“Incremental growth is key to success.”

In this episode, Nick speaks with Jason Yarusi, a successful real estate investor and entrepreneur. They discuss Jason’s journey from working in bars to managing multiple businesses, including a property management company and coaching. The conversation delves into the importance of prioritizing family, managing time effectively, and creating a productive morning routine. Jason shares insights on how to navigate the challenges of a busy life while maintaining a focus on personal growth and self-mastery.

What to listen for:

• We wanted to set a nature where we could spend time with family
• You have to create the importance level of the things on your list
• Incremental growth is essential for success in any endeavor
• Don’t panic; instead, focus on finding solutions
• Managing panic involves empowering your team to act
• Stay balanced and avoid getting lost in emotional ups and downs
• Break down challenges into manageable tasks to reduce stress
• Goals require actionable steps to become a reality

“If everyone in the world took all their problems and put them into one big pile and then took that big pile and split it into even paths and everybody took their problems out from there, the majority of the world would be begging for their problems back.”

• Our struggles often seem overwhelming until we compare them to what others are dealing with.
• Recognizing that others might gladly trade places with us helps foster gratitude
• People naturally adjust to their own challenges, making them more manageable over time
• What feels impossible to you may be someone else’s dream scenario
• Instead of wishing them away, embrace your problems as opportunities for growth

“Usually there’s three things, maybe four things that you need to do each day that are gonna bring you into a better spot, personally, financially, physically, emotionally.”

• Prioritize the few tasks that truly impact your life and progress
• Daily, intentional actions compound into significant results over time
• Just because you’re doing a lot doesn’t mean you’re being productive
• Growth isn’t just about work—nurture your body, mind, finances, and relationships
• Consistency beats intensity when it comes to building the life you want

About Jason Yarusi

Jason brings all of his hands-on experience to you. His personal story and extensive work has made him an inspirational force, captivating audiences as a dynamic motivational speaker. With an innate ability to ignite positive transformations, Jason empowers individuals to conquer challenges and embrace change with unwavering resilience. His electrifying talks instill a renewed sense of purpose, propelling audiences to reach new heights in both personal and professional spheres.

• http://www.jasonyarusi.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonyarusi/
• https://www.instagram.com/jasonyarusi/
• https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-live-100-podcast-with-jaso-119521772/

Resources:

Interested in starting your own podcast or need help with one you already have? Send Nick an email or schedule a time to discuss your podcast today!

nick@themindsetandselfmasteryshow.com

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Click To View The Episode Transcript

Nick McGowan (00:01.902)
All right, three, two, hello and welcome to the Mindset and Self Mastery Show. I’m your host, Nick McGowan. Today on the show we have Jason Yarusi. Jason, how you doing today?

Jason Yarusi (00:12.27)
Hey, I’m doing great. Good to be here.

Nick McGowan (00:14.094)
Yeah, I’m glad you’re here, man. I’m excited for us to get in everything we’re gonna get into. We were just talking a little bit about where our stomping grounds are in a sense and how sort of different it was in certain ways. man, why don’t you kick us off? Tell us what you do for a living and what’s one thing most people don’t know about you that’s maybe little odd or bizarre.

Jason Yarusi (00:32.536)
So I am down here just south of Nashville, Tennessee in a town called Murfreesboro, Tennessee. I invest in apartment buildings. I’ve brought a commercial real estate for over a decade now. I own about 3,300 units across the Southeast in seven different states. And so that’s our primary business. We have a property management business and two HVAC and plumbing businesses and a coaching business. So that pretty much wraps up from there. What’s odd, you know,

I met my wife in 2003, it took us over a decade to actually become a couple, but we worked in a bar together for over a decade before we actually became a couple. So that seems it. And she ends up being from Hawaii and I was from New Jersey, meeting in New York City and now we’re in Tennessee. So as random, we were the only New Jersey, Hawaii couple here in the state of Tennessee I’ve found.

Nick McGowan (01:24.173)
That would be a little out of like, so where are you two from? Jersey, Hawaii, how the hell did you get to Tennessee?

Jason Yarusi (01:29.742)
Pretty much every every conversation who asked that yes, yeah 100 %

Nick McGowan (01:34.143)
And so I’ve never been to Hawaii. My partner lived in Hawaii for a little while. Her family lived in Hawaii for a while. And every time I hear about it, there are just different parts of like the different almost environments that there are on the different islands and how everything’s vastly different. And I’m like, but I’ve never been to any of them. So how is it that that your wife went from Hawaii to New York to Tennessee?

and how did you all get to Tennessee and why not Hawaii?

Jason Yarusi (02:06.69)
Yeah, mean, so theater, right? So she moved to New York City for school through theater, right? And so theater, she did theater there and she moved to LA for a little bit. And as many happen in the arts, you you find your way into working into something else. And so she started working in bars, right? So she was working in a bar in New York City and I ended up, I was traveling around, I moved into New York City, just doing odd jobs. And I ended up coming to the bar she was working at, right? And so that’s how I ended up there.

Nick McGowan (02:10.038)
Okay.

Jason Yarusi (02:36.268)
And then at a certain point, she moved back to Hawaii and I was still working in New York City and her and I started connecting and we ended up meeting out in California and becoming a couple before moving back to New York City and then moved out to New Jersey to work and run the family construction business before moving into real estate. And one day we said, you know what, we should think about moving some places. And then on the cusp of that,

hurricane, or what’s called COVID came around, right? And in COVID, we had three little kids, they were in and out of school. It was just chaos. just like, it was just, nothing made sense. So we were like, well, this is a great time to decide to move. And we were thinking, not Hawaii, we were thinking Phoenix, Denver, or Nashville, right? And Phoenix, was just all desert. We’d like the kids outside, just for some reason, we ruled that out.

Nick McGowan (03:20.653)
Hmm.

Jason Yarusi (03:27.47)
Denver, we were out there a lot for all kinds of, know, speaking things for real estate. We just, for some reason, had had enough with Denver and lo and behold, we had a bunch of property down this way and we had a couple of friends who were in select cities around Nashville and we had just actually brought an apartment building in the city of Murfreesboro. So we said, let’s move down there. And I had been there, but Pee-wee, my wife, moved down here, basically sight unseen. With the premise, I was like, listen, let’s just go there. And if we like it, great. We ended up.

we did, right? But if we didn’t like it, no harm, no foul, we’ll move somewhere else. But moving back to Hawaii, she hadn’t been there almost in like 20 years now. Her whole family’s still there, but she hadn’t lived there. But it’s whole different world, right? It’s great to be there. We take the family out there. We’ll go once a year until we stay somewhere around 10 or 12 days. And then her family can come and visit out here. But it’s not the place we chose to live today, not to say that I ever said I would live in Tennessee. So tomorrow could be a whole different story.

Nick McGowan (04:24.556)
Sure. Yeah, I’m sure it’s also a lot different. Just living on the islands, like the amount that things cost getting things to you. There was somebody I talked to recently where they were getting some new stuff for their podcasts, like getting them set up and we’re working through that stuff. She’s like, well, it takes like an extra two, three weeks to be able to get things where I’m located, where you can’t just always prime things or whatever sort of first world problems. But you know, it is what it is.

Jason Yarusi (04:54.378)
Yeah. Yeah. Her family was like, we’re in a dishwasher. It was going to take like five weeks. It was something crazy. then funny, when COVID happened, they got rid of all the rental cars. So you go over there and the rental cars are like, if you want to get a rental car, it’s like $500 a day. So you just have those constraints that are just odd to the universe, right? But you see that how.

Nick McGowan (04:58.539)
Jeez.

Jason Yarusi (05:12.942)
The economy is just shaped there. mean, it’s almost construction and tourism now, right? That’s where it all goes. And so a lot of the pineapple or sugar cane, it’s funny because they used to have sugar cane in sugar fields. But if you look at the sugar packets, they will say like, it will say some reference of Hawaii, but it like made in New York City, right? And so basically Hawaiian sugar shipped from New York, right? So you look at that, you’re like, man, how times have changed, right? But that’s just the adaptation because you can’t survive with all this farmland, right? So you sell it off for production. And that’s where…

Nick McGowan (05:29.448)
Yeah.

Jason Yarusi (05:41.774)
you see a lot of like multi-generational homes, right? It’s because the real estate, you know, it’s constrained by the island and then you have limited houses, but then you have families who want to stay there, but then the income doesn’t track, right? So then you’ll have, you know, the grandparents living with the parents and then the kids will stay longer. And so you have these multi-generational houses that are worth, you know, $800,000, $900,000. You put it on this part for a very small piece of property.

Nick McGowan (05:44.597)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Yarusi (06:06.584)
But if they want to sell, the choice is that they either have to move off-island, right, move to the mainland, right, somewhere else, or they don’t have a way to replace that, because the next home is just gonna be that much more expensive. So they stay in that home and just continue to just adapt to

Nick McGowan (06:21.131)
Geez. Yeah, I mean, we’re, we can’t make more land. Maybe we can start building underwater, but I think we’ll probably be on some other planet by the time that actually happens. Yeah, if Musk has anything to say about it. But that it’s interesting. And one of the things that you kind of just like, blew past pretty quickly, was that you have several different businesses and like 100 billion different homes. I’ve used that number twice now. I don’t know where that’s come from. But

Jason Yarusi (06:32.142)
Yeah, we’ll probably go to Mars before we source that.

That’s right.

Nick McGowan (06:50.11)
you have a lot of different rentals. And that’s a lot of management. So one of the things I like to be able to talk about with people, no matter what you’re doing, or what’s going on, like everybody experiences things a little differently. They relate to things differently. We all think like, my gosh, my day is so busy today, but it could be busier without actually pointing to somebody else and saying like, Well, you have it worse than I do, or it could always be worse, etc.

But we all have to manage the way that we go through things. mean, the whole point to self-mastery is, again, just kind of height and level discipline. But for you to have your family, all the different businesses, all the things, and then still be able to try to find time to just do the things that make you happy, then I’m not talking about just like going to the gym or doing stuff that you need to do to keep yourself healthy and things of that sort, but just like pastimes and hobbies and all of that. So I want to get a little macro with that sort of stuff because

I think we could easily go down the real estate path. And I almost caught myself because I’m interested in that sort of stuff. But I want to get macro with this of like, how did you actually go through all the stuff that you’ve gone through? And how do you manage your days and still be able to have time for not only podcasts like this, but just life and you said you even have to go pick up one of the kids, I’m assuming you’re not the dad that’s like, hurry up, get in the back. And then you just like fly off. I mean, you might be, dude, I don’t.

But, you I want to be able to talk about the discipline of that and then being able to figure out how do we take pieces from that that everybody can kind of walk away with. So where do you want to start with it?

Jason Yarusi (08:27.542)
You know, what came to mind is relational, we all can only just see our problems. And so we only have relation of who’s around us. we all, typically are in some range of similar problems. And so we think our problems are so bad, right? And there’s that, I think it’s a Socrates quote, it just reminded me of it, where it’s like, if everyone in the world took all their problems and put them into one big pile and then took that big pile and split into even paths and everybody took their problems out from there, the majority of the world would be begging for their problems back.

right, because we don’t have it that bad. We actually have it really good, right? And so when we can do that, you know, the world gets a lot easier. And what really was the part is that, you know, from working in bars, I just jumped to where we are today. But in the meantime, you know, we just wanted to stop working in bars, right? So we just had Peeley stop. And then I moved to run the family construction business. And we were able to run that a really busy time was actually you lived up in Philadelphia when Hurricane Sandy happened up there. are my dad’s business was really targeted on

really foundation issues, raising homes. He had done that for over four decades. And so his business exploded. So we went from there to doing almost like something like 2000 projects in like a couple of years, it was nuts. So we were very busy with that. And then we started to do different forms of real estate, which was very transactional. And all I was doing was being very transactional in nature. And with that, that really requires me and requires effort. Because if I’m not doing a task, then I’m not creating a result, then I’m not getting income. And so if you look at that,

the more I can do, the more I can get, right? And it’s that vicious cycle that the world never stops. And so here we are, know, Peely, my wife was pregnant with our first child and all we kept thinking about was like, we just have to find a way to get our time back. Cause the one thing we were lacking was that I couldn’t create more time, right? There was, you if there was eight days in a week, I would be like, okay, let’s use the eight days, but there’s not, right? It was me just trying to constantly, you know, squeeze more, more juice out of the limit, right? And for that fact, we said, okay, we have to do something different. And what it was was, was just,

change the priority list. Because right now when you change your priority list, you start to maximize the time you have for the other items. And priorities, of course, right, is your business, your life. But really you look back at it, it’s like you want to have that time with your kids, your family, you want to be able to go and explore and do your things you want. And that doesn’t come later. You can’t constantly push that off or you run out of time, right? You get to this point in the end where you want to do all this stuff and then the end comes and you haven’t done all this stuff, right? And then your life’s over.

Jason Yarusi (10:49.152)
And so you have to look back and say, okay, what’s important to me right now? And we wanted to set a nature where we could spend time with family and do the things with the kids and be present. And that became the priority. And so it made the time I had for everything else that I actually had to be focused to do it. So what that looks like now is that, you know, we do have all these businesses. I have a great team of great employees. However, you know, I coach multi- I’m right now I’m coaching soccer, I’m coaching basketball and flag football for, you know, three different kids, right? And so like,

I make those a priority and is it busy? Sure, yeah, it’s busy. But then it makes the time that I’m here at work that I have to be focused where I am. Like right here, know, like being on a podcast, like I could be here and be like, I’m so busy. Like I’m here talking to you, then I’m like texting on the phone. I’m doing all these things and I’m not really here present, right?

Well, that’s how our life gets. Is that like, we’re with our family, but then we’re not really present because we’re there with them, but they were trying to, know, text and do this and do that. But then the same thing at work, we’re at work, but we’re not really focused because we feel bad because we weren’t really committed when we with our family. And then we’re not really getting the max at anything. And so it got back to just setting priorities. And if you’re saying, just don’t have time to do this with my family, right? Well, then make it that you have time and then you have to figure everything out. Because we don’t realize that the waste that happens within the rest of your life, right? You have all this time where

You find time to do random things that don’t need to be done because you haven’t really scaled the list of what really needs to happen right now that had the most impact in my life.

Nick McGowan (12:15.432)
Sure. One of the things I really appreciate about having these conversations, we’re in a safe space to be able to talk about this stuff. We’re not in an immediate spot where we have to do anything with it. And there are sometimes I hear from people that are just like, you you can’t mindset yourself through life and like you can’t just do these things because they’re blocks and whatever that they have. But one of the things that you’re pointing out is actually saying, well, if I have a finite amount of time and just being straight up logical with it, what can I do within that? How do I shift the things and what

priorities do I put this, but sometimes it can be easy to just talk about these things. Now, clearly you’ve done it. But I’m sure there are times where you’re like, fuck, I need to do this today. And I need to do these eight other things. And then being able to kind of massage and work through over the course of time where you kind of have less of those things, but you find yourself into a rhythm. There are certain conversations I have with people at times, or they’re just like, almost quickly overwhelmed with it. Because they’ve been using it as almost a badge of honor.

Jason Yarusi (12:57.678)
Please.

Nick McGowan (13:14.471)
being just so busy. And I think that was a big thing with hustle culture for a long time, where everybody’s like, I’m busy, and I’m doing all these things. And it’s like, okay, well, how do you actually step outside of that? Did you find yourself in that throughout God 2003 to 2024?

Jason Yarusi (13:28.64)
always. I mean, that’s a lesson for anyone and even in just till today is that, you know, I’m an action person, right? And so we’re doing transactions, we have a lot happening, you we have multiple things and like, you create controls and you create episode, but the real part with it is to actually focus on what’s happening in front of you.

So you’re not just doing a bunch of stuff, right? Cause we can just all fill our time just doing stuff, but it’s something that needs to be done being done, right? Cause like, that’s what usually happens that most people don’t want to change their word about all the things they’re juggling right now. But if you actually, it’s like, you know, I equate it like if there was like a waiter with a bunch of plates, right? He can’t drop all the plates, but in your life, there’s a lot of things you can drop. It’s not gonna have an effect, right? But sometimes you have to drop it you’ll find what the priorities are. Like the priorities, can pick my kids up today, right? Like, and like that’s a priority, right?

I have to make sure that payrolls and these things are important because it goes in the levels of importance. But do I need to go buy stamps today? if that was on the list, no. But you use that, they’re all the same level of urgency or importance, right? But in fact, they’re not. So you have to create the importance level of the things in your list. Because usually there’s three things, maybe four things that you need to do each day that are going to bring you into a better spot, personally, financially, physically, emotionally, you name it, right?

But what we’ll do is those are usually things that are a little bit uncomfortable. So we’ll put them at the bottom of the and we’ll fill it with the 93 other things that really kind of you could do, don’t do, it doesn’t really matter, but you’ll do them and then you’re so busy and then you just don’t get to the bottom three or four that should have been done first. And then the same thing happens tomorrow and the next day. And then what goes from there is that you don’t get results and you’re like, well, why am I not getting results? Well, I’m not getting the things done that are uncomfortable, but that’s what’s going to push me past where I am today to get where I want to go.

Nick McGowan (15:16.017)
I think there are like tried and true situations and ways to go about this. Again, we’re being very logical about it. Like you have this amount of time, these things need to get done. If you do the things that are fun first and you take up nine hours to do it, then you don’t have any time to do the other things. But taking a step outside of that, I also want to talk about how like you’d even called yourself out of being an action person, more of a generator. I don’t know if you get into human design or things of that sort.

But when we generate throughout the day, then we go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning and we just have more energy to do things. There’s a lot of people that are like that. And then there are others that they literally need a lot of time. But I think finding ourselves to figure out like, how do I actually operate? Like I remember seeing some quote, I think it was from Mark Cuban, who was like, I wake up before my feet even touch the floor. I’ve got a laptop open. I’m doing other things. And there are other people that they have like a nine hour ritual in the morning.

where they have to go out and jump into negative 28 degree water and go hunt bears or whatever they do for like the nine hours to get their day together. But we all have to figure out what actually works for us. So let’s get a little macro with that. What did that look like as you’re trying to kind of figure out, because it looked like you went or it sounds like you went from, all right, I’m gonna go in the bar. We don’t wanna do this anymore. All right, I’ll help with the construction business. Geez, this is crazy. There’s a lot going on. And then from there, we have money.

I’m already kind of familiar with this. I’m going to jump into these things and it kind of snowballed that way. But I’m sure there are days where you were like, what the fuck everybody just needs to leave me alone for like an hour. How did you go through that?

Jason Yarusi (16:52.046)
Yeah. Well, you create that hour, right? That’s the thing is that, you know, when you’re working in bars, like I had many days where you’re just up late, you’re drinking, you’re just like, you’re just out of control, right? And then you’re getting chaotic results. And then you’re like, well, why am getting chaotic results? And then I do it was one night I left the bar at two thirty in the morning. was on my bike. I was heading across.

Manhattan and I got hit by a car, right? And I got a couple, you know, stitches. I got like a pin in my wrist. I got a broken bone in my shoulder. And I didn’t like working at bar. I was just working at the bar, right? And I was thinking the next day, I was like, I got to get back to working at the bar because I need to, you know, make rent coming up, right? And so you have that crazy thought of like, well, I am doing exactly what I want to do. And now I have this crazy thing happen. I’m getting all these kinetic results. I’m thinking about just getting back to this crazy life, right? And your choice is you just keep doing that. And many times like,

It’s just not uncomfortable enough so we don’t make a change. Or you just start to do different than what you’re doing, right? And so I adapted slowly to start slowly doing things differently because usually when we’re stuck, we don’t know how to break free even though if it’s just changing one thing that’s breaking free. We’re just stuck. It’s like we have these imaginary handcuffs that we can’t break the patterns that we’re doing. But when you start to do small changes, right? And so stop drinking and get up early, start to work out, start to have a good system plan, right?

Nick McGowan (17:58.309)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Yarusi (18:12.334)
it doesn’t happen immediately, but you start to create things that give you energy, that start to stop taking away and start to start building into, right? And so, today, my life looks like I wake up early, I’ll have a glass of water right when get up, I will go and I’ll meditate, I’ll meditate for less than 10 minutes, I’ll meditate, and then I’ll go work out, and that’s it, because it gives me my pause, my time, and by that time, the kids are getting up, my wife’s coming together, and then they’ll get breakfast and I’ll take them to school.

I don’t eat in the morning, I’ll eat afternoon. That’s been a pattern that’s worked for me for a long time now. But I’ve done that because it just gives me that moment of pause before everything else starts. Because when it starts, you don’t get that pause back. You can’t go high in the corner at this point. You literally have a lot happening. And phone, email, this call, that’s just part of the day.

Nick McGowan (18:58.126)
Mm-hmm.

Jason Yarusi (19:06.668)
So you have to take a breath and that breath is to just take a control back and that basically is setting my control so I can be at my base, my base level, right? And we think a lot like when we’re evaluating apartment buildings, we have our best case, we have our worst case, we have our base case, right? We want to have my base case every day is I can just have a calm position that I can start the day from. And when I do that, what’s happened is I’ve built in that, you know, there’s gonna be wildfires every day.

just in any part of your life. if you’re trying to avoid them, it’s gonna be harder than if you’re just trying to mentally prepare to be focused when they do show up, then you’re ready to actually just deal with them, right? And so I’ve had my moment, I’m paused, I go through my day and whatever happens, okay, I am now clear in my mind, right? And just my thoughts that I can go and just really be present with what has to be done just because now we can get through it.

Nick McGowan (19:57.986)
Yeah, that makes sense man. think there’s a for you to be able to set the parameters for yourself and boundaries in a sense of like I gotta have me time to be able to do these things. And I’m glad that you’re honest and real about it. I don’t really have anybody on here that’s like fake or straight up lying about things. But it’s interesting when I find that there are people that are like, I can meditate for hours and hours and hours because if you really talk to them, that’s not a thing they started last Thursday.

you know, they’ve been doing it for like decades, because it’s incremental growth. And you start to do it. It’s almost like when you’re at the gym, and you’re like, all right, well, I’ll do this weight. That wasn’t as terrible. Maybe I’ll put a little bit more. Next thing know, you’re doing more and more and more. And it’s not like it keeps going where at some point, you’ll just be able to do bench presses of 1000 plus, like, that’s not how we’re built. But you find that sweet spot for yourself. I also realized just over the course of life for myself and

talking with other people, working with people, that there are also things that we get that are probably part of our genetic makeup, but then there’s also the environment thing. So you said the family construction company, I assume your pop or your mom started it and probably not when you were 25. Was it something that like you grew up in with them running a business?

Jason Yarusi (21:17.646)
Yeah, I I come from five generation of construction, And so in my bunch of Italians, my family, no one, know, everyone was in disagreement. So it was really just my dad, right? Because no one, no one gets along, right? So my dad, always in construction, but started really working in heavy construction. Probably, I mean, just by the time I was born, he was already into that business. So he had done that, you know, but.

Nick McGowan (21:21.163)
Alright, cool.

Nick McGowan (21:27.683)
Hmm.

Jason Yarusi (21:38.39)
It’s not easy. mean, a small business when you run a mom and pop, and that’s honestly what we do today is we buy a lot of those operations and we improve them because there’s many ways that, you know, a mom and pop operation is great. And there’s many ways that a mom and pop operation is not great. Right. Typically it’s that the business is everything, right. You never leave it, you know, outside, you bring it home, right. That’s part of anything, right. If you’re a business owner, like there’s a very hard separation of church and state. Right. And so that business,

was a very involved, intense, difficult and hard business, right? And so he did that for many years. And so when I came out and started working in the business, my little brother was working for me in the city. He came out and started working with us too. And it was more Italian, so constantly more battles, but we were able to really do a lot, right? We were able to grow the business, but it still had constraints, When you’re still running a family business that had constraints. And so I use those as…

Lessons like we got my dad to retirement. Fantastic, right? Didn’t know that would ever come. But the piece of it was that, you know, I look back in that and there’s lessons everywhere, right? I worked, I learned lessons from working behind bars. I learned lessons from working in family businesses. I learned lessons. opened and sold a brewery. I learned lessons from that. You you learn lessons from everywhere. And the goal is that when you look at these lessons, you’re gonna use the lessons in a couple ways. Okay, cool. I can build upon that. like that’s lesson not to do that again.

And I had both of Like my dad, very, very great. He knows how to do all the things, but from a business side, there was a lot left. He was not the best in the business side because he was so busy working. And that’s many times what happens when a business, when you’re so into it, you’re so busy doing the thing that you forget that it’s actually the business that needs to operate for you to be able to do the thing. And so we were able to give some context to the thing and create more variables and then learn how I can do other businesses in a way that can continue to operate.

Nick McGowan (23:04.107)
the

Jason Yarusi (23:32.512)
Because you want to look at them as like, many times, businesses get capped because they don’t have a huge ability to get economies of scale. And that was one of them. It was very labor intensive, very insurance heavy, just things that were hard to scale. So, okay, cool. So we have to go and just be very cost conscious while driving revenue. And so you take that and you look forward to what we’re doing today is that I have a lot of those little nuggets that have been built into what I do as our day-to-day business.

Nick McGowan (24:02.486)
Make sense? Are there any kind of pivotal moments that you can look back to to think like, damn, that thing sucked. But because of that situation, here’s where I’m at. Or this is one of the things where like it was like a massive missile went right past your head and you guys were able to learn from it. But that has changed the way that you run the other businesses and how you also run your family. You know, just by being yourself and being able to show to your kids like, you can do these things. And that was part of what I was bringing up with your

parents too of like, we can do this, but we can still be parents where other people sometimes are just like, my dad was never around because he ran some company or what have you. So all that lines up, but are there some key moments you can look back to to go, damn, that was a changer right there.

Jason Yarusi (24:47.246)
Oh, I have dozens. There’s lots of things that build upon. Like my dad worked so hard, he wasn’t around a lot during high school. that was, he was just working hard, but he wasn’t there. He would be out before I was awake and then back after I was asleep. But he was trying to accomplish, and so no fault there. The real estate business, have thousands of…

Nick McGowan (24:50.516)
Pick one. Yeah, I bet

Jason Yarusi (25:12.11)
people living in buildings, right? So things are gonna happen. Like I brought a building, I don’t know, eight, nine years ago and all the right inspections, everything came back approved. And a month in there was this lift system because at one point the road had been rebuilt higher than the sewer, right? So you had a system that actually pushed the sewer line up while the lift system broke. It took all the building out. So nobody in the building had water, right? it was like the first reports come back like, oh, you might not be able to get this

part for like three months because it was built in like it was a Chinese part to like replace this thing, right? But you you have to always be in figured out mode because that’s the part. It’s like, okay, I can’t have this whole building vacated. Like that’s not the option. So, you know, the figured out mode is that, okay, how do I find the right answer? And you have just have to look at your team, look at people around you. then, because there’s the right answer out there, but many times I’m not getting the right answer. either don’t know the right question or I don’t know the right person to ask it to, right? And so, you know, we ended up

getting to the right person who had a connection with a company that actually manufactures parts within, I think it was like 36 hours, we had the building back up, right? So you go from catastrophic event to being like, okay, solved, right? And that’s like a lot of what it is, is that you you gotta learn not to panic when these things happen because it’s not ideal, but this is what you’re in it for. Like you’re an entrepreneur, like you’re.

Nick McGowan (26:19.934)
Nice.

Jason Yarusi (26:38.252)
you’re solving problems. And so when the problem comes up, Okay, it’s either let’s run away from the problem and it’s just probably gonna compound, get worse, right? And just manifest or let’s just dive into it and just figure it out. And if you look at it, like you could think of it as like five second problems or five year problems. Like if it’s a five second problem that you’re only gonna remember for five seconds, just deal with it, just get it done. If it’s a five year problem, you gotta put your energy into it. Cause it could make a big difference. So be full all in, right? And when you do that,

then you can really set your sights on what’s really priority.

Nick McGowan (27:10.112)
You pointed out being not panicking. That was one of the things you said even just going through what you do in the morning to make sure that you’re calm. That’s something I noticed right off the bat. Even when we first started talking, you were just instantly calm. Like we’re starting off having a conversation. You obviously have some energy to you. And I think shit, even if you even if you spent four or five years just in Jersey and then moved, you’d still have probably some Jersey energy in you. So no matter where you’re at, believe me, I understand that.

Jason Yarusi (27:36.174)
That’s right.

Nick McGowan (27:39.635)
But I think that’s a testament to the work that you’ve done, but also being able to look at things as a logical and looking at things of like, well, we just have to get this stuff done. So how do we go about it? But that’s where some of the macro pieces come into play of like, if there were some trauma that was living in your body, some situation that kept telling you, look, you’re stupid. Every time this happens, it makes it worse. And then you start to go through those things. Are there any of those things that you’ve kind of worked through that the audience take away from? Because

You could go, it sounds like you’d go from a situation with one of your buildings to a kid, to something else, to this thing and that thing. And it could be like hit after hit after hit that would just chop you down. But if you can look at it say, well, we’re not going to panic. We’re just going to move through these things and do it. Were there moments where you did panic over the course of time that you were like, well, here’s how I learned to work through that.

Jason Yarusi (28:31.08)
I, there’s always panic and there’s not, right? And so, you know, especially as you go through things, right? You either are always in a state of emergency, right? Or you learn that everything’s not an emergency, right? And like, even in the world here, it’s like with teams, right? You’re either gonna build a team where every time something happens, they run to you, or you’re gonna empower the team to do something, right? And that’s what you have to do to really have a business that grows. So, yeah, mean, there’s been countless times where, you know, we face things

that are just all kinds of things. I mean, we had a closing nine, eight months ago, right? And like very big closing and somehow there was like four lawyers, just way too many people involved. And usually with that, creates an issue, right? Because someone misses something, right? And we’re at literally two hours to the closing and it was a very dilating closing because the seller had to break a security that was their loan to be able to close and it had to be done in a timely fashion and it would have

blown up and we would have lost a couple hundred thousand dollars, the whole deal. Well, one of the lawyers ended up not reading the paper right and couldn’t give an opinion letter because they weren’t licensed in the state that they needed a letter in within, and had like an hour and 45 minutes to close. And so it was this part of like, well, what are we going to do now? Let’s try to, you know, like, or it could have been like, oh, I guess that’s it. And like, let’s be mad at the lawyer and everything else. And like, you know, like throw our hands at them and scream at them and all the things and like, you know,

a decade ago, a year ago, it probably when my energy went, but the part was just like, that sucked, but okay, what are we gonna do? And so we just got on, we found it. I ended up randomly knowing a guy through who I had met through a connection, who was a lawyer that I literally just knew that was licensed in state. called him, I was like, listen, I got this thing. I will pay your rate double if you can get it done in the next 45 minutes. And you got it done, I think we closed when we had about like seven minutes left for this to be able to fund.

Nick McGowan (30:27.369)
Jeez.

Jason Yarusi (30:27.48)
for what it was, but it was just like, yeah, okay. And then, know, but like, it’s not a thing that you celebrate or not. Like, I think I’ve learned that I don’t get down on the downs or up on the ups. I just roll and that’s where it is because if you ride that roller coaster, it’s hard because the, you know, if you look out, like I think, you know, a good equation was like, my youngest is six. He was like, how is the world around, but we’re driving it so straight right now.

And you try to explain to them that how small of a format we’re in that right now we’re such a small scape, right? So like right now it’s sunny here, but on the other side of the world, the sun’s not out because now the world is round. And so just where we see it looks straight, but if you looked out hundreds and thousands of miles, it would have a curve to it, right? But that’s like what we do in our life is that we treat every up and down like we’re on this roller coaster. And if you just look out over your course of your life, it usually just has a nice curve to it in a nice good way.

Nick McGowan (30:56.785)
Yeah.

Jason Yarusi (31:20.878)
but we get so stuck in the ups and downs that we get lost in the moment that it makes everything emotionally harder. And I’ll give you one more equation is like New Jersey and feel your same thing. Like it gets real hot or it gets real cold, right? But it doesn’t get like hot and cold in the same day. Well, like here in Tennessee, you know, like it’s weird because like the cold can sometimes feel colder because it will be like 15 degrees in the day and then it’ll get like 65 in like the middle of the day and then like 12 degrees at nighttime. And then it’s like 15 degrees and then it’s like 55 degrees. And it’s like.

Nick McGowan (31:33.37)
you

Nick McGowan (31:42.781)
the

Jason Yarusi (31:48.012)
You can’t figure out the weather, right? It’s like never hot or cold. It’s like everything at the same time. So if it was more shocking, then it was just inherently colder, inherently warm, right? But if we look at our life, you know, we just have to stay balanced with where we are because then it allows life to just be lived.

Nick McGowan (32:03.176)
Man, you nailed it with the temperature. Where we’re at, was literally like 25 or so this morning. It’s basically 60 right now. Like, I would have the window open, but there’s a dog outside. So, I will once we’re done. What an interesting thing. And even as you were talking about that stuff, it’s like, their outliers saw this stuff. I don’t wanna call anybody out, but I don’t think we have anybody that listens that…

Jason Yarusi (32:11.639)
Yeah.

Nick McGowan (32:29.502)
beliefs in this. Maybe we do, but you’re talking about the globe and the earth being round. There are also people that think you could keep driving then just fall off. So there are outliers to these things and beliefs that come from different spots. And one of the things you would even said like 10 years ago, a year ago, whatever it’s like these are incremental growths that even even if shit gets kind of crazy, you can go nuts, you can yell at those people, you can throw things.

it’s not gonna give you your money back. It’s not gonna get your shit done. And it’s not gonna get the deal done. But you can be upset and grumpy, but that’s not even gonna do anything for you to go like, damn, that sucks. All right, what do I do? I call this dude, this is how I can get this thing done and start to move into that motion. was having a conversation earlier with how animals are different than we as humans are. We can stew on things. Like a bird might sit up on a wire and see something that’s right down.

that they just want to go grab and eat. They’re not going to think like, man, you know, I kind of my ankle this morning or, you know, I got into a fight with the wife before I left and now I got to feed these damn little birds or whatever. It’s like, no, just gonna get it shit done, go down, eat it and move along with its day. If it were to get angry, it were to get crazy about it, it could potentially miss and then not eat and not be able to do those things where we as humans do that stuff where we get so angry and like I see it in sports at times somebody will get

just so frazzled in the moment. Other times other people just don’t. Like, I don’t know what side you’re on, but I’m assuming it’s either green and white with the jets or blue with the giants.

Jason Yarusi (34:10.062)
I’m a Jets fan. It’s almost a good thought of perseverance. But even what I see with the Jets fans is that many times I see so much excitement at the beginning of the year just to be beat down. But if you just go in there emotionally ready for a heartache, if the goods come, the goods come. But you can’t get too high to find a letdown.

Nick McGowan (34:18.456)
Yeah.

Nick McGowan (34:34.438)
Well some point Gary Vee will own the Jets and I think something good will come out of that.

Jason Yarusi (34:37.55)
I think we’ll at least have some good marketing will come from come our way from the jets for sure Yeah

Nick McGowan (34:42.172)
At least at least But I think of you the Eagles won the Super Bowl this year. Jalen Hurts was just cool calm and collected and they beat the hell out of the Chiefs and If he lost his mind if he went a little crazy Then he could have missed those things just like Basically what you’re talking about of the not panicking thing So along those lines for people that are on their path towards self mastery. What sort of advice would you give to them? regarding

Jason Yarusi (34:52.182)
Mm, yeah.

Nick McGowan (35:11.65)
how to basically keep cool in those really tough spots.

Jason Yarusi (35:15.566)
Get back to the actions, right? I think usually when there’s a lot of stuff going on, you just have to break down actually what’s going on. And it could be anything. Like you could mentally put it in the silos. You could write down the five things in front of you on paper, but you have to break it down because you can’t deal with it all at once, right? So have a lot of stuff going on. You only deal with one thing at a time, right? So have to figure what is the thing of a priority list and just focus on that one thing. And it just gets back to little steps.

the little steps build into big steps. And you’re taking little steps the wrong way, right? You’re gonna be really off track. But if you can get back to where these little steps building into, then that one step after the other, it just builds confidence back in you because you’re now building that momentum. But if you look at these like big goals, you try to go after big goals and you don’t have any foundation for where you’re trying to build upon, well, it’s gonna crumble fast. And that’s why you don’t see goals reach a lot because there’s really no actions that are built out to achieve the goal at hand. It’s just a wish.

Nick McGowan (36:09.191)
It’s just like having the strategy of hope. Like it’s a good thing to have, but that’s not gonna really gain much. Well, man, I exactly. Well, I appreciate you being on. And before I let you go, where can people find you and where can they connect with you?

Jason Yarusi (36:11.886)
Correct. Yep. It’s Star Wars. Yeah.

Jason Yarusi (36:22.188)
Yeah, great talk. you can find, I have the Live 100 podcast, it’s short form podcast. We hit it quick. It’s about just going out there and breaking barriers to get the life you truly desire. So Live 100 podcast, find out across all the social media platforms. And then you get me at Jason Urussi at Instagram.

Nick McGowan (36:39.355)
Again, Jason, so much fun. I appreciate you being here today.

Jason Yarusi (36:42.819)
Thank you.

https://youtu.be/TLxju5mrs5o