What if your business could run more efficiently and give you back the freedom you started it for? Ryan Schuetter is an operations expert and AI implementation leader who has helped more than 100 businesses adopt AI and build better systems. Ryan isn't a guru. He's an operator. Through Schuetter Consulting and Schuetter AI, he helps companies turn technology into practical workflows that reduce chaos, improve profitability, and empower teams to work smarter.
Ryan explores why founders become trapped by their businesses, how AI can transform everyday operations, and what it takes to build a company that creates freedom instead of consuming it. Whether you're a real estate entrepreneur, business owner, or investor looking to scale, this conversation offers practical insights to help you take back control of your time and your business.
In this episode, you will be able to:
The key moments in this episode are:
3:41 AI That Saves Time Or Money
6:03 Diagnose Before You Automate
11:26 Deal Flow Tools And Email Agents
14:18 80 20 Underwriting With Buy Box
20:56 Staying Top Of Mind With Brokers
24:20 Start Small and Learn By Doing
FOLLOW:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanschuetter/
IF YOU'RE LOOKING TO BUILD WEALTH THROUGH OPPORTUNITIES IN THE REAL ESTATE INDUSTRY
✅ http://relfreedom.tv
GET STARTED INVESTING TODAY AND ACCESS OUR DEAL LIST!
📈 https://pinnaclecapitalinvestments.com/
LEARN ABOUT REL FREEDOM & HEAR MORE REAL LIFE STORIES
🎙️http://www.FreedomThroughRealEstate.com
FREEBIES: DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE FREEDOM FOUNDATION BLUEPRINT
💵 https://www.relfreedom.com/blueprint
SUBSCRIBE TO THE REL FREEDOM PODCAST
🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rel-freedom-podcast/id1535281574
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5nXA5hLHbDzRwxypc2wLur?si=uwhs8FjVS_mpUAG2znbBDA&nd=1&dlsi=069fb8d4b74d4cfb
LET'S CONNECT
👉 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-swenson/
👉 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/getrelfreedom/
👉 TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@relfreedom
👉 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mswenson13
Full transcript here:
Ryan Schuetter
Probably know who is the person that you need to be best friends with to move forward with your path. It could be brokers, it could be um, you know, investors at the next echelon of where you're trying to go. Um, whoever it might be, just try to study people that are already in those circles and then try to make systems that emulate those.
Mike Swenson
We inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Real Freedom, where we talk about ways that you can build time and financial freedom through the opportunities that are involved in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. If you want to get started on your real estate journey, check out our website, freedom throughrealestate.com. It's where we put all of our content, all of our conversations to help you get involved and scale and grow inside of real estate. And I'm excited to share with you today. We're going to talk about something that we've touched on just a little bit, but we can talk about a little bit more. We've got Ryan Schuder here. Ryan is an AI and business systems consultant and helps people scale and grow their systems inside of real estate and other industries, has worked with a lot of people in a mastermind that we're in together. And personally, I'll quick throw a plug. It's helped me. We're building out our new website for our investing platform. And Ryan was the guy that helped orchestrate it all. And so a ton of wisdom for people looking to grow in AI business systems and to be able to scale. Ryan is a great voice in the space. So, Ryan, we're so excited to have you on the show.
Ryan Schuetter
Thanks for having me on, Mike. I'm excited to chat with you.
Mike Swenson
Take us back, just share a little bit about your background and what you're working on, and we'll take it from there.
Ryan Schuetter
My background's not in real estate or AI or anything like that. I it's been a long journey to get here. I started in healthcare where I was in project management for a little bit, doing clinical studies at a local um children's hospital in Cincinnati. So I had, you know, grandiose ideas of going to medical school growing up. Hence, I graduated from college with a health sciences degree at Ohio State. Then I um joined the children's hospital. And then just through those roles I had at the hospital, I really kind of started to gain my knowledge in um like sales systems and technology platforms. And I kind of became the local um tech nerd trying to optimize their sort of systems there naturally. As time went on there, I actually started to do some land flipping on the side as sort of a side hustle in my first taste in entrepreneurship. But that um with that experience, the same sort of themes popped up with me being the tech nerd that loves optimizing the systems I was using, trying to create automations within my own business, and then eventually started to help some of my other um friends' businesses do the same. Um, this was prior to AI being a very big um topic for most people. Most people wouldn't even back, you know, two years ago, weren't daily using ChatGPT or Cloud or anything like that. But I was certainly an early-on user of those platforms, trying to implement it into my own business, started helping a couple of others do the same. And then it kind of clicked in my head that I should be doing what I consider my zone of genius full-time, which hence brought me to um being more so of an AI and small business educator slash consultant, starting full-time last summer when I left that healthcare job.
Mike Swenson
For somebody that, let's just say 35 years old plus, right? They've heard about AI, they know they need to be doing more with AI. You know, it doesn't work for a large company. Just real quick, like some things that you think that are benefits of it, why it's worth investing the time, because we're we're busy doing our own thing, right? And sometimes you think things are fad, sometimes they're not. This is obviously not that. So it's just you've got to figure out how to adapt it, but we're uncomfortable, we don't understand technology, something like that. For somebody like that, walk through some of those conversations you have with people or kind of the the benefits of why it's worth their attention and their time to start pouring time in to understanding it better.
Ryan Schuetter
Certainly. So the two sort of categories that I try to break out any sort of AI project into is either saving time or making more money. If you can't tie into using AI for one of those two factors, then likely you're not really getting the true sort of use out of it. Um, there's a lot of easy ways to get distracted with AI. Maybe you're on social media as much as I am, and I see all these sort of distractions out there about, oh, I should add AI into my business to help with this or with that. But you want to really tie it to a specific problem that you're having in your business and then understand the return on investment of adding it into those business processes. So with the role that I've been, you know, with the roles I've been playing in the teams that I've been a part of, um, it's never about, oh, let's replace this employee with AI or let's try to get rid of this department or anything like that. It's really trying to enable the people within the business to be more efficient so they could be spending their manpower or their um most important hours of their day on the things that they specifically can move the needle forward on, whereas the AI could play a part in maybe the more monotonous tasks or the tasks that take a lot of time or the things that probably don't require really a lot of human thought. So that's the way I like to describe it.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. I mean, if somebody, you know, say somebody's working in an eight-hour work day, they're doing eight hours of work. Well, what if they were able to get 16 hours of work done in an eight-hour day? And so, like you said, it's not like we're looking for ways to eliminate people, it's how do we leverage those people to be able to do more and solve more problems for the business or your department, whatever that might be, utilizing the functionality
Mike Swenson
in AI. Walk through how you start that process with somebody. So if I'm coming to you, Ryan, uh, we just had a great conversation offline of me, you playing therapist, me sharing all my problems. So if somebody comes to you with a problem, how does that conversation happen? And how do you start to pull things from their brain to figure out where you can take this and where you can help them?
Ryan Schuetter
Yeah, well, funny enough, now that we already identified the problem, a lot of the hard work's already done for me and you, Mike, but typically I have to really drag that out of the people when I start these sort of conversations. I'm a big frameworks person. I follow a lot of frameworks in my systems work because I like being super systematic about how I'm building with AI and making sure I'm solving real world problems. And the first pro the first uh step of all of this is identifying the problem in the first place. What is the thing that's keeping you up at night, Mike? What is the thing that's most limiting your business from scaling or from growth? Or what's preventing you from growing your portfolio within your investments, things like that. Um, so usually first step of any process of me just talking to any sort of potential client is identifying the main problem and or trying to drag it out of them however I can. But from there, if we're extremely clear, if maybe it's a limitation in your marketing outreach, or if it's a limitation into your day-to-day, you have too much work on your plate and it's becoming um it's bogging you down or it's slowing down your progress with whatever you're trying to achieve. The first goal is to make sure that we word this and put this front and center for everything we do together. This is the one thing that we're trying to solve for. Once we have that, we usually try to articulate what different solutions for this might look like. Obviously, you could work with AI to talk through what these different solutions might entail, but you really want to envision what your day-to-day looks like and how can a solution fit into it. So, for instance, maybe you as an investor spend a lot of time working in some sort of sales system, marketing back and forth with potential investors trying to raise capital, or maybe you're doing a lot of social media growth and you're trying to post as much on social media to get potential investors to come in. Um, one potential problem we could identify is maybe your main bottleneck is trying to get more investors in some sort of capacity, but no matter the avenue. Um, what a solution might look like is some sort of tool that fits in the platforms that you're already using on a day-to-day basis. Or it could be something that scrapes the internet for social media posts ideas, or depending on whatever the bottleneck is, you really want to articulate what a solution could look like. You could also study people that have done it in the past. A lot of these sort of, you know, research steps go into this early-on phase where we don't even use AI in the first place. It's really just trying to figure out potential solutions. From there, we try to make some sort of system that works with you directly without having AI come in and replace you yet. So you want to make sure that whatever sort of um solution that you have proposed, it is entering a foolproof sort of system that you've already built. Um I think the catchphrase I always like to use is automating chaos is scaling chaos. If you're trying to plug AI into a system that's already broken or doesn't work for you already, for instance, maybe you have some sort of investor relations pipeline or lead funnel or something like that. But if it doesn't work with you running it yourself, AI isn't going to run it at a higher level than you. It's probably just going to scale the chaos that already exists. So a lot of this upfront work, right? It's like, oh man, Ryan, why are you telling me to do all this upfront work? I got work. I just want AI to come in and help me solve these problems from the get-go. Um, that's kind of a fallacy, in my opinion. You need to figure out a really proper system, and then you could implement AI and it could take it off your hands. So a lot of it comes into my sort of framework. I call it the DASA framework, which stands for diagnose, articulate, systemize, and then finally AI implementation. And it follows that exact step, that exact sort of steps that I've just outlined for you.
Mike Swenson
An ounce of planning is worth a pound of prevention or what's that phrase?
Ryan Schuetter
I yeah, I it's off, I uh I know exactly what you're talking about.
Mike Swenson
But yeah, I was gonna say the other analogy I always give is we used to say, you know, if you if you started a flight in New York and you were heading west, the difference between Seattle and Los Angeles is like one degree at the beginning. So if you don't figure out which way you're going, you're either gonna, if you just say, let's go, right? Let's just hop in the plane and start flying west, you could end up in Seattle or Los Angeles. And the difference between the two is not much at the beginning. So you've got to get set on what you are trying to accomplish before you hop in the plane and fly away.
Ryan Schuetter
Yeah. And absolutely, and it's easy to set AI up for success in the future if it if you just take the time to gather as much context on what you're trying to build as possible. It's easy to just jump into these things and say, build this solution to help with my um, you know, short-term rentals or managing these sort of rentals for me. But if you don't take the time to articulate exactly what this could look like and talk about your business with the AI platform that's helping you build these things out, then it could lead you astray. And then you're probably building a solution that will not last and you'll probably ditch within the first month of using it.
Mike Swenson
I've also heard people use it help with finding deals or analyzing deals, right? Reaching out to brokers, agents, things like that to find property. You know, hey, only only send me this if it fits these criteria, things like that. That, yeah, like you mentioned, you know, just scraping the internet can help save a lot of time.
Ryan Schuetter
Yeah, certainly. The favorite tool that I've built in relation to the things that you were just talking about was a tool that was sending me real estate deals based on my buy box. So for a little bit, I was in the residential assisted living space, and we were in a blessed position, fortunately, to have a lot of deals hitting our inbox from broker relationships, from um having certain people in our network sending these deals. So we had a lot to underwrite. And I was the person in charge of doing the underwriting. So it became um my bottleneck became the amount of time that I had to contribute to these things. So one of the tools that I built to help solve this problem was essentially an email agent that took all the deals that hit my email inbox, figured out which ones were the ones that truly fit my buy box, almost doing a preliminary underwriting for me so it could do this, you know, sort of upfront analysis, present some green flags and red flags to me. So I didn't have to spend the time doing the full underwriting for all these deals that hit my inbox. Let's say five deals hit my inbox a day that came from different sources. I wanted to get cut down to one so I could only underwrite the most important one. So that's just one example of the many things you can build. You could also build scraping agents that go onto certain sources and try to find deals. You know, there's caveats to that because some websites are easier to scrape than others. If you've been building in the AI space, you could quickly realize that. But um, for all you know, intensive purposes for beginners, um, it just comes down to understanding what your bottleneck is. Is your bottleneck the time that it takes to go into underwriting these deals like myself, or is your bottleneck you don't have enough deals on your plate, then you want to bring AI in to help fix those problems.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. So out of curiosity, just kind of let's let's walk through this for a little bit. So you had mentioned about somebody that could anal, you know, something that could analyze deals. Yeah. Um to do so, right? So this is me thinking, I've got a lot of information to process, right? Financials, um, projections, things like that. Uh, you may not have everything that you need to properly analyze a deal. So you might get one deal that has all the information you need you need, you might get one that has some, one that has minimal. So walk through being able to build a tool like that that needs to find and fill in data to be able to properly analyze it. Like how do you go about that just so somebody could hear kind of logistically how something like that gets executed?
Ryan Schuetter
Yeah, sure. So it always helps to have some sort of system you already use prior to building the AI to um align with that. So obviously, a lot of people have deal calculators, and a lot of people have maybe specific checklists they go through to figure out what fits their buy box, what doesn't, how they figure out the, you know, they go through the underwriting process, right? Um for me, what that looked like, at least building this sort of AI agent, I understood that it's not gonna be able to do the full underwriting process for me, nor do I want it to, because as of August of 2026, thing, you know, AI should not be doing the full underwriting process for you. It's too high risk because it's probably gonna miss some things. It's probably gonna try to make assumptions that don't exist. But with that said, it could still do a pretty good job at getting the first glance for you done. So I really like to follow the 80-20 rule for whatever I'm doing, which essentially means you try to do the 20% of what moves the needle forward, whereas maybe systems or AI or you know, other people try to do the 80% that doesn't really need you to be a part of this sort of system. So how AI fits into the 80-20 rule for me is that the AI does first glances at these deals that are hitting my inbox. And I have very specific metrics that are absolute non-negotiables that are easy to grab from these, you know, materials, including um like square footage of the property or um how many floors, very specific layout instructions, things like that that are non-negotiables for what I'm trying to do. It's easy to scrape that no matter how much information a broker is grab uh sending to you, you know, if it comes in the form of an OM or a SIM or whatever is hitting your inbox. It's, you know, AI is easily getting some of these numeric values because it is very practical and it's in every sort of um, any any sort of materials that gets in your way, right? So this AI agent that does this preliminary, preliminary underwriting for me, it does a really good job of taking these first maybe like top 10 criteria and just cranking through them whenever this hits our inbox. It's very focused on understanding does it fit this criteria? Yes, no, maybe. And then maybe it gives it a grade out of 10. It fits seven out of 10 of these criteria, eight out of 10. And usually for the ones that we proceeded to do a full underwriting on, it usually hit at least nine out of 10 of that criteria, ideally 10, because of the properties we were trying to go after for the residential assisted living stuff, being very particular in what we needed.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, that's great. I was also thinking of an example you had mentioned about or you had showed us in our group that we were in about how you have AI reading the transcripts of your calls and suggesting ideas for topics for social media posts. Yeah. So you had mentioned that as something. So talk a little bit more about that.
Ryan Schuetter
I have been actively building what I call my content engine, which is essentially trying to repurpose things that I do on a day-to-day basis to be social media posts or to be transformed into email outreach or ads for my business, things like that. So you might ask, like, how is that even possible? It takes a lot of time for me to do all these marketing tasks on a day-to-day basis. I essentially try to use the information I already have within my own business. So, for instance, I have my email inbox full of messages that I've previously written. I have a lot of social media content out there already. I have a Google Drive full of meeting transcripts with, you know, coaching call transcripts I've had with Mike or others, things like that. And they just accumulate and cumulate. And you um, as you accumulate all of these um different pieces of information, you could be reusing these to help you with your day-to-day business. So a very easy example of something literally anyone can do these days is connecting your some sort of meeting transcript bot to um social media scheduling platforms or cloud. So the way this works is for instance, a meeting like this will get recorded. Maybe it's our weekly team meeting, or maybe it's a one-on-one meeting with a client or an employee or something like that. This meeting transcript gets recorded by Gemini, for instance, and gets added to my Google Drive every single day. I probably have three or four meetings at least every single day that's hitting my Google Drive. Then what AI does, specifically Claude for me, goes through these transcripts and summarizes the main themes from these transcripts, understands if I can make certain social media posts from these transcripts based on the themes that came up. And then it drafts emails, uh, sorry, an email to me with some of these drafted social media posts. So maybe from this conversation me and Mike had today, one drafted post could be about um a investor relations um social media post that talks about how AI could fit into investor relations, something like that, because me and Mike are talking about it. These ideas are getting recorded, saved my Google Drive. AI reads through these things in my Google Drive and makes social media posts for me in my own voice. Since I have so much social media posts out there already, it could grab those previous posts and understand how I like to talk, how I like to draft these things. So, in the process of building all this, I laid out the problem I'm trying to solve for. I'm trying to make sure I'm creating more social media content. I articulate what this looks like. It looks like these previous posts that I've already made manually. And then the system is transcript to Google Drive, to Claude, to my email inbox with maybe three to five drafts a day. It'll be written drafts, right? It'll be like a Facebook draft, a LinkedIn draft for something that I could maybe post directly or talk about in a talking head video, something like that. So I've been using that a lot, but I'm also trying to grow this into other avenues in my business. I have an email inbox full of ideas now. I have my Google Drive full of a lot of notes I've taken over time. So it's really trying to lower the barrier to entry by giving it more information about my day-to-day life and the conversations I'm having.
Mike Swenson
That's awesome. And and the opportunities are endless of what you can continue to do to scale that, bring somebody else on board, train something else to be able to execute on that stuff. What are some other things that you're seeing out there of kind of problems for you know business owners or you know, real estate professionals, investors, whatever that might be that uh you've had conversations around?
Ryan Schuetter
Yeah, certainly. So I think at least for a lot of the potential listeners of this podcast, obviously it's trying to get more deals on uh in your inbox. Um you know, it might be the fact that you have too many deals to underwrite, but for a lot of people, I kind of doubt that. I feel like more than anything, you just need more reps because the people that are doing this at an extremely high level, the people that you're the level you're trying to get to, you need to be looking at more deals. So building something like the things I already talked about is great, but also how can you become the best friend with the broker that can get you the deals that you need? So I'm always trying to figure out some sort of tool or some sort of dashboard or maybe just a framework to follow that allows me to become the best friends with the people that will move me forward. Me and Mike were previously talking about who, not how. That sort of idea is definitely coming into play with this. So the example back to my um my residential assistant. A living work, we had a list of brokers that we were constantly constantly in contact with, right? We were always trying to be top of mind for these people. Whenever a deal hit their inbox, we wanted them to instantly think of our group. Like, how can you brainwash in quotations people to think of you first more than your competitors? And there's ways to systemize that. There's ways to make sure that you're reaching out to people in different ways and staying top of mind. You could send them little gifts or letters, you could send them friendly text messages or phone calls without obviously, you know, bombarding them and pissing them off and making them block your number, things like that. It's certainly, you know, walking a fine line, but how can you use AI to maybe remind you of these things? So I essentially built an automation that connected to my CRM system. My CRM had a bunch of broker, um, broker contact information, emails, phone numbers, things like that. And I created a system within it that reminds me to reach out to Mike because maybe I know Mike's birthday is coming up. Let's send Mike a quick happy birthday text and remind him of maybe the deals we're looking for, trying to be as friendly as possible. Likewise, um, you could have a newsletter that goes out to these people. There's a lot of different automations that come into it, but the gist is try to study people that are really good at keeping these relationships at a very high level. Who are the people that are the first people to come to mind in your own life when you're referring business? Just try to get the system down that um can make you the best friend of whoever you're trying to grow with. Um so you know, it is kind of goofy and it's a little um obsolete what I'm talking about right now. But I think for everyone's individual cases, you probably know who is the person that you need to be best friends with to move forward with your path. It could be brokers, it could be um, you know, investors at the next echelon of where you're trying to go, um whoever it might be, just try to study people that are already in those circles and then try to make systems that emulate those.
Mike Swenson
So you've talked a lot about ways to bring in new business, analyze business, scale business. What else do you want to share before we wrap up?
Ryan Schuetter
AI is scary for people getting started, especially when you see like videos of people that might be way far ahead of you and they're like, oh my gosh, my competitors are launching all these crazy tools. This person's gloating about how they underwrote, you know, a million deals over the last year using AI, something ridiculous. Um I would just recommend just trying to get some started in some very um low maintenance way. Just try to think about the problems that you're going through on a day-to-day basis. What is something that you do every single day that maybe is the same process that you follow every single day that potentially could be handed off to AI? Once you identify that problem, then I would just build maybe a small solution. You could even work with Claude, discuss what this solution could look like, and then just go try to build it. It really is just about taking action. And the first time you do this will be messy and it will probably come out with some sort of gross output that you won't appreciate. But once you do this rep once, you'll be leaps and bounds ahead of most people already because people are not doing this. You know, 90% of people aren't doing this already.
Mike Swenson
Are you looking to get started or scale in real estate investing but don't know your next step? Are you overwhelmed thinking about finding deals, analyzing deals, doing due diligence, and managing properties on top of it? Go ahead and push the easy button and invest with us. Real estate investing is what we do full time. We've done dozens of deals with hundreds of doors. We have the knowledge and experience to handpick the best deals that most investors can't find. We've got large off-market deals all the time where you can hopefully find returns and economies of scale that you just can't find on your own. The best thing is it's 100% passive to you or for less capital than you put down trying to acquire a property on your own. Don't let this year go by before you don't make the leap, add to your portfolio, or you just did an analysis by paralysis. To find out more, visit freedomthroughrealestate.com and click on invest. You can book a call and learn more there. So get to scaling your portfolio now with us by your side. That's freedomthrurealestate.com and click on invest.
Ryan Schuetter
And then secondly, you'll be you you'll just become understanding of what the AI build process looks like. So then you could build other things for your business, or you could become an extremely tech forward business, whatever you're trying to do. Um, and likely that just starts with what problems you're facing on a day-to-day basis. Likewise, maybe you're not actively investing in any properties right now, and maybe you're just in the learning phase. I always encourage people to just start by building something fun. I uh, you know, as nerdy as it is, I love building video games with AI just for kicks and giggles. Um, that is something that if you're like, you know what, I really just want to learn about how to use AI to build certain applications. Um start by making a really, you know, low maintenance, easy game that could just get you introduced to platforms like Cloud Code, for instance. Um it's super easy to do. You won't be stressed out doing it. There's you know nothing riding on this, no money that's gonna be lost, things like that. So if you're trying to get started, I heavily encourage you to do that.
Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, thank you, Ryan, for coming on and sharing tips and ideas for people. Obviously, it's it's a much deeper conversation and there's a lot more work to be done to kind of walk people through these phases and help them out and get them moving. And and for somebody like you that can be an outsider and and see things and help things and recommend things, um, it's super important. So for for people that want to reach out to you, kind of learn how to connect and ways that you could help them, how can they do so?
Ryan Schuetter
Yeah, Mike, I appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me on today. Um, anyone that's listening could find me at ryan shooter.com. That's spelled f-c-h-u-e-t-t-e-r. Um, I post on pretty much any social media platform. You can find me on Instagram, find me on Facebook, find me on LinkedIn, YouTube. Um, I'm always posting demos about what I'm building so you can get inspiration from those. Um and additionally, I'm writing a newsletter called the Freedom Based Founder on Substack. So um feel free to reach out on whatever platform you use most often. And hopefully I could have some resources that I send your way.
Mike Swenson
Thank you so much. Excited to see what you've done. You've you've helped me a ton. So if you're listening to this, make sure you reach out to Ryan because he can help you as well. So thanks for coming on.
50% Complete
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.