Creating positive momentum and taking control over your work day with Jason Yarusi

Hey, everybody. Drew here. You know, we are always looking for more ways to be helpful and meet you wherever you’re at to help you grow your agency. It’s one of the reasons why we’ve produced this podcast for so long, and I’m super grateful that you listen as often as you do. However, there are some topics that are better suited for quick hyper-focused answers in under 10 minutes. That’s where our YouTube channel really comes in. For quick doses of inspiration, best practices, tips and tricks, head over to youtube.com/the at sign agency Management institute. Again, that’s youtube.com/the at sign or symbol.

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Running an agency can be a lonely proposition, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn how to be better faster if we learn together. Welcome to Agency Management Institute’s Build, a Better Agency Podcast, presented by White Label IQ. Tune in every week for insights on how small to mid-size agencies are surviving and thriving in today’s market with 25 plus years of experience as both an agency owner and agency consultant. Please welcome your host, Drew McLellan.

Hey everybody. Drew McLellan here with another episode of Build a Better Agency. Welcome back. Glad to have you. You know, I think this is a challenging time for agency owners. We are undergoing so much change, and I’m gonna focus on that in upcoming solo cast. But for today, I have a great guest who’s gonna talk to us about that, how we react to change, how we take control of our life, how we set the course and direction of our business is much more in our control than sometimes we allow it to be, or we think that it is. And so, Jason Yarusi is our guest today, and he has a really interesting life story.

It’s not in our business, but I think his story is absolutely something that we can learn from and should learn from as we sort of navigate this sort of post covid change rich time, and thinking about how we want to show up and how we wanna define success and how we want to get there. So, without further ado, let’s welcome him to the show. Jason, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

So, give everybody a little bit of your background and sort of how you came to have the views around success that you do. What Give everyone your, your backstory.

You know, I I, I grew up as a pretty shy, lacking, confident kid. Didn’t have, you know, my dad, my parents were always together, still together today, but my dad had a small business and it was a very intensive, heavy construction business, and he wasn’t home. And like, I, like high school. I probably didn’t see my dad for the majority of it. And through that time, I was facing, you know, a lot of traumatic events in my life. I, I’d lost a a couple friends throughout like my formative years to just tragic accidents. And I lived in a pretty, you know, middle class town, you know, and culminating with my girlfriend getting killed in a car accident when I was 17. Wow. So I went to college least really with a lack of just, I just was lost and ended up picking a major based on just a random suggestion from, from a, a girlfriend’s mom at the time.

She said, you know, you’re, you’re good at math. Why don’t you do business? So I was, I was really making very, very defined choices as you could see, right. So, I, I picked business, got a finance degree, left college, and it had no devotion to want to do finance and moved into New York City and did the logical choice was to be a bartender. So I started working bars and restaurants and all these, all these things that really weren’t self-serving, but they were just to do right. And just wasn’t happy. You know, I, I was just lost for what I wanted to do. I didn’t feel committed. I, I felt lost in life and I was doing just a bunch of random acts and just picking up random jobs. And of course I was getting chaotic results. And so every day, every moment, it just, it wasn’t something I was happy about, and it was just a lot of stress in life.

And one night I was riding home, you know, from on my bike from a bar at two 30 in the morning after getting off of a shift. And I was just mad at the universe because I was just constantly just blaming everybody else. You know, it’s very easy when, when, when you point the finger out to say, oh, you know, it’s my upbringing, you know, my education, you know, my friends, you know, my family, it’s everybody else’s fault, but myself. Right. And on that journey home, you know, I, I’m riding home and, and out of nowhere a flashlight comes out and I get hit by a car, and a car throws me into the air. And next thing I know, I’m, I’m, I’m pulling myself outta the street. And I get taken to the hospital with a bunch of broken bones. And at that moment I’m like, I need to get back to work because I need to make money for rent. And I had this like, moment of pause.

I was like, man, you just kept saying through this whole day how how miserable you are and what you are, how, how much you despise what you’re doing, how much you don’t like everything you have. And all you’re thinking about now is you gotta get back to this job. You don’t want to be at. Like, that’s crazy talk. So I had this moment of like, reflection, like, okay, if that’s the path I’m gonna take, I can’t keep being upset at the results because I’m choosing this, or I can just figure out something different to get some better results. Now I’m not, I’m not gonna sit here and say that I magically transformed overnight, like this whole epiphany and like kumbaya the next day. But I started rapidly making some small better choices and, you know, stop drinking. And I get up at, at a, at a useful time, you know, go and, and start to work out, have a active rhythm, start to learn, right?

Get back to this learning phase. I was in this phase for years where I just was like, I’m done learning. I’m outta school. I’m not gonna read books like these things that like just come as, as like your new guided principle in your life. Right? So I got back to putting myself on the spotlight and turning the finger back on me and saying, okay, it’s, it’s on you now. You can’t blame me to be out. You have to go out there. And from there, it led me to start doing things that started to get better results. So I went out there and opened, you know, a bar opened a restaurant, opened and sold a brewery. And then in 2011, I moved to New Jersey to help dad with that family construction business. ’cause his business had exploded because of a hurricane that had happened up there. So that, that ended up being very, I guess, informing for many years.

I learned a lot from that business on all sides of just how to scale business, but also some of the things that could really set back a small business or family business constraints. And I just kept looking for other ways that I could get back my time. Right. Get back a point, because at that point, you know, I had met my wife, you know, she’s pregnant now with our first child. And I, I just had no time and I was running ragged throughout the day. If there was 25 hours in a day, I, I would’ve used all 25 hours. Well, we ventured into real estate because we thought that was the answer. The, the, the step that we did. We started flipping homes and that, that proactively started to give us some more revenue. And we were doing fine with that. But now I’m so busy, I’m just getting less active, less time back in my life.

So we kept asking that question, what else could there be out there? And we came upon buying large apartment buildings. Hmm. And we heard someone doing this, and we saw the message and we went out there and started going to learn all we could about this. And in 2017, we brought an apartment building that was over in Louisville, Kentucky. That was the first of a number of transactions today. So we brought a 94 unit there. At the time it was $2.3 million. And now, fast forward to today, we’ve done about 32 acquisitions of apartment buildings in seven states here in the southeast. And I’ve brought about 3000 apartment units to date. So we, we’ve done very well in that space throughout that time. You know, I’ve been on a journey myself of just trying to improve myself.

So I’ve just been constantly testing myself through, you know, doing a ton of marathons, doing 50 mile races, some a hundred mile races, just to really put myself to the forefront. And people, you know, kept asking like, how are you making the change, you said? And I look back about what I did, and, you know, I started putting into these blocks. I started to break the habits, right? That, that didn’t serve me. And I started to build momentum with more intentional execution. And that, of course, magnified the results. And that’s the message that I talked to today called Live 100. That’s helped me take my results from where I was and fast forward to today, get the results that lead me to the life I live today.

So that was what period of time from, from the kind of the wake up call of being hit by the car to today? What, what was that window of time? How

Much? Yeah, so the car was 2010. So, so you take 2010 to 2024. Okay.

So over the 14 years, years, what was the most important sort of, for you of here’s how I wanna change my life?

You know, the biggest part is to be, be self-aware about how I’m showing up. I, I would say that’s gotta be the starting point right now. Because many times I, I, I was showing up and getting bad results because I was constantly looking outwards and not looking back about how I was, right. Because I, I can’t control what’s coming to me, but I can’t control how I reacted. And I was reacting poorly for many years until I started taking it apart. It’s like, okay, I can’t control all these things. And so to control the controllables and then for the non controllables, understanding how you’re showing up and making sure that’s pivoting to the person you want to be.

So that’s easy to say, I wanna show up different, but what does it actually look like?

We all have stress in the day, right? So, so if you think about that, like you, you have stress in your day. Like it’s just, it’s something that’s gonna go on there and, and, and you grow through your stress. But many times we’re getting more stressed out because we’re not taking control of the things we control. So like, for instance, I get up early, I get up early, so, you know, before my kids, I come up, I, I have three kids, I get up early so I can get up and take a couple minutes and do some breath work and then, and you know, have a coffee and, you know, do some brain games and I go work out and I can come back and I can feel set for the day. Like, that’s my set for the day. That’s like my starting line. So I get back, you know, my wife’s waking up, she can go have her moment, I could spend time with the kids, where in, in many times in the past it was that, you know, I’d get up late, maybe hit the snooze button and I would run downstairs.

And of course you’re late for everything now your phone’s blowing up and now you’re running to the part, now you know, you’re, you’re, you’re short with your kids. You jump in a car and now you’re stuck in traffic. And then the whole day is just a fire. And you’re gonna have things that like happen, like through your business that are just not ideal during the day. But when you’re not prepared with yourself for what you can do to set the stage for your day, it starts to blow things up. So the first thing is like, I control my morning to best of my ability. So if the day doesn’t go perfect, at least I’ve had the moment in time for myself in the morning that I can clearly be focused on this. And that allows me to go through the day that, you know, are they all perfect? No, absolutely not. But at least when that comes up, I can have the brain space to truly focus on it.

So that’d be the first thing that would come to my mind.

So setting the day off with a routine that sort of is grounding and lets you sort of clear your head, probably identify the key things you have to get done that day. What are my priorities for the day? And then, you know, the day comes right? And the day brings all the things that the day brings, whether it’s a disgruntled employee or it’s a financial issue or whatever it may be. How do you find, how do you take yourself back to that grounding throughout the day? How do you, when, when things start to go off course, which every day does? I, you know, I, I was just thinking yesterday, I thought I had a certain kind of day.

I actually had a day with no meetings, which never happens Monday through Friday for me. I had a couple people cancel, things happen. And I, I had this, I knew I was gonna get all this stuff done. And then of course my day blows up and I’m getting texts, people saying, can you talk today? And, you know, all the things. So that’s the reality for all of us, right? So how do you recenter when the day starts to get off course?

You know, like when you, you start getting going and you start moving faster and faster and faster and faster, right? Yeah. And that’s usually how chaotic moments happen, is that like, when one thing happens, the next thing happens. Now you’re just in this ping pong is like whack-a-mole. That’s all coming at you so fast. And the hardest thing. But the best thing to do is just in the moment, just stop. Because we usually have our day ruined by like five second events or one minute events, right? Something like, oh, if someone cuts us off, right? Or someone says something that, you know, an email is misguided right? Or something and it blows up our day. But if I look at this, I usually ask myself, okay, right now, if I pause right now and let me get my thoughts clear, is this thing gonna completely boil over?

Is everything gonna blow up? Right? And usually 99% of the time it’s not. Because usually what happens is that we get into some, you know, misguided email back to the person, or we say something short because we’re, we’re, we’re thinking that we’re moving at a great pace, but then we make it even worse because we’re rushing to the moment. But these moments are hard, especially, you know, you’re, you’re higher energy, I’m hiring energy. The people listening to this are higher energy to work in a fast paced environment. So it’s, it’s hard to stop, right? Yeah. Especially go, go, go, go, go. But sometimes you have to stop for the moment and put that down for an hour and then allow it to come back to you because your message will completely change. Because you’ll have yourself to think through the thoughts of saying, okay, here’s, here’s the problem. Right? At the moment, I just see one path forward, right?

And so I just go and just, that’s the moment. Like, I just go and like, that has a purpose in time. But most of the time we need the moment to say, okay, here is the thing that’s in front of me. Here’s the situation here typically is there’s probably three ways I can go, but I’ve only thought of one of ’em. ’cause I’m rushing to it, right? But I taken a moment, I give myself an hour, I go back to those three moments, and the one I picked before may, may be the right choice, okay, then go forward. But now the other three have popped up and I, I’ve had a rational decision about what I do, and I can go execute on the plan. That’s usually first and foremost. That would, that would be the first part. Second part would be, depending on the team around you, there’s some of these things here that they’re better served to allow your team if, depending on where it is, especially if you’re, you’re a solopreneur, you might need to bring somebody on that can start taking some of those off your plate.

Because somebody stressors may be misguided now because you need to have your energy focused on, on higher callings for your business. And there are some other things that can be happening on your, on your business that from the day-to-day could be taken off your plate. That was hard for me to do too. We were doing too many of the day-to-Day activities that, that weren’t, they, they, they were needed for the business, but they weren’t carrying the business forward, right? I was just checking boxes. And so I had to make sure to take off my plate, okay, there’s someone that is in a better role, that’s their highest calling to go in there and do those tasks for me day that I can continue pushing the business forward.

So I wanna talk a little bit about how you made that shift, but for now, let’s take a quick break and let’s come back to sort of how you shifted from you doing everything to you sort of figuring out where you needed to focus your attention, and then how to find somebody you could trust and train to do the things that you had been doing. So let’s take a quick break and then we’ll come back and chat about that. I promise I’m only gonna keep you a minute before we get back to the show. But I wanna remind you that the Build a Better Agency Summit, the annual conference where we bring 350 agency owners and leaders together is coming up May 21st and 22nd. May 20th is a AMI family day or member day. But whether you are a member or not, we would love to have you with us May 21st and 22nd to read more about the conference, see who the speakers are, or register head over to agency management institute.com.

And the very first button on the nav is BABA summit. Click on that and all the information is right there. And we would love to see you in Denver in May. All right, let’s get back to the show. Are we all right? We are back with Jason. We’re talking about really being purposeful in our life and really, and really being mindful of how we focus and expend our energy, how we get through a a day. ’cause every day is a day, right? One day way or another. Every day is a challenging, interesting, unexpected day. So at a certain point in time you realize that you are not focused on the right things inside your business. How did you A, recognize that?

And B, how did you find a way to let go of those things that feels like it was still gonna be done, be done with excellence and you could actually let it go? Because I think a lot of people delegate the work, but they don’t really delegate the work, right? They’re always checking back in and they’re always worried about it, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

You know, you, you never hire, I see me at the right time, right? It’s typically that part where like you’re either hiring ahead of the curve, right? You’re, you’re hiring with the, with the future ahead of you. So, so now you’re, you’re spending more resources without maybe the revenue coming in, right? That’s one side. Yeah. And the other side, which most of us are in, is that we get so busy, we get so overwhelmed and now we need people desperately, right? And then we’re, we’re, we bring ’em on and we may not have time like we have to like, oh, just go do stuff. Right? We don’t give ’em proper training and then ultimately we don’t get the right results, right? Right. So we were on the latter side where, you know, my wife and I, we had done a couple of these larger real estate projects, right? And we, we were doing these proactively, however, we were now becoming the bottleneck because the, we did these to be able to manage projects. So we get back control of our time. And then when you have a number of projects on you, you now have no time.

Because if I’m doing one role, I can’t do the other role. So if there’s 10 roles, right? Even if I do ’em all, perfect, right? I’m only doing one. So nine are not getting served. So the hardest thing is to find a person understanding that you are in the driver’s seat, right? You’re the, the leader of your business. So are you probably gonna do this role the best? Yeah, absolutely. You’re probably gonna do this the best, right? But finding someone in there like to complete some of these tasks, sometimes you need it 90%. ’cause getting the other nine done at 90% is better than you just doing one at a hundred and zero at nine. Yeah. Right? And that’s the hardest thing. So we started bringing people in, you know, as teammates that could, could start taking some of the day-to-day activities. And you could do it a couple ways. Things you’re not good at or things that you, you don’t like doing.

Right? And if you, you would take a moment through your day and you just write down 10 things like, I’m not good at these and I don’t like things. Okay. Those are the first person, like you probably need some kind of administrative assistant to come on, start taking on those roles. It could be everything like, you know, making sure like the bookkeeper set up or like going in there making sure like utility bills are paid or making sure, like I check in on when tax payments are made or going there, making sure accounts are set up with the mortgage or sending things back, you know, through, through to the underwriter, right? Like it could be things of that process from like a, like a marketing side or a sales side, right? It could be, you know, the follow up for invoicing with clients. Like all these things here, like, you know, they’re part of your day, but if you’re gonna grow to a massive company, you can’t be sending every invoice to the, to the client, right? Right. You can’t be a follow up and have tasks in there. You’re like, oh, I have to set them up in QuickBooks and all these different things.

Right? There’s someone else who can very much proficiently do that. Now, do you have to give everything to ’em? No. That’s usually where get caught off. Like, oh, I’m just never gonna be able to let go control. We’re not asking you to let go of control. What we’re doing is that, say there’s 20 things that you, you don’t like doing or are not good at doing, well start ’em off and give ’em three and you know, the next week, you know, give ’em three more, right? Because you slowly build into it because you do wanna make sure someone’s committed to your team because we do invest a lot of time in them. Right? And what I liked doing when I did this is I, I, when I bring on employees, I help them. We, we now have manuals, but in the beginning I’d had them help create the manual because at a certain point I’ve had two things. Someone moves into some other course of life, moves somewhere else.

Well now I have a manual of how this, how this role operates. Or two, as they grow in the company, they’ve now moved up and now we have a manual for how that person is that they’re training who comes in there. So it’s helped me evolve into company as well to get to that next step by helping others do their best calling. ’cause what we do when we hire people is many times, you know, my dad and I were always at, at edge because he was a, a task giver, right? And, and you wouldn’t know he was fantastic at everything he did. But he would give me like one task. Like, okay, go get that shovel. Okay, got the shovel, go dig a hole. Okay. How deep, right? Like we, so we, not even I digging a hole, like I don’t even know, you know, what the purpose of, right?

And I was guilty of that too, is that every time someone needed to do something, they had to come back and ask me like, okay, what do I do next? Because they didn’t understand what was the result? Like what was the purpose of this? Right? Right.

What am I trying to accomplish?

Correct. Right. And usually what happens is that what I’ve learned today is that I don’t know the best route. Many times I’m like, Hey, I’m here to, I, I need to get here. Right? Here’s how I would do it. Do you have any, any indication of something that would make this more proactive? 50% of the time they do. Yeah. Okay, go do it your way. Now they take ownership on it. Now they have more commitment to it. Now I get a better, quicker result because now they’re invested in it and now they’re committed to that task. And now that’s their task going forward. And that’s helped us grow because I’ve now empowered the team around me. ’cause the team is not waiting for me for each step, because now it’s just almost like having no team. ’cause I’m just like basically hiring at will every time I need something, I’m just calling someone to go do something.

So all of this sounds, the way we’ve been talking about it, which I know is not, not accurate. All of this sounds a little frenetic and sort of piecemeal, but I know you believe that there’s sort of a process that we have to go through to sort of have the life that we wanna have. And, and I’m sure that when you think about that, you’re thinking of it in a larger sense than just our work life. But if somebody came to you and said, my life is chaotic. I feel like I am constantly putting out fires. Not really, I sort of know what my bigger calling or purpose is, but I don’t really seem to have time to get to it. How, what would you suggest somebody in that place do to kind of find their way?

You know, the hardest thing to do is again, just stop and write down. Like right now, if you’re saying like, I’m constantly putting out fires, like are you perceiving that the real fires or the actual fires, right? Like, so if you don’t put this out, like is the, does that mean like your business is over tomorrow? Yeah. You’re out of money in the bank. You will now, like your house is gonna go, right? You’re gonna come take your dog. Like are we talking like massive fire, right? Or are we simply talking about you’re you’re making something into a fire that’s literally part of your business, right? Because some of these things might just be part of your business and this is the business you choose. So let’s just go through the point instead of, and maybe transition our thought about how we’re looking at these, right? Because usually the solutions you find here is how you’re making money, right?

You’re here, especially like if you’re in the marketing world, you’re here to solve, you know, a message that’s helping someone else do something that they can’t do themself, right? And to get this message out there somewhere to get them a result you want, right? So if it’s constantly a client fire, it’s not part, well, that’s what you hear. You’re here to solve the problem. So maybe if we transition our mind from putting out fires, is that the every part of every solution of every problem, right? Is me creating more revenue. So you may have to just change your mind of, of positioning yourself to say, okay, these aren’t actually fires, these are opportunities for me to make a difference and make an impact and write them down. Like, what are the fires in your day? Because you look at that and you say, okay, yeah, they look like fires, but this is what I’ve signed up to do.

So the truth is like, this is part of my business. Is there a way that I could rapidly change it? That there’s no fires? If there is, now let’s write down what would be a way I could do that. It could be stop doing this business. It could be transition to another client base. It could be, you know, change my business plan. Or it could be that this is the way, this is the plan I have. Okay, so now that’s where things in front of us. Which one do you wanna do? You, you don’t wanna shut the business, right? I assume, right? Is this something that you need to maybe have less clients or have better clients? Okay, maybe that’s the point, right? So proactively look at what you’re doing in those steps, but typically when we transition our thought about how we’re thinking about things and from a, from a negative to a positive, or even just flip it around, right? Like, if this is, if this wasn’t a fire, what would this look like?

And then you can get a proactive solution. Because when we come here, I have fires. It’s not something that you can proactively do forward. Like, there’s nothing I can fix there. I have fires. Like it’s what can I do with the fire to proactively improve? Yeah. When you look at it from proactive step, it gives you something you can actively do right now in the moment to take action and take control back. That’s, and that’s usually the in control and not control

That, that’s sort of the key, right? It’s, it’s not just about getting your head in place, but it’s also about shifting the actions that you take. So talk a little bit about how you think through changing a habit that is not serving you to a habit that is serving you.

Yeah. You know, I guess the easiest thing to equate to is like New Year’s resolutions, right? Like we, we come up at this point, like we’ve done everything wrong for the whole year and then overnight by tomorrow we’re gonna rapidly,

I’m gonna work out, right? Or I’m gonna stop smoking or yeah.

At home and I’m gonna work out for three hours. I haven’t worked out in six months. Right? And then it fails. Well, you, you said changing, right? Because we’re not, we’re not stopping habits. No one stops a habit. We pivot a habit. Like, oh, you stop smoking, you start drinking tea, right? You, you, you know, you, you start, you know, doing something compared to something you weren’t doing before. Yeah. So you have to look about what you’re going to replace your habit with. So you know, if you’re, if you’re, you know, going out there and you’re not working out, okay, so what can you do to, can you get a treadmill? You, you don’t have time to get outta the office. Okay? Can you put a walking treadmill under your office here? And then you commit that 15 minutes a day when you’re on meetings or you’re doing something, you’re gonna walk in that treadmill only 15 minutes. And you can do that proactively. Because we had, usually when we look at this like we wanna make this rapid transformation tomorrow, and the world has set us up for this.

Like everything’s given us like, oh, you do this and tomorrow you’d be like this. But that’s not the case. What we have to ask is like, okay, if I’m gonna set up to make a commitment to break a habit, what is the result that I wanna go out there and achieve, right? ’cause this is, this is a life you wanna live, right? If you wanna go out there and have a very important business that makes an impact, you don’t want that for just a moment. You know, you’re looking for that to have impact for many years, for decades, right? So if you’re making choices based on a result of now, is that gonna give you a business potential for the future? Right? I, you know, I was looking, listening to things like, there’s so many businesses that have a moment in time. You know, I was listening to something the other day, I was talking about like tough mutter, right? Tough mutter, you know, wildly popular events and had all this part had all this energy to it.

And now it just went, you know, they, they filed for, you know, bankruptcy because their moment in time had passed because they know they had a very quick moment, but there was no runway to that. So if you think about your fitness, you know, many times we get very in shape and then we get outta shape and then we try to get in shape and we try to get outta shape. ’cause we’re trying to do these crash moments of like, I’m gonna lose 30 pounds. But we forget to ask ourself, okay, when I get to losing 30 pounds and I get to that moment, who is that person? How do I show up then? How do IE each day? How do I, how do I work out each day? ’cause you’re not just constantly gonna be crashing down and lose, like go to go to oblivion and, and have no weight left, right? You’re gonna stop at that 30 pound weight loss. And then what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna go back to those bad actions. You’re gonna say, oh, I could just do this, or I can, you know, eat, eat french fries, or I could just not work out for a week.

Then you gain that weight back. If you got to think about who you’re gonna identify as that person. So owning where you are, but then positioning yourself for greatness is very important. Like I own and I’m overweight, okay? So I’m gonna do these steps and, and execute with intention. And when I get there, I’m gonna position myself for greatness because this is going to be how I’m gonna live in my life when I get there. So you think about you and your business, like, okay, I’m gonna grow my business from, you know, you know, top line revenue of a million dollars to $10 million, right? Massive transformation in your business. Okay? When I get to that $10 million business, how am I gonna look? Like, am I going to be very active in my company? Am I going to be something I’m gonna set up other leaders within my company? Am I going to bring on employees? How many clients do we need? Right? When you do that, you can proactively look into the future.

’cause usually what you’re doing right now, it’s, it’s gotten you to that level, right? Whether it’s some failure in terms of, you know, like fighting with your spouse or you know, not being a great parent and not working out or to even good things. It’s like growing your business to $1 million. But something’s gotta change. If you wanna go to that next level. If you want to turn around in your relationship with your spouse, maybe you have to stop getting upset over nothing. And just at this point, take it and just say, you know, what is that worth gonna set up? I’m, I’ve married this person. Is it worth that five seconds to go and fight over this? Is that five seconds? Am I gonna remember this in five years or your company, you got to a million dollars with, okay, I did these steps to go to a million. If I do these same steps, I’m working 18 hour days. Can I systematically do this to get to 10 million?

Probably not. So I have to understand that I have to change something right now, even though we’re doing good to get to. Great. And usually that’s where the steps come from. Breaking your patterns to position your patterns for those that are gonna get you to a higher level of greatness.

Who do you think people get stuck?

Mine first. You know, usually we, we, we don’t, you know, like when when you do something, you rush, you can do it again. But before you, before you’ve done it, people can tell, you can do it. You can see it done, but you, but you don’t believe yourself that you can do it, right? So mentally each morning it’s the hardest thing because we have, we have to start over. Like, it’s not like we had a fantastic day yesterday. You go to sleep and it’s not like today’s like, anywhere guaranteed. Excuse me. So like at that point you have to start over again. So I think in that fact, it’s really setting up your morning.

So all of this sounds great. How do I put it into action? How do I start? So, so I, I’ve taken some time to write down some things that I want to be different in my life. Let’s just stay focused on work. So some things I want to be different in my work, right? And I’ve identified some of the ways that maybe I’m showing up that’s getting in the way of those things being different. ’cause I think a lot of times to your point to the early part of your story, it’s really easy to look out and go, oh, well business is hard because of this, or because of that company, or because the client did this or because my employees aren’t good at that, or whatever the external cause is.

But if I’m gonna own the fact that I, the change, whatever the change is has to start with me, then, okay, I know I wanna change something. I’m gonna internalize how I’m contributing to the change. But the gap between where we’re at now and where I wanna be is big. How do I begin to chip away at that without getting discouraged? Because the gap is a year away.

You know, you, you actually put in there like you have to chip away, right? You, you, you have to do it apart. Like there’s many things to, to look at that you can do here. But the simplest thing is that do things daily, they can get you the result. Not looking at the result. Because like, if I wanted to say like, my goal is to go out, buy another apartment building, well, I can’t control that. I can’t control if someone accepts my offer. I can’t control if I find a good deal. I can’t control all those steps. But what I can control is I can control how many calls I make each day, how many deals that I underwrite each week, how many offers I make, I can control those steps. You have to look at the things in your day that you can do that you can control. So if you wanna ramp up your business right now, write down three things that you should do right now.

I should go and ask every one of my clients from the last year for referral. I should ask for three referrals every day from, from, you know, three different, three different clients. Two, you know, I, I should be making 10, you know, new sales calls each day. You know, three, you know, I, I need to proactively, you know, fill in the blank. You know, check, check, you know, my KPIs, right? You know, and, and just make sure we’re on point. Like those are my three things. Good. Those are gonna carry your business forward. So five days a week, if you did those three things and you do them with commitment and you do them with intention, right? You are gonna have some positive momentum. Now. Now the the trick is you have to look at the, the things that you can do, but you can’t look at the results yet.

You have to look at the things you can do knowing these things carry you forward to a business. ’cause what you usually do is you do ’em the first day. Like I go work out for the day and I’m expecting they’d be, you know, a superman by the end of the day and I’m not. Right? But if I do these three things and I do them repeatedly for 3, 4, 5 months, I’m transformed. Same thing with your business, you know? And so Andy has this great thing where, you know, win the day, right? The win the day thing is that, you know, you write down three, three things. And what we usually get caught in is I write down a hundred and I do the, the 97 easy things and I don’t do the three things that carry my business. So these are only three things. So those three things I just talked about, you do them. And at the end of the day, if you did two of them, you write an L at the top of the page. If you do three of them, you write a w.

Now you’re not gonna win every day, but say you went from zero to now winning 22 days out of out of 30 in a month, right? Think about how much different your month is gonna be the next month. Maybe the next month you get 19, maybe the next month you get 25, right? And you have all these wins that start stacking and now you’re getting these referrals, you’re getting these new leads, right? You’re systematic, you see your KPIs growing, right? You see all these things happening, happening, happening. And now you have this mile market, what was supposed to be your goal in the end? Well, you’re so far past your goal, you’ve created a new goal because the usual part that we get stuck on is that we think the goal is just the end, right? Like, like I talk about the 30 pounds down or I make a million dollars or you know, I, I got a hundred new clients, but that’s just another day and time.

You got to that moment you got there. So what’s next? So you constantly have to be looking at the actions you’re taking because you’re not the goal, you’re the journey. And when you can look at these steps upon the journey, that’s where your time’s gonna spend. That’s what’s gonna make a difference in you and your business. And that’s what’s gonna get your results by doing that and making sure you’re committing to that and the results will follow. Absolutely. Because I guarantee you, you do that, you know, I don’t know where you’ll be, but you’ll be better than where you were. I guarantee that. Yeah.

Yeah. I, I have practiced the three things rule forever. So I literally take a, you know, a post-it note like this size the square post-it note, I write down the three things and I stick ’em on that little spot next to the track pad on my laptop every day. And it just sits there and looks at me and reminds me, okay, this is what I gotta get done today. And I, I I, I think you’re absolutely right. I, I think we are so overwhelmed with tasks and to-dos that, and it feels good to get a lot of things done. I mean, we’re entrepreneurs and so we’re type A, we’re drivers. And so it, in theory, it feels better to get 20 things done than one thing done.

But those are the 20 things that are meaningless to the business. Yeah. Where the one thing actually could propel something forward. Yeah. And it may be the one thing we don’t wanna do or we’re afraid to do or feels heavier, but when we get those things done, the day feels very, very different. You feel very accomplished.

Well, you exactly what you just said. Like, you think about that, like your one hard thing was to call three new clients, right? But in the day you’re like, I was so busy, you know, like I reorganized the office, I went to the post office and mailed a letter. I went and picked up, you know, checks and I went and da da da and you got back. Yeah. And you’re like, you been like, I was so busy. And then like the three clients is what you need to do. Yeah. You didn’t do that, but you feel like I did stuff, but you really didn’t do anything that was moving you forward.

Yeah. I, I think that’s so important. So, so not only do you and your wife buy apartment complexes and do all of that, but you’ve invested a lot of time and energy into sort of capturing this idea of living a purposeful life. So as we kind of wrap up this conversation, and I feel like we’ve just sort of scratched the surface of what people can learn from you. Tell folks a little bit more about that side of your world and your work and how they can learn more about all of that.

Yeah, absolutely. Appreciate you having me. So we have the live 100 podcast. You go there and learn, it’s really just five to seven minute quick hits talking about the live 100 living your life to the highest calling of where you should be and where you can serve the world. Within that. You can go over to Jason Yarusi dot com and learn more about working with us. There’s also our free assessment there if you wanna go take the live 100 assessment and see how you’re showing up at your starting part for your journey. ’cause that’s usually the pinnacle moment is that we want to identify where we are now, which our starting line now, and it’s fine. You can be at all different parts for your starting line. Right? We just need to know what that is. And from there we can build you to future to get in the right direction to start leading you down the path to be able to create a difference not only within yourself, but within those around you.

And for people you’ve worked with. When they look back, what do they say to you?

Yeah. Usually the funniest thing is that we come in there with, you know, the fires or the, or the problems, right? Yeah. And what happens is those problems are, you know, mountain Rushmore, you like they’re, or they’re, they’re, they’re Mount Everest, right? They’re just massive, monumental problems. But when you look back on ’em, now they’re just speed bumps because every moment we’re facing, right? We, we have to discipline ourselves to be resilient to the moment. But we learn that we have to go through these Mount Everest moments to understand what we can do and understand what we can accomplish. Yeah. So we help people reframe their mind to thinking about these moments. Is this, this is something you’re going through. Because most of the time these, these monumental moments we’re, we’re tackling right now today, five years out, you don’t even remember ’em. But in the moment you think it’s the end all right? But when you get through that right, it helps you evolve to be ready for the next moment.

Because it, it is a simple thing of that you want problems. If you want to get success, you want to be the solution maker for those problems. Yeah. If you want problems that can carry you forward to be and do something better, right? So we’re constantly looking at really reframing our mind to what is a problem, to how can we find a solution to something that can help make this better.

Yeah. Yeah. All about choices, right? Focus on choices. Absolute. Yeah. Yep. So Jason, thanks for being on the show. This was a good reminder I think to everybody that we have a lot more control over, not only our day, but how our business plays out and how we show up in all the aspects of our life. And that it really is a bunch of tiny little choices and opportunities to make minor adjustments, which add up to major change. I think, I think, I think it’s so easy to get caught up and think that we have to change everything in a day or it’s too big to change. And the reality is neither of those are true that everything can be changed.

It just takes time. It took us time to get there and it’s gonna take us time to get wherever else we want to go. And b, it’s never too late and we can start today.

Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Yeah. It’s been great having you. Thank you for being with us. Alright guys, this wraps up another episode of Build a Better Agency. I think Jason gave you a lot of tools to play with. I think hopefully what he did was he reminded you that no matter where you’re at, I know a lot of you are tired. I know a lot of you are feeling like the business is changing so fast, it’s hard to keep up with. And I think sometimes we get caught up in this sense of being overwhelmed. And I, I think that’s a really dangerous place to be is when you’re overwhelmed. The way I translate overwhelmed is we feel out of control. And the truth of the matter is, we are always in control of the things we could always control.

There’s lots of things in our lives that we will never be in control of, and we might as well just accept that right now. But there are many, many aspects of our life, how we show up, how we do the work we do, how we show up in relationship, what matters to us, what we give our time to, what we turn our head away from. All of those things are choices and chances for us to control the things that really set our day, our week, our month, our year, our life art. And so I think, I think you have a lot of great tools in this conversation that you can start to play with a and go check out the podcast, check out the website, take the assessment.

I think one of the most important things that Jason said was, we have to start understanding where we’re at and, and just accept it. It is what it is. It’s not a judgment thing, it’s not a good or bad thing, it’s just, it is just the truth of the moment. But it is the truth of the moment, not the truth forever. So figure out where you’re at and then figure out where you want to go. And then start figuring out how do I make these tiny little incremental changes, but in significant ways and in serious committed ways so that I can get where I want to be. Again, that could be in a personal relationship. It could be in the business, it could be with an employee, whatever it is. You have a lot more control than you sort of give yourself credit for.

You just have to take it and you have to own it, and you have to do something. So lots to think about with this episode. Hopefully it got you thinking. Hopefully it’s gonna have you putting a plan in place. And, and by the way, don’t pick everything. Pick one thing, just, just, again, all of you are good at this. You’ve just, sometimes I think you just get sort of the snowballs going down the hill so fast that we forget that we can slow down and we can change course. Sometimes it feels like we’re, we are out of control. The snowball is bigger than us. It’s rolling down the hill. This is just not the case. I know it feels that way, but it’s not the case. So take charge. Pick the one thing you want to change the most and start chipping away at it.

All right. So before I let you go, I wanna say thank you to our friends at White. Label IQ. As you know, they’re the presenting sponsor of this podcast. They’ve been with us a long time. They help agencies scale up when it comes to dev design and pc. So head over to White Label IQ dot com slash AAMI to learn more about them and how they can help your business. And you know what? I’m gonna be back next week. I hope you will too. I love hanging out with you. I love learning from people like Jason about how we can be better in all aspects of our life, but particularly how we show up as business owners and leaders. So I’m coming back. I hope you do too. See you next week. Thanks for listening.

That’s all for this episode of AAMIs Build. a Better Agency Podcast. Be sure to visit agency management institute.com to learn more about our workshops, online courses, and other ways we serve small to midsize agencies. Don’t forget to subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode.