#55 Jonathan Lusk | 99.9% of Ranches Are in the Red

About the episode

Jonathan Lusk spent his early career in wealth management, at Goldman Sachs and then at his own firm running money for 25 Texas families. One of those clients, ICON CEO Jason Ballard, told him he was wasting his life, asked him to manage his ranch, and put up capital when the hunting marketplace Lusk went looking for turned out not to exist. Lusk co-founded BirdDog in 2022. Colt McCoy was his second investor.

BirdDog started as the Airbnb for hunting and now charges landowners nothing to list. The hunts bring landowners in. The money comes from what they need next: Section 180 soil-fertility deductions billed at $40 an acre, 50 to 100 basis points on the spread of ranch loans for the life of the loan, and the insurance policies BirdDog brokers. Lusk says the company broke even in the first quarter of this year and now works with landowners in about 40 states.

His head of sales used Claude to build a loan-qualifying tool in 30 minutes that a bank expected to spend $10 million and 12 months building. BirdDog’s salespeople now spend most of the day writing code.