Jason Yarusi’s journey is a testament to the power of embracing a transformative mindset, rooted in his ‘Live 100’ culture—a philosophy that champions long-term growth, purposeful living, and sustainable success. In this episode, Jason reveals how a near-fatal accident forced him to confront his dissatisfaction and build a life of purpose. He dives deep into the core principles of his ‘Live 100’ culture: self-awareness, owning your reality, and positioning yourself for greatness. Tune in to learn how to apply these principles to your own life and achieve peak performance in all areas.

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Jason Yarusi – Building A ‘Live 100’ Culture: Creating Workplaces That Inspire Peak Performance

Welcome to this episode of the show, where we delve into the secrets of building workplaces that not only function but flourish. Joining us is Jason Yarusi. He is a titan in creating dynamic and thriving business environments. As a seasoned fund manager with over $300 million in commercial real estate and a builder of community-focused cultures, Jason has mastered the art of empowering people to reach their full potential.

Through his leadership at Yarusi Holdings, which has acquired thousands of apartment units, Jason has cultivated a Live 100 culture. We’re going to talk about what that means. He has been pushing for peak performance by nurturing empowerment and inspiration among his people. Beyond real estate, his diverse entrepreneurial background spans from construction to hospitality. Each venture is guided by his commitment to excellence and team growth. Whether it’s running ultramarathons or hosting Multifamily Live Podcast, which is his podcast, Jason embodies the principles of living fully and leading passionately. Get ready to be inspired by his insights on transforming your workplace into a launchpad for exceptional achievements.

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Welcome, Jason.

It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Jason Yarusi’s Journey And Success Story

As we kick things off here, one of the things that I’d love to learn more about is you as a person. I know that you have a lot of stories to tell. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got to where you are and your success in both life and work?

I grew up as a shy kid. I was very shy and wasn’t really outgoing. I didn’t have a lot of confidence built into things. I left high school after facing some challenges. I had some close friends who passed away from some tragic events and I felt a little bit lost. I went to college, got a Business degree, and found that I didn’t want to have anything to do with anything finance or business.

I moved to New York City. Instead of taking the logical approach that most of my friends were from going and finding a job somewhere in finance, engineering, or something of that management position, I moved in and started working in bars and restaurants. I spent a number of years doing that to the point that it was my life. I was doing chaotic things and getting chaotic results. A couple of years in, I found that everything I was doing, I hated it. I wasn’t happy with it. It cultivated and crafted my results both financially and personally. I wasn’t in great relationships.

Lo and behold, one night, I was leaving a bar at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning, got on my bike to ride across Manhattan, and got hit by a car. The next thing I know, I’m in the hospital with a couple of broken bones, some stitches, and a pin on my wrist. I’m leaving the hospital and the only thing I could think about was, “I need to find a way to get back to this job because I need to make money for rent.

I had this pause where I said to myself, “That’s a pretty crazy thought. Here we are, out of the hospital, and all I can think about is getting back to this job that I don’t want anything to do with. Either I have to say, “I’m okay with what I’m doing,” and go on and stop complaining and blaming everybody else or do something different.” The thing was, I didn’t know what to do differently. Many times, we get stuck and say, “I got to do something different,” but we don’t know what to do, so we keep doing the same thing, expecting different results.

Lo and behold, I started to try something that was different from what I was doing. I stopped drinking at night. I stopped staying out late. I would get up in the morning and work out continually. I would go do things that were different. They weren’t massive changes, but consistently doing them day in and day out started to create energy that was going away from the negative into a positive direction. That started to compound where I went from working behind a bar to opening up a bar and restaurant and selling a brewery before finding another path of moving into the construction world.

I went out after Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast to help my dad with a family construction business that was always a small business. We grew that to a good state to get my dad retired a few years after that before finding my way into real estate. In 2011 or ‘12, I started to move into the direction of real estate. We started to flip homes, buy some Airbnbs, do wholesaling, and a bunch of things.

When things started to take off, I stopped doing all of these things. We were having good success but we weren’t doing great because we were doing too many things. I came upon buying apartment communities. That stuck with me because I understand the model of being able to buy a large asset and being able to use the economies of scale you get built-in with even a large business. We started to treat it like that.

 

From 2016 into 2017, we started buying apartment communities. The first one we brought was a 94-unit. Over the course of the next 8 or 9 years, we’ve brought a little over 3,300 or 3,400 units down here, mainly in the Southeast. That brings us to where we stand.  I’ve moved from the East Coast. I’m down South of Nashville in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

What does it take to run all those different locations? What’s the size of your staff?

There are internal and external staff. I have an internal staff of seven people. They handle many facets, a lot of the parts from investor relations to admin and marketing. We have an in-house property management team that manages about 450 of the units, everything from leasing to construction management, to asset management. We have that on my side. We have an external team. That comes down to all of my property managers who handle these properties in different parts that have the on-site leasing staff, the maintenance staff, and any of the backend office staff they have. We have two different formats that go.

For our internal team, we have about half of them here that are in Tennessee. The other half, some are up in New Jersey. They help manage the assets from there. When we first started this in 2017 or 2016, it was just my wife and myself. We found that it was great. We were like, “Cool.” We did it with that, the 2nd one we did, and then the 3rd one.

It quickly became apparent that if we wanted to progress in this, we were the ones stopping the growth. If we were working on talking with brokers or underwriting deals, then we weren’t able to service investors. We weren’t able to work with the property managers. There was always a piece missing because there wasn’t enough focus on building a team for support.

As soon as we started to put people in positions around us, it was able to allow us to go and flourish in the roles that we really should be doing for our business that cultivates new opportunities and then also investors. When we did that and got the energy back into that, then the business started to take off in the following years from there.

Overcoming Fear And Financial Challenges

How’d you overcome that initial fear? Everyone’s always afraid of, “I can’t do this because I have to pay my rent. I got to put food on the table. I have to provide for my family.” How’d you overcome all those hurdles?

I was talking about this. Many times, we think everything is the 1% worst-case scenario. We have to get credence that there’s also the opportunity for the 1% best scenario to happen. Most of the time, we’ll say, “If I do this, then the property might burn down. All of a sudden, the collector is going to come after me. I’m going to lose my house and they’re going to come take my dog.” What happened? All you were thinking about was trying to do something better than where you are. You have to put things in the silos. Even when I was explaining this to my wife, we’re a good pair because I’ll look at the future, but then she’ll ask me, “Do we need to do this? Give me a cause to have reservation,” and make sure to go through it.

I started to look at this because I had a small restaurant and a big restaurant. I found with the small restaurant versus the big restaurant, I had the same thing. I had the same taxes, the same insurance, and the same electricity, but I only had 12 or 13 seats whereas the big restaurant had hundreds. When you look at that, I had the same things happening and I had to pay for the rent, but I had more opportunity to go out there and create revenue on the bigger property because I could sustain more.

With the apartment buildings, if I had a four-unit and I couldn’t hire a property management company, that meant I had to run the whole thing. If I had 2 units vacant, I was at 50% occupied. I might not even cover my expenses or my mortgage. If I did certain things, it wasn’t going to make that much difference. If I went to push the rent up $50, it was only $200 a month. If I have a 100-unit building and I have 5 vacant units, I’m still 95% occupied. I have one roof. Potentially, if it has to be replaced, it can still be sustained as part of the operations. I could hire a whole team to operate the building.

Many times, we think bigger is more scary or more risky, but many times, bigger can provide more opportunity for you to go out there and create a business model. Share on X

I started to break it down into a logical approach to look at it and say why this makes sense. Many times, we think bigger is scarier or more risky, but many times, bigger can provide more opportunity for you to go out there and create a business model. When we do small, it’s like you’re putting your toe into water. Maybe you can work out the process, but you’re constrained by the limitations of the property. You have to look at both sides and say, “Where’s my temperament?”

Many times, when we work with people, they ask, “What unit size should I start with?” It really comes down to their mental capacity at the time. If you want to do a twenty-unit, we can build a plan to get there. If you want to do a 100-unit, that’s fantastic. We can do a unit to get there. If you want to do a six-unit, no problem. That’s where we need to start. You don’t need to do a 6-unit to do a 100-unit. It’s like, “I want to go swimming, so I need to learn how to ride a bike first.” It’s not translatable. It’s not where you need to do one. It’s where you set your stage and where you go out there.

To get over that fear, I started saying to myself, “I don’t like where I am.” To make that change and get where I want to go, it’s going to take something different from what I’m doing. If I keep saying, “I want things to change,” each and every day, that’s what I have done for years. I was saying, “I want things to change,” but I’m doing the same thing. Nothing’s changed. You’re doing the same thing, so why should something change? We get so comfortable not liking where we are but it’s safer than us stretching to potentially do something else that we stay in this place that’s comfortable even though we dislike it to extremes.

Was there a catalyst that inspired you to make that change to ramp up and then also focus on reducing risk?

There’s always a catalyst. It’s that time of you choosing to act on it. What was a big part is that with all the different things we’re doing in real estate, if there were 25 hours in the day, 8 days a week, we could’ve used them because we were running rampant. My wife was pregnant with our first child at a certain point and we had no time. It was time-induced, and we were the ones causing the activity, but more activity wasn’t necessarily getting more results.

With many parts of real estate, it’s very transactional. If we went and flipped the house, it’s not like, “It’s all good. We can’t do anything else.” You got to go do the next project. You do that next project. You create this hamster wheel you’re constantly on until you can say, “What’s the direction we go from there? Do we continue to ramp up this business?” We started to do that at a certain point.

More activity creates the need for more activity. When I started looking at apartment communities, what made the logical sense was that it started to get my time back, and I could focus on things that could scale a business and pull myself out of the part of activity. I’m not here on the ground talking with contractors, running the Home Depot, and trying to work with getting things leased. I can put together a plan where other people would service it. It was that strain and pressure on me wanting to break the mold of being chaotic in my day. The days are chaotic enough without me adding to it.

Understanding The Live 100 Philosophy

Tell us about Live 100. How did that come up? What does it mean? What is it?

 

Live 100 is breaking your bad habits so you can build moments and you can magnify the success you deserve to have. The three foundational blocks are break, build, and magnify. Each of those three blocks has core principles on top of them. What really stood out is that a lot of people have come up to me over the years and said, “How’d you break this chain? How’d you get out from being at this one part or from being a bartender and making these things?” I look back and it got to the simple part. It is that I started to be self-aware of how I was showing up. That’s the first principle.

I’m self-aware that I wasn’t showing up in a good way. I was negative. I wasn’t forthcoming. I didn’t have a good head on my shoulders. I wasn’t responding in a positive way. My thoughts were always from the lack and not from the long. I had to be self-aware of how I was showing up. The next part of that was instead of saying, “That’s what it is,” I started to own it. I said, “I’m not showing up this way. I’m not showing up as the person I want to be.”

What stood out was that I knew I wanted to be someone different. I wanted someone who could control my day, be healthy, and have success. I then started to look at the habits of what that person would have. How does that person show up? They weren’t constantly saying when someone asked them, “How’s your day?” “At least I’m not dead.”

I started to get away from those things that you would hear. You start to pay attention. It gets that part. When you start putting those words out into the universe, your mind can’t tell the difference. Whatever you’re feeding your mind, it starts to create your energy going out there. I started to be self-aware but own it. I was like, “I’m not showing up as that person. How does that person show up?”

You have self-awareness and own where you are. The third principle is positioning yourself for greatness. You start to look at the person you want to become. You don’t know exactly how that person is, but you have ideas. You see what this person is. They’re confident. They stand up straight. They speak in the affirmative. They have beliefs that are positive beliefs. They talk with a positive nature. You start to say, “What is the gap from where I am to where that person is?” It starts to make you aware. Your mind starts to open up.

98% of our day is handled in a subconscious way. 2% were conscious of it. When you first go to drive a car, you get into the car and you’re aware like, “Here’s the steering wheel. How do I put the car from the park in reverse? Where’s the pedal? Where’s the brake?” After some time, you get in the car and go and drive it. That’s a lot with our habits. You either have good or bad habits. You’re constantly saying, “This is a good or bad habit.” Most of the time, we’re built on a lot of bad habits that happen routinely throughout our day, and we don’t even pay attention to them. When we start being self-aware of those habits, then we start positioning those habits to be better habits.

The key, especially here with New Year’s resolutions, is that people want to break all these habits. You can’t break the habit and say, “It’s broken. There’s going to be a white space there that now needs to be filled.” If you’re a smoker and you smoke 8 times a day, and 15 minutes within that day, there are 2 hours that are opened up. If you’re not conscious about what serves in those two hours, you’re going to fill with another one. You’re going to go in there and be like, “I’m not smoking. I’m chewing nicotine gum.” You’re doing something that replaces that moment. You’re not really truly thinking of that time you’ve gotten back and what’s going to serve it.

The best way to break a habit is to find a positive habit to replace it. Share on X

The best way when you’re limiting, trailing back, or trying to break a habit is to find what is going to replace that habit in a positive way because it allows that time to be filled with something that’s going to help you in both ways. One is going to make you a better person because the habit is a better builder, but it’s also going to allow that habit that is being replaced to consistently stay replaced.

Finding ways to cut out bad habits and replace them with investing in yourself in some ways.

It may be investing in yourself, but it also may be stopping to pull yourself down. It doesn’t always have to be energy, like, “I need to invest myself. I don’t need to smoke. Now, I’m going to run a marathon or read a book.” You can eliminate something that’s pulling you down and detracting from the rest of the positive you’re doing.

Eating healthy would be one thing. If you’re not eating healthy, do you cut out every single thing you do, make it so hard on yourself, and go to this part? No. You can live your life. If you start going from 0% of healthy eating to 70%, think about how your day changes. Think about how your mood changes. Think about how your energy changes. You can have big changes in a small amount that allows you to sustain.

I talk a lot about consistent habits that are built and repeated where not every day you win but you start winning more than a lot. That changes the whole dynamic of your outlook. Usually, when we do a New Year’s resolution, we go from not working out all year to being in the gym on the 1st week. After three hours of working out, you’re like, “I’m so sore,” and then you never go back. That’s because you’ve made this transition that there’s no foundation for.

The build part of it is that you need to build habits and rituals that can serve you but then intentionally execute. What would be better? Trying to find 3 hours to work out where you can do that 1 time a week or do 15-minute workouts 5 days a week? Fifteen-minute workouts are going to build you into a better person over the long run because you’re going to build a consistent habit. You’re going to repeat it. It’s going to make you a healthier person than trying to find this three-hour workout that you constantly have to look for that may not ever fit into your day.

Balancing Drive With Leisure And Recharge

I know that the people reading are going, “That sounds great. It all makes sense.” I’m thinking, “Drive. How do we think about this in our leisure time? How do we recharge?”

Leisure time gets back to this part. Do you use your time for leisure, or do you use it constantly for scrolling? With social media, we all use it in a way that builds us and we can use it in a way for fun too. You can’t use it in this mode of a constant filler. I like to run. When I go out and run, I’m not out there scrolling on social media or listening to things. There are many times I’ll go out there and run because what happens is it opens my mind to not have this distraction filler. This distraction filler stops me from being creative or having ideas.

I get out there and what happens? A lot of the things that are on my mind get solved because I’ve had my mind a moment of pause that frees it up. Do you have to cut back and say, “I’m not going to watch TV ever again.” No. If you say, “I usually watch TV for an hour,” what if you watch it for 50 minutes and take 10 minutes before to have this time where you write down your day or write down your moments? You start putting these parts. What’s going to happen is that you’re going to start getting creativity back in your mind. You’re going to start to solve a lot of problems that usually get washed away because what you’re doing is filling time.

I was trying to explain to my kids. We went to Europe. I said, “Ten or twenty years ago, you’d be on a plane and you’re flying somewhere. There are no TVs everywhere and all this stuff. Now, you have bells, whistles, and things.” Many times, you’re fully engulfed in so much noise at all points that you have no time for yourself. Many of us live from the second that we wake up to the second we go to sleep with our phones in our hands. That’s part of the life of the business that’s available, but that’s not all that life has to go.

If your job is very draining and needs you a lot, and you constantly have to be on your phone, one of the things that I’ve done that’s worked is that I go on a jiu-jitsu quest twice a week. It’s an hour right in the middle of the day. I usually come out with anywhere between 60 to 100 calls, texts, and emails because it’s right in the middle of the day. What I find is that if I didn’t go to that, I’d be in the motion or in the thing like, “Let’s solve the problem.”

Usually, you empower people because most of that, let’s say 60% of that, is solved by the time I get to it because they’ve gone to find a solution. With your team, you can either be a task giver where you’re constantly giving the answer or you get a better team by going and saying, “I brought you in for this role. Here are our goals. Here’s our shining light. Here’s our lighthouse. Here’s where we want to be. What would you suggest we do in this moment?” What that does is it allows them to take control back and start to empower themselves in the moment to be able to go and make decisions. You can then go and say, if you give them these three options, “Those are great options. Let’s do this option,” or if they’re on a great path, go run with it.

What’s helped us grow is that we have the idea of how we want this to role. I’m like, “I’ve brought you in to run this role, so give me your ideas of how we can make this better, and then we’ll go craft it together,” instead of me saying, “Howard, I need you to go out there and lease this property. Go put it on these three marketing channels. When they come in there, do this.”

We may be stopped because you’re doing exactly what I told you to, even though you know there’s a better way or even though you see there are different options to grow. You’re like, “That’s what you’ve told me,” so you’re staying in your lane. That’s allowed us to grow as a company because the employees feel part of it, and then they feel empowered to go out there and make progress.

Adopting The Live 100 Philosophy For Employees

Have you adopted the Live 100 philosophy with your employees?

We have worked in a lot of capacity to continue to break it. We’ve started a process where we buy the same apartment buildings all the time. We try to find the same type of assets and do that model. What that does is it creates consistency in our business plan, but there’s always room to expand. We look at it constantly with our process of the apartment communities and the property manager side and then say, “These are the steps we’re taking. How can we constantly refine these steps?” That allows us to build. You go into those peaks but then you plateau. When you’re plateauing, you’re saying, “We’re doing the same model, but now the model needs to be changed.”

 

We talked a little bit offline about how the market’s always changing. You see pressures. There are times when everybody’s doing really great and everybody has got money. There are all these things. They’re getting stimulus money. You’ve also seen the last few years where there has been a ton of inflation. Everything costs more. Gas is more. Groceries are more. Rent is more. People are having harder times. There are different marketing channels. You have to look at ways that we can continually go and look at our business and look at the things, the habits that we’re doing, the execution that’s happening as part of those habits, and how that needs to be adapted so we can continue to build and continue to magnify the growth that we have.

Live 100 Impact On Leadership And Organizational Culture

Being on the Live 100 program that you’ve adopted for yourself has you show up differently as a leader, more healthy, and so forth. How has that impacted your culture at your organization?

I’ve gone away from the directional to the empowered role. That made a big difference. Years ago, I had more angst and more anger. A lot of that was built on prior things. This time, I’ve gone to the part where everything is not level ten. We’re not always operating at 8,000 rpm. Many of us in our lives in day-to-day action treat everything as if it’s its own same fire where 98% of the time, they’re not fires.

What I look at is what I call five-year problems. I’m like, “If I’m going to remember this in five years, then it needs my full attention right now.” Ninety-eight percent of our day are things that we are not going to remember in five years, so they need to be handled in the appropriate manner. When you get back to that, then you can work with the team and say, “Here’s the problem at hand. This can either be something that weighs or something we need to find a better way.” What it usually does is it puts us in a position to create better practices for the future.

When things come up, you look at it and say, “That was not what we wanted to happen.” Before, it may have been something that I got very upset about, but this time, I looked and said, “Let’s not have it happen again. How can we make our processes better?” That has helped us overall because the team can say, “We’re going to make this better. We’re not going to allow this to happen again, but the next time we see this, we’ll be able to handle it in a way that’ll be quicker, cleaner, and more appropriate for the time.”

Your leadership style is helping people be accountable and autonomous in their daily jobs and so forth. I imagine that it takes really clear communication, framing out priorities, and so forth. You mentioned setting up priorities and so forth. Do you help your people on a certain cadence to understand their priorities?

We do two days of meetings. It’s a Monday meeting and a Thursday meeting. We don’t want to meet in-depth, but we want to meet and hit on the things that are most valuable to our business. The Monday meeting is a meeting that’s on the organization. We come in there, handle open items, and handle anything that’s urgent or needs to be explored. It gets the week off on the right foot.

On Thursday, we meet with the team, internal and external, on each property. What that does is it allows us to go in and focus on the property. We’ll focus on the property. We’ll be leasing, we’ll be operations, we’ll be anything that’s construction-related, and then we’ll be open items. It allows each person that is usually operating in a silo or maybe operating in a silo for a week to get in there to make sure everybody is on the same part for the same team. What that gets us out of is the chaos of everybody trying to communicate on all levels throughout the week.

We start Monday with the right focus. We go into Thursday looking at where we stand on each of the properties. That allows us to refocus to get us back to Monday. We found that those are two good linchpin days for us to address the open items that really need to be handled with the properties and with the team.

You were talking about balance and then avoiding burnout. That’s part of making sure that people are autonomous and accountable. I know that you’ve established this for yourself, but for your employees, are they practicing some of these same habits?

We always want things now. We want to be in shape now. We want to have money now. What we want to do is have this forever, too. We want to find the things that we do in our day that are enjoyable and that we want to continue to do into our thirties, forties, fifties, and sixties. Working with a team and working with others is about building a process and building a life that we can continue to do.

People ask, “Why do you work out now?” It is so when I’m in my fifties, sixties, and seventies, I can still be working out but I can also have time for my kids and my grandkids, feel healthy, and still live a life. Many do things because they’re up to a point. They’re sick or in a hospital. They have some diagnosis. They have to because they’re forced to do it.

A lot of this is that there is a point to doing it, but there’s also not a rush to do it because you’re going to be doing this for a long time. You have to find things in your life, whether it’s working out, reading, or having time with your kids, that you’re fully engaged in for the moment, but then you use this as a stepping stone to get to the next moment. We use these New Year’s resolutions to go out there to try to do something immediate, but it doesn’t stick because we haven’t built into the foundation of what that’s going to present. It’s like, “There’s such a disconnect between where I am to where I want to be that I don’t have the foundation for it to sustain.”

With the team, it’s constantly working with them. I want them to make as much money as they can. That’s the big focus. I don’t want my team here to be struggling and to be lacking because that’s not what this whole thing was built on. We’re constantly looking to empower them and empower the people we work with to go out there and make the best life they can. Why are you here doing all this if it’s not for something that’s going to make you better as a person, both for yourself and for others around you?

It also requires building a level of trust between you and all the folks.

Empowering people is about giving them trust, not just telling them what to do without understanding why they’re doing it. Share on X

When you think about trust, there are many times when you work with employees and part of empowering them is that they feel a level of trust because you’re not saying, “Do this.” They don’t really know why they’re doing it, but then they also don’t feel like you trust them because you’re not allowing them to do the role they’ve been brought into.

Inevitably, someone screws up. It happens. How do you handle those types of situations?

It’s human nature. We’re all sinners. We’re all making mistakes. We’re all doing things. That happens. You get back to the root cause, “How did this mistake happen?” The goal is to say, “This has happened. What are the ramifications? Let’s deal with that, but then also, let’s correct the process going forward.” Many times, in my past, I would’ve been like, “You did this,” but usually, a lot of the things that happen start from the top. There is some practice or some principle where it happened because I didn’t create something from an organizational standpoint or a team standpoint for this to be handled accordingly, so it was not handled accordingly.

You look at that and say, “It comes back to me. This is my company. I’m given a part. I’ve put them in these roles.” It gets down to, “Is this the right thing that I have set up? How does it need to be changed? How does it need to be corrected? What needs to change in the employee manual or overall company operations?” When you look at that, it’s not so much of a blame. You’re saying, “This has happened. Let’s course correct.” If it happens repeatedly, then we have to say, “Is it the wrong person in the wrong seat?” We then make that adjustment.

Sometimes, people do need guidance. There’s a balance between full autonomy and then giving people the right amount of guidance. Are there ways that you develop your people? Do you have certain programs in place as far as development?

We look at the roles in which we bring someone on for a role, but then we’ll develop them into the role. We’ll build out the role of the person. Our company has expanded with the people that we have here, but I’m not scared to also look at them and how they’ve developed in the role and say, “You’re in the wrong role. There’s another role that’s grown here that we need to move you into.”

We have two people in our team that started in one role, and then we moved into another role because as we’ve developed with them and worked for them, it has stood out that they would be better positioned in different roles. When we work with our team, we don’t want to stick with it and say, “I hired you for this, so you’re staying here.” We want to say, “What’s going to be the best position for them but also for the company?” It’s constantly looking at the team and making sure we’re addressing where they stand so we can all continue to rise together.

Lessons From A Serial Entrepreneur

I want to back things up a bit. I know that you’re a serial entrepreneur. You’ve had a restaurant. You’ve been in construction. You have this real estate business that you’re doing and this empire. Among developing all those businesses, what types of learnings do you have as far as for other leaders that are building a business around the people element, which is hiring right, making sure that you’re motivating people, and retaining your top performers?

There are many levels we can go on there. You have to have at least your lighthouse to start. Sometimes, we open up the business but we don’t know what the business is going to serve, who it’s going to serve, or who the customer’s going to be. We’re guessing out there. You have to have a lighthouse. When you start a business, you can read as much as you want or listen as much as you want, but you’re going to learn the most by taking action.

What actions allow you to do is it allows you to get feedback in real-time to understand, “Am I in the wrong direction and I need to stop and change?” or, “Am I going somewhere in the right direction and I need to pivot?” or, “Am I in the right direction and now I can go put fuel in the fire?” When you think about that as part of that process, you have to look at it as, “Do I need to bring people on? Who is that first person I need to bring on?”

When you’re hiring, you can hire in a way of saying, “Who’s the best candidate?” You can also hire on energy too. Some of the best people who will come on have great energy and they’re great people. They’re going to figure it out. That’s the person we need on our team. We also find people that are fully capable, but then they don’t have the mental capacity yet or they’re lacking in their own mind and they can’t serve the role because they’re in doubt at the moment.

When you look at the team, some of the early hires are the most important. Let’s say you go from 5 people to 100 people. They’re going to be based on the principles and the operations of those first five people. I’ve constantly looked at our business to say, “What’s going to be that driving goal we want? What are some of the first people we need to get there?”

You mentioned that you’re looking for those people who are innately engaged and who will really want to perform, and they’ll figure it out no matter what on your team, which is great. I also find that some of those individuals who are high-powered can burn themselves out. How do you help your team prevent burnout in those situations?

We’ve kept the work hours to what we find is reasonable. We give them shorter times on Fridays. It’s, “Here, get the work done. After hours, things may come up but we’re not going to constantly hammer you after hours.” Many times, like anything, everything can always be a fire or it can be part of operations. When you get burnout is when everything seems to be a fire.

It may be that a tenant called that a doorknob is loose and it’s 10:00 at night. I’d be like, “That doesn’t need to be handled tonight, team. We’ll work on it in the morning and put in proper procedures.” We get back to procedures of, “Did they put it into the platform? Did they put in a maintenance request?” We then allow that to go through the channels. It is about allowing the team to understand the dynamic of, “There are certain urgencies that we need from you each and every day,” and then there’s, “Not everything is an emergency.” It allows them to focus on it.

 

It’s like a to-do list. If you give the team 100 things to do on a to-do list, they’re going to feel constantly busy and are probably going to focus on the easiest things to do. If you say, “As part of this to-do list, there are only three things that matter here today. That’s where I need your focus.” It allows them to put that energy into it, so then we’re getting the most appropriate things done for the time.

How To Learn More About The Live 100 Philosophy

Coming full circle back to leadership and personal development, I know that there are a lot of things that you’ve done in your program. First of all, if somebody wants to learn more about Live 100, what it means, and how they can find more information on that, what would their first step be?

There are two things. We have the Live 100 Podcast. You can find it on all the podcast platforms or YouTube. They are very short hits. We’re talking for 6 to 8 minutes. We talk a lot about the core principles of Live 100 and a lot about our journey. You can go to JasonYarusi.com. There’s a free assessment there they can take. It answers questions for themselves so they can get their starting line of where they’re at.

Is this another business line that you have that you’re also running and helping entrepreneurs do better with their lives?

Yeah. We do peak performance coaching for a number of people. A lot of them are real estate-driven. A lot of them are business owners as well. They’re having some level of success but it’s not exactly where they want to be. We help them craft the plan to break out from their mold of where they stand.

How long have you been doing the podcast and the individual coaching?

We have the Multifamily Live Podcast and then the Live 100 Podcast. For the Multifamily Live Podcast, it was 2016, I believe. We’ve been out there. For the Live 100 Podcast, maybe a year and a half. We’ve done a lot of coaching both on the real estate side and performance side in the last couple of years. It’s been maybe 3 or 4 years.

I’ve got to say that I’ve been looking at a lot of your content on Instagram and social media. It’s really inspirational. It’s a great balance of life and business. That’s one thing a lot of leaders lose their eye on. I know Howard and I come from a long line of large or Fortune 500 experience. Many years ago, it was like, “You’re not supposed to have a personal life.” You go into business and do your thing. One thing that I love about the new leadership is that we understand that there’s a connection. It’s like the mind-body type thing. There is a work and life harmony that needs to happen for people to do their best work. You demonstrate that in your program and what you’re providing online, so thank you for that.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Top Leadership Takeaways: Key Insights For Success

As we wrap up here, what are the top things that you would like leaders to walk away from this discussion?

You touched on it. A big thing, which you even speak to, is that there are more ways for us to connect at all times. You can be constantly on all the time. The thing that’s worked very well for me, which I’ve parted with others, is to be focused on where you are. Many times, we’re at home and with our family but we’re not really there. The time is not well-spent.

When you’re in one place, just be where your feet are. Focus fully on the moment, and you’ll be more productive when you’re in the next space. Share on X

We’re with our kids for a couple of hours and all we’re thinking about is work, and then we get to work and we feel bad that we weren’t with our kids. Neither is beneficial because we’re not at either place at either time. When you’re in one place where your feet are, put your mind down and put your time into it because it’s going to allow that experience to be better. You’re going to be so much more productive in the other space when you’re there. That’d be number one.

Number two is the to-do list, we all have them, but usually, if you look at your to-do list right, there are 3 or 5 things that have to happen. Do them first. It’s very easy. For the other 30 or 40 things, either find the people who should be doing it or get them off your list because, most of the time, they shouldn’t even be on the list. All you’re doing is making a longer list each day. You’re doing them like, “Today, I need to call that one client who is thinking about not re-upping with us but I’m going to go get stamps.” That’s a lot of our focus. You put off the things that need to happen that have the most focus on the growth of your business.

That’s a good point there. I catch myself doing that all the time. It’s like, “I don’t want to pick up the phone again today.” I have that mantra. My mantra for 2025 is an extra 2%.

I like it.

I’m trying to think about that as I go along to keep it going. There are those little bits every day. I know that you’re a very fit individual. You were talking about jiu-jitsu and so forth. One thing that I found most impactful these past few years is a regular routine. You do a little bit each day. It doesn’t have to be painful. It needs to be consistent, pushing the needle every day, and then it magnifies.

One thousand percent. You said 2%. I don’t know the compounding number for that but you get 1% better every day. People are like, “That’s not that much.” It’s a 3800% of improvement. You look at that and how big of a change that is. It’s everything. I like to set off my mornings by having control in my morning. The rest of the day is going to have chaos in it, whether you want it or not, but it allows you to be at least present and focused on that and not feel like your whole day starts in chaos. I get up and have consistency in my morning. It allows the rest of it when it’s inconsistent for me to be ready for it.

My wife was sharing this social media post with our kids. Sometimes, you get up in the morning and walk into the room and their bed is in shambles. It’s like a bomb hit in there or something. She shared about this Military guy on his social media about making sure that your bed is tight and how that’s the first thing that’s on your to-do list. That’s because if you make that bed and make it nice and pretty, then you can check that one thing off in the morning. No matter how your day is, and it can be the worst day ever, you come back into your room and there’s that first thing that you did right right there in front of you. You made the bed.

Starting with a win is a very important thing in life.

It’s been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much for your time and expertise and for giving it back to the community here. Thank you.

Thank you both. It’s been great to be here.

Take care.

Take care, everyone. We’ll see you in the next episode of the show.

 

Important Links

• Jason Yarusi
• Yarusi Holdings
• Multifamily Live Podcast
• Live 100 Podcast
• Live 100 Podcast on YouTube
• Live 100 Assessment
• Jason Yarusi on Instagram

 

About Jason Yarusi

Jason Yarusi is a private fund manager specializing in multifamily real estate, overseeing a portfolio valued at over $245 million. Since 2017, he and his wife, Pili, have built Yarusi Holdings, acquiring and repositioning over 2,300 apartment units. Through operational efficiencies, strategic renovations, and complete rebranding, their firm helps properties reach their full potential.

As a thought leader in the real estate space, Jason hosts The Multifamily Live Podcast, delivering actionable strategies to empower multifamily investors. He also leads the 7 Figure Multifamily Mastermind, a program that trains aspiring investors on the success formula for acquiring and managing apartment buildings.

In addition to his professional achievements, Jason is an ultra-runner, fitness enthusiast, and devoted family man.