Tori Nook: Hi, it's Tori Nook. Welcome back to the Tori Nook Talk Show where we have meaningful conversations with inspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, creators, and wellness leaders who are making an impact in their industries and the lives of the people they serve. And I'm your host, I'm Tori Nook. And today I'm excited to welcome Brandon Cobb. He's a real estate developer, investor, entrepreneur, and the CEO of HBG Capital Group. And today we're gonna unload a lot even beyond his capital group with what he's doing with his land development accelerator and some AI products that he's coming out with now. And so we've got a lot to talk about. because we're gonna talk about his reinvention, his resilience and real estate development world. He's been building wealth through his real estate assets. And we're gonna talk about what it takes to turn, you know, setbacks into opportunities and how to make your life a lot easier by using AI tools as well. So, Brandon, welcome to the show.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Hey, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. I feel honored.

Tori Nook: Yeah. I am really excited to talk about what you're doing, but first I wanted to kind of just dive into where are you from, where'd you go to school, et cetera, and where are you now?

Brandon Cobb: yeah. So Nashville, Tennessee, though it's becoming lost now I call it Nash Vegas now downtown with all the bachelorette parties that are coming around. But Nashville, Tennessee, from Memphis, Tennessee originally. My background was in medical device sales before getting fired from my job and getting into the whole real estate world. Now we invent new housing communities and sell them to DR Horton and Lenar. So not a lot of people know that there's a developer that is kind of at

Tori Nook: Right.

Brandon Cobb: behind the scenes of these neighborhoods that get invented, right? Lenard, D.R. Horton, the national builders, they just build the houses. They don't develop the land. And so we do that first phase, which is getting all the land approved and developed and sold. Yeah.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Right. And I think a lot of people don't know that. That you're

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, went to but yeah, went to school, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. So, you know, go vols. so I'm I'm down home and you know, bred here in Tennessee.

Tori Nook: Awesome. How old were you when you got fired and started jumping into the real estate world?

Brandon Cobb: Like twenty six, twenty seven. It was roughly ten years ago. It's crazy that it's been that long.

Tori Nook: Yeah. It's a w isn't it amazing what how awesome your life can change in a matter of ten years? Everything that you think is a curse usually turns out to be a blessing later. So but let's dig in first to your we're not gonna say first career because your first career was medical sales. We don't really need to talk about that. but we're gonna I wanna jump into real estate and land and your land entitlement. How did you even decide to even

Brandon Cobb: Wild. Yes it is.

Tori Nook: start doing that because that's a whole different niche. actually when I started interning, I interned for a gentleman here in Ohio that did exactly what you did. I didn't even know, you know, being 21, 22, that the develop the home developers that were coming in, I thought they did all the entitlements and land development, but really like they're just building the house. why don't you dive into what that work is and What it entails and how you even got interested in that fat in that arena.

Brandon Cobb: So when I got let go from my job, I said, let's give this whole entrepreneurspreneur thing a shot, right? I don't think I'm a natural entrepreneur. I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I was kind of forced into it. I gave myself a six-month ultimatum to make some money. And if I hit it, great. I keep going. If I didn't, I'll just go back and get another job, right? I was comfortable with the worst case scenario. I made $30,000 about eight days from my ultimatum. I said, Well, I guess I gotta keep going. I made that $30,000.

Tori Nook: You're right.

Brandon Cobb: By finding and buying a property that was facing foreclosure. Guy really needed just to sell quickly. He didn't want his credit to get ruined. He was sick and tired of taking care of the house. He just wanted out. Bought it. I sold all my retirement accounts. Brought a little business partner in to fund the rest of it. we put the cash together, scraped it up, bought it, flipped it and sold it, made thirty thousand dollars. Woohoo, you know? Easy peasy. Well, that money was taken and put into marketing.

Tori Nook: Right.

Brandon Cobb: Or, you know, as I call it, you know, the big furnace of no end. When we first sold that house, if you've ever seen the movie Batman where the Joker slides down the big pile of money, this is the Heath Ledger Joker, Batman days. he's dealing with the mob and he throws gasoline on the fire, lights it on fire, just you know, burns like what looks like hundreds of millions of dollars of cash. That's what we were doing with marketing dollars. But that led to us finding even more real estate deals, houses to flip.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brandon Cobb: So I started flipping houses. I built that business up to doing about 30, 50, 40 house flips per year. And then one day the light bulb went off. We had an opportunity to buy this house that had some fire damage. Whole second story, crispy. First floor, framing still looked good. Foundation was in good shape. We said, man, we can buy this property for less than what the land is worth. It's gotta be a deal. So we bought that house and we reframed the second floor. And basically rebuilt the entire home. We made three times as much money on that as we did one of our regular house flips. And we said, why are we doing house flipping? We need to be doing new construction. So that's how we got into doing the new construction game. Well, we were chasing all these little vacant lots all over the place. A little vacant lot here, a vacant lot there, here, there. And we were tired of talking to you know 200 landowners a year to get, you know, 30 new builds out of the ground. We said, why can't we just talk to one person that owns one parcel of land and we can do all 30 new builds we're going to do for the year on that one parcel of land? Seems pretty straightforward, right? And that's how the whole land development game was born. So we started doing the entitlement process, going through the approvals to get the land approved. And then what happened was we were going to we started developing, and that was how to grow our new construction company. So we wanted to build more houses. That's why we got into it.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: Well then we started getting, you the knocks on the door from these big national builders saying, Hey, we really like your land. We want to buy it from you. And we were like, get out of here. Get lost. It's not for sale. You can't have it. And then they said it's a purchase agreement. And we're like, interesting. And they said, Yeah, you still still not want to sell it. And we're like, My partner I looked at my partner. We looked at the contract. I looked it in. We looked at the contract and we said, It's for s you can have it. And do you want the one across the street too? Because we'll develop and we'll sell you that one.

Tori Nook: Okay.

Brandon Cobb: So we started getting bought out of all of our land positions by these big national builders. And, you know, so we just had no reason to really build the homes on right? We're getting such a great cost basis and a great price on So that's how we got into doing the development game. And so now, you know, we we work with these big national builders and we basically go outsource land for get it approved, sell it to them, or we might even develop the land and sell them the ready to build lots.

Tori Nook: Take somebody, a listener who is listening here about how you even find those large tracts of land. Because that's an argument in itself, too.

Brandon Cobb: So what we Yeah. Well so what we did a really good job of, there's a couple different ways. One, you got to figure out your target market. So it's pretty easy. Just go chat GPT, top 10 national builders in this market, and they'll tell you who they are. And if you go type in to Google, Lenar, Nashville, Tennessee neighborhoods, or Ryan Holmes, Nashville, Tennessee neighborhoods, you can go to the website and a whole map of where their building pops up.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: All we do is go focus on those areas. That's it. They've told you where they want to be already. All right. It's pretty simple. So there we then go have a conversation with the city. If it is in a local if it's in a suburb, we go speak with the planning director. If it's in a major metropolis area, you know, downtown Nashville, they have council members that are assigned to districts that are the decision makers on what gets approved. We go talk with them and we just pull up a chair on the same side of the table and we say, Hey, look, you we're a new developer in town.

Tori Nook: Okay. Okay.

Brandon Cobb: What are some things other developers have done to create win-wins for, you know, you and the community? What are some things that developers have done that have kind of put a bad taste? What is the, you know, council really wanting to approve right now? What are the citizens complaining about? And just try to be a value add to them. And so they'll actually tell you, you know, I actually might know some people who've got some land or yeah, these landowners try to get some stuff submitted. I didn't approve it because it wasn't the right product. I'd like to see this here. I'll introduce you.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: So that's a really great way to do it. You want to go speak to the decision maker, either the planning director or the council person in that district. Now, if you're going to, once you've done that and you're just sourcing off market properties, it's pretty simple. We want to be in the areas that the national builders are already building. And so if you pull a GIS map up, so every county has like a GIS map and it shows all the individual parcels of land and they fit together like a puzzle piece. We want to be the

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Right. Right. Isn't that?

Brandon Cobb: Bi we're going after the big puzzle pieces that are down the street from all the little bitty puzzle pieces. The little bitty pu the the little bitty puzzle pieces being the developments that have already been approved and you've got a lot of density on that piece of land, like a lot of homes are are are already on it. We want to be around the corner from those. And that and that's that's our that's how we go and target these things.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. It's n it's really not I mean, it's really not any different than commercial development. you know, either. I I mean, we're mostly definitely stripping GIS maps and looking up owners and then calling them, but first talking to the cities 'cause it just it's just saves so much time or the councilman or or what or whatnot. Or is there like a minimum acreage that you buy?

Brandon Cobb: No, it's that all depends on the zoning. 'Cause you might be able to get thirteen and a half units on an acre if it's a town owned project, or you might only be able to get four units on an acre if it's, you know, single family detached. So the the density definitely matters.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Right. When you were first starting out, what was like one of the biggest lessons or mistakes that help shape how you're doing business today? Ten years later?

Brandon Cobb: Man, I there's so, so many of them. When I was first starting out, I was wearing all the hats. I was doing the acquisitions, I was doing the marketing. I was out doing the project management stuff. And then I learned how much a young single, you know, man could work. And I was a year into it. The first year you start your business, you're all excited, you're jammed, you're working till midnight, you're up at five because you want to, you're excited about it.

Tori Nook: Bye bye.

Brandon Cobb: Well, doing that for a whole year gets old and I didn't see an end in sight, right? That's what burnout is. Burnout is doing something without an exit in mind. Is there any gonna be an end to this? That's how you get burnout on things. And that's what was happening. And then I joined a a mastermind, you know, I I invested in some coaching, and they're like, dude, you need to hire a director of first impressions or somebody to answer the phone

Tori Nook: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Right.

Brandon Cobb: So that that was something earlier on. that really, really helped me shape things. And of course along the way, the journey, there's been lots of other things.

Tori Nook: Do you what's interesting is some people don't even know what a mastermind is. Do you wanna explain what that is versus a coach?

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and I'd be curious to hear what your opinion is on it too, because it is something that is not widely talked about in the you know pop culture circles. But a mastermind, the mastermind I joined after being in business for one year was a mastermind of other house flippers and wholesalers. That's how I started my business. When you join a group of business owners that have the same business as you, you come to them with a lot of problems that you have, and they have all the same problems. They've solved all those problems before.

Tori Nook: Sure. It's not. Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Brandon Cobb: So you get immediate solutions to the things that you're struggling with. I'll never forget when I needed an onboarding guide for a sales rep. I was hiring my first sales rep. I was like, I gotta build an onboarding guide and teach him. And what are all the classes and this and that? And someone's like, I got that. Here you go. They've been building something for five years and I just got it for free. Right. So that's like what a mastermind does. You get to lean on other people who are in the same business as you that.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: Teach and share what's working in their business. And you get to just ping them and develop relationships with them and keep up. You know, entrepreneurship is a lonely journey. You know, it takes a community to to, you know, create successful entrepreneurs. So that's that's what it is. It's a community of business owners with a sharing mindset that want to help each other succeed.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. No, I agree. That's exactly what a mastermind is. And I would say some a lot of times people aren't in them forever. They might just do them for a year or two. some stay in them for for years. I would find most to be extremely more expensive than even a high price coach. I don't know what I don't know what you've you've seen, but and they and you're and you're right. They're you want to join a mastermind that's particular to your specific business. Like I want to join your mastermind, even though I'm in real estate, because that's not my niche is I'm not doing land development. What what you're doing.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. You wanna yeah, you want it to be focused on like what you're doing, right? Yeah. There's and there's there's masterminds like that. I've also seen other masterminds that are, you know, they're not specific to a particular business, but it is like a bunch of entrepreneurs, but maybe there's a shared thing in common that they're all work maybe it's like a I don't know, a sales mastermind, right? You know, and they're all there because you've got to have sales in an organization. There's a lot of different ways to slice it up, but I highly recommend the ones where you're getting to

Tori Nook: Right. Right. Right. Right.

Brandon Cobb: to meet and develop relationships with peers that have the same business model as you.

Tori Nook: Exactly. Like I don't know if they call themselves a mastermind, but I'd say probably YPO is like the oldest out there for just in general if you're in business where you know you meet other entrepreneurs answering questions on you know how to run your company, right? Because, you know, running your own business, like you said, entrepreneurship is lonely. And same with being married or having kids. Like there's no playbook, you know, for how to handle everything. And it's nice to get other people's opinions out there and the community that it that it is.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, yeah.

Tori Nook: what did you find that the coaches helped you with? Did you do coaching and the mastermind at the same time or or no?

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, it was kinda so I'd hired a coach and you know I joined the mastermind. So I had a little bit of both. The so the here's how the mastermind helped me. So one one of the benefits of being in a mastermind is the owner of that mastermind goes out and negotiates group discount pricing with vendors that you're gonna pay anyway. So like I paid twenty five thousand dollars ten years ago to be a part of that that mastermind, that house flipping wholesaling mastermind.

Tori Nook: Okay, at the same time. Right.

Brandon Cobb: And by the it's called seven figure flipping. If anybody wants to know, it's run by Bill Allen. Great group. Highly recommend it if you're wanting to do house flipping and wholesaling and kind of get into the entry level real estate stuff. On the second week, I was introduced to their, they had a vendor they'd negotiated postcards with, right? And I was paying, I'm gonna get this wrong, but I remember what I saved. I was paying something like fifty six cents a postcard. I think, or it might have been 68 cents. I can't remember, but it was like six, let's call it sixty-eight cents a postcard. But I remember because I joined the group, I got access to the special pricing of the group, which was 60 cents a postcard. I was sending 30,000 postcards a month out. So take 30 grand multiply by eight cents. What is that? Like 26, $2,700 a month of savings. So I saved eight cents a postcard times 30,000.

Tori Nook: Exactly. Right.

Brandon Cobb: Per month. That alone paid for my entire mastermind membership for the entire year. And I was like, I just got a complete ROI on this two weeks in. Now it's making sense why people are joining and doing this type of stuff. Right. So that that was a huge ROI for me. And then you get the playbook if, hey, I, you know, this is the highest responding mailer that we're using, right? Someone else has the highest response rates. They can share it with you. And you get to navigate the hurdles of a particular industry together.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Right. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: You get to figure out what's working and what's not working because the economy's tough, right? It's gonna throw you some balls. You've got to be able to navigate that. And being able to navigate it as a group together is a lot easier and more powerful than having to navigate it and figure it all out yourself. So it's I mean, it's a no-brainer. You know, if you're in business, you've you've almost gotta be in some sort of mastermind to be super successful these days because those Those are the people that have an advantage, right? Everyone's sharing what's working and sharing what's not working. So the efficiency and time savings and the money savings is just you can't even measure it almost.

Tori Nook: So glad you mentioned that because you're really the only second guest I have interviewed that is part of a mastermind. And anyone I know who i is part of one, I because I know people get sticker shock. You paid 25,000. Then I mean typically they are 30 plus thousand, you know, now in commercial real estate world. But I don't know anyone who's not not gotten the return back on them. You know.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean I've paid a I've I've spent, you know, six figures easily on just coaching and masterminds because it's worth it. You know, do you want to go fast? and and you're typically getting what you're paying for too, right? You know, I paid fifty-five thousand to be a part of one because of what it attracts, right? To be able to pay for a fifty-five thousand dollar per year mastermind, that's gonna attract a certain level of success because they can only afford something like that. And so you're getting to rub shoulders with higher performers with more successful people and to be able to tap into what they're doing is going to be more powerful than you know doing it at a lower level. And so yeah, it's you get what you pay for, but it's it's a tough sell because for some reason and the way I I pitch this in our discovery calls, because I, you know, we I've got a couple of masterminds that I run too. I'm like, you know, what'd you pay for college? And they're going, I don't know. I think tuition was like,

Tori Nook: Sure.

Brandon Cobb: $12,000 per year. I was like, man, that's cheap. $12,000 per year. Okay. But what room and board? God. Yeah. I mean, okay, that's another, you know, $8,000 per year. Got okay, well, what about food and everything? you know, by the time you get to it, you know, you're spending $35,000, $40,000 a year to support this kid through college, you know, like just everything, food and everything. And and and, you know, so you're spending six figures on college by the end of it. So we have no problem doing that, not getting an ROI for four years.

Tori Nook: Okay.

Brandon Cobb: But for some reason to pay a fraction of that to a program that's gonna catapult their success, teach them actual tools on how to make money, not just theory, and they don't graduate with a bunch of debt, it's crazy to me. So I tell people that on a call, I'm like, I'm not gonna charge you what you would pay for college. It's gonna be a fraction and we're gonna get results in one year instead of four years.

Tori Nook: Right. Right. I mean, personally, I mean I my husband and I have talked this because he's in international business and I mean he is his MBA. I've got my BSBA, you know, w we both graduated in business. And what's funny is with how expensive colleges are these days, if you're looking to go into business, and I would say even especially being real estate or real estate developer, whether it's residential or commercial, you easily could just go pay for a mastermind and then start making money and not even have to go to college. You would be making probably at least six figures by the time you were twenty two if you really focus on the program. Which masterminds, what are the names of the ones that you're doing?

Brandon Cobb: So gosh, let's see here. The ones that like the names of mine are the ones that I've been a part of in the past.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Know the ones that you're doing.

Brandon Cobb: So we run land development accelerator. That's everything we teach for land development, right? We got a lot of builders in that group, that same thing as where we were, you know, six years ago. They're like, I'm tired of chasing these onesie twosie little infill lots, right? I I wanna have my whole I wanna have four or five years worth of inventory on one parcel of land. We got those that we got the land flippers in that group that are flipping these small parcels, making thirty, forty thousand a parcel. And they're like, Hey, I I wanna make, you know, the big bucks doing some bigger land deals. Like that's the next logical progression. So

Tori Nook: Right. Right. Right.

Brandon Cobb: That's the land development accelerator. It's it's everything land development and raising capital. We teach a lot of raising money because if you're gonna do development, you gotta be able to set up a fund, a syndication, and raise money. So that's that one. And then we've got the AI agent accelerator. This is a new one I launched this year because so many people were reaching out about how to automate their business using AI. And we had created the AI Agent Accelerator course in that mastermind community. It was a huge success. We started having to do Thursday calls just because we couldn't fit everything we wanted to do in during the week on Wednesdays during our coaching calls. That again, we're typically capital raising or land focused. So we started doing these Thursday calls talking about AI and building AI agents. And everyone was, you know, we were teaching how to automate using the AI agents. It became so popular. I was sharing what we were doing on social media. I had a ton of people reach out going, I want to be a part of something like this, but I'm not in land development. And of course, as you know, business is business. You know, you don't have to be in land development to, you know, build an agent that's handling your sales or build an agent that's automating your bookkeeping or build an agent that's replacing your executive assistant, managing your calendar and your emails and stuff. So we created that AI agent accelerator for people that are business owners, but are, you know, not doing land development specifically. So it's a little bit more broad, but the general consensus is.

Tori Nook: Okay. Right.

Brandon Cobb: They own a business. They want to implement AI agents into that business.

Tori Nook: Interesting. So what let's back up. When did what year did you wind up starting the land development accelerator?

Brandon Cobb: We launched that one in March of last year.

Tori Nook: Okay. And how many people are typically in like a map your mastermind like at a time? Like do they sign up for a year? Like how what's the process?

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, I think we've got twenty-three members total in that group. Might be twenty-five to twenty-three or twenty-five. It's always for a year, right? So masterminds go for about a year. You get to decide whether or not you want to renew or not. Typical structure is there is some kind of online forum. This could be a Discord. This could be a Facebook community. School.com. S K O O L dot com is very popular. Yeah, we use we use school.com. And so you can

Tori Nook: Yeah, that's typical. Yeah. Right. Is it? Is that what you use at school? Okay.

Brandon Cobb: There's a community section, like a forum where if you need something, you post. the members will give it to you. So you got a deal that you need feedback on that you need us to like hand hold you through, you post it. And so you get access to that community. And then there's the coursework, right? Like the learning. And then every Wednesday and Thursday, Wednesdays are all about capital raising or land development. We do a coaching call, people bring their problems. And dude, I just we we go through, we tore through somebody's l 21 luxury townhome project that they're doing. So looked at that whole thing. We're helping them get it off its feet. And then Thursdays we do the mastermind call, which is the AI mastermind call, which it's all about AI. So we don't talk about capital raising or land. We're just talking about what kind of agents we're building and deploying in our business, how they're helping and people are sharing what they've learned and and what they've built there.

Tori Nook: Okay. G now is that a s so with the AI, is that a separate mastermind membership? Cause you said it was for anyone in business.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. So for the land development accelerator, which is just land development focused, you get access to the AI mastermind and the weekly coaching call. That one's all in one group. So everything's like developer focused. This other one called the AI agent accelerator, that one is different. That one is you don't have to be in real estate. You have to be a business owner, but you don't have to be doing development or anything. So we have more broad business owners, but the general consensus is

Tori Nook: Right. All inclusive.

Brandon Cobb: They have a business and they want to plug AI agents in to automate.

Tori Nook: And did they join that for a year too? The AI? Okay. Fascinating. Even though in a way with AI changing so much, you could be doing it forever.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, depths for a full year. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the crazy thing with AI is like I can't keep up with it. I had to build me an agent just to go scrub specific YouTube channels, give me the good stuff, and then create a plan for me to implement it in our business. So I created the AI Intel agent that it goes and it gives me a report every week on, hey Brandon, here's what's new with AI and how it applies to business. Here's how I think we can apply it to your business and see here's an implementation plan.

Tori Nook: Okay. Okay.

Brandon Cobb: Do you want to roll out this specific thing? And I go click a button and it goes and does it for me. You know, if you want, that's the only way to stay ahead of everything that's happening with AI. You've got to be a part of a group that everyone's going out learning and sharing what they've learned, what works, what doesn't work. Because you got to be unemployed just to try to keep up with this stuff. And I mean, it's, it's about impossible with how much stuff's happening.

Tori Nook: It is do you know Rod Sanomassimo at all? yeah, I interviewed him and he is huge on AI. I mean, he's really the first person in real estate world that I met that really was deep into it. And it is a day he's he's doing exactly what you're doing. It is a day it's like a daily task with a team. Keeping on top of it. well, it it's very intriguing. And you know, l Speaking of w what I wanna dig into too is a lot of people like I've noticed this with investing in real estate, whether it's commercial, residential land, whatever, that you're you're teaching how to raise capital and syndicate. Cause I think a lot of people are scared to even get into this industry because they think, well, I don't have any money, right? Well, you don't have to have any money, right? You can, you know, learn how to raise capital, syndicate. And I think that's a great part that you have that in your mastermind program teaching that.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, you've got to. It's the most, in my opinion, the highest value skill you can have as a real estate entrepreneur investor. Real estate's expensive. You're gonna have to be able to go raise money for projects, right? I wish I'd learned it a whole lot sooner. You gotta smoothen out the cash flow. You can't use hard money loans. You know, when you have the ability to go raise private capital, you know, it it it is a game changer for your business, right? Yours there's there's multiple forms of leverage, and one of those le those fulcrums that you can pull.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right.

Brandon Cobb: on the leverage system is other people's money.

Tori Nook: Right. And I mean to not have and it helps the process go faster too with what you're doing. By not dealing with traditional things. I mean, even nowadays I was just talking to

Brandon Cobb: one hundred percent. Yeah.

Tori Nook: Somebody that I a consultant that I use and for some aspects of my business and he was even saying how difficult it is just to refinance a house now, being ten ninety nine. It's crazy. And I mean, cash is king to get things done faster.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Now you've got to I remember the first time I learned this. So like I had raised three, four million bucks when I was flipping houses and was was starting to build homes. And I remember thinking, my gosh, you know, I want to do, you know, fifty homes and my gosh, like that that's twenty million dollars. I've raised three, four million and I was playing Tetris. I was doing promissory notes, right? So it was like one investor in each property, but it was like playing Tetris.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Brandon Cobb: You know, you never had the perfect fit in and the pieces falling and you got to put it in place before it lands or it breaks. And I was like, you know, I had an investor with three hundred and fifty thousand, but I needed four hundred, you know, and it just and when you're doing 30 homes a year is a lot. Then I discovered this magic vehicle called a a fund. you can also do a syndication. And I went to the investors, I was like, Hey, great news. I'm gonna be able to keep all your money busy. We're gonna take you from 10%.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: And we're gonna bump you up to 18% on your money. You happy about that? They're Yeah, how are you gonna do that? I said, I'm gonna make you partners in the deal instead of just lenders. And, you know, overnight I converted you know, three, four million bucks from debt into equity. And I went to a bank and the bank says, you got four million dollars cash, equity. Yeah, I'll give you twenty million dollar loan. And we were able to just blow our business up. See, I mean, for X our business literally overnight. And

Tori Nook: Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: You know, that's the power of being able to raise money and being able to use these vehicles that allow you to syndicate the capital, crowdsource it, syndicate fancy word for crowdsource, and do bigger projects. All the big projects are done by this way. It's not one rich person just funding the whole thing, it's crowdsource capital together.

Tori Nook: No. Right. I mean, how many investors do you usually have at a time?

Brandon Cobb: You know, I think we've got thirty-three active investors and I probably got seventy people on a list that just have said, I got money, I wanna see what you have. So I got about a hundred people that I go down and call that have met with me and said, I wanna do business with you, I like your model. And I just go down the list, call and and pitch them deals, and that's how we get stuff funded now.

Tori Nook: Okay. Gotcha. do you want to s really explain what the word syndication means? Because some people don't really understand what that is.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, it's like it's like crowdsourcing. So it's like, you know, I can't go and afford the commercial building, but you know, Tori, how about you get some friends, y'all all throw in some money, I'll get some friends, they'll all throw in some money, we'll pool it together and use that to buy the building. That's a syndication.

Tori Nook: I wanna switch gears here and talk go back to AI. So what like right now, what are the Big it like what are you using to build your models? Like are you using perplexity a lot now? Cause that's something that's become really popular. Like I realize like in our office, like we even use certain ones for certain things, whether it's Gemini and we still use ChatGPT in there, but I mean more normally like the creative side or using Cloud. I mean, there's so many different programs that come out.

Brandon Cobb: So there's different models for different things, but none of that really matters, quite frankly. I am building all of my own agents on my own server and I'm letting them pick what they want to use. So I I have my own server. I'm using I'm I'm using Claude Code or Codex to write the Python script that builds the agents that live on my server. And if I need them to go do a thing.

Tori Nook: Okay. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: They go off and they go do it. If that's using perplexity, they can go use perplexity and use that model. If they want to use chat GPT for something, they can use that. But these are agents that I'm building to go accomplish tasks, right? Like the agent that builds all my YouTube thumbnails for me and works with the YouTube agent. It's using Nano Banana, Gemini's image generator, right? To create the images, right? It's doing it. It picked, you know, not me, right? It's doing it. So

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: I I'm not using a lot of these models. I'm I'm I'm writing code and that code creates my agents and my agents are set up and doing the business for me, if that makes sense.

Tori Nook: No, it it does. I think sometimes AI gets so people think it's really complicated, but really when you break it down, it's really the same no matter what business you're in, it's the same strategy and really the same tools that that that you're using for everything. Do you when you're you when you're with your social media, are you you handling it or do you have like a social media manager or are how how are you handling that world?

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, I used to and and have been bad about my social media lately over the past couple of weeks. But I have it set up where I record, you know, when I do short form videos, right? Facebook's a little different. I do a lot of personal stuff on Facebook. So that's me texting, not AI. but for like the TikTok, the Instagrams, the the YouTube shorts, all that stuff. I record the video, goes into a Google Drive folder, my agent scrapes it, takes the video.

Tori Nook: Right.

Brandon Cobb: uploads it to the editor, makes the edits, puts this, puts the sub sub subtitles on there, and it puts it on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, just blast it out. And then it rewrites the hashtag and the titles specific to that social media algorithm. So what the title might be and the descriptions and the hashtag for Instagram might be different than YouTube. So it's trained on the specific algorithm that is completely automated.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: Used to have a social media manager. I don't know. I used to have a full-time bookkeeper. I don't know. It's it's got access to QuickBooks. It's auto-categorizing all of our transactions. It's trained on seven years worth of transactions. I have a little tab. I built out a little mission control center that's got everything integrated in it. It shows me all the expenses that happen per day and how it codes it. If it's green, it got it right.

Tori Nook: Okay.

Brandon Cobb: If it's red, it doesn't know. It needs some input. So it's automating all my bookkeeping. I have a sales coach agent that listens to all of our sales reps calls and my calls. I do sales calls too. And it grades it and it says, This is what, you know, this is the moment that cost you the deal, Brandon. This is what you said. This is what happened. This is what you should have said. And I literally have closed people by taking what it said, texting it to them, and they're like, Yeah, I'm in.

Tori Nook: Okay. Right.

Brandon Cobb: I mean, it's the closest thing I can point to to say that AI is actually making me money. I just did a whole presentation in a in a in a group today showing them all this stuff. But that's where AI is. And most people don't know this. We are entering what's called the agentic economy. All of these agents are going to be transacting and doing the work of human beings. And right now, it's kind of interesting. Right now, this is what's happening. When I go wake my 18 month old soul up.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: 18 month old son up in the morning. He first thing he's just laying there kind of dead and then he hears me come in and he's like starts wiggling a little bit. And then he gets up and he's like paying attention and he's excited. And then after a while, if I don't go pick him up, he starts freaking out and crying, getting upset. We're about to go through those same emotions as people in this economy, business owners included. Right now, everybody's that like The wiggling kind of waking up stage. Some of them are paying attention. When all these things hit mainstream and they start doing these transactions and doing the actual work of people and the disruption hits, right? We've seen the ads, we've seen Jack Dorsey laying off 4,000 people off of, I think, the company block, something like that, and Facebook and firing. Everyone's going to get real excited because, my gosh, AI's actually doing the thing. And then everyone's going to be freaking out.

Tori Nook: Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: Because all the business owners that didn't implement this stuff are gonna be out of business because you can't compete with AI.

Tori Nook: True, to a to a degree. It depend you know, that you still need people, but there's so many jobs that don't need people, right? And I think that's something that people have not wrapped their arms around with. I mean, if you even think about just how dinosaur ish some companies, not all obviously, but some companies, I mean, they can't even get their arms wrapped around social media, right? It's kind of like when fax is one to emails. Like there's always this delayed response of getting, you know, with the program of what's going on.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. It's it's not all doom and gloom like people think, because I mean this is what's gonna happen. They but here's the reality. I'll tell you what I'm what I'm referring to when I say there's gonna be disruption and why a lot of people are gonna be out of business. And then I'll show you, I'll I'll explain like what what what I think is going to be the future. You know, take it with a grain of salt and my two cents because that's all it's worth. But I used to pay a controller ninety thousand dollars a year. I used to pay a bookkeeper forty thousand dollars a year. That's a hundred and ten thousand dollars. I don't pay

Tori Nook: Right. Right. Mm-hmm. Hm. Yep. Right.

Brandon Cobb: that anymore. I got a bookkeeper that's part time. All of the click Categorize the transaction, click, categorize the transaction, click. All AI does all of that. And it's trained so it knows. That $110,000, I can now go dump into marketing, add budgets. I can hire a Ford to pay a better sales rep. I'm gonna beat you because you're still having to pay people to do the thing that I don't have to pay. I can reallocate resources and we're competitors. I'm gonna squash you like a buck.

Tori Nook: Right. Mm-hmm. Right.

Brandon Cobb: That's the reality. And that's why I was staying up to one in the morning to figure all this stuff out in February, because I realized holy crap, if I don't learn this, I'm going to be out of business by the people who are. Now, where people get it wrong, tech jobs are gonna be lost. It's already happening. I mean, get ready. Like job, they're coming for your jobs, robots are coming for your jobs, but stop freaking out because what happens when you have this new technical revolution is it creates entire industries that didn't exist before.

Tori Nook: yeah.

Brandon Cobb: So let's go back a little bit, right? The internet. Okay, everyone was freaking out about the internet and job displacement and what it was gonna do. And my gosh, you know, what are we gonna do with the telephone industry and mailing letter, yeah, all that kind of stuff. The internet created a multi-trillion dollar industry of wealth and prosperity that didn't exist before, connected the entire world to do business in ways that we couldn't before. You couldn't do business over in Asia very easily or over in Russia, the United States.

Tori Nook: Sure. Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: Now it's very easy to do that. And it's becoming become even more easy here with the stuff that's coming down the pipeline. But that's the internet. And you had people protesting, right? You know, my God, we need to put the training over on this. Yeah. Well, let's go back a hundred and two hundred years, five hundred years, let's go back even more. The sewing machine. There were people burning sewing machines at the stake, going, No, sewing machines, what are women gonna do? You know, the women are scared. Like, what are what

Tori Nook: It's a great example. Uh-huh.

Brandon Cobb: We're sewing all day. What are we gonna do with our time? woe is me. They moved on to bigger and better things. Right. Okay. They created a whole new industry, which we just got to wear more clothes and better clothes. And you know, fashion got to be born. That wasn't a thing, you know, 500 years ago. So new industries are gonna be created from this that we can't see that don't exist, and there'll be plenty of jobs and stuff for people to do there.

Tori Nook: Right, right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I love that. And those are great analogies to it's not all doom and gloom. There's always a twist to what's being revolutionized in any industry to bring something better and more advanced and to make your life ten thousand times easier. It is really interesting how you decide so it was in February when you decided that you were gonna dig in hard on on AI. Because not too many people who have a set business already, you know. You've been in a land developer for ten years. You're even teaching people now with your land development accelerator mastermind too, that you decided, like how how did you just decide to just dig in so deep? Like you're you're heavy into it.

Brandon Cobb: Well, I saw where things were going and I saw what was gonna happen if I didn't learn it. I was freaking out going, if I don't learn this, I'm gonna be out of business. This is a the the people who try to hire people to build this stuff out are missing the point. Or the people are like, you know, my marketing person is super techie, and they'll figure it out. You're missing the point. This is a new skill set that has to be learned on how to use this new tool.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: You have to learn this as the business owner because nobody knows your business like you do. It's like when the internet came out and being like, one of my employees will figure out how to use Gmail and the internet, and I don't need to learn it. It's ludicrous, but that's the attitude that a lot of business owners have right now. I just don't have time for it, right? You'll have time for it once you start going out of business, once your competitors start taking your customers. And, you know, by then it's gonna be a little too late.

Tori Nook: Yeah. Mm. Right. Right. And yeah, and I think it's it it all is also interesting how you found the advantage with AI. Like you're not leaving your land development business, you're not leaving, you know, you're teaching it either. I mean, you're even advancing yourself more. You're just you really learn how to save capital to plow it into your bread and butter, you know, established business.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. It's Yeah, it's it's not just saving capital though. Like people think, you know, I can just replace people with it. It's not it's not the big thing. It's it allows you to work your business in a way that you didn't see it before. It's a whole new way of seeing your business and what's possible. If you're looking at your lens of your business through the capabilities of your employees versus the lens of

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: An infinite number of AI agents that you can build that don't get sick, don't complain, don't have to go pick their kids up from school, dogs don't die, don't leave you. It's not the same. But the only way to see this is to actually get your hands dirty and learn how to build these things, learn how to manage them, learn how to fix them, you know, when they go down, and learn how to automate it. It's just like building a business and automating your business. You're building it digitally using the AI agent workforce.

Tori Nook: believe me, I know. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: And they're going to be able to run things in a way that the human beings can't. It's it's really fascinating to see. I can't have a human being go and scrub a the entire like right now, one of the big things I'm working on is as a group in in the land development accelerator, we're all building a land due diligence agent together. We all have our own little agents that are designed to do due diligence on the land in our particular market.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: But it takes me six hours to underwrite a piece of land. I've trained my agent how to go pull the zoning information, go read the overlays, go pull the neighborhood evolving plan and take the number of acres, subtract out the stormwater retention, the utilities, lose 30%, and do six hours worth of due diligence in a few minutes, right? We're building something where everyone is feeding that information up to call it like a mothership.

Tori Nook: Okay. Okay. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: agent and we're building this like national DD agent. And if somebody else's agent learns something and posts it to the mothership, and my agent sees what it posted, it's going, that's interesting. We need we need to implement that. That's a good thing. We're gonna take that and we're gonna implement it here locally. That's like the next step of these things is everybody's agents communicating and working on the big projects together.

Tori Nook: Right.

Brandon Cobb: Cause the person who who gets to this thing and figures it out first, which is we want to find how to quickly find the land that's right for development, get in touch with the person as fast as possible, right? It's a funnel. And I just want to bang out as many offers as possible to get the very best deals. And he who figures that out without a human being being involved is gonna win. Cause right now with development, like all these national builders, it's hey, here's a sales rep and they hey, go knock on doors. Right. That I mean, that's basically what they do.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm.

Brandon Cobb: There's no automated marketing system because it's very difficult to find these types of parcels and there's data that you got to get. Where's the sewer maps to the area? What's the topography? So you can have AI go and sort through that whole maze of information for you, find you the right parcels, automatically reach out to them and have them set up a call with you to talk to them.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Gotcha. How many employees do you have now then?

Brandon Cobb: In our construction company, we've got, well, it's they're technically kind of employees, but they're 1099. we've got three in the construction company. Most of what we do is outsourced, right? We look for strategic partners and we do partnerships with. in my in my mastermind, we've got one employee there that run that helps run both masterminds. And then in our capital raising business, we've got one employee there. So we're a pretty small shop. I used to have you know, twelve employees and, you know, was running the whole machine. You just don't need to now. You can be you can be a solopreneur and just have your whole team of AI agents doing the work for you.

Tori Nook: Uh-huh. Yeah, it's it is amazing. well I'm gonna wrap things up here right now. and I'm gonna just kind of like give you some bulletproof questions. I'm gonna rip off. So what do you think one of the biggest misconceptions people have right now about investing in land development?

Brandon Cobb: That it's risky. You know, people hear the word development and then automatically has the risky bells going off. Anything's risky if you don't know what you're doing. You know, we spend a lot of time on how to mitigate that risk. You know, a lot of people got burned during the whole bridge loan crisis and multifamily when rates went up, right? I know a lot of people follow personal bankruptcies and have been hurt pretty bad by that. You know, developers that were great been doing it a very long time.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Right. Such a good point. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brandon Cobb: But I think that's a big misconception is it's, you know, got the word development in it and it's just automatically risky.

Tori Nook: So because you had a big setback being fired, that's why I'm an entrepreneur now too, because I was also fired. what do you what's one of the things that you would tell people have a major career setback? what would you want them to hear if that happens to them?

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, where one door closes, another opens, right? Like me getting fired sucked 'cause medical device sales was my dream job. I worked years to break into that industry. I was very happy with what I did. I don't have some story where I hated my job and had some dream to go do real estate. That wasn't me. Like I was very happy with what I did. And, you know, it seemed like everything was just woe as me after that. I remember when I got fired, all I could think about was what did I do wrong? What did I do wrong?

Tori Nook: Yeah.

Brandon Cobb: just over and over and over again. And, you know, then it hit me, which was I didn't do anything wrong. I learned a valuable lesson, which is nobody's going to look out for my well-being but me. And you know, my boss, dude, he was like a father figure to me, right? You know, gave me a shot in the industry, taught me everything about it, like super appreciative for everything that he did. But at the end of the day, you're a number to the company. And, you know, he had to do what was best for him.

Tori Nook: Right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And that's that's the hard truth in life. what advice would you give someone who wants to start building wealth through real estate? Like what what do they need to know to even start? Like where should they start?

Brandon Cobb: Start with what you're most interested in. You can make money in anything. I think people get held up on, okay, what's the right path? Is it, is it wholesaling? Is it house flipping? Is it self-storage? Is it land development? Pick whatever interests you the most. Maybe do a little bit of everything and just see kind of what you gravitate towards and do that.

Tori Nook: Yeah. I like that. I think it's good to focus on one thing and then dive hard into it. And if you don't like it, move on.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

Tori Nook: So what's next for you personally and professionally? I mean, I know you're already doing a lot with your masterminds, but is there anything else that's next after this?

Brandon Cobb: You know, our goal is to grow to a hundred million in revenue with the development company through strategic partnerships. it's definitely possible to do. You we used to be vertically integrated and had the big overhead machine and all the employees. And I realized in order to grow that through the hundred million, my gosh, what does that look like? You can do that through strategic partnerships with no overhead, just giving away a bigger piece of the pie. So that's what we're focused on, right? I want to focus on acquiring strategic partnerships to grow.

Tori Nook: Okay. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Brandon Cobb: our land development business and the sky's the limit there. Yeah, the masterminds, dude, we we love, you know, that's that's part of it. You know, we we're happy to do deals with people in the community that come in. You know, a lot of people want their deals funded. we raise capital. So that's another way to find deals. We do deals and other members are doing deals in the community. But I I really love coaching. It's a lot of fun for me. I really enjoy it. And you know, we started that community just because I didn't see anything out there that that had it. Otherwise I'd have joined it. Right. So we created something that we didn't know was there. So I'm really focused on building that community and getting some high level talent in it where it's kind of its own little self-sustaining community where everybody is adding value to everybody and not so much of it is just centered on me, you know, providing value.

Tori Nook: Right. Right. Well what do you do outside of work? Like just stay grounded and, you know, feed yourself.

Brandon Cobb: I yeah. I mean my my b business is a sport and I love it, right? Like I work a lot and I'm okay with that. I I enjoy what I do, but I work out every single morning. Business is not the most important thing. I I my health will always be the most important thing to me. So I'm really into biohacking. You know, I I did a run this morning, I got in my cold plunge, I hopped out, drank my green smoothie that I make, you know, played with my kiddo. you know, I'm a new dad, been a dad for 18 months now, and it's the best thing ever.

Tori Nook: Right. Yeah. Okay. Okay. We love it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, congrats.

Brandon Cobb: And I'm just obsessed

Tori Nook: It is.

Brandon Cobb: with using business as a tool to create unforgettable life experiences with with those that I love. So like I I do an annual mom son trip. She was a 25 year, 30 year retired history teacher. I take her places that she's always taught about for several decades, but never been able to afford to go to. So, you know, we we've been to San Antonio, the the Alamo, you know. we're we're gonna probably gonna go to Boston this year, do the American Trail, stuff like that. And then I've got I do an annual.

Tori Nook: Mm. Yep. ne right.

Brandon Cobb: Sibling trip with my brother and sister. We just did a 20 mile hike at Yosemite Park in October up up to Half Dome and back. Almost killed me, but I did it. And then you know, I do annual trips with my dad. He likes crypto and he likes bourbon. So we do like a crypto conference or the Kentucky Bourbon Trail or something like that. And I do the same thing with my friends and my wife and my kids. And so business is a tool.

Tori Nook: cool. Yeah.

Brandon Cobb: To create these unforgettable life experiences. I'm I'm obsessed with that. That's what I like to use money for.

Tori Nook: And that's exactly what I my whole goal of working too is to experience things that you know I've never experienced before in my family. And it's it's amazing. learn what especially when you're in other places. Like sometimes you even get such great like intuitive hits on things to bring back for your business and what you're gonna do next. It empties out your brain to reset. well I loved having you here on the show.

Brandon Cobb: Very cool.

Tori Nook: And I want you to tell everyone where they can find you.

Brandon Cobb: Yeah, so you know, I'm on social media, Brandon Cobb, like Corn on Cobb, C O B B. I'm on you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, all that kind of stuff. I I post content on Facebook a lot if you want to check that out. But you know, if you're an investor that is interested in learning more about our deals, investment opportunities, you can go to HBG Capital.net forward slash wait list. So it's pronounced Harry Bob Gary Capital.net forward slash wait list. You can watch our whole investment thesis video. If want our free ebook, 100 questions business owners ask before investing, go to hbgcapital.net. So that's pronounced Harry BobGary Capital.net. That's it. Just just that no wait list on the end of it. And then if you are wanting to learn development, land development, land entitlement, and you're interested in being a part of a community that of other people that are doing it, you can go to learnlanddevelopment.com. I got a video on there. Talks about the community. You can book a call, see if it's a fit for you. I've also got a free course for you to get started. It's like eight hours of content. You can learn all about land development, see interviews from civil engineers to national home builders to raising money, how to do the due diligence on the land, all that fun stuff. so if you go to learnlanddevelopment.com, you can go and you can grab it. And then we've got a podcast, Recession Resistant Real Estate Radio. You can check out some content there too.

Tori Nook: Mm-hmm. Awesome. Is it on all the channels, Apple, Spotify, and everything?

Brandon Cobb: Yeah. Yeah, we're we're across all the main channels.

Tori Nook: Awesome. Yeah, that is you've got a lot of amazing tools there in your toolkit that people can access. And I love it. It's this is amazing stuff. And you just if anybody checks out Brandon's work, you'll save a lot of years and time and money, I would have to say. No matter what you're looking to do. whether it's land development or business. But thank you so much for being here today and sharing your amazing story and all your insight and wisdom. Online development, investing, AI, and your mastermind and entrepreneurship in general. So for anyone listening, thank you so much. My podcast drops every Tuesday. It's on YouTube, Spotify, Apple. Please leave a review. DM me, DM my guests if you have any questions. Feel free. And I'll see you next time.