Don’t spend your whole life playing penny ante games.
Early in my career I spent months working a deal. Drove the area, ran the comps, found the right buyer, got it closed. Made about a thousand dollars on it.
I was working with my dad at the time, so he saw all of it. The driving around, the dead ends, the slow grind toward a buyer. He told me I’d done everything right, worked it the way it should be worked. Then he told me something I didn’t fully get at the time.
He said it isn’t any harder to work a big deal than a small one.
I argued with that a little in my head. Surely the bigger deal has more moving parts, more zeros, more ways to mess it up. More people who’d notice if you got it wrong.
He was right and I was wrong. (Don’t tell him I said that.) The work is close to identical. Find someone who wants to buy, someone who wants to sell, put them together and get something done that leaves everyone better off. What changes is the number at the end, and that number doesn’t ask you to do anything different to get there.
Most of what makes the big version feel harder isn’t the deal. It’s you. You start adding weight to it that isn’t actually there. Bigger feels like it should require more, so you tense up, slow down, second-guess yourself in ways you never would on something smaller. The deal didn’t get harder. You did.
It applies to most things, and most people never test it. Making two hundred thousand a year isn’t meaningfully harder than making forty. It’s a different set of habits, different deals, different conversations, but it isn’t five times the effort or five times the stress. People assume the bigger number requires being a different kind of person. Mostly it just requires not getting in your own way at the size you’re currently working.
People spend years circling the smaller version of something because it felt safer, only to find out later the bigger version asked the same of them. If not less. They just hadn’t been willing to find out.
PS- Most landowners aren’t thinking about a deal of any size today.
But the ones who do well, big or small, tend to be the ones who stopped sizing up the work before they’d even started it.
That’s what the MBR Land Reality Check is for. It looks at nearby sales, current listings, development pressure, and the details affecting value that aren’t obvious from the road.
Is it a bad idea to know where things stand?
PPS- If you’re not ready for a Reality Check but enjoy reading about land, markets, and negotiation, you can sign up below and get these posts in your inbox.
