Full Transcript is Below:
– Welcome to our Top Producer series for the month of February, 2022. I’m NFM TV’s, Greg Sher. And today, we are featuring just a phenomenal person, producer and leader from the Colorado Springs area, kind of new to NFM Lending, only been here about a handful of months, Shanon Schinkel is our top producer for the month of February. This is your big NFM TV debut, how are you?
– Hi, I am so excited to be here.
– Let’s get into when you got into the business let’s start right there. What was the catalyst to you getting into the mortgage industry?
– My husband, my boyfriend at the time, owned a mortgage company because he is a realtor and he suggested maybe I try mortgages, which did not seem appealing to me at all at the time but then my best friend said that she wanted to buy a house and I was like, oh good, I’m in mortgages now and that was my first loan and I told my mom that I helped my friend and my mom was my second loan and it turned into something that I really did enjoy.
– I know and look at you now. Last year you closed over 320 loans personally, for over 130 million dollars in production, just so the layperson knows, that is just tremendous, like that puts you in the top 1% in your profession and I’m sure you’ve learned some lessons along the way, what have some of those been?
– That you can’t get there alone. I tried that for a lot of years and did well but it wasn’t anything to write home about and once I started growing a team and having people join me on the journey, it was both a lot more fun and a lot more productive.
– That’s a great insight and like so many of us at NFM, so many of our top producers, you have that CORE influence in there talking about Rick Ruby in that phenomenal program, what have you learned from the CORE and how inspirational has that been to kind of bring the best of Shanon Schinkel out?
– The CORE has definitely been a game changer and a life changer. I was pretty unbalanced before the CORE and I struggled with those boundaries and they’ve taught me to enjoy life, to work hard and to enjoy the life that I’ve built.
– I wanna talk to you about your love for the military. Your dad was in the navy, you’ve got members of your family currently serving, thank them for us for their service but talk to us about this love you have for military.
– Well, growing up in Colorado Springs, military is all around us, luckily and I’ve been fortunate enough that my husband, my sister, my bonus son have all been in the military or are currently in the military and we appreciate and love our veterans and are always looking for opportunities to give back to them.
– You think that in the lending space that’s an underserved community or do you feel like they get what’s due?
– I think that it’s a little unfair the stereotypes that have happen with VA loans sometimes where it’s an amazing benefit to not have to put money down on a house and it’s a great ROI when you don’t have anything to put down but I think sometimes it’s looked negatively when competing with offers where they are putting money down, they’re sometimes overlooked. So we work really hard to make sure that their treated equally, we do some upfront work to make sure that their offer looks just as good as a conventional loan where they’re putting money down, because they definitely deserve to be homeowners.
– Now you had taken a look at NFM prior to going to a different company for a short period of time and then you finally found your way through a very windy road back here to NFM, why NFM? What have you found about the company?
– I worked at other companies before and never had Zoom calls with the COO, the presidents never asked me my opinion and I feel super valued and important here and what you’re doing, what you guys are doing with technology and TikTok and supporting veterans, I wanna be a part of that.
– Hey, let’s talk about the things you like to do for fun. You’ve got this softball thing. One of your real estate partners is an incredible softball player, feel free to give them a shout out if you want but this support that you give towards softball, something I’m very fond of, where does it come from?
– It’s a passion of one of my realtors and it became a passion of mine. They’re an amazing team of men and we’ve sponsored them for about seven years. They’ve gone to the military world championships and we couldn’t be more proud of ’em.
– I mean, who’s the best softball player you personally know? You have to pick one person and I know there are a lot of people you can pick from.
– Kevin Basinger, for sure. He is the heart of the team and one of my favorite people, he is amazing.
– Well, look, I’m 51 and I’ve been playing softball for the last 25 years, I want you to show him this, I’m gonna get a little selfish here, normally it’s all about the person I’m interviewing but take a look at this bomb I hit last year in my first year of senior softball, 50 years old at the time. I will say the wind was blowing out, it’s about 330 to left center, we had about a 40 mile per hour gust but I got it up and over the fence. Take a look at this. I mean, is there any way I could join the team?
– I will definitely talk to him about that.
– Oh, okay, so I’m not quite on it but maybe I can be a sub. So tell us about some of the things that you’re doing kind of off the field, away from mortgage that are important to you.
– My husband and I decided we needed some hobbies, so we are taking golf lessons right now and tennis lessons and we have decided to try to hike a fourteener this year. We live in Colorado and we haven’t taken advantage of that yet, so we have some lofty goals.
– So lastly, what advice do you have for people out there that wanna be the next Shanon Schinkel, that wanna kind of ascend through the ranks and be one of the absolute best and most successful originators in the business.
– Show up every day. I don’t think that I have any other talents that anyone else doesn’t have, I just show up and I do the work every day. My team of course helps get me there. They are amazing and we spend as much time as we can with them. That would be one thing that I would say is I tried a long time to go at it alone and I didn’t go very far and once I embraced and had amazing group of women join me, I went significantly farther.
– How often do you find you’re failing, in life, in business and what do you do in those moments?
– I probably feel a little like that every day, Greg. I have a tendency maybe to focus on how far I have to go still, instead of how far I’ve come. I focused on all the things I hadn’t done yet and it made me not appreciate any of it and so I actively work to be grateful and to be positive about the things, ’cause I’m very lucky. I’ve done some amazing things, I have amazing people in my life and when I focus on those, I’m a lot happier.
– So happy you’re part of NFM Lending and congratulations on all you’ve accomplished and all you will accomplish moving forward. Shanon Schinkel from Colorado Springs, thank you for your time.
– Thank you, Greg.
– All right, that’s Shanon Schinkel, our Top Producer for the month of February, 2022. I’m NFM TV’s, Greg Sher, we’ll see you again next time.