Unlocking Harmony: 5 Essential Mindset Shifts for Business Success

John Harcar (00:01.703)
Okay, hey guys, welcome back to our show. I’m your host, John Harcar, and I’m here today with Ryan Speltz. And what we’re going to talk about, you know, besides his journey in business and in mortgage, we’re going to talk about really creating harmony within your life and in business. Remember guys, at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, really all real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their business. You know, we’re providing tools, resources in the community to

to really level up and scale your business, which in turn helps you live the life you wanna live. So, hey Ryan, welcome to our show.

Ryan Speltz (00:37.71)
Appreciate it, John. Good to be here.

John Harcar (00:39.029)
Yeah, I’m definitely looking forward to our talk about creating harmony. Everybody likes a bit of harmony. for me, I love mindset. So I think that all kind of melds into each other. But before we talk about all that, why don’t you kind of give our audience some information on you, your background in business, how you got into mortgage or real estate, and just kind of what brought you all the to today.

Ryan Speltz (00:59.15)
Sure. Yeah, I’ve always been kind of entrepreneurial and kind of getting out there and doing my own thing. really, you know, I always tell the story when I was younger and I kind of grew up in the technology age. So the video games would come out, you know, Madden, Madden 06 with Dante Culpepper on the cover was my favorite or 98. was. Yeah. Yeah. Madden 98, I think, was even the best game of all time that Madden ever came out with. And. Yeah, yeah, I did play it a little bit like Clearland. Yeah.

John Harcar (01:13.669)
yeah, I remember that one all too well.

John Harcar (01:21.519)
I could date myself. I’m a tech mobile. Remember tech mobile? Yeah, that’s a little past your time. Early before your time, yeah. A little before your time,

Ryan Speltz (01:29.486)
So that, you know, being that way, playing Madden, I never really played the games. I would always just be the coach and the manager in the background because I liked kind of moving pieces around and that kind of thing. So I just simulate the whole season. And so that, you know, I look back at that and I go, that’s kind of my journey into leadership and entrepreneurship is, know, I’ve always been just the guy that wants to play with the pieces and help people accomplish their goals and get things done. And, you know, I carry that into the mortgage business now. I’ve been in the mortgage industry for over a decade and

seen the good, the bad and the ugly and been in a few companies and had great experiences and had poor experiences and all around. And one of the major things that I do recognize is that, you know, when people fail to recognize that there’s life outside of work is when they start getting burned out and they go through the emotional roller coaster, the business roller coaster, they don’t want to do the things that they once thought that they were really good at and like to do. And eventually they end up

folding up shop and going somewhere else, or they just stick it out and they’re miserable for 30 years. And we all know those people in the industry and dealing with those people on the other end of the transaction. So, you know, we always talk about not living the same life over and over again. And that’s really like the messaging that that I like to put out there as well as just, you know, finding new experiences within your day to day and kind of falling in love with the boring, but then also recognizing that you don’t have to give up on the moments outside of work to be able to

John Harcar (02:32.499)
Right.

Ryan Speltz (02:54.582)
to accomplish your goals.

John Harcar (02:56.661)
Got it. So did you go to school for finance or how did you get into the mortgage business?

Ryan Speltz (03:02.062)
That’s a great, great entry question. was actually, I went to school for psychology because I had no idea what I wanted to do. So that was like my fifth major. I started in like anatomy because I was interested in the medical field. My mom was a nurse for, you know, has been a nurse now for 40 years. And so I started in anatomy and failed it because the teacher just like did the slides out of the book. And I was like, you’re not showing me anything. So I stopped showing up and all that fun stuff. So I’ve changed majors after that class.

And then, you know, ended up into business and business is all about, you know, the spreadsheets and stuff. And while I enjoy the math, I don’t like staring at that stuff all day. So I kind of transferred out of the business business major there, too, and and transferred schools and just kind of ended up in psychology because I knew I could use it to launch into any other program after the fact. And then never went back to school because I just didn’t didn’t feel, you know, got kind of got more into.

entrepreneurship and getting in the directions of, you know, kind of finding my own way out there. And really it was reading, you know, Think and Grow Rich while I was working overnights at a mental hospital that I took pages and pages. I probably just, you know, wrote the book again where I was thinking I was taking notes, but I was really just like writing the whole thing down.

John Harcar (04:19.54)
Yeah.

John Harcar (04:23.049)
writing everything, right? Everything that you see. That’s cool.

Ryan Speltz (04:25.262)
Right. Yeah, just kind of copying it. Right. And once I kind of did that, it kind of set off the entrepreneur journey and, a bunch of different failed businesses up until this point. But that’s that’s kind of how the direction started. And then really jumping into mortgage, I was in I was working about 80 hours in a new shoe store that was at an outlet mall. And I was the assistant manager of the store. But there was no store manager.

So I was dealing with different people each week coming in and acting as store manager. I was just like, well, I mean, I know the ins and outs of the store, like the back of my hand, I’ve been here six months. Why can’t I become the store manager? And, you know, they basically told me like, well, you’re not ready for it. I said, okay. And just kind of kept sticking it out. And, and then one of my buddies is like, dude, you’re miserable. You’re working 80 hours a week. You know, you’re making 35 grand, like come over here. And it was a company that ended up, they were buying leads from lending tree. So I’d make, you know,

80 to 100 calls a day and just keep hitting the button until you make as much money as you want. And that was kind of how the transition happened and eventually recognized that that wasn’t my path either and wanted to go a little bit more lifestyle focused on the business versus just slamming out phone calls the whole time.

John Harcar (05:39.871)
Okay, so what were some of the maybe struggles or things that you ran into getting into the mortgage industry, like when you started, like you said, slamming the phones and doing all that stuff?

Ryan Speltz (05:52.653)
Yeah, there was really finding the balance, right? And that’s probably why it’s so important for me today is because the pendulum would just swing. I attribute a lot of that pendulum swinging is because I was still kind of hitting the bottle a little hard at that point. I had just come out of college and so I was just kind of like, thinking I was enjoying my time, right? That was my balance. You finish work, you have a beer, turns into six, whatever.

John Harcar (06:08.927)
Yeah, right.

Ryan Speltz (06:17.07)
And I’ve been sober now for four years, so get to look back and laugh about that. But there was a ton of times in there that weren’t so great. Awesome. That’s that’s fantastic, man. I always love when I look up and it’s somebody’s out there leading the way. And so thanks for leading the way. Yeah, and it just turned into like my life balance was, you know, that’s what it was, was like, OK, let’s have a couple of drinks and look back at it now. And it’s like all I did was do the same thing in different places.

John Harcar (06:20.981)
Congratulations. Yeah, congratulations. I just got 11. So, yeah.

John Harcar (06:34.175)
Thank you.

John Harcar (06:46.965)
Mm-hmm.

Ryan Speltz (06:47.03)
And so that’s where the lead to sobriety kind of came from. But that was really the struggle was just like finding the balance because, you know, my wife at that point was working two jobs. I was working a job and a half just trying to make it work to rent a 600 square foot apartment in Louisville, Kentucky. And we just kind of pushed and pushed and pushed. And I told her like, this is the way. I didn’t close a loan for like the first six months. So I left a retail job that I was making, you know, $3,000 a month. I didn’t have a long runway here. Like it was like…

we’re just going to make work what we can. And, you know, she, she looked at me kind of like halfway through the fifth month there and was like, is this really like, is this really what’s going to work? And then the next day I got my first contract. So it was just like that, digging for the diamonds or gold or whatever they call that, you know, that, that was the big struggle is just being able to maintain enough balance to, to hold it all together.

John Harcar (07:18.494)
Mm-hmm.

John Harcar (07:41.045)
And I guess a good question would be like your mindset through all that, right? I mean, that’s gotta be, you leave the comfort, you leave the security, you go in and, I mean, it happens to a lot of guys that get into real estate, get into wholesale and get into stuff. Months go by and there’s no money, there’s no deals. Like how did you keep yourself dialed in and focused?

Ryan Speltz (08:05.79)
The problem was I probably wasn’t keeping myself dialed in. That’s probably why it took six months, you know, like we just talked about. But but you know, it’s it’s something that I can look back on and go, man, if I wouldn’t have gone through that, I don’t think I’d be where I am right now. And, you know, especially with the ebbs and flows of the last couple of years coming out of 2021, 22, where everything was like you could throw a rock and hit somebody that needed a refinance to now, you know, you can’t find anyone to refinance. So you’re completely based on on purchase money.

John Harcar (08:08.053)
Okay, right.

John Harcar (08:34.186)
Hmm?

Ryan Speltz (08:34.678)
And it becomes, you know, that that’s the difficulty. so when you have a lower month, you go, well, it’s not a zero. And I’ve been through zero. And, know, so it doesn’t get worse than where I was. So like that, that’s kind of the mindset now that has developed out of that was like the ability to just recognize that like it can’t get worse than what it was when I started. And so if there’s a pivot that needs to happen, you make it. Or I think the honestly, now the biggest thing that people need to recognize is

It’s not pivoting. It’s not another marketing opportunity. It’s not an AI platform. It’s not chat GPT that’s going to change your life in your business. The answer is go deeper on what you’re good at. Like if you’re good at one thing, just take that one thing and run with it as long as you possibly can and as go as deep as you can.

John Harcar (09:14.707)
Hmm.

John Harcar (09:18.677)
I love that. I love that. And I think that’s what people get the shiny object syndrome, you know, what they call it. It’s been that way. mean, especially in the real estate space, the wholesale investing space. mean, there’s just that shiny object syndrome is the killer of so many people. But I love how you said that, you know, just dig in and focus on that one thing. So.

Ryan Speltz (09:25.96)
so bad right now too because there’s so much out there.

John Harcar (09:45.289)
Where are you seeing trends in the mortgage industry going? I mean, we all know what rates are. We know that’s caused some slowdown and stuff. So where are you seeing things coming along or coming?

Ryan Speltz (09:56.191)
I mean, as far as rates, we can guess and pick and choose. But right now, the markets are hinging on tweets at this point of up and down. Right. So it could be five minutes from now we get a tweet that says something that the markets don’t like and it changes tremendously, especially, you know, we’ve seen the 10 year fluctuate over the last two months within like a 75 basis point range, which is crazy to see that, you know, it puts us kind of back into 2020. We hadn’t seen that since then. But as far as.

trends in the industry, I think is probably more important to talk about because if we start focusing on rates outside of ourselves, we can never really get outside of that, right? Like the rates never going to be good enough for us. So.

John Harcar (10:30.557)
Right, right, right. Yeah, I meant the kind of the whole mortgage industry. What kind of trends are you seeing coming down the pipe?

Ryan Speltz (10:36.566)
Yeah, you know, I mentioned chat, you’ve seen the things to not that won’t change your life, but arguably it can if you do it the right way. Right. And I think that right now, if you are a business owner in the mortgage industry and you’re not focusing on how I can streamline some of the things behind you, you’re missing and eventually you’re going to get stuck behind. And again, you know, we talk about work life harmony as kind of the intro that might be OK. Right. Like maybe you are a guy that you’re doing five loans a month.

and that feeds your family and accomplishes all your goals, you don’t have to go implement something that’s going to get you to seven to 10, right? Like at some point you’ve got to recognize like if I’m just chasing more and more and more, it doesn’t make any sense. That being said, if you are the guy that wants to go from five to 10, the best way to do it is data and using some kind of system that streamlines something that takes you a long time. And so, you know, when we talk about shiny object,

It’s consistently add, add, add, add. But if you can use the tool to subtract something from yourself, then you have more time to do that one thing that you can go as deep as possible on. And that’s kind of the focus for our company, especially, and bringing in loan officers and helping them see that. It’s super important for the rest and kind of the next direction of the mortgage industry is using that technology.

John Harcar (11:58.889)
Awesome. What does your team look like now? What does your company look like now?

Ryan Speltz (12:02.956)
Yeah, we started, we launched about a year ago now. So just kind of getting out the kinks and figuring out, you know, we’re in six different states. So filing quarterly reports and for the business and tax reports, even though, you know, we only have one W2 employee, he moved in the middle of his employment. So now I’ve got two states extra to file in, they, it’s just like figuring it all out, right? Like taking your bumps. But we’ve got, you know, it’s, me and a partner, Jason, and he’s also sober. So it’s kind of cool to have that.

John Harcar (12:22.728)
man.

John Harcar (12:32.137)
Yeah, definitely.

Ryan Speltz (12:32.278)
together. And, you know, we’ve known each other for quite some time. And so good friends operating at a high level is really fun to kind of do. And that’s kind of how I’ve wanted to design my business from the beginning is just started working with people I enjoy being with. And so we got the partner and then we’ve got a loan partner and a processing team. And so it’s kind of nice to get the loans in and then not have to do all the minutia of those kinds of things. And, and then we’ve got, you know,

pretty solid tech stack that takes a lot off our plate with everything else.

John Harcar (13:05.045)
Awesome, awesome. Well, let’s kind of talk a little bit more about the creating harmony in life and business. if you’re talking with someone about this, what are some of the things that you recommend? Or maybe it could be questions they need to ask themselves. Our society says, go, go, go, go, go, accomplish, accomplish, accomplish, get as much as you can. How do you get people to steer away from that and understand that life?

Ryan Speltz (13:29.186)
The biggest thing is really just not necessarily even knowing your numbers. That’s obviously important to know like conversion rates and how many people you actually have to talk to to get a loan and that kind of stuff. That’s just like surface level stuff though because you can figure that out and then not know what to do with that information. Right. Like you may know that at one out of every 10 people you talk to you close a loan on them. OK cool. But where does that lead to. Like do know how much you make per loan. Do you know how much you need to make. And so this is something I’ve kind of adopted from Glover you which is a

big real estate coaching company and Jeff Glover, I’ve met him personally a few times. He’s a fantastic dude, like, like top notch. If you’re looking for coaching in real estate, he’s a dude. He’s a dude that I would talk to, you know, just to tap his brain. He’s a, he’s a good dude. And I went to one of his events and we spent the entire first day morning. Like it took like a 10 minute break out of four hours. We spent the entire morning breaking down our needs, our wants, and then translating those into numbers.

so that you can recognize like, you know, people ask, if you ask a loan officer how much he wants to make, he’s gonna tell you $100,000. Because anybody that’s never made $100,000, they wanna make $100,000. That’s like the benchmark, right? And then you break it down for him. did this with one of the loan officers I used to work with. She put $100,000 down as her goal. We did the numbers. I told her like, make up this crazy vacation. Like she wanted to go to Ireland. said,

I’ve been to Ireland it’ll cost you about four grand if you do it where you drive all over the country and and spend your nights in Airbnbs and you know do it like the thrift way right I said I don’t want you to do it the thrift way I literally want you to plan this trip and I want you to make it as crazy as you could think of right like someone drives you around the entire country and You spend the night in the castle every night, right? So we did the math she ends up coming up with like a $17,000 number or something like that

Her husband’s got a really good job. She’s kind of just doing this. She’s a stay at home mom. She wanted to add some extra income to the family, kind of clear out some debt. So that was the other thing was I want to clear out the debt. So we did the math and she had set this hundred thousand dollar bar, which at the time would have been three loans a month for her. broke it all down, end up being like sixty two thousand dollars and she only had a close one point one loans per month. But she was aiming for three loans a month as a new loan officer, thinking like, I can’t even get one loan. How am I going to get three?

John Harcar (15:53.416)
Right.

Ryan Speltz (15:53.903)
like stressing herself out about making this arbitrary hundred thousand dollar number when really she needed not nowhere near that. So breaking it down like that just kind of like it takes the pressure off. Even if it ends up being more loans than you thought, that’s fine. But now you know, and then you start breaking down daily habits. So long story there, biggest thing would be break down what you need and what you want. And

John Harcar (16:05.098)
Yeah.

Ryan Speltz (16:17.806)
you know, take what your big, big wants are and average them over the next 12 months to kind of get a benchmark of what you could do. And then you’ll get to the end of the 12 months and you go, I could push that another 12 months. Let me figure something else out for the next 12. And then you’ve got this big chunk of money sitting around that you didn’t use on the, you know, $20,000 vacation. So it’s just kind of recognizing what you actually want and need. And then going after it is the biggest thing that we do on day one when we bring in loan officers.

John Harcar (16:35.091)
Right.

John Harcar (16:45.183)
So kind of just kind of like reverse engineering your goals, right? Start with the end in mind and then break it down into pieces. How do you get there? What do you, yeah, okay.

Ryan Speltz (16:48.237)
Yeah, and.

Ryan Speltz (16:53.09)
Yeah, and changing goals because everybody kind of looks at goals. It’s one of those words that can kind of be like pie in the sky a little bit, kind of turning goals more into benchmarks and objectives. Right. So now you go, OK, I want to close three loans a month. I know I have to talk to 15 people today. How am I going to do that? And then you check it off and you go, OK, that was a perfect day. And then the next day you put a perfect day together and then you make a whole perfect week. And now you go look back and you have something in, you know, as David Goggins would say, in the cookie jar to pull out like you you just did a whole week of it.

You can do next week too, and you just keep pushing and pushing, but you’re not pushing for something that’s just more. You’re pushing to an actual objective, which is so much more powerful internally.

John Harcar (17:23.881)
Yeah.

John Harcar (17:30.485)
to a goal.

John Harcar (17:34.037)
100%, 100%. Awesome, man. Great content, dude. Before we sign off here, is there any last words of advice? Anything that you kind of want to share with our audience that might lend to that whole harmony in life of business thing?

Ryan Speltz (17:49.945)
Yeah, the number one thing that I’ve recognized, and again, this comes with clarity of sobriety, I’m sure. And, you know, it doesn’t put anybody that does drink or, you know, that isn’t sober behind the eight ball or anything like that. You just have to sit down and kind of really figure out what you actually want. And if that’s not where you are right now, then that’s OK. But just start talking about where you want to be and start talking about yourself as you are already there.

and things will start being put in front of you that you didn’t recognize before. And I think a lot of us bury ourselves very quickly into places where we can’t see opportunity because we’re so buried. And if we can kind of build a stairway out of that, it’s just as cliche as it sounds, take the first step and really figure out where you want to be and then put yourself there.

John Harcar (18:44.691)
Love it. Ryan, thank you, man, for coming on here and sharing all that stuff. That’s that’s some great info. mean, just a whole life, you know, life part of it. know, guys, I hope you at home enjoyed the show, too. Hope you took some good notes, took some good nuggets. You know, it’s it’s important to balance that life and business. You’re going to die faster than you want to. Ryan, I appreciate your time, man. Thank you for coming on again. And folks, we’ll see on the next one. Cheers.

Ryan Speltz (19:10.607)
Thanks, John.