that happened because I got richer. It happened because I got good. Get really good first. The capital follows. If you can’t raise money, you don’t have a money problem. You have a deal problem. 4. Take total ownership. Ownership isn’t a switch. It’s a line. Far left, passive ownership: rates went up, the seller lied, the market’s dead, my partner dropped the ball. Far right, active ownership: it’s my role to solve this, whatever caused it. Here’s the test. “Rates went up in 2023” is true. I also chose floating-rate debt on 85 doors in 12 months. The circumstance was real. The exposure was mine. Every one of my three near-misses looks the same when I’m honest: a real circumstance, and a decision I made that put me in front of it. The further right you sit, the more you make. I’ve never seen an exception. Not because the right side gets luckier. Because the right side is the only side that can fix anything. 5. Be boring. Boring is marketing out every week whether or not last week’s worked. Boring is solving the big problem in the business instead of the fun one. Solving problems is tedious, it kind of sucks, and it’s the whole job. Boring is the easy stuff you skip because it’s easy. Prospecting. Sales training. Getting 1% better at the same call you’ve made 500 times. Nobody gets rich on the exciting part. The exciting part is a closing wire, and closing wires are a lagging indicator of six boring weeks you already did. This week I sat with a client who came off the two best months of her career, got hit with a lawsuit, then went a month with zero contracts. She was bored, she was tired, and she was asking whether to stay in the business. I pulled her numbers. Marketing out. Follow-up running. Offers going out. Everything we built, she’d implemented. I told her: you’re doing all the right things. Be patient. She looked at me and said, “No. We’re going to make this work.” That’s the sentence. Boring isn’t the absence of problems. Boring is solving the same ones, every week, until they stop being problems. 6. Fix one constraint at a time. For years I tried to fix marketing, sales, operations, team, tech, and my own head all at once. Nothing moved. Every week I’d touch six things and finish none. A business has one bottleneck at a time. One. If revenue is low, the chain tells you where: leads, conversations, offers, contracts, closings. Find the broken link. Fix only that. Build the system so you never fix it twice. The other five will scream at you. Ignore them. A constraint fixed completely moves the whole business. Six constraints touched lightly move nothing. One bottleneck. One focus. One season. 7. Never skip two days. This one is about the addiction. I’m not going to turn it into content. What I’ll say is that the way out wasn’t a breakthrough. It was a rule. Miss one day and you’re human. Miss two and you’ve started a new habit, and the new habit is the old one. The same rule runs everything I do now. Phone down at dinner. 30 pages a day. Never skip two days in the gym. None of them are heroic. They’re votes. Every day you cast one for the man you’re becoming or the one you were. You don’t need more discipline. You need fewer decisions. You say “I’m not going to do this,” and then you don’t negotiate with yourself at 9pm. The negotiation is where every relapse starts. 8. Hard body. Hard mind. Soft heart. The next few years get weird. AI, digital banking, surveillance, political tension, money that buys less every year. You can’t control any of that. You can control whether you’re ready. Hard body: train before the world wakes up. Stop drinking. Stop eating things that make you weak. If you call yourself awake and you can’t carry your son up a hill, you’re not awake. You’re informed. Hard mind: know who you are and what makes you tick. Most men have never sat still long enough to find out. Meditate. Put yourself in situations that are mentally uncomfortable on purpose: the cold water, the hard conversation, the number you don’t want to look at. That’s where your psychology gets worked on. Fear lives in the gap between what you know about yourself and what you’ve tested. Soft heart: realizing there’s a bigger purpose in this world than you. For me, it’s my wife. It’s my son. It’s a Creator much larger than myself. It’s the man next to me who hasn’t closed his first deal yet, and the family who gets an affordable lot because somebody found the land nobody else was looking at. That’s where our company purpose, 100/100, was born. We exist to help 100 partners make over $100K and put 100 Americans in 100 affordable homes by 2030. A man who builds only for himself builds a very small thing. The order matters. Hard body first, because a weak body makes a scared mind. Hard mind second, because a scared mind makes a selfish heart. 9. Own something they can’t print. Prices are up about 30% since January 2020. They print the money and get it first. By the time it reaches your paycheck, it buys less. Then they hand you the script. Don’t own anything. Put it in the market. Give control to an advisor. Rent. Scroll. Wait for the crash. Index funds aren’t a scam. They’re cheap. But you get the sliver and they get the vote. Three firms are the largest shareholder in 88% of the S&P 500. A man who controls nothing can’t protect his family with it. So own things they can’t print. A business you control, where your income is a function of your skill and not someone else’s vote. Land, because they’re not making any more of it. A house on your own ground. Options. Make as much money as you can right now, while it can still be done from a laptop. A life with real options isn’t cheap. The last place you want to be in a weird decade is broke and dependent. And pick your ground. Where you live is a decision, not a default. We chose the Pennsylvania hills on purpose. Be somewhere that shares your values before you need it to. 10. Find your tribe. Entrepreneurship alone is one of the loneliest things a man can do. Nobody at Thanksgiving understands why you left the job. Your friends think you’re either rich or crazy, and you’re neither. When it’s going badly you can’t tell anyone, because the people who love you will tell you to quit, and the people who don’t will enjoy it. I did most of my twenties that way. It cost me years, and it almost cost me the business more than once. Every one of my worst decisions was made alone, at night, with nobody in the room who’d been there before. So find your tribe. Not a network. Not a mastermind you paid for and never show up to. People aligned with your core values. Men who show their losses. Women who make the men better. People you’d do life with, and people you’d go to war with, because it’s going to be both. The test is simple. Would this person tell me the truth when it costs them something? If yes, keep them close. If no, they’re an acquaintance, and acquaintances don’t help you at 2am. That’s what we built. A community of people who own something, who took responsibility for their outcomes, and who help the one behind them. That’s what 100 at $100K looks like. Not 100 students. 100 people who stopped doing this alone. If that’s you, the free Landman Community is where we do it, and where we show people how to take ownership of their lives through land investing. Comment OWNER and I’ll send you the link.

My buddy told me at dinner he’s quitting his W2 to build a business that lets him work 10 hours a week. Figures it’ll take a year. I almost choked on my steak. He’s smart. Successful. Top of his field. And he believes every myth W2 earners believe about owning a business. I’ve spent 10 years on the other side of the fence. Here are the 7 biggest ones: 1. “I’ll work less.” You’ll work more than you ever have. Year one is 60-hour weeks. Year two is 60-hour weeks plus payroll. The 10-hour week exists. It takes 7 to 10 years, and nobody who got there was aiming for it. 2. “I’ll be my own boss.” You’ll have 50 bosses. Every customer, every lender, every employee who can quit. Your W2 boss could only fire you. Your customers can fire you every day. 3. “I’ll make more money.” Not for years. You’ll make less, pay yourself last, and put your own savings on the line. The money comes after the machine works. Not before. How fast you build the machine decides how fast you get paid. 4. “I’m good at my job, so I’ll be good at business.” Being the best engineer, lawyer, or salesperson makes you a great employee. Business is a different sport. Hiring, cash flow, sales, firing your friend. None of that was in your job description. 5. “I just need a good idea.” Ideas are free. Execution is the whole game. The guy with a boring business and a real system beats the guy with a great idea and no customers every time. 6. “Once I hire people, I’m out.” You can’t delegate what you don’t understand. Every seat you hire for, you have to be able to do first. Otherwise you just hired someone to lie to you. 7. “Passive income is a thing.” It isn’t. It’s income that was active for a long time and is now maintained by someone you pay. There is no version where you stop paying attention. None of this means don’t do it. It means do it with your eyes open. The people selling the 10-hour week have never built anything. They sell hope certificates to people who’ve never missed a paycheck. If the first thing you want from a business is to not be in it, you don’t want a business. You want a lottery ticket with extra steps.

Prices are coming down. There are more opportunities today than ever to find good deals in real estate. I'm predicting there are going to be some serious legacy assets that are going to be coming to the market over the next six months. So in order to prepare for that, this next 90 to 180 days all comes down to getting really, really good at dispo. Couple of things we are doing to sell our deals faster: 1. Going on offense. When we get a parcel of land, we are calling 5-10 brokers in the county, neighbors, and other cash buyers. We no longer wait for a buyer to come to us. 2. Listing early in states we can. If we are under contract in a state we can wholesale in, we will list it immediately while we are in escrow to get 30-45 more days of exposure. 3. Price to sell. We don’t price at market, we price our lots 10%-15% below our competition. Margins shrink because of this BUT our speed to disposition is much faster. Right now, take that. Acquisitions are NOT going to be a problem. 4. Reprice every 30 days. Drop price and drop fast. 5. Take it off the market and refresh it every 90 days. We will take our parcels off the market and get new photos every 90 days. Tough times call for serious measures. We're doing all of this and more in our business to ensure that our deals are selling faster. What are some things you are doing to sell your deals faster?