Real Estate Survival Guide

Recently on a Mastermind call, Vincent Pugliese talked about the three-year journey everyone goes through in their business. I want to share it with you and how it has worked in my real estate business. I hope it encourages you and helps you in your struggle. Vincent describes the first year of any business as pain—the struggles of starting a business and everything that goes into that. The second year is trying to find balance, and the third year on is where you can begin to find some freedom. I found it interesting because my real estate business is three years old, going on four, my podcast is going on two years, and the membership community is not even a year old. I didn’t plan to, but I’ve added something new every year and it makes me wonder what’s in store for the next 12 months. But I’ve seen each of these stages with my business—pain, balance, and freedom. That first year was spent working a lot, trying to make money. In the second year the income was there, but I was trying to balance work, family, and faith—how to spend my time. Now I’ve managed to find that freedom that allows me to do pretty much whatever I want to do. I really want to encourage you—I know how hard the pain of that first year is. You’ll figure out a system and you’ll start to get some balance and then you’ll move into that third year of freedom. Don’t be discouraged—you’ll get there—and one day that business will run like a well-oiled machine.

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

Today I want to talk to you about your entrepreneurial solar system. Monday, we talked a little about your content waterfall, but today I want to expand on that. I learned all this from Vincent Pugliese when he showed it to us at a Total Life Freedom retreat a couple of weeks ago in Florida. The entrepreneurial brain is always wanting to build something—the challenge is exciting. I never want to be restricted to one income. I want to have it all diversified—I never want to be dependent on one thing—and the more you build out your solar system, the less you are. For example, I’m doing real estate, doing things for the team, social media, coaching, training, the membership, the group calls on Monday—making money on all those things. People in the membership pay for one-on-one coaching, I make money from the podcast and being a guest on shows…Why? Well, because it all leads back to what I'm selling, right? My membership, my podcast, the things I'm building. And that's really where I want to encourage you. You need to build multiple streams of income to support what you're doing to get in front of people and create content that people find helpful. What is your solar system? Some of you barely have a planet, right? Some of you haven't thought about these things, and you need to. You need to be thinking about the things you can do, the content you can produce that people want. The biggest thing for some of you is to just talk about your business. You’ve got to step out of your comfort zone. What in your business could you grow and expand? What could you grow by reaching out to people—by having an email list, a blog, social media, content, videos? All these different things are valuable to your business. Grow the arms of your business—grow your solar system—expand your reach with different ideas, topics, and different business opportunities as well as producing content that people can find on multiple platforms. I hope that you can think about this in your business and expand your entrepreneurial solar system.

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

Raymond and Walter have recently released a book called “The Startup Agent: Start Your Real Estate Business the Right Way the First Time” which is available on Amazon. Both Raymond and Walter are amazing Realtors and now have put out an amazing book to help other Realtors be successful in their real estate businesses. They were recently guests on a membership call where they answered questions about their new book. Walter served 21 years in the US Navy where he bought property every time he relocated with the service. He became an investor before he became a real estate agent. He worked full time with the Navy while also working full time in his real estate business for the first three years and was successful—becoming the number one agent in his office and top 3% of his MLS. He loves helping agents, and after making a few YouTube videos, he made the switch to coaching. Raymond has been in real estate for over 30 years, but his passion is creating products. He has created, designed, engineered, manufactured, and distributed over 450 different products in 30 years—all funded by his real estate investments. When Covid hit, he had to make the change to coaching and started his podcast to support his family of 5, including one special needs daughter. He met Walter and they wrote the book to help others find success in real estate.

• Discover the secret to building a successful real estate business
• Why Raymond and Walter wrote their book
• What makes Realtors fail
• The resources that are included in “The Startup Agent”
• The best way to expand your network and make relationships
• Time allocation vs. time management
• How activity management allows you to choose success
• The difference between what’s important and what’s urgent
• Why everyone should have a podcast
• How three priorities can protect your time
• Making mindset key

The Startup Agent: Start Your Real Estate Business the Right Way the First Time

https://a.co/d/hnbgU3s

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

I want to talk to you about building your content waterfall—a term I’ve used before, but I wanted to deep dive today into what I do with content, the kind of content I'm producing, and some things you can do in your business to get content out to people. A friend of mine, John Stange, has a great program called Platform Launchers that produces content and uses it in different ways such as blog posts, emails, social media posts, etc. He says it’s really not hard to produce a content waterfall, and the more you start using this in your real estate business, the more success you’ll have. The more you do, the easier and faster you will get doing it—you refine your process. People consume content in different ways. It is not your job to figure out which way people should consume the content—your job in your business as a Realtor, as an entrepreneur, is to give people content in different ways. When I talk about content waterfall, an example would be the interview I had on Wednesday. I had the interview on my membership call, but then I shared it on the podcast, and I posted about it on social media. Maybe part of it goes into a blog post—do you see how I take one piece of content and use it in multiple ways to help multiple people? You are missing so much by not producing content in multiple ways. If you're a Realtor, I would challenge you and ask, how are you connecting with your clients? It shouldn't just be texts and phone calls. They need to see you on social media. They need to see you on an email list. They need to see you on a blog. They need to hear from you. If you want to have success, you need to say on their mind. How do you do that? By having a content waterfall, where multiple content is in front of people in multiple ways each and every week. Thanks for listening. Hope this is helpful.

 Resources

John Stange Platform Launchers https://www.platformlaunchers.com/

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA,with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

Real Estate Business News

It’s the final business update for 2022 and it’s been a crazy year—a good year. I shared in October that things were picking up and I had some clients coming down the pipeline and that’s exactly how November played out. I had a couple of clients under contract and four more deals going at the same time. As rates drop, more people are interested in seeing houses and I have a couple of other deals that may close before the end of the year. I’m closer to my goal for the year and am super excited about that. I have about 20 clients that if the rates would drop another 1% or so, they would be rushing to look at homes, so I’m still investing the time with them and when those rates drop it will be wild. I continue to be thankful for clients that trust me to help them buy or sell a home.

Community for Realtors

The podcast is still going incredibly well. I’ve been on a ton of podcasts lately and I think I shared with you that I’ve hired someone to book me on podcasts. I was probably on about 20 podcasts in November. I also started using PodMatch in November. I met this amazing guy named Alex at some of the podcast conferences and he started PodMatch which is the equivalent of speed dating for podcasting. You meet potential podcast guests, hosts who would love to have you on their show—it’s been a great fit and my show has grown a ton. The show continues to grow listeners every month and I’m loving every minute of it. The membership community is growing and in November I actually built out the membership community mastermind community. I’ve realized that some people want to get on a call every week for a quick hour where we talk about topics and have guest speakers on Mondays, but others want a little more. So, we’ve built up another tier that works a lot like the Total Life Freedom Mastermind where they will have access to the community calls, but also have access to the private Facebook page and a weekly call where we’ll deep dive into their business every week. In November I also had someone reach out from the membership and want to hire me for six months of personal coaching and another who wants social media coaching, so that’s been exciting.

On the Home Front

I have to start out by saying happy birthday to my beautiful wife, Valerie. I was so honored that she came on the podcast last week to share a little about our journey to becoming debt free. We were excited to get to do our debt-free scream with Ramsey Solutions. Our family also enjoyed their week away—it was an incredible time. Anyway, I just want to wish my wife a happy birthday—she’s the glue that holds our family together and I could not survive without you.

Thank You

Thank you for being a part of this and supporting the show, sharing it with people, leaving reviews, and helping the show grow. I appreciate it so much. Whether you want a free trial to the membership, social media help with your business, really, anything I can do to help you in your business and help your business thrive and grow, support you and encourage you along the journey, I'd love to do it. Feel free to connect with me. Thank you for listening. Thanks for supporting everything going on here. 

The podcast is edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails.com. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

 This episode is going to be a little different. Normally, I try to share a lesson with you guys. Sometimes I use an analogy that can apply to your real estate business. But today is a personal celebration for me and my family.

As you can see from the title, today is the day that we are doing our debt-free scream at Ramsey Solutions in Franklin, Tennessee. We have been in Nashville since Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Our family got up the next morning and drove to Kentucky first, and then down to Nashville for a few days, and we are so pumped to be here today.

Our scream is scheduled for sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 PM Central. For those of you in the Eastern time zone, that will be from 4:00 to 5:00 PM, today, November 30th.

We are so thankful for Dave Ramsey's plan and how, years ago our time in Financial Peace University led to us, finally getting on the same page about money and then finally paying off all our consumer debt before our son turned one, which was in September of 2020. And then, we paid off our house to be completely debt free this past June, um, right before my birthday, which was the best birthday gift.

I'm a nobody, and I've said that often, but I hope God can use our story in a small way to impact some of you guys. And who knows, maybe you could be paying off your house in less than a year. Maybe you could be doing a debt-free scream at Ramsey Solutions. It's definitely a remarkable experience.

I'm here today doing the debt-free scream, but I've been here before and met Dave and some of the staff here, and they're absolutely incredible people. So definitely check it out. Check out Dave's programs. You can find the stuff they're doing at DaveRamsey.com. If you search Dave Ramsey YouTube, you can go to the YouTube page and the username is the Ramsey Show and they will have a playlist there where you can go to the Ramsey show with the full episode. So if you guys have questions, feel free to ask. Thanks for being a part of our debt free journey, and I hope to talk to you guys again very soon.

Today we have the boss of the Schuchman household on the show—my beautiful wife, Valerie! So many of you have asked me about our debt free journey, and soon we will have our debt-free scream day on the Dave Ramsey show. So today the show is from our home—you might hear screaming kids in the background—but I’m excited to be here with my wife to talk about our journey.

 “What we go through and what we do can help somebody else. It makes it all worth it.”

“I feel like one of the biggest things that I have learned is just trusting the process— trusting the process of becoming debt free, trusting the process of the work that it takes to become a realtor, trusting the process through just the whole entire time of all of the changes in your life.”

Find out the following and more:

• Why they signed up for Financial Peace
• Are you a spender or a saver?
• Why balance is so important when couples budget
• Why patience and research are important in making financial decisions
• When Valerie knew it was going to work out for John in real estate
• How you can better support your spouse as a Realtor
• How the Schuchmans juggle work and family life
• The importance of helping others with your experiences
• What it’s like being married to a Realtor and Valerie’s advice to spouses

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA,with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

On today's episode, I want to talk to you about not being there to pitch. This is a phrase I used recently on a call, and I want to share with you the power that can happen when you just show up to help rather than trying to pitch. This applies to Realtors, the podcast community, as well as with working with clients. So, this call was to promote a book some friends had just launched and I was there to help answer questions in the chat, google links, etc. After a while, my friend asked me to talk about my podcast because there were 30 or 40 Realtors listening on the call. I replied that I wasn’t there to pitch, that they didn’t have to give me that opportunity, but they said that they knew it would help those Realtors that were listening, and they knew that was how I grew my membership. I appreciated that amazing opportunity, but I was just there to support and serve in any way that I could. If you show up trying to pitch, people will see through that and just be bothered that you're using their meeting to promote yourself. I showed up and answered questions in the chat to help people and I was just there to support. They called on me and gave me an awesome opportunity to talk about the podcast—and even if they wouldn't have, that’s not the point. It’s just a reminder come from a heart and try to serve. I wasn't there to pitch—that should be your heart in everything that you do. I wasn't there to pitch, I was just here to help, to build relationships, to pour into people. You’ll have an opportunity to hear these friends and learn about their book in a future podcast, but for today I really hope you can think about seeking to serve with no expectation of pitching or selling what you're doing in your business and use this idea to create more success.

 Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails.

John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

Heath is a mortgage lender and does a show for mortgage lenders. We connected about our mutual connection for real estate and Heath has had an amazing career. He has been a top producer in the mortgage business since 2002. In his current position, he is the branch manager for Cardinal Financial where he spearheads a six-person team that is full of dedicated, fun loving, and driven professionals. He has a combined 35 years of industry experience, and they have closed over $50 million a year in loan volume. Heath is a native Texan who graduated from Texas A&M with a BBA in business and marketing. The energy and passion he demonstrates for the business coupled with his competitive spirits is apparent—even in his downtime. He's hiked to the summit of the Grand Teton (13,700 feet, he’s a licensed pilot, a six-time Triathlete, and snow skier. He also has an amazing podcast called Mortgages Reimagined, where he coaches loan officers on how to build a business that support their life.

 “…if you're listening and you're not sure whether or not you're gonna make it through, I will give you a little bit of advice. One, find yourself a coach or mentor that will hold you accountable to those tasks that you need to do every single day.”

“…most people are focusing on the doing when they should be focusing on the being. Who are they gonna be today that's going to attract the people that they wanna do business with.”

• How Heath built his business as a loan officer
• What he learned from the crash of 2008
• How a coaching organization helped his business
• The importance of focusing on today and staying out of your head
• With the right coach and the right training, you can do anything
• Staying tough through tough times
• How real estate is like a marathon…and how not to quit
• Dealing with fear of failure
• The benefit of going all in with your real estate career
• Tips for leading a team
• Heath’s platinum rule
• The importance of asking questions

Website/Podcast https://heathbarnes.com/

Fear Setting by Tim Ferris https://youtu.be/5J6jAC6XxAI

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails.

John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA, with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener. 

This is a really cool lesson I've been processing recently— today I want to talk to you about how there's always more in the tank. I've been trying to get back into running over the last few months, and when you haven't run in a while that first run is always the hardest. I was pretty worn out after that first mile and my goal was to run three, so I kept going—running a bit, walking a bit—and after the second mile, I noticed my time had gotten a bit faster. Despite feeling like I had nothing left in the tank, I ran my split. That made me wonder if I could make the third mile even faster. The point is that even though I felt like I had nothing left to give, there was more in the tank. I want to encourage you, in your real estate business, that sometimes you have to push yourself. If you feel like you're struggling in the real estate business, if you feel like you've got nothing left, if you feel like you're just like at the end of your rope, let me tell you to first of all, reach out and get help from someone to encourage you and then know that you are much stronger than you think. You have much more in you. God's put so much more in there, so much more in you than you really think is there. And so that's my encouragement to you today. There is always more in the tank.

Podcast edited by Kenny Carfagno.

Show notes and blog posts are created by Jennifer Harshman and RealtorEmails. John Schuchman is a licensed REALTOR® in Lancaster, PA,with Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty and a part of the Andrew Welk Group. The opinions shared on this show represent the opinions & values of John Schuchman and do not necessarily represent the opinions & values of Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Homesale Realty. The opinions & ideas shared in this podcast do not guarantee or promise any results of success to the listener.