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If there’s vacant land to be bought, it’s possible that Jesse Bibbee of Buddy Buys Land is looking to purchase it. The Florida Atlantic University grad turned Collective Genius member has been in the industry for a short time but has already made a name for himself as he continues to scale his solopreneur business.
We sat down with Jesse to learn about his career trajectory, his pivot into vacant land, and what his advice is for other up-and-coming solopreneurs interested in investing, as well as his recent successes with the Motivated Leads team.
Making the right connections with Collective Genius
“When I started learning, you do the whole ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’, whatever, right? All the books and the podcasts, all that good stuff,” says Jesse. But things didn’t really kick off until he started following the big real estate influencers on social media and noticed a group of them were all in Tampa, Jesse’s home base, at the same time.
“So I'm like, ‘What is everyone doing here in Tampa?’ I looked into it, and everyone was at a Collective Genius event. So I looked into it and I'm like, ‘Wow, this is amazing.’ It was people looking to scale their businesses and be better people – you don't really find that too often, especially in this world.”
Despite not having a portfolio to his name, Jesse felt called to reach out to Collective Genius founder and CEO Jason Medley. He pitched Jason on letting him come to a Collective Genius event as a guest – no strings attached – to serve and learn. After letting Jesse attend an event, Jason asked him to come on board as a Membership Consultant for the collective.
“That's kind of what got me into this world: It completely opened my eyes to investing at a high level. Before, my goal was just to buy one rental a year and do that for ten years and have a portfolio of ten houses,” Jesse mentions. “I didn't really know anything then but, now, it's wildly different. Collective Genius really opened my eyes to what is possible in the real estate world.”
The pivot into vacant land
When it comes to real estate investing, you tend to fall into a certain niche – be it multi-family, single-family, apartments, or commercial, among others. “I just started doing things,” Jesse recalls. “I'd be like, ‘Oh, man, that guy's flipping self storage. I'm going to start doing self storage,’ or ‘I'm going to start doing single family.’
Ultimately, Jesse quickly burnt out from those ventures because he didn’t feel like they aligned with his end goal, so the actions felt less sustainable. By the end of 2022, he took a step back.
“I started to really reflect on what were the easiest deals that made me the most money, and those were all vacant land deals. Obviously, being in Collective Genius, I saw a few other vacant land guys. One of them is doing it remotely from Spain. Other guys are just flipping in all different parts of the country.”
He realized this is exactly what he needed to be doing. He cut off marketing for all of his other streams and has focused solely on vacant land since February. To date, he’s made 27 deals and averaged $15-20k in profit per deal.
What comes next: Scaling the business
Jesse’s all in on vacant land sales. Next, he just wants to scale the business as much as possible.
“I want to consistently do maybe 10-20 of these cash flips a month and automate it as much as possible. Then, I want to start mainly focusing on creating notes for cash flow. I just got my first note, which is pretty exciting,” Jesse says. “So I want to continue to scale that more for the passive and then focus on some bigger deals for the active. There are a lot of guys doing entitlements and bigger subdivisions and things like that – I would love to really automate the cash flips as much as possible and have that coming in on a monthly basis.”
Once he’s able to automate those monthly deals and build a team around him to manage that aspect of the business, Jesse aims to reposition himself to focus on bigger deals, learn more about that process, and make a lot more money.
How Motivated Leads is supplementing Jesse’s quality lead pipeline
Jesse just started up with Motivated Leads in July, but he’s already been impressed with the quality and quantity of leads coming his way.
“I had heard really good things about Motivated Leads just through the single-family investors that are part of Collective Genius. Obviously, there are a lot of pay-per-lead providers out there – I have not heard great things about a lot of them, but with Bryan, I've heard really good things.”
Jesse met Motivated Leads co-founder Bryan Driscoll at a Collective Genius event and picked his brain on using our services for vacant land deals specifically.
“It's been huge for me so far. I've only been doing it for a couple of months now – I think just about two months – and in that time frame, I've already gotten six deals. Last month, in July, I had a total of seven deals in the business. Four out of those seven deals came from Motivated Leads,” Jesse says. “I'm waiting on the disposition side of things to wrap up so I can collect the revenue, but they're projected to be my biggest deals, too. Each one of those deals will be higher than my average for direct mail and SMS.”
Most investors receive a number of leads per day through various marketing channels – most of them aren’t perfect, and only a handful can turn into something viable. Jesse’s been excited about the caliber of leads he’s receiving through Motivated Leads. He says “It’s like every four or five are very solid leads that have a very high likelihood of converting into a contract. I've been thrilled with them so far.”
Jesse’s advice to vacant land investors and solopreneurs
It wasn’t long ago – not even a full year – that Jesse was the newcomer to the scene looking for advice. But in the nearly 30 deals and tens of thousands of dollars he’s recouped in profits, the young solopreneur has learned a lot, and he’s sharing the one thing that has made all the difference for him.
Align with your end vision: Design what you want your life to look like, then build a business model around that.
“I want to build a business that serves my vision to travel, to work remotely, and to do all these different types of things, so I have to have a business that has a lower amount of variables: lower overhead and team to staff, lower monthly marketing overhead, all those different types of things. Get honed in on what you actually want this business to do for your personal life and then focus on what's going to get you there.”
Jesse recalls his ventures in self-storage and single-family and the burnout he experienced trying those things that weren’t inevitably going to get him to the life he had set up for himself.
“If you don't have a clearly defined end state, it's going to take you a hundred times longer whereas, since February to now, I've done 27 deals and made a lot more money than I had in the entire year of me doing it before.”
Once you’ve created the business plan that serves your personal vision, Jesse implores aspiring solopreneurs to take action: “There's literally nothing that's going to replace action,” he says. “I was one to read all the books and listen to all the podcasts and take mediocre action, but that obviously didn't get me anywhere. So take massive, imperfect action to a desired end state that really fits with what you want your life to look like and you will see results a lot quicker than you think.”
Get quality leads for your portfolio from Motivated Leads
“I would just recommend anyone that's checking out any sort of pay-per-lead services – like I said before, there are a ton of them out there – to wholeheartedly check out Motivated Leads. I have heard and now experienced the best results with Bryan and his team,” Jesse says. “To anyone that's kind of been on the fence of checking them out: Pull the trigger, set aside a budget, at least test it because, for me, it's been massive.”
If you want to close more deals and scale your investments within your market, take it from Jesse and other satisfied Motivated Leads clients. Click here to learn more about our business and where we can help you bring in better, higher quality leads.
