Well what's up my friends this is the Jason Stapleton program the entrepreneurial podcast that breaks down the skills you need to start and grow a business that creates more wealth and freedom for you that sounds like your jam let's get started well welcome back everybody it is well today's Thursday I didn't have a show on Monday I was out of town and so I knew I had this one in the wings for you guys and I was I'm excited to share it with you this is a friend of mine Derek Richards

he and I did real estate together many many years ago and he has gone on over the last 15 years to create a fantastic business a brokerage with over 19 agents working underneath of him he has a really powerful mission that he's on not not just to grow his own business but to really be an inspiration to anyone who's starting a business and especially those people in the real estate industry and so I'm really I think you're really going to like this this

episode and if you do like it I'd just invite you to go and subscribe to Derek stuff he's on Instagram and he's doing all kinds of reals are really motivational that's real one of the reasons I asked him to come on is because I I absolutely love all the entrepreneurial motivational stuff and conversations that he's having to help inspire people to get out there and become the best version of themselves so before we get to that though I want to tell you about our sponsor for today we've got Shopify guys Shopify makes it simple to sell to anyone

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Let's get on to the show. Zarek, man, what's been going on Jason? Well, first of all, thank you so much for inviting me on your channel well, it's any of the year so to answer your question is honestly as I can things are slowing down a little bit, especially in my world of real estate, you know, we're seeing interest rates rise so hopefully as we're telling our other agents that we're getting to a new normal but honestly, things couldn't couldn't be

any better. We're healthy. We're enjoying the the holiday season so everything's good man. That's good. I mean, you guys are wait, you guys are having terrible weather there, right? It's like, it's like negative five degrees today.

You you've experienced Kansas weather before my friend last week, we had 58 degrees today is a negative five with a windshield of negative 28. So, um, we're going to have a we're going to have sunshine and rainbows here by Friday, I'm sure.

Well, the gamut that we run, I was going to say I, I remember one year when I was there, it was negative 10 without the wind.

And I remember that just being the coldest that I've ever felt like you didn't couldn't put on enough clothes to where you couldn't feel the negative 10 and the wind just cutting through everything that you owned.

And the idea that it's negative 23 there and it's snowing. Apparently it's snowing all day today is what I heard.

Yeah, it's it's not the fun snow either. It's just the wind blistering just smacking the face. No, it's that dry snow. Yeah, yeah, you can't make a snowball out of it. It's just it's just a tease man. This weather sucks.

Well, I wanted to have you come on the show because I was really I was interested in everything that you've been doing because you and I met.

What was it 2007 2006 went how far or maybe before that when we first met each other. Do you remember? I believe it was around 2006. Yeah, we started that that real estate journey together for.

Yeah, so Derek and I worked underneath the same real estate agent Andrew Nicola doing residential real estate and when we knew each other like work together every day, both of us had like no business.

And we were just trying to figure out how to try and make money selling real estate and to Andrew's great credit. He was a great mentor and he he was feeding us some deals and kind of trying to help us out.

But then you and I about the same time I still feel bad about this because Andrew like put a lot of it invested a lot of money. I didn't realize how much I didn't realize what he was trying to do at the time because we was trying to do is trying to build a team that he could then use to grow his business, which is what I think every business owner should do, right?

You got to get a grow. If you want to grow, there can't there's got to be multiples of you that can handle some of that business. And you and I about exactly the same time decided that we were going to go do other things. And I went to commercial real estate for a short time and you ended up moving from Kansas City back to Manhattan, right?

Manhattan, Kansas. Yeah, Manhattan, Kansas. Yeah, not Manhattan, New York, Manhattan, Kansas. And you started selling real estate out there. And that's kind of where

that's where our paths deviated all those years ago. And so I want to kind of go back to that point when you made that leap because do you and I apologize for not knowing more about this, but do you own your own brokerage now or are you just an agent working underneath somebody else?

No, great question. And yeah, I love talking about the journey because to me, there's nothing unique about it, I think. I think it's very organic in nature and a lot of just trial and air with being comfortable with risk.

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