How to Create a Real Estate Personal Brand | Tips for Success

Nathan Schiess (00:00)
I would say is you should …

you should invest that social capital wisely. So you should invest it though, because if you don’t, it’s just a waste and there’s no virtue in wasting

Kristen Knapp (01:42)
back to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I’m Kristen Knapp and I’m here with Nathan Schiess, who’s the founder of Real Estate Personal Branding Agency. We’re going to get into your personal brand and maybe what you’re missing and what you can have help with. So thank you for being here, Nathan. This is, I mean, this is such an interesting part of the business. What got you interested in this in general?

Nathan Schiess (01:55)
Thank you, Kristen, for having me.

Yeah, absolutely. So I started down the personal branding rabbit hole actually when I went through a divorce and had to sell everything that I had built over the last ⁓ five, 10 years and kind of start over. And what happened is I had to sell it all. And I realized that once everything was sold, I mean, had money in my bank account, but there was really no evidence.

that I’d done anything. I hadn’t recorded what I’d been doing. I hadn’t leveraged any of the experience that I had gained. And I was kind of left, I was left kind of, know, hat in hand. Like, what do I?

What do I do next? And it made me realize like, hey, at that same time, I had a couple of friends who had really leaned into their personal brands. They’d started YouTube channels and they’d started, you know, Facebook pages and they were, they’d worked very hard on them. And I looked at where they were at and any setbacks that they had, they, it was like an insurance policy. They had this insurance policy that showed their, their credibility, showed their competence. And so they had instant rapport wherever they went.

And it really acted as this buoy that held them up no matter what storm came around and I realized I didn’t have that. So as a recompense for my sins, I started a personal branding agency and said, I’m gonna go, I’m gonna do this then. And that’s kind of my personality to do things like that. And so it’s been great. And I found exactly what I was missing when I had to sell everything and was left kind of.

not having anything now, no matter what happens. People know what I do and it’s been a huge, yeah, it’s been a huge help.

Kristen Knapp (03:42)
Right?

It is, that’s such an interesting way to say it, where you can be kind of working in this black hole where nobody knows about it except your network, and yeah, if something happens, it can go away.

Nathan Schiess (03:56)
Yeah. And I grew up in a small town where there’s kind of a, there’s a stigma against, against engaging on social media that it makes you a try hard or something like that. And, and, and I get it. I understand like that there are cultures where that’s the case, but I kind of view it like this. It’s social capital and it’s just like money. Right? So if you have social capital and you leave it in the bank and you don’t invest it anywhere, right?

Kristen Knapp (04:05)
Right.

Nathan Schiess (04:24)
Eventually, inflation kind of creeps up on it and it never really goes anywhere and it never, and you die and it never got you anything. It just kind of sat there and depreciated and didn’t do great. And so you don’t want to be wasteful with your social capital. And I think that may be what people are worried that they’ll do if they have a personal brand. It’s like wasting the goodwill and social capital they have with friends and family and you know, they’re sitting in the community and whatnot. But

I would say is you should …

you should invest that social capital wisely.

So you should invest it though, because if you don’t, it’s just a waste and there’s no virtue in wasting

right? So pick whatever you’re gonna do and help people. That’s another thing I was talking to a client about the other day. He had so much to offer so many people and it wouldn’t be that hard to get it out, but he didn’t wanna have this…

He didn’t want to have that stigma or like, I try, then it’s going to be this. It’s like, no, don’t do this for you, man. Do it for someone else, if anything. mean, do it for you, make the money, take care of your family. But there are other people that need the expertise that you have. And there are so many people who are just afraid to share it.

Kristen Knapp (06:22)
Yeah, and I think people get in their own heads and they kind of close the door before it even opens where the reality is, I mean, maybe you will have some people that judge you, but a lot of people aren’t really thinking about you and a lot of people don’t care. And a lot of people, if you have great people in your life, will actually be very supportive of it, or they should be at least.

Nathan Schiess (06:34)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, you’re exactly right. You touched on a couple of things. The first being that nobody cares. that sounds a little harsh, but the other piece is that I think people are concerned that, well, if I start posting, people are gonna see it they’re gonna make fun of you, or they’re gonna make fun of me if I do it. And the funny and great thing is, no one will see it. The reason no one will see it is because Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, any of them, maybe TikTok as an exception, because they have a different algorithm, but like,

The social media platforms don’t want to show your stuff to anybody because you don’t have an audience. So they’re not going to show it to anyone. So you’re two or three weeks out of publishing consistently before they even start showing it to a fraction of your friends or connections or whatever. that’s a problem. Everyone wishes that was the problem, that I’ll post something and everyone will see it. That would be great. That’s not the problem at all. ⁓ People don’t aren’t going to see it, which is great because you kind of get a runway.

Kristen Knapp (07:10)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nathan Schiess (07:34)
And then the second piece that you brought up is a good segue into kind of like what I do. We can talk about it as much or as little as you want, but the first thing you have to understand when you’re doing a personal brand is what do you want? What do you want? I think that one thing that holds people back is they’re so concerned about posting something that’s going to appeal to their ex-girlfriends and their nan and their ex-employer and their best friend and the person that they met at this marketing event or at this networking event.

Kristen Knapp (07:34)
Right.

of

Nathan Schiess (08:02)
And the deal is you will never be all things to all people. once you decide the direction of your personal brand, meaning saying, want this, my personal brand is a tool to get me to this thing. You are going to speak then to a very specific group of people and everyone else can kick rocks. They don’t matter. They don’t matter at all. And it’s interesting too that,

Kristen Knapp (08:21)
Yeah.

Nathan Schiess (08:27)
one of the epidemics that we have in the personal branding space is that we think that by being all things to all people that it’s getting us somewhere, or that there’s some virtue in not really revealing too much of yourself or taking a position, but you’re just irrelevant. You’re just irrelevant. It’s like having, again, that capital that sits in the bank that does nothing. It’s just irrelevant. It’s like you don’t exist. And so, yeah, the first …

Kristen Knapp (08:37)
Great.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nathan Schiess (08:56)
And the hardest part of a personal brand is figuring out what you want. ⁓ That’s the hardest part of building a personal brand.

Kristen Knapp (09:05)
And when you say personal brand, is this social media specific or is this like graphic design as well? You know, websites, all that.

Nathan Schiess (09:12)
Yeah,

great question. It’s like a media kit type thing. It can be that your personal brand does have that component to it for sure. I really lean in heavy into the, I guess, like the substantive part of it, of the message, the substantive part of the message. The graphic design part is gonna come secondary of like what colors and what’s your logo and that kind of a thing. It kind of gets back to what you said where it’s like, no one’s gonna see or care about that for a while.

Kristen Knapp (09:29)
Yeah.

Nathan Schiess (09:41)
The first thing we need to do is to say, okay, what is the message? Like, well, what do you want is the first thing, right? So I want to be, you know,

I want to get hard money. I want to get my hard money out. I have hard money. I want to lend it to people, right? So you say, okay, who do you want to lend it to? And so then once we know what you want and who we’re talking to, which is the other, that’s the next step in the process, then we get to the message part where we say, okay,

What do those people need to hear in order for them to work with you? So yeah, the personal brand is the messaging, the foundational pillars are what do you want, getting super clear on that, and then who is going to help you get there, right? And usually in that part, we’re also talking about your USP, so your unique selling proposition. So we identify that ISP, which is your ideal, or ICP, excuse me, your ideal client profile.

and then you have your unique selling proposition to those people. And so it follows kind of this funnel of, know, but the main issue, the thing that like to walk away, the takeaway here is you have to have a goal and a direction with your brand, or it doesn’t matter if you make the flashiest TikToks in the world, where is it taking you? Where is it getting you? I have…

tons of clients that have come to me and said, I have a following of a hundred thousand and I can’t make any money with it. And the issue is that, okay, you made this following and they followed you for some reason, but you’re not a hundred percent sure why, you know, who is your ICP, your ideal client profile? Who is this group of people? What do they want from you? And that’s fine, but you’re kind of now working backwards because it should have started with what was the outcome you wanted from doing this in the first place?

Kristen Knapp (11:39)
Wow. Wow.

Mm-hmm.

Nathan Schiess (12:05)
And I think there’s two things that we don’t want to admit to ourselves. And I think it’s important in real estate because as real estate investors, we are not immune to this at all. But men especially, women too, but men especially want respect. They don’t want to have to ask for it. They don’t want to say that’s what they want. They want respect. And then the second one, and this one I feel like skews a little towards women, but definitely the case with men too, is they want to be loved. They want to feel loved and they want to feel respected. And so they make a personal brand whose job it is to get them love and respect.

And that’s a losing proposition. That’s not what you do. As far as respect, we can definitely gain ⁓ credibility, right? Like there’s definitely that piece of it. But when I’m talking about respect, I think people want respect in terms of like they want esteem from people in general. They want to be the king or the queen. And I think it’s kind of just a derivative of wanting to be loved a bit. ⁓ And those are as…

Kristen Knapp (12:34)
Mm.

Yeah.

Nathan Schiess (13:00)
kind of distant as those are from real estate investing, so many real estate investors, personal brands are actually geared towards that. Instead of, want to flip houses or I want to sell houses or I want to lend hard money or raise money for a fund or whatever.

Kristen Knapp (13:07)
Yeah.

And I think you hit on such an important ⁓ aspect of this, because I think a lot of people with social media, they just know they’re supposed to have it. And they’re like, well, I just need social. But they’re not taking the time to actually figure out, what am I utilizing this social media for? So it becomes kind of just like checking boxes.

Nathan Schiess (13:34)
Yeah, yeah, and that’s kind of the hard, that’s kind of the issue, right, is that we think it’s irrelevant, but it’s so irrelevant. So there’s a group of people who are trying and kind of getting into a direction that isn’t really serving them. There’s another group of people where I’ve been in this for sure, where it’s kind of like, yeah, I have it, but I don’t have time to do anything with it. And that was my thing. And I’m sure that there’s so many listeners of this show where it’s like, with what time?

Am I gonna post on social media and do replies and stuff? Like I am flipping, you know, I’m flipping houses and I have a property management company. This was my situation. I’m flipping five houses at a time. I have a property management company. I have a construction company. I have a family. I’m trying to like balance everything. At what point am I gonna sit down and write a ⁓ cheeky Instagram post or make ⁓ a fun TikTok dance video? And the answer is like you don’t have time.

Kristen Knapp (14:24)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nathan Schiess (15:12)
You don’t. And also, I think the other concern that I had is I was like, and if I do get more business, what am gonna do with that business? I’m already so busy. I don’t know what to do with the time I have. So the thing that I really try to focus on is first of all, you don’t have time, just like I didn’t, that’s why you hire me. That’s why you need me is because you don’t have time. The other thing that I really focus on, and that’s that first part of like when we talk about what do you want,

is I’m gonna say, okay, what’s making you the most money with the least effort? Because those are the things we need to start on building your personal brand around, right? If you have, and like in my case, this is good example, you can use me as an example, I had a property management company, and I’m like, yeah, if I attract owners, properties are headaches, and they’re difficult, and property management’s super tough, and if you have great systems, it’s tough, and I didn’t have the best systems, and so it was like impossible. But the truth was, I was also an agent.

Kristen Knapp (15:42)
Mm.

Nathan Schiess (16:06)
And I also had, I was also flipping, and I also had access to a lot of capital that I could have done a bigger project with. So I would sit down with someone and say, okay, from all the things that you’re doing right now, I wanna do two things. I wanna pick something that’s gonna make you the most money, and it can’t be something that as I add clients to you, it becomes less and less manageable. Like it needs to be the thing, like being a real estate agent would be a good example.

If I’m an agent and a property manager, I wanna get you houses to sell because that’s gonna take you a couple weeks and you’re gonna make great money. Whereas a property manager, it’s like you’re gonna bring someone on and it’s good passive, but you could get inundated quick. And the systems that you need to scale that are significant. So yeah, think that recognizing the potential of it, of its money making capacity and not getting…

⁓ Not being afraid of starting it because either it’s gonna take too much time or that even if it brings in clients It’s just gonna bog you down

Kristen Knapp (17:07)
What I’m hearing is, you know, there’s ways to work around, every objection that you tell yourself, there’s something to work around it. Because I think a lot of people at the end of the day are very nervous to be on camera or to try. And so they come up with every reason why they can’t do it.

Nathan Schiess (17:24)
Yeah. Well, and I think that again, it’s interesting with marketing and there’s no different in real estate. And as a matter of fact, it’s, yeah, it’s kind of the worst, but there are kind of two aspects. There’s your message and there’s the aesthetic and everyone gets caught up in the aesthetic. And that’s, that’s Instagram. I detest Instagram. You have to do it. I’m not trying say don’t do Instagram, but I don’t like it. The reason being it’s all overtone. It’s all aesthetic. It’s all image, right? But that’s not what you need.

at all, especially at first. You want to know my favorite social media platform in the world? LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s wonderful because it’s all message. It’s not a static, it’s all message. And that’s what you need at first. The aesthetic comes, but again, we were talking about this before the call started, but if I have a flipper that comes on and he’s like, yeah, I’m looking to do a fun to pull something big down.

And he’s like, and I’ve got a following of me doing ⁓ really funny TikTok dances. I’m like, that does nothing for us. Like we honestly will always have to rip that down or start a new one because the people who are following you are irrelevant. They’re not going to spend money on you, your entertainment. There’s ways to make money doing that, but do you want to be an entertainer or do you want to be a syndicator or a fund manager? And so the first thing you need to do is you need to start publishing a copy.

So, just it’s text, like written stuff. And I write that for my clients, but I need to have a conversation with them. And they kind of end up acting as like an editor where we say, what are we trying to do? What do we want? Who are we talking to? What do they need to hear in order to give us money so that we can accomplish what we’re trying to accomplish? So, getting that down first is critical. And I think it takes a couple of weeks, sometimes about a month.

of just of writing posts that are just text. We’ll have pictures with them and that’s great. But you don’t, I don’t want to get you on camera doing like these visual hooks of like dropping the phone in water and then coming back up and here we, like this is, it’s, first of all, is that even gonna appeal to your ICP? Like if you’re trying to get people’s money, if I have a million dollars to invest, I don’t want to see an Instagram reel of someone like.

in a rubber, like a swimming suit and a rubber ducky thing, like doing this whole gimmick of, no, I wanna see you getting like ⁓ an Alex Hermosy, Chris Williamson style interview, like you’re a professional and an expert, right? And so you have to start with, again, what do you want? And then you get the messaging right first. So don’t even worry about like, well, what am I gonna look like on camera? Who cares? Literally, who are you trying to talk to?

Kristen Knapp (19:34)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nathan Schiess (20:00)
And that’s that big objection, that’s the roadblock that I have to help people overcome. It’s like, well if my nan sees me and she sees that have a beard, I didn’t have a beard, she’s gonna call me about it. You’ve gotta be able to get over that and say I’m only talking to my ICP and it doesn’t matter what I look like, it matters what my message is.

Kristen Knapp (20:17)
Yeah, and if like, if there’s one person like an ex that follows you that you’re worried about or whatever, block them. Like is someone going to really come in the way of your money at the end of the day?

Nathan Schiess (20:25)
Yeah.

Yeah,

right. And it gets back to what do you want? Do you want to get back with your ex? Have another conversation with yourself. Just say, is that really what you want? Are you trying to leave that door open? Because if so, then we should take that into account. But you need to say it with your chest. Say it with your chest. That’s what you want. Don’t hide in this fog. It’s a therapeutic endeavor, putting together a personal brand, because it makes you cut the dead wood. You have all of these things that you kind of want, and you have to say, no, no. What do I really want?

Kristen Knapp (20:31)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Nathan Schiess (20:57)
And to your point of like, you know, having an ex that isn’t going to like the post or whatever, when it comes to marketing, especially pay per click type stuff, which isn’t, isn’t something I have to get into a ton, but with pay per click, you don’t want people clicking your ad if they’re not your ICP. You don’t want to make something that appeals to everybody because it’s going to cost you money. You want to call everyone who isn’t a perfect match.

because you only want to pay, I mean ideally it’s like they click, every time you get a click on one of your ads, you get a sale. If you get a million clicks and no sales, that just costs you a lot of money and you got nothing in return. So there is something productive about having people not respond. It’s a great thing actually.

Kristen Knapp (21:35)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I love your perspective on it and I love how you start people off with text, which is a little bit more approachable. So you don’t have to dive head first into this, you know, thing that makes you uncomfortable. I mean, I’ve loved talking about this went by so fast. So what are your goals for this business and how can people find you and get involved?

Nathan Schiess (22:00)
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn, best social media platform, LinkedIn and Facebook.

You can find me there. I’m looking for, right now I’m looking for five more clients to take on. I’m picky about my clients, but I’m happy to do personal brand calls with anyone that’s interested. So you can find that link on my LinkedIn. Just sit down and we’ll have a conversation, kind of like we’re having, about what are the directions you could go. So that’s what I would say. I also have, I send out email templates. I have a

⁓ Sorry, excuse me social media templates. So I put together like a basically a canned post that you can you can kind of plug and play with and so that that link is also on my LinkedIn in my Facebook so if you want to that that’s a good place to start, know, if you’re just trying to dip your toe in of like, okay, you know, what am I post gonna look like? That’s a I give a little direction every week on that. So

Kristen Knapp (22:56)
Amazing. Well, everybody please check that out. Those five spots I think are gonna go very quickly. So hop on that and thank you so much Nathan for being here. I think people learned so much. This was a very great conversation. And thank you everyone for listening and we’ll see you next time.

Nathan Schiess (23:04)
Yeah, thank you, Kristen.

Thank you so much, appreciate you.