In this powerful episode of Epic Begins With One Step Forward, Zander Sprague sits down with serial entrepreneur Trevor Schade, whose life was transformed by what he calls a “total life implosion.” Within 18 months, Trevor underwent an epic reset: he endured divorce, career loss, real estate setbacks, and two strokes – events that shattered his belief in control and reshaped his outlook on life. Together, they explore the difference between control and influence, why mindset can make or break recovery, and the importance of giving yourself time to heal before moving forward. Trevor also shares how he built thriving businesses, created zero-attrition teams, and designed systems for success. Packed with hard-won wisdom, this conversation will inspire you to face your own epic unexpected moments with courage and clarity.
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From Stroke To Strength: Trevor Schade’s Epic Reset
Serial Entrepreneur Trevor Schade
Welcome back to another exciting episode of EPIC Begins with 1 Step Forward. I’m your host, Zander Sprague. I am honored to be joined by Trevor Schade. Trevor, tell us who you are and what you do.
Thanks for having me on here, Zander. I appreciate it. I run about four or five companies. I’ve started to lose track. My sister has convinced me that I am a serial entrepreneur. I had a programming background and turned into Lean Six Sigma. For any of the readers that haven’t heard of that, it’s statistical analytics, big data efficiencies. I went into sales, which turned into real estate, and several other companies from there, with all kinds of backgrounds in entrepreneur life, living, and choices that are both the pros and cons of it.
I certainly understand doing multiple things. People ask me what I do. I’m like, “I’m a podcast host. I’m a TV host. I’m a licensed professional clinical counselor.” It sounds like I don’t know what I want to do with my time, but I do find that they’re all complementary and they all work.
I’ve found the same. It looks like it was part of a plan or a recipe, but I suppose that’s because I wove it into having meaning. It’s all over the board for sure.
Trevor’s Unexpected Epic Reset
You have a bit of an interesting background. Certainly, one might say that you experienced what I like to call an epic unexpected, those things that all of a sudden happened to us that perhaps changed our lives. Do you want to talk for a moment about your epic unexpected?
I’ve had several. One of the largest ones that occurred to me was a total life implosion. I got a lot of understanding of other people, empathy situations, because in about a 12 to 18-month window of time, after I knew I had the world by the tail, I knew that I was going down this road, I had it all figured out, and I was crossing 30 or 33 zone, I started going through a divorce. I then ended up having the whole custody court-type situation going on. I had my career, which was in process design and process improvement for companies, corporations, and consulting. The bulk of those positions got laid off and converted into other positions.
I got that laid-off-you’re-not-wanted feel. I got to understand how people feel when that hits their life and they’re dealt that card. One of my closest grandparents went into hospice and passed away. It was my first experience and interaction with close and real death, and being in the room and all of that. I’m 100% self-employed, and I’m wondering, “Where am I going to figure out this shelter and this food? Am I going to lose custody?” I’m amidst all of that, with now shifting into, “I don’t have a paycheck.” I have to drum it up through either a consulting contract with somebody, and then get them to see the value that I can bring to their company or real estate sales.
I had a real estate license about that time. I started leaning in that direction just to try to somehow make some income. One of my real estate investments, my only one at the time, was a fiveplex, a converted home into five units. It got bedbugs. It went through the entire system, and I had to let everybody out of their leases. At that time, I was in Nebraska. There’s a cold season, quite cold. All five of those units, I had to start carrying all of the utilities while on no income through the winter season, and pay the mortgages. I started looking at financial bankruptcy. What was that going to look like? Did that affect custody again? It all keeps coming back to that. My system was under so much pressure, my whole body.
I wasn’t feeling well. I wasn’t taking care of myself and my health because I was up against the wall and panicking a little bit. I had a chiropractic adjustment in there. Because of the extreme pressure inside of me and in my system at the time, my artery wouldn’t stretch a normal distance. The inner wall snapped in one of my arteries during an adjustment. It created a flap, and that flap slammed to the other side of the artery and blocked all the blood to the left side of my brain. I have a TIA stroke. The right side of my body shuts off, my face, the whole works. I go to the emergency room. They have me under the MRI machines. They show me where a blood clot hit my brain.
Two days later, I retore it, and I had another TIA stroke that was worse. I didn’t have the full strength of the right side of my body. All of that was the culmination of hitting that epic moment, that low low where I started finally shattering some of these beliefs I had. The final straw that broke that camel’s back, I had gotten out of the ICU, I suppose. I was going to the neurological floor of the Nebraska Med Center. It is the world-renowned Nebraska Med Center.
I’m walking down this hallway, just stretching my legs for the day. I had already had 90% recovery. The floor is shaped in the shape of an H. As I’m walking down one of the legs, I’m looking in the rooms and I see people lying there. Most have silver hair. They’ve got somebody at their bedside with them, they’re alone, or they’ve got what I would see as a spouse or a daughter or something. I can still see all these faces in my head and in one room after another. I hit that crossbar of the H, and I look across the reception in the elevators.
Clear at the other end, I see this little lady with her walker. She moves the walker one inch, and then she moves her feet one inch. All of a sudden, it finally shattered. I remember I dropped to a knee. I hit my hand on the ground, and I just had to catch my breath for a minute. It hit me that I was the only person on this floor that could both walk and talk. Everybody else could do one, the other, or neither. That was where it finally shattered this illusion for me of believing that I had control. I could control things, and I was in charge.
That’s not to take away from a lot of business consulting I do with somebody wanting to influence the likelihood or probabilities of their businesses and to have ultimate ownership. I’m not going to take away from that, but the illusion of control is not true. Influence is. It took all of that together to finally crack that shell and that belief that I’d built up, that I had it all, and I was always going to be in charge. That was my epic moment that changed the perspective, the perception, and the trajectory of my life.
The illusion of control is not true. Influence is.
That is quite a lot there, Trevor. You seem to be okay now. The right side of your body seems to be fully healed. You seem to be doing fine.
There is a little paranoia. You sit on your right leg a little too long, and something goes numb. I start freaking out like things are falling apart again, but no, all good.
You get a headache, and you’re like, “My God.”
Yes, I have a little bit of paranoia. It’s been enough years to where it’s not that bad anymore, but yes, a little bit is still there.
It is completely understandable. We all have those experiences that make us just a little gun-shy, as they say. Even though it may not be so bad, maybe internally, you’re reacting to that one a little. That’s got the heart going. I get that. I’ve had experiences, and then I’m like, “No.” I crashed on my bike years ago and shattered my shoulder. My audience knows this, so I’m not going to go into the story. I’ve gotten back on my road bike. Although I do have moments where I’m like, “Just don’t fall,” I was determined not to let fear be the driver there. All too often, things happen to us, and they are scary. I cannot begin to imagine what that must have been like for you as a young man having multiple TIAs.
You’re right. It was scary. It was a fluke. It’s like breaking a femur. Usually, your femur doesn’t just break. Something happens to cause it. It was that situation. In that moment, I remember pretty rapidly getting comfortable with, “I could recover from this fully, and it could be as if it never happened. I could heal from this, but only ever have use of half of my body. Is this where I spiraled to darkness?” I remember all three of those very vividly and clearly twice going through my head, wondering, “Which way does this wave crash, because I don’t get to choose? I don’t have a way to push this wave or control it,” or even influence it at that time. It was pretty wild and scary. I hit acceptance pretty quickly. That helped me come to the realization that sometimes, in life, you don’t have a muscle to flex.
Having A Choice Every Day
I know in my own life, I’ve realized that there are things I might want the answer to, but I’m not going to get that answer. I need to find a way to get okay with, “This isn’t an answer. This question is not answerable, and that’s okay.” Something you touched on, which is important for the work I do with helping people step into their epic, is that you have a choice every day. You had a choice to say, “Do I spiral into depression, blackness, and woe is me?” Do I make the choice to say, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m determined to be better?” There are lots of psychological studies that say your mindset about overcoming an injury, an illness, job loss, the end of a relationship, and some major life event greatly affects your outcome.
I’ve heard people say things like, “Everything happens for a reason.” I have some belief in the sentence, but I need to tweak it a little bit before I can get fully on board. I subscribe more to, “Everything happens for a reason if you give it reason.” I do think there’s a participation component there that everything can happen, and that’s all fine and good. In that moment, when I was at that crossroads that I could either go introspective, learn, study, and break that illusion of control versus influence, or I could fall into depression, there was a choice component there. I could choose to give everything that was happening a reason and let it all have happened for a reason, or it could have just happened, and it could have dominated me.
You seem like a man who probably does lots of reading about a whole lot of different subjects, takes nuggets out of each one, and says, “I’m going to add that to how I’m thinking about stuff.” I remember reading this book. It was called The Diamond Cutter. Of this whole book, the one nugget I took away was that in Buddhism, there’s this idea that nothing is inherently good or bad. It’s how we interpret it.
I live in California. The sun is out. That’s awesome. You live in Nebraska. There are a few farmers in Nebraska. The sun being out may not be viewed as a good thing because there’s a drought. That’s killing my crops and stuff. Inherently, the sun being out is not either good or bad. It’s how we want to see it. Like anything in our lives, it is how we choose to view what’s going on. Just like you said, do I utilize choice and say, “Let me think about what all of this is. Where’s the message? What might I learn from this?”
There’s a timing to it also. Especially a lot of us, we’re very hard on ourselves.
We’re the meanest people in our own lives.
We are. We beat on ourselves. It’s crazy town.
We’re horrible. We should be nicer to ourselves.
A parallel that a lot of people can understand is if you break a bone in your leg, you don’t immediately start physical therapy. You have to lick your wounds for a minute. You have to know that this is not the time to make decisions. This is not the time to dive in and move forward. This is not the time to take how I feel and make something happen. Sometimes, there does need to be a measured, finite, and pre-decided amount of time.
If a doctor says, “It’s going to take you six weeks to heal that, and then we’ll start physical therapy,” same thing. If somebody has something tragic happen in their life, give yourself some time to lick the wounds and do the lick the wounds phase. In some of those big traumas, they can take twelve months just to get your breath back and be able to make a decision of, “What do I do with it?” We got to give ourselves permission to have that time.
Training Your Emotional Muscle
I’m smiling because part of the work I do is a lot of work talking about, advocating, and working with sibling survivors, people who’ve lost their brother or sister. I wrote a book for siblings and for parents about it. The funny thing is, it’s great that people know about my book, but inevitably someone’s like, “A colleague just lost their brother. Where can I get your book?” I’m flattered that they are thinking about me, and they know that the book exists. My book is not for the day after you lost your sibling. It’s 3 to 6 months after.
I know because I lost my sister. I was in no shape for months to read a book about grief or loss or anything. I just wasn’t there. The same thing I do when I hurt my shoulder, I did not start physical therapy right away. Why? I had to let stuff heal. It wasn’t the time. I used to work in the corporate world. I worked in startups here in California. I was reduced, enforced, fired, laid off, outsourced, downsized, and all the different acronyms for “I didn’t have a job now.” The first couple of times, it took a beat to go, “I need to get back out there.” It was not because I didn’t want to, but you just have to heal your psyche and your ego a little.
It’s like any other muscle training, and it’s just emotional muscle training. The more you go through some things and the more exertion that you have to do in these different areas, the stronger you get. You do. You get more resilient. You can recover faster. That’s no different than working out, any sport, any physical training that someone does, or physical therapy. We’re pretty uniform in how we get stronger.
The more you go through difficult things, the stronger and more resilient you get.
It goes back to Daniel Coyle, who wrote The Talent Code. He talks about basically building a mile and a super highway. He’s talking about people playing music or sports, but I also think it’s true for your emotional thing. You have those experiences of loss or whatever. It’s not that it gets easier. You just have the tools to know how to deal with it, so it may not take as long because now, you know the tools.
You’ve been down the road. You’re like, “I know what’s coming. I don’t know when it’s coming. I don’t know how long it may last. I may take a step forward and a step back.” You have the tools. I know from my own experience in working with people. It does get easier. You’ve built all of that mile. “Here’s how to do it.” Think about driving. I assume that you’ve been driving for quite a few years.
A minute, yes.
Remember when you first learned how to drive. It was exhausting because you spent so much time seeing every single sign and paying attention to everything. You drive down the road. There’s a lot of almost subconscious. You know what’s going on. You’re able to deal with stuff, but you see street signs, speed limit signs, blinkers, and stuff. That’s all because your body knows what to do. “I know how to do this.”
Every topic is that way. You can go into parenting, and the parallels would be the same. Did you know how long your first child was going to endlessly cry when they were young? Does that ever end? Is this going to be eighteen years of this? You just can’t get your head around it, but then by kid two, you can see that. Business is no different. The number of businesses that I’ve started and failed at or didn’t go the way that I wanted, and then others that went well, you just develop a resilience in all of these areas the same way.
You talked about seeing signs while driving. In business, it’s the same way. You start to see patterns that you’re like, “I remember when this happened before. This isn’t really a big deal. I already know how it plays out. I know the ending of this now.” Same thing when you go through an emotional trauma or hardship. After you come through something like that, you know that there is an end. The next time it comes around, it can’t phase you quite as much because you know that there’s an end. You know that you’re capable of getting through it. You’ve proved it to yourself once before. It’s way less daunting because you don’t have the fear of the unknown. It is because it’s no longer unknown.
It’s true. None of us wants to fail, especially if we’re doing business, but the fact of the matter is, failure is part of this journey. You are not going to get it 100% right. You hope that what you didn’t get right isn’t catastrophic to your business, but sometimes, it is. I like to joke that, as an entrepreneur, I’ve been very generous in buying lots of tools that are supposed to help me in my business. I don’t use them anymore, so I paid for them. It’s not that they’re bad tools. They’re just not the right tool for me. That happens in our businesses. You think, “Is this CRM? Yes, I need a CRM.” They’re all great. Are they doing what you needed to do?
Are they the right tool for you anymore, or are they the right tool for you yet? Again, pick any avenue. Pick a business, or pick your emotional recovery. It’s all the same. You may have certain tools that are needed now, and then after a while, you won’t need them anymore. You pick them up, and they’re the wrong tool from the get-go. You know you love them, but you’re not ready for the tool yet. You will be in two years.
Creating Zero-Attrition Teams
You say you have all these different businesses, but they’re all melded together. Talk for a minute about what it is that you’re currently doing.
I’ve got the real estate properties. I’ve done some flips. I’ve done single-family rentals, and then I got into a large apartment complex and commercial syndications. I am helping people take their investment money and be an owner of an LLC. There are operators in there. Let’s say maybe you invest. Over the course of ten years, you 3X your money on your investment through real estate. You get the tax depreciations and all that. Helping people do passive investing and create wealth, definitely. Helping people on a one-on-one level and guiding them through the real estate world, definitely.
Going in and speaking with groups, leaders, teams, organizations, and companies, we can start talking about culture creation. In one of my businesses, it’s usually a very high-turnover business. It was a real estate agent business. From 0 to 26 agents, we had zero attrition over five years. Nobody didn’t renew a license. Nobody switched brokerages or teams. I’ll go teach a lot of culture components, “How do you inspire people? How do you learn enough about people that they want to be part of this and they feel seen and heard?” I don’t mean that just as a buzzword. We use Gallup Strengths. People were looking at a wall of everybody’s strengths. They looked up there, and they saw their own.
I love the StrengthsFinder.
Everybody gets to see their own uniqueness. They get to see that their peers know their uniqueness. They’re allowed to just be them. It’s wonderful. I am doing that kind of consulting, and then a huge part of my background is with coding, efficiencies, and all of the Lean Six Sigma. From a very young age and an early start, I was outsourcing things, or I was setting machines up to run my processes. I was now able to scale and systematize so many of these different businesses with workflows.
A great culture allows everybody to see their unique strengths.
If one action showed up in a business, a new contact, a new lead, or a new project that I needed project-managed, or anything, I could kick it out to the right channels. I could have it run through a very efficient path that nobody touched. It ran by perfection based on rules. Sometimes, I needed somebody to touch something, but I didn’t have to take my highest-salaried person and have them be the one to do it.
I didn’t need to have me as probably the highest-paid person. It wasn’t that I was earning and paying myself the most money, but anytime I took myself away from what I should be working on, we experienced the most loss. That equates to my monetary contribution and value to the company. We needed me to be working on hardly anything that was extra or that anybody could do. I got everything into the right lanes.
I coach a lot of businesses and a lot of teams through how to set that up, how to think about it, how to zoom way out into the high-level thinking, and then get super granular so you can execute this process management, control, or ordinance-type set of working world. Those are the primaries. I run a marketing company. I publicly speak. I do keynotes. I talk to organizations and companies and work with people. I do the consulting and then the real estate wealth creation. That’s my wheelhouse at the moment.
I’m interested to know what your top two or three Gallup Strengths are.
I have a multitude of what you call amplifier strengths. My sister runs a Gallup Strengths consulting company in Dallas. My subsequent strengths amplify the top ones. I am Strategic to the fifth. Individualization is also multiplied. We cross into Maximizer, Command, and Focus. Those are my top five.
I’m a Maximizer Woo. I did this when I was working in a really large corporation. I thought, “This probably isn’t going to be good. They’re not going to like it.” First of all, that’s one of my strengths. Lean into your strengths. When you do the test and you read it, you go, “Yes, that’s me.” It turned out that they’re like, “No, having a woo is good. It means you can get people to do stuff.” It’s true. I get all kinds of stuff just because I’ve got a strong woo, make people feel good, maximize, and stuff.
I do love the StrengthsFinder. I do talk about it when I’m talking to corporations about building their epic teams. I’m like, “Know what your team can do. How can you manage if you don’t know what your team can do? If you have someone good at being social and presenting, don’t have them in the back room and have the person who’s not as good at that, no matter what their position is.”
I’m all for taking individuals and having them just love what they’re involved in, be inspired, and be neurotic. We’ve all been on these projects in high school, college, or whatever. We already completed all the requirements at midnight, but we were just in love with what we were doing. We got all bouncy. We worked all the way to 3:00 AM, and then turned the sucker in. It was way over the top. I was like, “If I can figure out someone’s strengths and know what they just love to do, I don’t even need half the metrics anymore because they just outperform.”
When you’re working in your areas of strength, it’s not so much work. It is, but I say it’s the stuff that intuitively comes to you. It just makes sense. If you’re good at math, you look at the page, and it’s almost like the answers are right there for you. You’re like, “I don’t know how people are struggling with this.” I love public speaking. I get that for most of the world, that’s their top three biggest fears. I’m like, “I don’t understand why. A day I get to be on stage is a great day.”
I get it. I agree with you 100%, but if you hand me a set of administrative tasks, I’ll fall apart. Some people find safety and comfort in the structure and the predictability. It took me a long time to understand that these really are all strengths. Everybody has a preference and has gifts. If we can help them do what they love, man, everybody just loves being part of that culture.
Get In Touch With Trevor
Trevor, this has been an epic conversation. We’ve been all over the place.
Thanks for having me on, Zander.
If people are interested in getting a hold of you, how can they do that?
They can go to TrevorSchade.com. They can throw my name into any search engine or social media. They’re all going to feed back to TrevorSchade.com. I have all kinds of contact info and even different avenues to choose from, depending on which of these 50 multitudes we hit on here that someone wants to talk about. There are even generic ones. What kind of conversation do you want to kick off? We start from there and see what I can help with.
I want to thank you again for joining me. I want to remind everyone that if you’re ready to begin your epic journey, go to EpicBegins.com. As always, epic choices lead to the epic life that you want.
Important Links
- Trevor Schade’s Website
- The Diamond Cutter
- The Talent Code
- CliftonStrengths Online Talent Assessment | EN – Gallup
- Zander Sprague’s Website
About Trevor Schade
Trevor’s career started with obtaining a Lean Six Sigma Blackbelt certification while working for a national insurance company. That plus his coding background turned into consulting and advising in businesses, projects, efficiencies and outsourcing strategies. Trevor did his first flip in 2008, got his real estate license in 2013, and did his first long-term hold in 2014. He sold 27 homes in his first 7 months. He then built a real estate team of 26 agents over 5 years with absolutely zero turnover.
Trevor outsourced his admin tasks: the ones that he didn’t believe were best handled by API engines and tech sites/tools to a team in the Philippines and had the team earning over $1.1M in total commissions. The business allowed him to purchase personally through my LLC’s about 23 homes from 2020 to date and keep 10, plus his personal home – as much of this was achieved from an apartment! The ones that he kept are 3 bed, 2+bath, 2 car garage, high demand homes. They appreciate unlike anything he could have guessed, as do the rent increases.
Trevor didn’t see the real estate team ever becoming passive enough to allow the future life that he truly wanted AND the math was legitimately the math. So Nov 2023, he shut his real estate team down and has been able to work on real estate buying and selling personally and for clients with tiny expenses and huge commissions. He has also been asked to speak on the art of negotiations, taking one’s time back & operational efficiencies, as well as real estate investing, and which strategies are right at which times for each investor. This then gave birth to Life Wealth Courses, where Trevor has three 7-week courses full up and running.
His intent and vision for the future is to continue growing both net worth and monthly cash flow through real estate and these courses. Trevor loves how much traction others seem to get in their own lives every time that he is speaking or on a podcast, so he personally plans to pursue that much more, while of course promoting my partners, courses, and methods.