In this uniform episode, Todd Schuchart, Founder of Razor Ridge Leads, shares how to master consistent lead generation and sales without burning out in stage 2. If you struggle with feast-or-famine revenue and relying on referrals alone, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to build repeatable outbound systems that fill your pipeline predictably

- Why consistent daily prospecting beats sporadic "big swings" every time

- What simple scripts and follow-up cadences turn cold outreach into warm conversations

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Todd Schuchart is an expert in life insurance sales and lead generation, leading Razor Ridge Leads. With a deep understanding of the industry, he focuses on developing innovative solutions for agents, including conversational sales training and AI-driven CRM tools, to help life insurance professionals streamline their processes, improve client connections, and boost conversions. Todd is known for his commitment to simplifying the sales process, his levity to everyday situations, and his agent-first approach, creating high-quality resources that empower agents to succeed in a competitive market.

Want to learn more about Todd Schuchart's work at Razor Ridge Leads? Check out his website at https://razorridge.com/

Connect with Todd through his LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddcharles/

Check out his Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/razorridgeleads

Check out his other work at Sales Chowder at https://saleschowder.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed. Podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and if you're in a

service based business or you you really have to sell anything

to anyone, but particularly for those of you who are in that

stage two startup entrepreneur mode, getting out there and

getting it done. You know the brutal truth, you can have a

great product, you can have an amazing service, and still

struggle to close business. And we almost universally fall prey

to the lie that it's just because we don't have enough

leads. But that might not be the problem. In fact, there might be

a different problem that no matter how many leads you have,

you simply cannot overcome, and our guest is going to share what

that problem is here in just a moment, but he's well equipped

to do so, because he's totally flipped the script on how sales

are done, particularly in B to B and insurance businesses. He

Himself sold six figures in 60 days, and he's here to show you

how our guest today is Todd Schuchart, who is an expert in

life insurance sales and lead generation, leading razor edge

leads now with a deep understanding of the industry,

he focuses on developing innovative solutions for agents,

including conversational sales training and AI driven CRM

tools. He uses all this to help life insurance professionals

streamline their profits processes, improve client

connections, can't talk today, and boost conversions. Oh my

gosh, here we go. Todd is known for his commitment to

simplifying the sales process, his levity to everyday

situations, and his agent first approach, creating high quality

resources that empower agents to succeed in a competitive market,

and he's here with us today. Todd, you got to tell us a

story. How'd you do it? You went from I believe it was nothing,

to generating six figures in your first 60 days. What's the

what's the secret here?

Yeah, decades of secrets sitting behind that one

for sure. You know, it's that overnight success thing where

everybody doesn't see the bottom of the bottom of the iceberg and

all the work that you put in to do it. Truthfully, I didn't have

a choice, right? So when you don't have a Plan B, Plan A has

to work right? And I think that anytime that you have, you enter

into anything that you're doing in your life, whether it's for

pleasure or for profit, if you're coming in with with half

a cheek and you're not fully committed, then you're going to

get the results of a half a cheek, right? You're not going

to get when you're fully committed. I listen to a lot of

different podcasts, and one of my favorites is, is some is

actors talking about how, you know, they finally made their

break in. Every one of them, every one of the household names

that you guys, that everybody listening would know, they all

have a very similar story. I wasn't good at anything else. I

wasn't going to do anything else. This is all I had. It had

to work. And every single one of them, every single one of them,

did not have a plan B. So when Plan A starts to get a little

squirrely, what do you do? You don't leave it. You shift and

adjust to it. So half of the game Scott is figuring out how

to sell, what it is that you're selling, that's it. And you

know, you only do that by playing, you know, it's not

rigid, right? And I think a lot of times, especially

entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, not young in age,

but young in effort, or young in the entrepreneurial world, we

come in with a with a very, very specific mission. I'm going to

do, I'm going to this is what is what we do. This is how we do

it. And then we roll it out to the world. And if we're if we're

paying attention, we let the audience or the world tell us

how we need to adjust that messaging so that it will

resonate with them, so that they'll work with us. And then

we can take that really great idea that we have and birth it.

But so many times I see guys get in and they just, they grind to

the right. This is my idea. It's going to work. I'm going to get

the world to bend to it. It's not going to happen. And then we

start seeing all these, you know, things go sideways. And

there's a lot of really great ideas collecting dusts on a lot

of shelves and garages and basements around the world for

that reason alone, right? It's so true. Yeah, and check your

ego, because it this isn't where it exists. You know, you get the

ego later when you exit it for a billion dollars and, you know,

you're, you're floating around, you know, drinking my ties on

your your yacht. But until then, it's a very humbling experience,

and you've got to be paying attention. You have to listen to

what your audience is trying to tell you. Make sense?

It does. It really does. There's, there's so

much to unpack in that. One of the things right out of the gate

is I love this idea of playing that's not how most people think

about and teach about how to succeed as an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneur, but you're so right. You don't know the

answers when you start. And and so one of the traps I see folks

fall into, especially when they follow these rigid processes, is

that they are rigid processes based on assumptions that were

never validated. And and so I love this idea of playing

because I think it brings freedom to actually validate

some of those things and freedom to adjust them when you

invalidate some of them. I really like that language. I

think that's fantastic. The other point that you made in

there, that I want to draw out is this is a really big

distinction between the entrepreneur stage and the pre

entrepreneur stage, stage one. And in stage one you have other

options. In fact, you should be exploring other options once you

make the leap to stage two, once you jump in the game, you're

right, if you're if you got one foot in, one foot out, I'm yet

to see that work well. And and so for a lot of folks, there's

two things to take from that. Is one, be more thoughtful before

you make the leap. You know, make sure this is really what

you're you're going to do, and then once you make the leap, be

more diligent in working through the inevitable shortcomings that

are coming. I'm interested to know, because you did this in a

very short period of time. So what does, what did that play

process look like for you in in kind of cracking the code so

quickly.

Great question, man. You know, I think that if,

okay, so this goes back to Plan B, right? If we have a plan B

and A starts to get wonky, we just go, Well, I got Plan B. I'm

okay. But when B doesn't exist, and you're back in the corner.

You have to fight your way out of the corner. So you just start

doing what anybody does that's ever been in an actual fight

that you just start throwing things, you're biting, you're

kicking, you're punching, you're swinging, you're jumping,

whatever you can do to move. And what happens eventually is maybe

one of those, those frantic throws catches. And if you're

paying attention to that, you go, Ooh, let's try that again.

Hey, wait a minute this. I got something here. This is working,

right? So for me, originally, we had rolled out, you know, a beta

with our leads, and it did well, because we had top closers in

our in our group, and then we rolled it out to a mass

audience, and everybody kept telling me how bad everything

sucked. And I was like, okay, so I don't believe you, because

I've been doing this since a long time ago. We're not gonna

confess to ages, not true confessions today. Is it we? I

just said, You know what? I know they're not bad leads. I've

worked leads my entire career, and anytime I found a lead of

the quality that we were generating, I tried to buy all

of them. I tried to lock that market up. So something was a

miss. So I got jumped in, jumped in the ring, and started working

the leads. And I was calling them just like you would any

other lead. And they were right. They sucked. Nobody answered the

phone. And I was going, what am I going to do? Pure desperation,

I started throwing those frantic punches, and I wrote 15 text

messages to 15 leads. Three of them were the same, and then I'd

switch, and I'd write three variants, and then three

variants. And then I closed my computer and I went to dinner,

and when I came back, 14 of the 15 had replied. I was jockeying

14 text conversations all at the same time. First person I text

was the first person that responded, was the first

appointment I booked, was the first deal I closed. And I went,

Oh, wait a minute, we don't call people anymore. We text people

now because nobody cares about the phone, right? They don't.

Nobody answers the phone. So that was it. It was, you know,

the gloves came off. I got my spot. Now, it was, how do we

optimize these processes to get the most response out of what we

have? And that's really been the mission ever since.

Yeah. Now, what does optimization look

like? Because, as I understand it, you're not a big fan of of

scripting, or at least over scripting the process. So tell

us a little bit. What does the process look like and and how

you think folks should really approach the sales function?

Yeah, I, you know, my sales philosophy is

conversational, right? So there's a couple of trainers out

there that I really like. I don't know if I'm is that cool

with you that we dropped those? Okay, so my first is, I love

Jordan Belfort, The Wolf of Wall Street. Only lots of reasons.

But you know, I don't, I don't think that the process that you

know, the the straight line process is, is innovative on its

own. I think what he's done really well, because that's

sidestep rebuttal clothes. But the thing that he's done really

well is he simplified a very convoluted, hard to train

process, so I appreciate that from him. So it's always staying

on your direction. You've got four to seven seconds to win him

over when they answer the phone or they get on the call with

you. Um. You're enthusiastic as hell, and tonality drives your

intent. Right. Then from there, we go to an old school trainer,

Stan Ballou. Stan came around the mid 80s, late 80s, early

90s. Amazing. If you can find his stuff, I promise you, it's

worth the hunt. Stan has since left us, but you know, you'd

appreciate to know things that are secrets, wouldn't you?

Scott, yeah, right. We, we like to do those types of things,

don't we stand ballooning you right now, is what I'm doing,

and we have firm things, right? Does that make you feel? How

does that make you feel? Felt found. It's all Stan. Stan

brought that to the market. Now he's been ripped off more than I

can tell at this point, but and then I like Jeffrey gitimer for

his givers gain. So I think when you when you line all those

things up together, you have structure from Jordan, tonality

from Jordan. You've got how to say what you're saying from from

a stand below, and you've got givers gain coming from a Gitmo

which positions you to really be of value while you're doing your

sales calls. So for me, a sales call is it's a conversation,

that's all it is. I have no intention at all other than to

bridge that gap between you and I Not knowing each other, and

now we know each other, if, in that process, we decide to do

business together. That's a win, win. But I am not the guy that's

going to going to say, Oh, here's your canned replies to

when they say this, because it's conversational. So I love when a

new, newer sales person says, What do I say when they say and

the it's really simple. Stop trying to be in sales mode and

just be a person, because if your best friend just asked you

that question, you would answer it, and it's the exact same

answer that you would give that person, that best friend, that

you would give to the potential new client. And then the last

thing I'll tell you on this piece is, if you're going to ask

a question, you better be paying attention to understand the

answer, because the answer is going to drive the rest of your

conversation, as they do in any conversation. So take sales off

of the table and just connect with people, find out if there's

a need there, pay attention to what they're saying. Do not

think about what you're going to say next, because what you're

going to say next probably isn't going to be relevant to what

they're replying to you with, right? That's really it in a

nutshell. It's that simple. Now you can you get past the basics.

You can start layering in things like psychology and the

takeaways and all the other kind of fun little things you can do

on sales calls, but at its core, it's just two people connecting.

It's all it is. So if you can do that, and most people that are

probably listening to this have had conversations in their life

where they've connected with somebody, same rules, right?

I certainly hope so. Yeah, I and I love

that, especially for for founders who who are actually

quite gifted at this within their domain, right? The thing

that they love, the passion about it, and the drive. I mean,

so many founders, at least the ones that I work with, are not

just driven by the thing that they do, but the that what it

does for the people they serve.

Right there, it's what is it doing. It's not

what is it it's what is it doing, right? So amplify this

thing. I don't care about your mp three player in 22 gigabots

or whatever. It doesn't matter to me now, 1000 songs in my

pocket. Yeah, that's exciting. And that's also where they owned

that space, and you don't see any of those players anymore.

They're just they've all kind of given up for good reason. Sorry

to cut you off there, but.

Yeah, no, that's exactly it. And I think

it's so freeing for folks. And one of the things that got me

excited about this conversation is that to succeed in this

stage, you don't have to be what we think of as this great sales

rep. You don't have to have the perfect sales script. You just

have to connect with the folks that you want to serve.

Write a script and write it again. So you write

your first script, and you're in the movie, man, your hair is

blowing. If this is just audio, I have no hair, but your hair is

blowing in the you know, and you're standing in front of your

troops, and you're rallying them, and, you know, it's like

the Mel Gibson, where he's got his face painted blue, and all

they've got are sticks and rocks, and they're going to go

against the guys with swords and cannons, right? And they all

ride off and get killed. But it's that inspirational thing

you want to write that just and it's this long, convoluted

process, and you write the whole thing, and then you go back with

a red marker, and you start taking out all the filler that

you don't need, and then you rewrite it. And you do that

process again and again and again until it has you want to

make sure you got some tempo to it so it's kind of running along

if you're saying it out loud and you're getting tongue twisted

on. Certain things that is not what you want in there. Get rid

of it. Replace it. You want to make it flow. But when it all

comes down to it, the script is just to keep you on pace. Right?

For new folks, it's your it's your treasure map. We start at

the open. The only thing that I have my folks scripted on word

for word is my opening, because the call is won and lost at the

open. If you open it wrong, and you get to the end and they got

to think about it, pray about it, sleep on and talk to someone

else about it, you opened your call improperly. You didn't make

the connection. Yeah. I mean, I had an old trend. Old sales guy

was telling one of my young reps, oh, don't. Small talks a

waste of time. I was like, Oh no, that's a 30% increase in

your close rate. Like, if you're not spending a few minutes

warming it up and getting to connect with somebody, don't get

on the call. You're not going to get what you want out of it

anyways. Yeah, right. Nobody wants to be transactioned. Yeah,

that's so true. You have let it no baby, you know, you hear.

You're bleeding for this thing. Let them hear and feel that from

you. You know,

Yeah, yeah. There's, yeah. There's like,

five ways I want to go with that, but I want to be

disciplined here. I have a question that I'm very

interested to see what you have to say. It's same question I saw

my guests, but I'm going to ask a view here, and that is, what

is the biggest secret you wish wasn't a secret at all. What's

that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening

today knew?

You know, there's, there's so many,

there's so many little micro channels that that could be

answered from right? It's but I think that 99% of whatever

you're struggling with right now as an entrepreneur is fear

based, and fear in today's world really doesn't have a whole lot

of room. You know, you're not going to get eaten by a lion

anymore. You know, when's the last time one of your friends

got struck by lightning? I mean, just, you know? And for the one

out there that did, I apologize. But for the most part, it's a

pretty, pretty, you know, chill, kind of existence. So fear is

the biggest thing, and we self inflict our fear, and it keeps

us from, from putting ourselves out there. It keeps doing things

like this, right? Like nobody wakes up one day and goes, I'm

awesome in interviews. No, you got to get out there, and you

got to do it, and you got to sweat and cotton mouth and all

the things that. But you got to let the fear go, yeah, because

that will absolutely hinder your growth, and not just your

business, but your personal all of it, it's everything.

Everything comes down to fear, in my opinion, right? Fear and

fear and value. So you are a value because you're here, and

that's just how it is. And you don't have to be afraid, because

there's really nothing you're going to do that's going to end

what you're doing. You might have a clunky video. So up put

it. I put a video out one time, and it said, and halfway

through, I went, Oh, take two. You know, many people reached

out to me. They're like, I love that. You left that in there. I

was like, Oh, I forgot. I didn't edit it. So, and it's not the no

fear thing, like an idiot running into, you know, off a

cliff without a parachute, but, you know, it's just those, those

little self doubts that you have. They're yours, and we all

have them, and the only way to get out of them is to get

uncomfortable and to do it, and then two or three times later,

you forget that you're even afraid of it, and great things

happen on the other side of it.

So good. Todd, I know there's some folks

listening and love to hear more. We've only just scratched the

surface of this. Where Can folks who are listening today find out

more about the work that you do?

So I've launched sales chowder. You can come see

us there. You can find me on this is the part I'm the worst

at. You can find me on LinkedIn. Come hang out with us. Love to

see you. We got lots of things launching, and we're always kind

of playing around in the space. So good stuff, but yeah, come

see me. I'm in Facebook. You can find me there. You can find me

on LinkedIn, sales, chowder.com, I'm kind of kind of floating

around everywhere these days, so.

Fantastic, fantastic. I love it. Todd,

thanks for being on the show. Thanks for sharing. With us here

today. It was just a brilliant conversation, and it really was

a privilege having you on the show. I appreciate it for those

of you watching and listening, you know that your time and

attention mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of

this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see

you next time. Take care.