The Zach and Pat Show

Brad Starnes, founder and CEO of Talent Fuse and host of the Agency Advantage podcast, sits down with Zach and Pat. We get into what nobody tells you about selling a business, how his college startup burned through $135K, the night he put $25,000 of credit-card debt on the TV and sold his Audi to buy an engagement ring, and calling every investor to explain what went wrong while fighting a stutter. Then how he hires (the ice cream question), why work-life balance is a myth, building your company like a doctor's office, a NICU start and two kids under two, and why the best thing you can do as a man is bet on yourself.

What do men secretly compete at that women never notice? When did you realize you turned into your dad? And what's the dumbest thing you ever did to impress a girl? No guest this week — just Zach and Pat with a deck of questions and zero filter. Who they'd fight from history, what their 16-year-old selves would roast them for, the hardest clients a realtor and a loan officer deal with (yes, including the dad with the toolbox), becoming your dad, snoring like Darth Vader, why you should let your kids be bored — and a lie Pat's been keeping from his parents since he was six.

Rates went from the high 5s to almost 8% in six months — and the market felt it. A full-time real estate agent and a top-1% mortgage loan officer break down what that actually means for your monthly payment, and what to do about it. No guest this week. Zach and Pat get into why "marry the house, date the rate" is dead, why listings are sitting, the seller move that beats a price cut, exactly how a 2-1 buydown works (with the real math), why your insurance may cost you more than your rate, and the "silver tsunami" nobody is talking about.

Jeremy Fernandez is a jiu jitsu brown belt, a father of four boys (two in college, one about to turn 10, and a stepson turning 30), and the owner of JF Woodworking, a one-man remodeling business in the St. Louis area. He's also one of the hosts' main training partners at Watson's.

Jeremy grew up poor in a chopped-up second-floor apartment with no air conditioning until he was 16. That's the year he stood up to his father, grabbed his clothes, and never went back. Wrestling was the first place he felt good at something: he started around 12, used his long, lanky frame for leverage, and won freestyle state as a sophomore. He talks openly about a father who drifted out of his life (the Christmas cards left in the screen door), about becoming a stepdad at 19 without any model for it, and about the things he'd do differently raising his older boys.

From there: custom car audio (where he learned to build), MMA under Jermaine Andre and later at Finney's, walking away from the cage, and finding the missing piece again in jiu jitsu. He breaks down how he competes (a relaxed "it's just a hobby" mindset held alongside an "I'm going to kill everybody" mindset), his exact competition-day ritual, the Dallas Open win over a six-time world champion, and why he stopped making game plans. The back half covers JF Woodworking: learning trades from old-timers, YouTube, and building codes, obsessing over tile, forgetting to bid a $5,500 shower, and a full kitchen/laundry/master-bath gut due by Christmas Eve.

Most Pilates instructors you see on Instagram got certified in a weekend.

Montanna Michaels spent 600+ hours, and she thinks that difference is everything. Montana Michaels, a former professional dancer, and Jacquez Perry, a D1 400m runner turned mechanical engineer, join Zach and Pat to talk about building three businesses at once: RYZE Studio STL, a classical Pilates studio; a South City rental portfolio built from city-owned LRA lots and tax-sale properties; and Jack's own qualification and validation engineering firm.

They explain how the St. Louis LRA program works, why multifamily beats single-family for them, what hiring the cheapest contractor cost them, and why they answer tenant maintenance calls within a day. Montannaa explains why Pilates exploded ("because it's cute"), how to tell a real studio from a trendy one, and the perfect weekly split of Pilates and lifting.

Jacquez explains how engineers keep a million dollars of medicine from spoiling overnight. Plus: ballet at five with someone yelling at you in the mirror, dancing in a living room during COVID, motivation vs. discipline, and Zach and Pat's plan for anyone starting out: five duplexes in five years. And why real estate is never passive income.

He spent 17 years in corporate IT and cybersecurity. Then a $4,000 detail job went so badly that he decided to build the shop he wished existed. Ron Podgorny, owner of Arch City Detail in High Ridge, MO, joins Zach and Pat to talk about walking away from a stable six-figure job, signing a personally guaranteed lease, and going from opening to full-time in five months. He breaks down why a shop beats mobile detailing on profit, why he was told never to hire experienced detailers, why his coach says a $1.5M business at 30% margin beats chasing $10M, and how an introvert calling 200 past customers turned into a ton of new work. Plus: detailing a $2.5 million car collection, a new hire caught napping to SpongeBob on the clock, what four years of jiu jitsu taught him about business, and the one thing he'd tell himself before quitting: everything takes five times longer and costs twice as much.

Some things your parents said make zero sense until the day you become one yourself.

No guest this week — just Zach and Pat running down the list of stuff that finally clicked: why dads fall asleep the second they sit down, why "we have food at home" was always right, why no plans beats exciting plans, and why letting your kid play one sport year-round might be the worst thing you can do for them.

Plus: the Costco cheese pizza macro hack, a 6-year-old who announced his retirement, and the one thing Pat does in the truck every night before he walks in the door.

Chad Klamen's family has been in real estate for over 100 years. Great-grandfather, grandfather, father — all house flippers. Nobody pushed him into it. His dad barely mentioned it at the dinner table. So Chad went and got a corporate job, made $70,000 with a company car, decided he'd made it — and got fired. He traveled Southeast Asia, came home, and asked his dad for a job. His dad said no: you know nothing about real estate, you know nothing about St. Louis, you just got fired and then traveled the world. Go figure it out and bring something to the company. So he did. He cold-called the richest real estate guys in St. Louis, landed with one of them, and spent two years walking into shopping centers and nail salons in a suit in the middle of summer getting told to get out. Today he closes 75 houses a year and is on pace for 100. This one is the whole operation, out loud. The buy box. The 56-day cash conversion cycle. Why 25% gets wholesaled, 50% gets whole-tailed and only 25% gets a full rehab. Why $100,000 houses have $100,000 problems. Why they cap rehabs at $75,000. And the line most investors will never say on camera: they WANT to lose money on one out of every fifty houses, because if they never lose one they aren't being aggressive enough on the buy. It's also three brothers and a father in one business, and the consultant they hired to teach them how to talk to each other. Pat gets into what working with family cost him — and why cutting his own business from $40 million a year to $20 million made him better at all of it. If you want to know what the flipping business actually looks like from the inside, this is it.

Tommy Marciano started with $240 in his pocket and his mom's car.

He'd seen a Gary Vee video about flipping stuff from garage sales, spent $40 of that $240 on his first buy, went home and called himself an idiot. He was too intimidated by eBay shipping to ever learn it — so he started meeting strangers at QuikTrip to do $3 deals and accidentally built a local Facebook following instead. Today Tommy Trades runs 52 auctions a year, pickups every Saturday, junk removal, moving, and some weekends he buys fifteen storage units at once.

This one is the whole machine, out loud. How storage-unit auctions actually work and why they open at $10. Why he goes to garage sales for marketing, not inventory. The $2,250 buy from a couple of seventy-year-old bikers in Maplewood that turned into $15,000 inside a week. The hoarder house in

Sunset Hills. The human skull. The $50,000 in gold somebody says they pulled out of his dumpster — and why he genuinely does not care.

It's also the parts nobody puts on Instagram: operating scared the entire time, seven bulging discs and pressing furniture overhead anyway, standing outside his own warehouse at 4 a.m. getting a job application from the guy stealing from him. Why anime is a better model for manhood than American TV.

Why he thinks prioritizing money is the stupidest thing you can do in business. Japan alone for a month, skydiving in Moab behind an 80-year-old and an amputee, and Bob at Missouri Coin — who was given up for dead, hallucinated his way to the top of a mountain, and got kicked off it by Jesus.

If you've got $240 and no idea where to start, this one's for you.

At 45, Joe Stewart flew to Florida for what he was told was a team meeting. It was not. His father's investor group had decided to sell the bank holding company Joe was running — and nobody had told him.

Eleven years later he walked away from a bank he'd grown from $60 million to over $200 million, on his own terms, at his own price. This episode is the whole arc: how a 20-year-old who wanted to work on the New York Stock Exchange became the entire collections department of a small Missouri bank by accident, how he clawed his way to owning the smallest bank in the group, and then exactly — step by step — how you sell a company. The investment banker. The two years of cleaning up financials so you're "the prettiest girl at the dance." Fifteen buyers down to ten, down to six, down to two. Highest and best. And the day the wire finally hits, which he describes as one part celebration and one part memorial.

Joe also gets into what most people get wrong about money — good debt versus bad debt, why "you don't want to be a slave to a payment," why your business should carry its own debt, and why just because you qualify for it doesn't mean you should sign for it. Plus 2008, PPP, flying a plane home from Oshkosh with a dead alternator, and why he steered both of his kids away from the business he spent his life in.

If you own something you'll eventually have to sell — or you're 25 and trying to figure out what to build first — this one's for you.