Antwan Marby, better known as Ish, has built a platform as co-host on the Joe Budden Podcast. However, the public figure also has stakes in real estate and joined BLACK ENTERPRISE’s Selena Hill to discuss all things entrepreneurship.
Marby has spent decades in the construction and real estate industry but this wasn’t where he always planned to be. For Marby, becoming an entrepreneur was something he gradually found himself falling into.
“It wasn’t even really a conscious decision, I don’t think,” he says. “I worked in corporate, I used to work in finance in corporate, and I experienced what I had heard about, where in corporate sometimes you’re fired or let go through no cause of your own. That happened to me at a young age.”
Marby revealed that he began pursuing real estate after being abruptly fired from his corporate job so his boss’s roommate could be hired. The experience marked a turning point for the young man, who promised himself to never feel that way again. That is how he launched his career in real estate as his own boss.
Marby started out by regularly attending seminars, where he learned his principles about rental real estate and financial freedom. “I was still working, I still had a job,” he shares.
“You’re scared to kind of jump out and do your own thing and so once that happened it kind of forced me to the entrepreneurial thing as opposed to me just making a deliberate and conscious decision. I won’t take the credit for that but I got kind of pushed down that road and I just ran with it.”
Now, Marby often finds himself advising twenty-somethings and even older people who are in the same position he was in.
“I get just tons and tons and tons of DMs where it’s younger people in their 20s asking me for tips and advice…A lot of us come from neighborhoods or environments where our parents didn’t own houses, our parents weren’t the most financially knowledgeable or financially sound so you feeling that you could ask questions for somebody that you could relate to, that you might look at as a big brother or uncle. It’s a comfortability there.”
Marby is branching out on a new venture—book writing. He is in the process of writing a novel breaking down finance and real estate. He also talks about how he is at a new stage in his career, adopting a mentorship role for young women and men.
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