Dave Ramsey - CEO, Ramsey Solutions | SRS #191

Summary

Highlights

• Ramsey’s journey from a millionaire at 28 to bankruptcy and back again is a rollercoaster of lessons learned🎢.
• Discovering God on his way up and getting to know Him on the way down was transformational for Ramsey.
• Shawn Ryan credits his financial turnaround to Ramsey’s Total Money Makeover book📘.
• Under Ramsey's leadership, over 6 million students have learned financial literacy through high school programs funded by Ramsey Solutions🎓.
• Ramsey emphasizes maintaining a no-debt policy in both personal and business finances as a key to financial freedom🔑.

Key Takeaways

• Dave Ramsey credits his financial discipline and Christian faith for his incredible comeback from bankruptcy to success📈.
• Shawn Ryan transformed his financial habits after reading Ramsey's book while on a deployment, changing his life completely🔄.
• Ramsey Solutions has grown into a powerhouse by maintaining strong, values-driven culture emphasizing care for employees❤️.
• Ramsey never tires of stressing the importance of financial literacy, offering courses for students and adults alike📚.
• The key to a lasting marriage, according to Ramsey, is continuous personal growth and deep alignment on values with your partner💍.

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Dave Ramsey's Financial Journey The chapter introduces the concept of financial uncertainty, as demonstrated by the volatility in the stock market caused by tariffs. It then transitions into Dave Ramsey's personal financial story, starting with his ambition to become a millionaire. Ramsey shares a pivotal moment where his car's muffler falls off, symbolizing the unpredictable nature of financial journeys. By age 26, Ramsey had amassed $4 million in real estate and a net worth exceeding $1 million, earning $250k that year. However, at 28, he faced bankruptcy, with income plummeting to $6,000 a year, underscoring the ups and downs of financial life. Additionally, Ramsey's narrative highlights his spiritual journey, emphasizing a deeper connection with God during challenging times.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Meeting God and Personal Transformation In this chapter, the speaker reflects on the challenges and responsibilities of ownership, comparing it to the organizational structures of the CIA or FBI. God is recognized as the ultimate owner of the business, aligning with the host's spiritual beliefs. The discussion opens with a warm welcome to Dave Ramsey, expressing mutual honor between the interviewer and guest. Despite logistical difficulties, there is excitement over the finally successful meeting. The chapter sets the stage for a wide-ranging conversation, highlighting anticipation for the discussion ahead.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Impact of Dave Ramsey's Book This chapter discusses the significant impact of Dave Ramsey's book on an individual's life. The narrator reflects on how Ramsey has been a mentor to them even before they met in person. The narrator was introduced to Ramsey’s work by their father while engaged in anti-piracy contract work off the coast of Yemen, indicating a deep and personal connection with the teachings in the book.
• 01:30 - 02:00: Financial Peace and Business Growth The narrator initially disregarded the book about financial peace and business growth, thinking it was unnecessary as they understood the basic concepts of debt elimination. However, with limited distractions while being on a ship, the narrator decided to give the book a try. Despite not being an avid reader, they found themselves deeply engrossed, completing the book in a day and a half. The experience was transformative for them, suggesting a significant impact on their perspective regarding financial management and personal growth.
• 02:00 - 02:30: Entrepreneurial Spirit and Parenting The chapter explores the intersection of entrepreneurial spirit and parenting through a personal narrative. The narrator discusses a transformative experience, where they used to spend extravagantly on luxury items, including a chopper and BMWs, financed by loans. However, after reading a life-changing book during a three-week deployment, the narrator decided to shift their lifestyle. They sold all unnecessary possessions to pay off debts and continued living debt-free, emphasizing a minimalist approach aligned with entrepreneurial values.
• 02:30 - 03:00: Building and Maintaining Business Culture In this chapter, the speaker discusses the internal conflict of maintaining a business despite its financial burdens. They express a realization that the joy and satisfaction initially associated with business ownership was outweighed by the stress of debt. Although hesitant at first due to personal attachments to possessions like a motorcycle and a BMW, the speaker ultimately finds peace and freedom in eliminating these financial obligations, emphasizing the value of reducing debt over material possessions.
• 03:00 - 03:30: Dealing with Betrayal in Business The chapter discusses the importance of managing finances in business without relying on debt. The individual shares personal experiences, like avoiding car payments and maintaining a debt-free lifestyle for 15-16 years. This approach allowed the business to grow organically, starting from an attic to now constructing a 7,000 square feet facility. The emphasis is on growing within means and handling business betrayals such as taking risky financial decisions that could jeopardize future stability. It highlights resilience, patience, and strategic growth despite challenges like betrayal in business settings.
• 03:30 - 04:00: Founding Ramsey Solutions Dave Ramsey shares how he established Ramsey Solutions emphasizing the importance of staying debt-free even in business initiatives.
• 04:00 - 04:30: Building and Losing Wealth The chapter discusses the process of building and losing wealth, focusing on a personal narrative where the speaker had to decide between being a CEO or hiring a COO. The speaker acknowledges the advice and influence of others in their decision-making process. They mention hiring Eric as the new COO in his third week, indicating a progression in their business structure. The speaker values external input and incorporates it into their success, presenting their achievements as a collective effort influenced by others' guidance.
• 04:30 - 05:00: Bankruptcy and Recovery The chapter opens with remarks on mentorship and an interaction indicating new insights or information being shared. A hint of the speaker's engagement and surprise is evident.
• 05:00 - 05:30: Launching Financial Peace University This chapter discusses the launch of Financial Peace University, a program dedicated to teaching effective money management strategies. It highlights the accomplishments of the speaker, who is an eight-time best-selling author and the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions. His notable works include the 'Total Money Makeover', a transformative book, and an upcoming release titled 'Build a Business You Love', set to launch on April 15th, coinciding with tax day. The essence of his mission is to provide people with hope and pragmatic financial guidance.
• 05:30 - 06:00: The Rise of The Dave Ramsey Show The chapter titled 'The Rise of The Dave Ramsey Show' celebrates the various achievements and personal aspects of Dave Ramsey's life. It acknowledges his induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2015 and highlights his long-lasting marriage to Sharon of 43 years, alongside raising three children. More importantly, it emphasizes Dave Ramsey's identity as a Christian. The chapter also hints at exploring the secrets of sustained success and personal life balance, though this is not detailed in the provided excerpt.
• 06:00 - 06:30: Media Expansion and Syndication This chapter discusses media expansion and syndication through a conversation that touches on themes of successful marriage and personal growth. The speaker humorously shares a personal anecdote about their marriage, mentioning a joke that emphasizes the bond with their spouse. They further reflect on an important change in their personal life, noting a significant spiritual encounter with God two years into their marriage, implying that this spiritual development was crucial to the survival and flourishing of their relationship.
• 06:30 - 07:00: Publishing Success and Book Impact The chapter discusses personal growth and transformation, particularly focusing on the narrator's changes over the years. It touches upon the past behavior and character of the narrator, who is described as a 'twerp,' a 'hellraising beer drinking hillbilly,' with a bad temper. Over time, however, the narrator describes a transformation attributed to Christ, suggesting significant personal and spiritual growth. The chapter highlights themes of redemption and the progressive nature of improvement, emphasizing that though perfection has not been achieved, significant positive change occurs year by year.
• 07:00 - 07:30: Product Development and Diversification The chapter 'Product Development and Diversification' explores the transformative journey of personal growth and evolution in relationships and leadership. The narrator reflects on past challenges, including significant losses, which served as defining moments leading to personal and professional evolution. The emphasis is on how experiences have reshaped them into a different and presumably better version of themselves, acknowledging change in roles such as being a father, husband, and leader, for the better.
• 07:30 - 08:00: Business Expansion and Employee Culture This chapter discusses the importance of change and improvement in the context of business expansion and employee culture. The speaker emphasizes the necessity of adapting and evolving, using the Bible as a guide for personal and professional growth, despite initially lacking direction and understanding, which they liken to being 'a wild animal.'
• 08:00 - 08:30: The Role of Faith in Business The speaker did not have a religious upbringing or attend church regularly during their childhood. Although Christianity is part of their heritage, with a great-grandfather who was a circuit-riding preacher, their parents did not actively practice or instill religious values. The speaker possesses an old family Bible from the 1800s as a keepsake but indicates a more secular familial environment.
• 08:30 - 09:00: Leadership and Decision Making The chapter titled 'Leadership and Decision Making' seems to delve into personal experiences and historical perspectives on religious engagement. It reflects on the speaker's childhood and family attitude towards religion, highlighting a lack of regular church attendance or adherence to Christian practices. The narrative mentions an instance where the speaker's grandmother incentivized memorizing the Lord's Prayer, illustrating a rare moment of religious instruction. This anecdote serves as a focal point for discussing broader themes of leadership and decision-making, particularly in contexts where traditional religious or communal involvement is minimal.
• 09:00 - 09:30: Handling Conflicts and Generosity The chapter 'Handling Conflicts and Generosity' features a personal account of the speaker's childhood experiences, particularly their aversion to attending church as a child. The speaker describes the discomfort of having to dress up and remain still during church services. They recall these experiences as brief but memorable moments of unhappiness in their youth. Additionally, the speaker provides some background on their upbringing in Antioch, Tennessee, albeit without much detail on what their childhood interests were or what life was like growing up there.
• 09:30 - 10:00: Parenting and Business Advice The chapter titled 'Parenting and Business Advice' reminisces about the speaker's childhood environment. It paints a picture of suburban life, describing it as a mix of suburbanites and redneck kids, hillbillies whose parents had transitioned from rural farm life to suburban jobs. The setting is akin to 'Leave it to Beaver,' emphasizing a quaint and simple suburban life.
• 10:00 - 10:30: Career Development and Industry Changes The chapter reflects on how career development and industry changes have evolved from the past, highlighting the contrast between past and present environments. The speaker reminisces about their childhood in a tough neighborhood where physical altercations were common among both young and older boys. There is a sense of relief and nostalgia as they acknowledge that such a situation is almost unimaginable for their grandchildren in today's world. The narrative captures the essence of how societal and economic environments have transformed over time, influencing career paths and personal growth.
• 10:30 - 11:00: Economic Analysis and Predictions The chapter titled 'Economic Analysis and Predictions' begins with a discussion of the author's background in real estate. The narrator shares that their parents owned a residential real estate business, which inspired them to obtain a real estate license shortly after turning 18. Despite the parents' long-term success in the field, they eventually closed the business during a market downturn, transitioning into other ventures. The chapter seems to set the stage for further discussion on how economic downturns impact real estate and predictions for future market behaviors.
• 11:00 - 11:30: Stages of Business Growth The chapter discusses the progressive stages of business growth through a narrative of the author's upbringing. Raised in an entrepreneurial family, the author recounts early exposure to sales conferences and influential figures like Zig Ziglar. This environment fostered a strong foundation in salesmanship, underscoring the crucial role of attitude and early learning in business development. The narrative illustrates how parental influence and early experiences can shape a successful entrepreneurial mindset.
• 11:30 - 12:00: Six Drivers of Business Success The chapter titled 'Six Drivers of Business Success' highlights the development of personal qualities such as grit and resilience through challenging environments. The discussion revolves around the idea that you learn to handle difficult situations, such as dealing with bullies or facing various challenges, without backing down. These experiences teach valuable lessons that are essential for success in business and life. The chapter also touches on the concern that such lessons are becoming scarce in modern environments, but emphasizes that these skills can still be learned outside of those situations.
• 12:00 - 12:30: Hiring and Firing Processes The chapter "Hiring and Firing Processes" emphasizes the importance of intentional parenting by allowing children to experience failure and develop resilience, character, and courage. It draws parallels to business situations, highlighting how handling high-intensity conflicts and making decisions like when to walk away are vital skills in the professional world.
• 12:30 - 13:00: Maintaining Work-Life Balance The chapter discusses the challenge of maintaining a work-life balance while imparting important life skills such as grit, courage, and standing up for one's beliefs to the next generation, despite growing up in a different environment. The speaker refers to their personal experience of building a massive business and how the approach within their household involved practical and metaphorical methods to instill these values.
• 13:00 - 13:30: Practical Investment Advice The chapter titled 'Practical Investment Advice' focuses on the importance of perseverance, especially through challenging and uncomfortable situations. It presents the idea that suffering produces perseverance, which in turn develops character and hope. By viewing challenges through a biblical lens, this advice discourages 'helicopter parenting,' suggesting instead that allowing individuals to face difficulties on their own can lead to personal growth and resilience. The chapter emphasizes the value of not shielding others from every minor adversity, thereby promoting strength and the ability to handle friction successfully.
• 13:30 - 14:00: Conclusion and Final Thoughts In the conclusion, the author reflects on the challenges and considerations involved when contemplating actions and decisions from a Christian perspective. They discuss the idea of asking what Christ would do in various difficult scenarios, ranging from interpersonal issues to business decisions. The author emphasizes exploring both the compassionate and challenging aspects of every situation, reflecting on personal learnings and spiritual insights. They mention dealing with difficult people such as a problematic teacher, or navigating social situations, particularly relating to teenagers, intertwining these personal anecdotes with broader life lessons. Overall, the chapter advocates for introspection and guided action grounded in faith, particularly when confronted with challenges.

Dave Ramsey - CEO, Ramsey Solutions | SRS #191 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 the tariffs are scaring the crap out of the stock market and the stock market's down i was explaining to her how someday I'm going to be a millionaire and we went across a railroad track and muffler fell off my car by the time I was 26 we had about $4 million of real estate and a little over a million dollar net worth and by 26 you had $4 million in real estate made 250k that year so by the time I'm 28 I'm bankrupt made 250k one year and the next year I made 6,000 when I was doing really good is when I met God i met him on the way up but got to know him on the
• 00:30 - 01:00 way down it's harder to get on with us than it is the CIA or the FBI i don't own the business god owns it dave Ramsey welcome to the show i'm so honored to be here thank you my friend my pleasure well I'm honored to have you and been trying to make this happen for quite some time and it's just uh you know it's awesome to have you here we've got a lot to talk about ridiculous it was so much trouble cuz I'm just right there i know i know
• 01:00 - 01:30 you're right literally right down the street stupid schedules yours and mine but yeah here we are here we are but um you know I just I don't even know where to put this in the interview so I'm just You've been a mentor from of mine since before way before we ever met and uh I was doing a I was doing a contract antipiriracy stuff off the coast of Yemen and my dad had had given me your book and it wanted me to read it and I I
• 01:30 - 02:00 kind of skimmed through it and I was like I get it get out of debt whatever i don't need to read this stuff but I didn't have anything to do on that damn ship other than uh possibly shoot some pirates and uh so I dug in and I'm not I'm not a big reader i just don't enjoy it and I read your book from front to back in about a day and a half and uh I was just glued to it totally changed
• 02:00 - 02:30 changed my life wow and um I was making pretty good money back then contracting but I was spending it all on [ __ ] i bought like a $30,000 chopper and all kinds of BMW all kinds of [ __ ] that I didn't need and I read that book on that little deployment it was about 3 weeks long came back home sold everything I had paid all my debt off no way yep and I've lived like that paid my house off sold everything all the [ __ ] that I didn't need that I had loans on and and
• 02:30 - 03:00 um and had you know I guess equity and some of it and uh so what the switch flipped you just you realize it's not giving you joy it's not the the stress of the debt didn't offset the fun of the Exactly and then I mean I was hesitant but I cuz I really liked my motorcycle and I really liked my BMW at the time and but the peace and the freedom that came from getting rid of my mortgage payment my credit card debt and all the
• 03:00 - 03:30 other [ __ ] car payments it just that was [ __ ] that was probably 15 16 years ago and I've just lived like that ever since wow and uh and even today you know I'm I'm debtree i build my business never took on debt only only grew as much as what I could afford at the time and um and uh and I mean now we're building you know we went from the attic of my house to this now we're building a 7,000 ft
• 03:30 - 04:00 studio out in the woods and all of it is there is zero debt and uh so I just want to say thank you well thank you that's a great story i didn't know that part yeah we've been friends for a while i never heard that part that's Well and then uh you know you continue to be a mentor of mine and we you know we had a discussion at your house what a couple months ago and I was looking for a CEO and wanted to get your advice on that and you told me don't get a CEO you
• 04:00 - 04:30 have to be the CEO and uh I think you mentioned you're you're probably looking more for a COO and uh you just met Eric downstairs this is uh the beginning of his third week so I wound up hiring a COO okay and uh so I just want you to know that you know everything you say you know I I take it in and uh and I know a lot of people do and and so this you know what I've built here is you know somewhat of a product of your
• 04:30 - 05:00 mentorship wow so I didn't even know wow that's very cool well now you know that's neat now you know but um but yeah so everybody everybody starts with an introduction here so where do we go dave Ramsey you're a legend in the personal finance world who's helped millions climb out of debt and take control of their money you're the host of the Dave of the Ramsay Show a nationally syndicated radio program
• 05:00 - 05:30 that's been teaching money management for over 30 years you're an eighttime best-selling author including Total Money Makeover the book that changed my life your newest book Build a Business You Love is set to release on April 15th tax day is that an accident who knows seemed like it was a good day i don't know you're the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions a company that that's all about giving people hope through practical nononsense financial advice
• 05:30 - 06:00 you were introduced into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2015 you've been a husband to Sharon for the last 43 years you raised three children together and most importantly out of everything I mentioned you are a Christian oh thank you and I'm sure I'm missing a ton there but but 43 years congratulations thank you so let's kick it off what's What's the secret to a successful to a
• 06:00 - 06:30 successful marriage well well the the the joke that I always use which is accurate I tell her if she leaves I'm going with her so and then she just giggles but the uh you know the truth is uh I met God about 2 years after we were married and um she probably wouldn't we still wouldn't be married if I hadn't because
• 06:30 - 07:00 the guy that she married was a twerp um he's a hellraising beer drinking hillbilly with a big temper and um wasn't much of a man much less much of a husband but he's a good salesman cuz I talked her into marrying me but um but thank God she's not still married to the same guy that his life has been transformed by Christ and so um every year a little better uh every year a little less dumb every year a little whatever it's not no nothing perfect obviously but um we've both grown um in
• 07:00 - 07:30 our faith and in our relationship steadily over those years and went through hell losing everything in our early days and um you know that that was um a defining moment uh in relationship and everything else but um yeah I'm not the same dad I was when I started i'm not the same husband I was when I started i'm not the same man I was i'm not the same leader I was when I started thank goodness you know good
• 07:30 - 08:00 lord who wouldn't want to just sit in the same poop all time and not change anything right i mean you got to you got to change you got to get better and um the thing that has impacted that is just you know uh is you know trying to figure out h how to do those things and the the instruction manual I used was the Bible so cuz I didn't know anything else so um but I didn't I was pretty much a wild animal really yeah i can't see that with
• 08:00 - 08:30 you well it's a long time ago but uh well so you didn't grow up you didn't grow up no going to church Christianity none of that none no it's in my heritage my great-grandfather was a circuit riding preacher and this kind of stuff but got his old Bible from the 1800s that's pretty cool keepsake but um and uh uh but my parents were just you know
• 08:30 - 09:00 uh they weren't particularly angry about it or anything we just didn't go and uh the people we ran around with weren't church people necessarily or Christians of any kind uh if you asked them they would have said they were mhm but but I mean we weren't you know I don't remember my grandmother when I was like nine they were in church uh she paid me uh $10 to memorize the Lord's Prayer and that's the closest I've ever came to you know and if we went to her house we went
• 09:00 - 09:30 to church wow but hated it didn't want to go i mean little kids getting all dressed up and not being able to squirm and yell and whatever and miserable and uh but that was 10 times in my life maybe but no I didn't know anything i was just a character where did you grow up uh just over the tracks over here in Antioch antioch Tennessee antioch Tennessee what were you into what was it like growing up uh it was uh it was uh nowadays it's a very
• 09:30 - 10:00 international community um but in those days it was just suburbanites and uh just redneck kids i mean we were just hillbillies and all most of our parents were had grown up on the farm and had moved to town to do take a job or something and so they bought all these little you know nice little suburban homes and it was a little suburbia leave it to Beaver and um so uh but I mean this is a neighborhood where it's
• 10:00 - 10:30 uh blue collar maybe some white collar but um I mean it's a different world long time ago you know but a neighborhood where little boys got in fights and uh big boys got in fights and it wasn't it wasn't wasn't like we have anything today you wouldn't you and him I I can't think of one of my grandkids being in that situation today at all but it was a um it wasn't uh horrible but it just tough just tough neighborhood you
• 10:30 - 11:00 know what did your parents do a real estate business the real estate business owned a residential real estate company there in the Harding Mall area and um so I got my real estate license 3 weeks after I turned 18 that's what I was going to do i was going to be a big real estate guy did they were they was were they successful realtors yeah yeah i mean they were in it for many many years uh they did finally close it in one of the downturns but and went on to other stuff but I guess they were in it for probably 10 or
• 11:00 - 11:30 15 years most of my you know growing up years that's what they did and um so that's that was the good news because they they're very entrepreneurial and um taught us you know we took us to sales conferences and so we were you know I got to I'm sitting in conference 12 years old listening to Zig Ziggler you know and uh you know talking about attitude and I'm like yeah okay um but I learned to sell early and uh that's that's I was gripping a salesman's household so there's a lot of
• 11:30 - 12:00 wonderful qualities come out of that and and also you get grit you know out of a situation like that you don't you know you learn how to deal with a bully you learn how to deal with um not back down on everything that comes at you and Mhm um so it's a little little Yeah I think that's uh some good lessons that seems like we're starting to lose these days yeah i mean you can you can you can learn them without having to necessarily be in that environment but yeah it's it's something
• 12:00 - 12:30 that moms and dads we have to be really intentional with our kids to let them fail let them get a bump let them uh develop some grit some character some courage um you know how do you handle a high intensity conflict situation you know and uh not something like you've done i don't mean that but I mean just in you know just in business if you just got somebody that's going to bow up what are you going to do you know you're just going to walk away every time um no sometimes walking away is a good idea
• 12:30 - 13:00 but sometimes metaphorically busting them in the nose is a real good idea too interesting how I mean so with you growing up like that and then you've built like this massive business how did you teach your kids grit courage stick with it stand up what you believe in well totally different environment yeah it is and but you know we just again we we in our house we were doing it through
• 13:00 - 13:30 the lens of scripture through the lens of the okay you know the perseverance matters you know uh rejoice in your suffering because suffering produces perseverance and perseverance character and character hope and and so perseverance is means you're engaged in something that is uncomfortable and there's friction oriented and so put put them in some situations like that and so uh not not I mean not not with anger or not anything like that but it's like don't helicopter them out of every little thing let them let them flop
• 13:30 - 14:00 around in it a little bit and uh and then talk about okay what would Christ do how do we handle this what's the tough aspect of this what's this compassionate aspect of this and you know what did you learn and what was God talking to you about while you were sitting there in that in that thing and you know you're dealing with this teacher that's a jerk you're dealing with a situation you know a social situation or whatever is your teenager all that kind of stuff and so you know we just um walk through all that as far as working around the business and stuff anytime we're doing anything I'm I'm a
• 14:00 - 14:30 uh one of the things we grew up with too was hard work ethic i mean you just work when in doubt just go to work shut up just go go leave the cave kill something drag it home i mean something needs to move and so we taught them that and if you're going to work around Ramsay and you're a 12year-old working the book table or shipping department or whatever uh you got to work twice as hard three times as hard as everybody else and you got to be three times as cheerful as everybody else and kind as everybody
• 14:30 - 15:00 else and strong as everybody else because otherwise you're not going to be respected they're going to assume you're a wussy little boss's kid that's worthless and so um our kids it was not it was like they were coaches kids it was tough we were tough on them around the business and so you know my middle middle daughter Rachel was working the book table and one of the events and um one of my guys that was one of my leaders looked over and saw her goofing off looking on her phone and they're like "You you don't do that here." And
• 15:00 - 15:30 he corrected her you know and uh she's like she tells that story and and that's good that's exactly the environment we wanted to put them in so um you know those things uh uh are the the building blocks of of having a high quality life so you got to put them in there it's a big deal part of the reason I do what I do is for my family i want to leave them a better country than the one I was born into i also want to make sure they are
• 15:30 - 16:00 taken care of financially and that's why I make it a priority to help protect the money I've worked so hard to earn and save and one of the ways I do that is by diversifying into gold and silver precious metals have been a store of value for thousands of years and they are known as a hedge against market risk and inflation if you're interested in learning about how precious metals can help you you should reach out to my partners at Goldco they're an amazing company they support this show and I
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• 16:30 - 17:00 with everything that's happening in the
• 17:00 - 17:30 economy it feels like we're all walking on shaky ground prices are high and it seems like nothing is affordable anymore it's no wonder many are relying on credit cards to cover the gaps credit card debt is skyrocketing and it's leaving a lot of people stressed out if you're a homeowner you don't have to face this uncertainty alone my friends at American Financing can help you take control they can help you access the equity in your home to help you pay down
• 17:30 - 18:00 that highinterest credit card debt giving you peace of mind and real savings on average people just like you are saving $800 a month plus they may close your loan in as little as 10 days don't let the chaos of the economy get the best of you call American Financing now it costs you nothing to get started and you may delay two mortgage payments giving you a cushion in this uncertain time call 8667818900 that's
• 18:00 - 18:30 866781-8900 or go to americanfancing.net netsrs when did you grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit when was your first business 12 12 years old yeah i told daddy I said I want to go down to the quicksack and get a icy i need some money he said "You don't need money you need a job." He said "Your lawnmowers in the basement go knock on the closest 50
• 18:30 - 19:00 doors." And I said "I don't know." He goes "Get in the car." and he took me down Nolanville Road over here little print shop printed up 500 business cards said Dave's Lawns i said "Dad that's a little overkill i just wanted an Icy." He uh came home and he said "Go knock on the closest 50 doors and ask them if you can have the opportunity to provide their lawn care needs don't look at your feet and say while you're standing on the man's front porch and say "You don't want me to cut your grass do you?" Uh you go in there and you you
• 19:00 - 19:30 throw your shoulders back and you smile and you give them service and they'll hire you and dad gump if it didn't work i had 27 yards to cut at 12 years old no kidding which you know I think it's called child abuse now but made me keep a profit and loss statement on my business my income minus his lawnmowers I tore up equals net profit but uh it was it was you know and I loved it i I it um cuz I always kind of been a little business nerd I guess and so I'm cutting Slugger Carneahan's yard
• 19:30 - 20:00 for $3 and my buddies are working at Burger King Whopper Floppers and you know they're making this long this is 70s right so they're making buck and a quarter an hour so I'm figuring all I got to cut this grass in faster than 2 hours or I'm making only what they're making no kidding you were thinking like that already while I'm mowing I'm like going looking at my watch going I got to I got to get these dollar per hour i got to keep this I got to make this work and that's how I price the yards out so I
• 20:00 - 20:30 can make more i wanted to try to make about double what my buddies were making if they were flopping whoppers at minimum wage and if I'm going to go if I'm going to sweat like that I need to make some money wow so 12 years old you're going that that taught you confidence that taught you responsibility business you You're already thinking interacting with adults you know and acting like you have your crap together how long did that last uh I guess the rest of my life all the
• 20:30 - 21:00 yards yeah the yards oh man i cut enough grass by the time I was 18 god said I never had to do it again so I ain't cutting grass in a long long time oh man yeah no I I when I took off to college uh when I got up into high school I started doing home repairs too they because they would buy an old house and fix it up and they'd put me in there to fix it up or one of their buddies would buy a house in the real estate business and put me in there 16 years old to paint it and change the dishwasher out and that kind of stuff so I did all that that's how I paid cash for my first car doing that and um and
• 21:00 - 21:30 then um it's how I actually paid for the first uh couple semesters of college just working my butt off swinging a hammer turning a screwdriver no good and did your would did your dad instigate that or Oh yeah yeah he could do he could fix that that neighborhood we were in everybody had you know tool belt everybody could fix anything and so you didn't uh throw stuff away in those days you you had it repaired or you fixed it you know today you know our stuff's throwaway we don't you know send a te
• 21:30 - 22:00 there's no television repair shops in today you know but in the old days you know you'd send it over there they'd put a new tube in it or something you know or we would take it apart and look at it and see if we could figure it out and so yeah those guys all turned a wrench on their own cars so we all learned to turn a wrench on a car and that you know it's a wonderful heritage to have it's not necessary to be successful but it's um I'm not uncomfortable i remember when I was taking my wife out on a date in
• 22:00 - 22:30 college i think it was about our third or fourth date i think I had a $116 in my checking account i was so broke I couldn't pay attention and I had a 1974 Monte Carlo that I was on the third engine and the second transmission and I had changed them i'd run the wheels off that car and had 200 something thousand miles on it was a piece of crap and uh uh I was explaining to her how someday I'm going to be a millionaire and we went across the railroad track the muffler fell off my
• 22:30 - 23:00 car and uh but I had a cra I had a Craftsman toolbox in the trunk with a towel to lay on and a towel to pick the muffler up and a 9/16 wrench to run the U-bolt up and uh it had fallen off before so I knew how to fix it and um um just rolled up under there fixed it and dusted my hands off and we went on the date she's like just fixed the car and got back in right after you tell me you're going to be a millionaire yeah okay she thought I was full of crap because I was but what you know just like we were talking about
• 23:00 - 23:30 before the interview I mean I got two little kids and and I really want them to become entrepreneurs you know I just I I see the I'm experiencing the freedom that you get and the and and you know with that being said it takes a tremendous amount of self-drive and um and as you said earlier perseverance but and it I think your kids are your kids entrepreneurs mhm so what age do you what age did you start instilling that into them what
• 23:30 - 24:00 Well I just um sometimes people get um from a job working for someone else the uh illusion and it is a delusion or an illusion that somehow that's safe and if you've ever been on the other side of that table where you're actually the guy making the payroll you know they're not safe cuz you know you got to run this whole thing right or oh my god we're
• 24:00 - 24:30 going to you can't pay them and but they're under the illusion that this stuff's automatic because they just get their check on Friday and everything's okay and so what the first thing we did was break that illusion with the kids is that you know your success is not dependent on plugging into some safety mechanism somewhere your safety mechanism is your ability your safety mechanism is your uh skill set your safety mechanism and so even if you're working for someone else you're self-employed you just have one
• 24:30 - 25:00 client and you need to go okay if I'm an architect and I lost that job I I wasn't leaning on that particular firm for my future my life the quality of my life i was leaning on my skills as an architect and uh and so if you're going to do that do it in such a way that you're always marketable and that you but you view it as I'm dependent on me i'm dep I'm self-dependent and then what that does automatically leads you into wanting to run your own thing you know you want to
• 25:00 - 25:30 you you don't want to work for somebody else because you want to go you know I I will take the risk of I will accept the fact that there is risk i'm not delusional about it and I'm going to just do it anyway and so um you don't necessarily entrepreneurs don't necessarily have to start something from the ground up my kids haven't they've come into Ramsey and you know are the next generation of leaders and owners of that organization and um and all three of them are very capable very different personality styles very different
• 25:30 - 26:00 approach to that but they're just not under the illusion that someone else is going to do it for them um or that uh their success is dependent uh or entitled or it's none of that it it's um sewing and reaping what age did that start and and how did you how did you instill that into them how did you show them um well you want to be age appropriate i mean you've got babies so don't send them to the salt mines
• 26:00 - 26:30 talking about you know it's um but you know uh 3 or 4 years old we start to go okay there's consequences and cause and effect going on again Bible talks about sewing and reaping you're going to reap what you sow and so um you know as quickly as we could we started teaching them three or four things about money um which were life lessons that we back into this conversation and it's like all kids need
• 26:30 - 27:00 to age appropriately need to learn to work to give so that they're not self-centered they're other centered to save so they're future oriented not just present oriented which is emotional maturity which not going to have much of that at four um and um to spend wisely so work to make money then save some give some and spend some and then you get opportunities to teach them and let them fail under your wing
• 27:00 - 27:30 and so um you know early you know it's as simple as um okay you're four your job is to pour the dog food into the dog bowl mhm this is your dog it's our family dog but the dog eats because you put the food in there and when you do that you get a dollar or your job is to clean up the toys in your room which when you're four usually means mom and dad clean up 80% of them and we make a game out of it and we sing songs and but
• 27:30 - 28:00 you're the best room cleaner in the world i've never seen anyone clean a room as good as you clean a room you're amazing and here's a dollar and um and then we get some of those dollars together and we go to the store sometime and we get something and that's as a result of you being the best room cleaner in the world and it all begins with something that primitive and that simple uh so it's positive reinforcement but they're they're emotionally starting to tie work equals money work equals the money cuz I meet 50 year olds that don't know work equals money yeah they haven't
• 28:00 - 28:30 figured that out nobody ever taught them and they're still waiting around for somebody else to fix their freaking life and so I didn't want that and you know and by the time they're 10 or 12 it starts to get pretty sophisticated and then we said "Okay we're going to do the money aspect." Like we said we got you know your your car when you turn 16 is your responsibility but we're going to help we're going to have 401 Dave we're going to match so whatever you save I'll match it if you save nothing get ready for a real nice
• 28:30 - 29:00 bicycle you know so you you be your little butt's going to be walking cuz you're going to pay for your car but I'm going to whatever you save now I will tell you you know you're starting young uh make sure you put a limit on that cuz the third one figured it out yeah he had 15 grand and now I'm looking at buying a $30,000 car for a 16-year-old not a chance damn so uh we talked that down and we worked that out and um he ended up giving some of that to a ministry and
• 29:00 - 29:30 it was an earthquake in Peru about that time and he'd been down there on a missions trip and some of the kids down there didn't have anything so he gave some of that money that and we matched it the whole thing anyway but some of it was generous and then he bought a real cool Jeep um but it still wasn't $30,000 freaking dollars but I had to keep my word cuz I had set this thing up so I'm warning the rest of you make sure you put a limit on it but we did that on all three of them and they'll tell you to this day that they had great pride the way they drove the car the way they took care of the car their friends didn't leave crap in the car you know you take
• 29:30 - 30:00 care of my car i worked for this and um and they did they worked they babysat they cut grass they worked at the company they sold books they you know whatever they at the company are they working for us all whatever they had to do but yeah we just so it built built character and confidence and dignity and responsibility and all of those things got woven into this little money lesson of you're going to save you're going to save you're going to save you're going to save you're going to save you're going to give you're going to give you're going to be other centered not
• 30:00 - 30:30 just self-centered this whole access to the world doesn't run through the top of your little head it ain't about you baby and so we're going to be selfless not selfish And we just talked about that like I guess all the time and they probably got sick of it but they turned out so it's okay yeah man that's great advice and so you started you start back to you you started you were a real estate agent at age 18 mhm how did that start well I turned 18 and I passed my
• 30:30 - 31:00 real estate test like two weeks later um and I sold a house like 3 weeks later which who buys a house from an 18-year-old kind of but I talked some guy into it a guy from high school $42,750 on East Ridge Drive off of Haywood Lane right over here in Antioch and uh that house today would be 800 grand probably you know but um I went off to college and um uh I was to take to get a degree in real
• 31:00 - 31:30 estate because I wanted to be I wanted to do commercial real estate mom and dad did houses residential and I wanted to do big numbers and I thought I was cool or whatever and so I my goal was to be a big you know like a shopping mall guy or whatever all that stuff and so um but I went moved my license down to East Tennessee and went to the University of Tennessee and I lived in uh Merville Mville is how it's spelled but over there we call it Mville Tennessee and um drove back and forth to UT and sold real
• 31:30 - 32:00 estate there and well and to get through school i made enough to get through school and um then I graduate from there and when I got home I had a couple jobs and then I ended up uh working for a home builder and then I left that and started buying houses and doing flip this house and that's when I got wealthy how many years did it take you from I mean how many years did it take you from selling houses to buying your first house uh well I mean I sold houses all the way
• 32:00 - 32:30 through college when I got out of college I went to work for a home builder selling houses and I worked there like a year so how old so I bought my first house probably to flip when I was um I was 22 or 23 something like that and I flipped it but there wasn't cable TV to tell you how to flip this house there wasn't Tik Tok and Chip and Joanna hadn't been born i mean it's so I mean it was not this was just me going out there digging up a foreclosure deal and talking some banker into loaning me the
• 32:30 - 33:00 money because I borrowed money up to my eyeballs and um I was doing flip this house and so yeah we started from nothing and by the time we 26 we had about $4 million of real estate and a little over a million dollar net worth and by 26 you had $4 million in real estate made 250k that year which and that's that's a million dollars now um a year and um but I had too much debt and the bank looked down and said "There's a child that owes us a million
• 33:00 - 33:30 dollar." And they were right and they called our notes and uh we spent two and a half years losing everything and um so by the time I'm 28 I'm bankrupt made 250k one year the next year I made 6,000 and the odd thing is is when I was doing really good is when I met God i met him on the way up but got to know him on the way down how'd you meet him um I went to a um a sales conference and with my beer drinking
• 33:30 - 34:00 buddy and um we were so stupid we would go to happy hour and then go make sales calls and couldn't figure out why people wouldn't buy from us that's how stupid we were so yeah anyway we go to a sales conference me and him and we're sitting on the back row up on top and we're kids and this guy comes on stage that makes 400K a year and we're like I got to I I want to be him so like okay here's the
• 34:00 - 34:30 five things I want to learn from him before he came up because we knew the guy was coming and um he actually used that our little questions he didn't have our questions we hadn't submitted them but he somehow answered every one of those questions so he had credibility before he walked up there he was a great speaker and then by the time he read our mail he owned us and he said "And there's one more thing." And we're like "No there's not we got all there that's it that's all we got." No there's one more thing he said "If you don't know
• 34:30 - 35:00 this man named Jesus you need to get introduced because it will change the way you do business you'll change the way you do relationships and business is all relationships you're going to be more successful when you understand how human relationships work and you will not understand that except through Christ and my wife had been ragging on me to go to church and I don't go to church um she's like "We're going to church." I'm like I'm like "Who are you?" She we got married and she remembered she was a Baptist you know and so she forgot that prior to marriage but um then she comes home and oh we're
• 35:00 - 35:30 going to No I'm not going to church sunday's when we drink beer and watch football and uh she would cry and get mad and go out and find our little Baptist people and go to church and um so then I come home from the sales conference and I'm like I think we ought to go to church and she's like who are you what you do with my husband and so we went into a couple of churches and they were boring as crud and I'm like if God's here if he was here he left cuz nobody here is excited about it and if there's got a God you got to be excited about it i mean come on hello and so we
• 35:30 - 36:00 go back in the back door of this little church over on uh Oicker Boulevard over here Christ Church and um you know you sit on the back row so you can eject in case they get weird you know or in case they get I don't want to talk to people i'm just here i'm checking this out you know you probably didn't do that but that's how I did i'm just I want to be able to eject and um couldn't get away from that place cuz old school pastor he'd stand at the back door and shake everybody's hand as they left only about 400 people in there and his wife was a big squishy woman and
• 36:00 - 36:30 she'd give you a big Jesus hug you know like grandma hug and oh man that woman hugged me into the kingdom and I'm standing there and he got up on there i thought Christians were wusses that's what I figured i figured a bunch of sissies you know and that's how I grew up and so uh this guy stood up and he was a man and he's like "This is what the Bible says if you don't agree with that you're what's known as wrong." And he would call out stuff in the political spectrum and say "This is morally wrong our nation you know stuff." And I went
• 36:30 - 37:00 you know that right and he's got like a backbone and stuff wow and you know they had this choir up there and it's a long time ago i mean this is ' 80s right so everybody wore a suit to church and all this kind of stuff in those days you didn't you know you didn't come in with coffee and shorts and a hat you know but nowadays it's what I wear to church but um but then you certainly didn't but this woman in the choir starts waving her hand raising her hand and I'm like
• 37:00 - 37:30 Sharon if they get snakes out I'm out of here this is crazy you know and it's like so yeah and um you know somebody said something about the Holy Spirit and I said I don't have any idea what that means and um we just kept coming and we didn't know what was drawing us back but we found out later it was it was the spirit of God we could feel it and it was just attractive and um Sharon was pregnant with our first
• 37:30 - 38:00 kid and we were making money but you know Jaguars and Rolexes weren't satisfying how long wasn't enough you know sorry to interrupt her but you know I I see you know it didn't take me long to figure that out and um you know but I I I don't think a lot of people ever figure that out and I mean you see it all over social media the the the greed and the
• 38:00 - 38:30 the flash and all that and I think it uh I think it actually detours a lot of people from they they think it's unreachable because a lot of it's fake you know you get people I mean they have they have businesses now where you can just go rent the jet not even fly in it go take a picture in front of the private jet and you go run a Lambo or you go rent whatever and they just put all this [ __ ] out on social media and I I think it it
• 38:30 - 39:00 it it makes people think that this becomes unreachable and and so you know when I finally started making money I bought some dumb [ __ ] i mean I just talked about you know the BMW we all did chopper all that kind of stuff and so I'm just curious how long did it take you to figure out that possessions don't fulfill you as a person you know I don't know that it was a
• 39:00 - 39:30 um a singular moment it was probably on a gradient truthfully um because that was my deal i'm going to go get some stuff i was in acquisition mode you know from 18 to 27 26 and and it worked by the way um you know except it didn't stick because of my the principles I used Build a House of Cards but but the concept worked of I'm going to go get some stuff and I went and got some stuff
• 39:30 - 40:00 and um but you start to realize pretty quick it's like you know if you eat enough lobster it tastes like soap i I love lobster but never had lobster till I was 12 years old and red lobster came to town i thought man I'm going to eat all that I can get i love this right but I always just laugh and go if you get enough of anything you get enough cars you get enough suits of clothes you get enough houses you get enough eventually you just go you it's it's not it's unfulfilling and it doesn't take a genius to grasp that um but and and so
• 40:00 - 40:30 probably what happened was I start going to church because my wife was dying for me to do that and I'm sitting there and they're talking about Christ they're talking about being oh it's not all about you it's you know first will be last and those that are happiest are those that serve and uh the most fulfilling thing you can do in your life is serve and not gather up another Jaguar uh or Lambo or whatever a jet whatever chopper whatever but um so I I'm in there for other reasons
• 40:30 - 41:00 but that's gnawing in there also and and so I think probably uh one of the uh almost byproducts of a spiritual shift and going "Okay I'm no longer Lord of my life he is i'm going to change that you're in charge what do you want to do because I obviously screwed this up i went bankrupt i lost everything my wife thought she married Sir Galahad turns out it was Goober." You know I mean it's like obviously I don't have my crap together so obviously
• 41:00 - 41:30 I need a new instruction manual and I need a someone else running my life other than just me because I'm pretty self-sufficient but I I need I need a I need some instruction and so um cuz when I went broke I wasn't just broke I was broken mhm and so you hit that bottom and then with that I go "Okay there's nothing wrong with getting you some stuff get some nice stuff i just drove a really nice truck up here today i mean I don't mind you having some stuff but
• 41:30 - 42:00 that's not the point the house you're building is really nice the house I live in you've been there is nice there's nothing nothing wrong with that but what's wrong with where it becomes wrong is if you are asking the stuff to do something it's not capable of which is give you peace and only the nail scarred hands can give you peace that passes understanding and so um that's what I got early you know there in my 20s and then I've been able to rebuild from losing everything over the last 35 years
• 42:00 - 42:30 and and you know become much wealthier than I was before but I don't have any emotional or spiritual attachment to it at all it's uh you know a guy I got a super expensive sports car and I parked it in front of a burrito place the other night i went to speak at this church thing and a kid comes in he goes "Hey is that your car outside?" And I said "Yeah." I thought he was just admiring the car and he goes "I just hit it." Like "Kid you have no idea what
• 42:30 - 43:00 it's going to cost you." I go out there there's a little ding about like this on the thing but that's probably you know gonna be 50 grand or something it's like and he's like I don't I don't I don't know if my insurance I don't my parents are going to kill me he's like 17 years old i'm like here's what I'll do he goes I said just I'm going to go over here and puke in the bushes and you're just going to go home and we're not going to worry about it he goes you're letting me go
• 43:00 - 43:30 and I'm like you can't do anything about it anyway it's It's out of your You're over your skis and um I'm I'm not real happy and I'm not mad at you and and I'm and I got home and and Sharon's like laughing at me and she's like "Yeah your problem is you just don't care you you like the car but you don't you don't love the car you're not It's not You're not worshiping the car it's just a fun car." Yeah you know and um and it's a ridiculously cool car but it doesn't it doesn't it's not a I'm not attached to
• 43:30 - 44:00 it and so I can just go let the 17-year-old go home and not kill him and because it's not it's not going to it's it's we're asking those things to do something for us that they're not capable of yeah it's almost like asking your wife or your husband if you're you know married uh uh if you're a lady watching this uh uh to be your Jesus that they're going to fail
• 44:00 - 44:30 miserably your husband's going to leave his underwear on the floor and you're going to realize right quick he's not Jesus there's underwear on the floor jesus wouldn't do that possibly would i don't know but but you know I mean you you can't ask things to do things that aren't that to be God that aren't capable that's the problem with idol worship that's the core of it when you mentioned that your your business mentor the the guy that you saw spoke said you
• 44:30 - 45:00 need to basically you need to implement Christ in your life into your business what did he mean by that i think he just was saying your character is changed and you become uh other centered rather than self-centered you become when you're selling if you're a taker buying can smell it on you mhm if you're when you're selling you're serving uh you're you're then you're there to help and they can smell that on you and
• 45:00 - 45:30 so uh again selfish or selfless or selfish other centered self-centered and um so we teach the sales team at Ramsay you know you work at a five-star restaurant with uh the best wine list on the planet and your job is to be the best server possible to where when the people leave that dining experience we're not in the dining business but I'm when they leave doing business with Ramsay that they've had an an experience
• 45:30 - 46:00 like a dining experience where they were served um and if you ever noticed if you're in that kind of a setting and I'm you know fine food is one of my favorite sports and so um you know if you're in that kind of a setting the server makes all the difference uh because they're going to they're they're not just slapping stuff on the table and the you can have the finest food the finest wine list in the world and and still have a crummy experience because you weren't served interesting so how with that being said how would a
• 46:00 - 46:30 sales pitch have gone without without that implemented and then how did it what what did it look like next well it's manipulative without because my goal is for me to win okay if I'm selling and so all I care is that you buy i don't care whether you buy the right thing i don't care if you need it i don't care if you finance it and it the finance contract ruins your life i don't care about you all I'm trying to do is get a unit out the door and you
• 46:30 - 47:00 are a unit of production for me you're not a human being that I'm trying to make your life better and so it changes the language changes the body language and we all know it even people that aren't in marketing or sales you know it you when you go into a ice cream store you can feel it mhm are they there to help you or are you just another dip you know and so it it's are they there to you know cuz you ever you meet someone and they light up you know uh you think
• 47:00 - 47:30 about it it's very contrived now but it's welcome to Mo you know I mean it's like we're glad you're here come into my house we were at a nice wonderful restaurant down in Mexico a few weeks ago and we walk in the guy's Italian and it's like he went to his home you meet met us at the front door with a glass of champagne come into my home and he was he had great joy in making sure that you had an amazing experience i think the food was good but I got lost
• 47:30 - 48:00 in the in the moment that he created you know it's just fabulous i love that kind of stuff very cool so yeah it sounds like So be personable listen listen listen to what they want help them be yeah you know what would you do if it was your little brother what would you do if he was your mama you make sure they took took care of and treat it like treat every one of them like that it's a great message blow their mind
• 48:00 - 48:30 what went wrong what went wrong in your business that you went bankrupt uh we had a I had a 1.2 two and 90 day notes because again I was buying a property fixing it you know had a rehab cruise running and so I buy a property fix it up and flip it and so at the end of 90 days you got to pay the whole thing or you can renew the note pay the interest and renew it for another 90 days if the bank allows that and they did because I'd never lost money on a deal but if I
• 48:30 - 49:00 had a house that we didn't get it finished and it it took 6 months instead of three months to get fixed and sold i pay the interest renew it and you know it's not a problem and and uh the problem was when they looked down and said "Oh we want it all right now." And so basically I had you know 120 days 90 days 90-day notes coming up due for a million too and it's all tied up in real estate you got to move it all right now well there's a word for real estate sold super fast it's cheap i started giving stuff away to meet the note
• 49:00 - 49:30 obligations and and so the income stopped because the income was from the profit and the profit all went away cuz I was selling it so cheap to get rid of it i really wasn't in over my head i mean I had a million dollars in equity i was sitting at 75% loan to value ratios and things so that was all working uh and I hadn't really lost money on deals i lost money on a couple of them here or there but I was making enough to cover that but I was pretty good at it um but I had built it uh on on this fragile unsustainable
• 49:30 - 50:00 platform of the bank had control of my life i didn't realize that they had a their hands around my neck until they started squeezing and um when that guy walked in and said you know you're going to pay all this right now because we're not going to renew any of this we fired the guy that did these deals with you and I'm like why he shouldn't have done them i'm like he didn't do anything wrong he was doing what you told him to do and anyway big argument and
• 50:00 - 50:30 uh and so we had to that that bank called their notes and then the second largest bank had a 800k with them and they heard through the grapevine that Dave was in trouble cuz Dave was in trouble and so um they they you know we spent one year making 250,000 the next year I made 6,000 cuz all I did was sell the houses damn all I did was just try to try to do the right thing and pay the bill and be honorable and all those
• 50:30 - 51:00 kinds of things but it didn't matter they were coming they were you know every time I would make a move or do anything to trying to help them get their money but they would stick me again you know so I had I was I was bleeding on every pore and um and I I was I was just bound to determine I was going to make it and I almost made it but I didn't uh I ran out of emotional and spiritual fuel and I couldn't I I I was really struggling
• 51:00 - 51:30 with that i I was a baby Christian i was really struggling with the idea that a Christian doesn't pay his bills and that's awful it's not you know and there's nothing in the about bankruptcy in the Bible you know and so what what allows this and I'm like you know they're coming to take the baby bed next week on one of these lawsuits they're going to take all the furniture out of our house i got a brand new baby and a toddler marriage is hanging on by a thread and I'm like "Oh so you had kids when this happened?" Had two kids rachel was born in April we filed in September so she was a little baby and Denise was
• 51:30 - 52:00 a toddler and Sharon would have left but she didn't have a car so she I mean it was awful and I stood in the shower as hot as I could stand i just stand there and cry i was so scared I couldn't breathe i didn't know what to do and um yeah so but I I just I I ran my tank ran dry my emotional spiritual
• 52:00 - 52:30 uh courage whatever you want to call it dry i I just I didn't know what else to do i just And finally they like were coming to take the furniture and I'm like then I got all red and act like they can't they took everything else they can't have the baby bed like I couldn't get another baby bed but I So so we filed on Thursday night Thursday afternoon to keep them from the truck from backing up at the house on Friday morning i took it that far two and a half years of hell that was 2 and 1/2 years holy [ __ ]
• 52:30 - 53:00 and it was water got cut off and I'm not proud of this but I went and hooked the water back up and then they cut it off again and then I went and hooked it back up again and then they took the water meter out cuz I kept turning it back on pirating my own water but I had two little kids in the house i didn't know what else to do i was so broke I couldn't breathe and it's awful and um it's my fault all of it was my fault and there's no the shame and the condemnation and then you start to heal
• 53:00 - 53:30 and those scriptures there is therefore now no condemnation so how so was it was it a two and a half year long process of them taking everything or did it from the time they called our first notes from the time they called our first notes we fought it we said okay you know and I gave them the middle finger I said all right I'm taking you people out of my life and I started selling everything and I really was under I was so stupid I was under the illusion I could sell enough of it fast enough to just pay
• 53:30 - 54:00 them all off and be done and then figure out something else to do or whatever but I couldn't get it all moved D and then they started foreclosing and I had unsecured notes out too uh and they started suing me on those i got sued like 78 times yeah we were on a firstname basis with the old boy at the sheriff's department that brings those pink lawsuit papers yeah sharon's like "Come in Harold got cookies on." But uh it was um it was hell wow and so you know it's it's pain is a thorough teacher so it's
• 54:00 - 54:30 no wonder Dave Ramsey doesn't borrow money when they say the borrower is slave to the lender in Proverbs I went "Uh-huh." Yeah got that one got that one the rich rules over the poor and the borrower's slave to the lender got that one i will never be another banker ever in my life except where I make deposits and uh none of you people will ever have that power over my life again i gave you that power once i'm not
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• 55:00 - 55:30 operations and training i wish I had had hoist as an option for hydration during my military career especially the brand new flavor they just released fivestar punch through December 31st 2025 Hoist is donating a minimum of $10,000 to Folds of Honor a nonprofit organization that provides educational scholarships to family members of fallen service members or first responders hoist is now available in all Publix locations you
• 55:30 - 56:00 can use the store locator on their website to find a store near you or you can purchase directly from drinkhoist.com where you can use my code SRS to save 15% on their website go check out their website that'shoist.com and use my code SRS to save 15% as you've heard on my show before there are bad guys out there who want to try to take us down it's all they think about and if you ask me this could
• 56:00 - 56:30 happen at any time will it be terrorists hackers we don't know i just think there's a possibility that something's coming that's why I'm asking you to get prepared and I'm making it easy go right now to preparewithshan.com and you'll see a threemonth emergency food kit from my Patriot Supply for $100 off their three-month kit provides 2,000 calories a day the amount most people need in an emergency down to the calorie they've
• 56:30 - 57:00 studied survival and know what they're doing if you're like me and want to help take control of your family safety this could be your chance go to preparewithshan.com and get $100 off a 3month emergency food kit from my Patriot Supply preparewithshan.com well I think I know the answer to this but I mean we're having discussions about private equity and all this stuff i mean have you ever taken any any of
• 57:00 - 57:30 that nope nothing nope everything's built grassroots and yeah we've organically cash flowed everything is the business answer to the question the reason was that um again I I didn't simply go bankrupt and I didn't simply meet God in the process the whole thing melded together and it took me all the way to powder to ground zero and I went okay so when I
• 57:30 - 58:00 started talking about opening up a business again after that when I healed I mean I went back to doing some real estate deals just to eat and I was able to get some food on the table but a couple years later I started learning this stuff the Bible says get out of debt you know and learning biblical finance which is common sense and I thought okay I can I I think we can do this and Shar and I started say "Okay we're going to handle our marriage by the book we're going to handle our kids
• 58:00 - 58:30 by the book we're going to handle our finances by the book and you know the beautiful thing about going broke is you no longer care what everybody thinks so I'm not taking a poll you know I love you i appreciate you but you don't really get a vote you know we get one vote jesus vote gets a vote that he's the one gets a vote and so this is how we you know submit yourselves one to another this is how we're going to be married that means I got to dry dishes and that means I got to serve my wife and as a as a high quality husband you
• 58:30 - 59:00 know and so how do you lead how do you hire and fire how do you you know anything I could figure out I'm going to do it this way whatever this book tells me this is what I'm going to do and these people in my life that are new pe new friends in my life to the extent there's that they're doing one of those things well according to this book I'm going to listen to them and so I had like one friend who had an incredible marriage he wasn't great business guy but but I could learn how to be a
• 59:00 - 59:30 husband from him and I had another guy who's a great business guy wasn't necessarily incredible at his marriage but I could learn some Christian business principles from him and so I took that and put it all together and so the all That is to say that the first principle was I don't own the business god owns it i'm a manager old English phrase in the King James is steward i'm a steward of which just means I'm a manager of other people's property and so I don't own Ramsey god owns it and um
• 59:30 - 60:00 uh so when I started it I'm like "Okay God what do you want to name your business?" And um sat there with a yellow pad and nothing couldn't hear anything didn't know what to name it and I kept on and I thought what we're going to do is we're going to help people we're going to give hope we're going to uh you know we're going to help people that are hurting like we're hurting we're hurting and you know uh and so I sat there with a yellow pad i'm like "Okay God." Next morning an hour sitting
• 60:00 - 60:30 there with a yellow pad nothing on it and I wrote down a couple things and I'm like "Those that wasn't God that's last night's pizza." and you know figuring out the difference in the holy spir spirit and pepperoni right and so uh and uh finally I wrote down light and I I honestly looked up and I went you're just really not good at marketing light consulting I mean light that's awful I'm having this argument with God like he's worried
• 60:30 - 61:00 about me and um and I was over at the church doing something helping the helping this little couple that had their car payment behind And um they had these uh concordances in the church these books that you can look up what the Greek or Hebrew meaning is and I thought okay we're going to we're going to open this business we're going to help people and we're not going to rub their nose in our Christianity but they're going to at least know where we got the
• 61:00 - 61:30 information we're going to This is where we're coming from okay so uh you know uh and so we're going to talk about it but not be thumping people with it right because nobody wants to be thumped and Bible thumped and so um anyway I open that book up i thought wouldn't it be interesting if this if the word light only appears one time because there's always multiple Hebrew words or multiple Greek words for the word light and so I'll go down through there sure enough
• 61:30 - 62:00 there's a Hebrew word but it applies like shows up like 10 times okay that's not helpful and so then there's a Greek word for light that shows up multiple times and here's another Greek word that only shows up one time in scripture i thought well I wonder what that is that's interesting it's Matthew and I pull open the English Bible i'm like okay the word is lampo which obviously we got our word lamp from light right and so um I flip open the Bible and it says "Don't hide your
• 62:00 - 62:30 light under a bushel put on a lampstand for all to see." Which is what we were promising to do that we were going to you know be a light to people and I went "Okay that's you God." And so the company that actually owns Ramsay is called Lampo no kidding yeah the Lampo Group Inc is the actual corporation DBA doing business as Ramsey Solutions um ran it that way publicly facing for a long long time but we started doing some branding shifts and but uh so God named
• 62:30 - 63:00 the company it's his company he runs it I don't own it and if he decides to uh bankrupt it by decides or it's not going to be generational it's his he gets to do with it what he wants to do with it just like that stupid car that the 17-year-old backed into and so um now based on that God what do you want to do with your company how do you want your employees treated how do you want your team treated how do you want to be people to be compensated ated how you going to treat the girl that gets cancer that works on the front desk oh we paid her and she wasn't at
• 63:00 - 63:30 work for 3 years for 3 years she's back at work one of my best friends I love the girl she beat it you know what god would do it uh but what would Jesus do he He would taking care of her her family he wouldn't oh you got cancer we're going to write you up for not being at work and you're get wrote up three times you're going to get fired right i mean I don't think that's how God run a business so we've done stuff like that you know we had a kid get hit in the head with a ball at camp over in
• 63:30 - 64:00 North Carolina and his daddy i was in Scotland but my leadership team did this and um they called me to tell me they chartered a plane to send dad over there cuz the camp called the hospital called and told the dad "The kids's got four hours to live you can't get to Asheville North Carolina from here in 4 hours but you can if you charter a jet." And um you know if that was me what would I and my kid is over there what would I want somebody to do for me well we sent him over there on a jet and the good news is
• 64:00 - 64:30 again kid made it wow the hospital was wrong thank God but um but I you know we don't do any of that for any reason but you know the interesting thing is when you love your people well the rest of them are watching and it becomes one of the best places to work in America because because it's one of the best places to work in America because God runs an incredible business you know I run this very very similar to that
• 64:30 - 65:00 uh I really I got a great relationship with everybody that works there i care about them i I consider this like a family to me yeah i can feel it when you walk in and you know I I got a question for you though and this is just something that I've struggled with is is sometimes I feel like my generosity may be somewhat of a weakness and so what I mean by that is is
• 65:00 - 65:30 people people see the generosity that I have and there have been a handful of people that come here and they take advantage of that mhm mhm and so how do you as a business owner I mean how do you how can you tell the difference how do you have the foresight into that how do you deal with it when it when it does happen um that and even worse they um you find out later that somebody's uh betraying
• 65:30 - 66:00 or stealing or they leave and then they say nasty things about you after you did something for them i gave a guy a car one time and then he's on a Facebook group i hate Dave Ramsey Facebook group and um uh I would like to tell you I know the formula for that i don't it still hurts my feelings and I still get pissed off
• 66:00 - 66:30 it's like I want to go find the guy and choke him but you know but I'm not going to and uh and you know and the thing the thing I have struggled with the most on that and you know I've got good friends in my life that have walked with me for 30 years and um I got a group of guys that I hang with that aren't that don't work at my company and that a lot of them I've been friends for 20 30 years through this whole spiritual journey and so I I'll just vent with those guys i'm
• 66:30 - 67:00 like you know and they go "Okay look you got 2,500 people or so that used to work at Ramsey you got,00 that work there now four of them are twerps keep the ratio of how much you're get how much rent you give in your brain to those four correct." Mhm because it really should be about 1% of your thought pattern instead of
• 67:00 - 67:30 25% of your thought pattern because I don't know about you but I get mad I get hurt and then I just ruminate on it i'm just hey I just run over and over and I can do this I do this shut that Facebook group down I'm I've called out some of these people a time or two but um but I end up spending too much of my calories on the wrong things then and it's hard for me is the answer to your question uh that's a real human emotion uh but it doesn't invalidate the idea you're not going to get to the end
• 67:30 - 68:00 of your life and go you know I regret helping that lady who had cancer you're not going to go I regret giving that um you know helping that guy with a jet i regret you know whatever the story is where you did something that was generous or whatever use some of God's money that he let you manage to do something for somebody one of his other children it's what it amounts to and um and and you know God has some crazy kids man some of them ain't
• 68:00 - 68:30 right and so you know you just got to go and I I I wish I was uh better and stronger about just letting that roll off my back but I'm not i'm trying to tell you it's probably not going to quit hurting when somebody does you wrong is it trans but it doesn't mean you don't be generous yeah yeah that's the point i mean I I can't stop that that's just part of who I am at the same aspect I mean has that I
• 68:30 - 69:00 mean has that transformed you into somebody who's a little more guarded um yeah probably uh and and I'm probably a little wiser uh about the generosity you know i I cuz I don't want to throw good money after bad that's not obviously I'm not going to I don't want to be a blessing to somebody who's going
• 69:00 - 69:30 to do something silly uh that's not what I'm trying to do that was not the intent and so you know you just you're probably just a little more I was probably a little more uh disorganized or chaotic in the generosity now I'm probably more precise gotcha and I'm going to go I think about the unintended consequences of this and I kind of sometimes I think well if I do all this and then they you know decide they're going to be nasty later on social media about Dave Ramsey or something how am I going to feel am I
• 69:30 - 70:00 still going to be glad I did it and I'm like "Yeah cuz when I do when we give someone a a large severance package or something you know we're overly generous there or we take care of somebody and then later you know uh we're really not uh doing that for what we get from it so let it go." And it's I have to just have you can tell I have this conversation myself a lot but yeah I'm probably more guarded i'm not not cynical i don't want
• 70:00 - 70:30 to get cynical but I do want to be more I do want to be more intelligent more wise about what are the unintended consequences of this and am I overdoing it out of some kind of sense of weakness or something or is this exactly what God would do right now cuz it's his money what do you want to do with your money God how would you treat this guy you know what he's going to do the scowl you know what they're going to do later and I'm trying to figure that out i'm still trying to figure it out i don't think I'll get it figured out this side of heaven but it's a it's a fun journey
• 70:30 - 71:00 so backtracking just a little bit so was I'm sorry what What was the light what was the original name of the business lambo lambo was that what was born out of the out of the downturn mhm the consulting business yeah yeah i first started helping people stop foreclosures cuz I was a foreclosure and I used to buy foreclosures and so I know how to stop foreclosures and uh house is three payments behind i know how to work the you know the deal with the bank the deal with the mortgage company get them
• 71:00 - 71:30 caught back up and keep them from losing their stinking house um and so people was first thing I did is people would come and pay us a couple of hundred bucks and we would help them get caught up on their credit cards and their car payments and get them on a budget and there wasn't a class there wasn't anything it was just me sitting in a room with a yellow pad and a calculator and I would call the credit card companies and you know yell at them and work cuz they're they're complete twerps how did you market that i mean coming from somebody that's making $6,000 $6,000 a year
• 71:30 - 72:00 to a consulting business well I number one I again I went back to doing some real estate deals that's what we were eating on okay and I was doing the other stuff at church just as a ministry the pastor called and goes "Hey there's a guy in my office getting foreclosed on can you help him?" I'm like "Yeah I'll be over in 20 minutes." And I sat down and that's the first time I ever did it well once you do something good you know you help you show that you have a talent in a church they'll have you do it all the time so I was over there almost every night pretty soon with somebody that was blowing up in their finances
• 72:00 - 72:30 and I'm showing them this is what we learned this is what we did we screwed it up and that you know our story of failure kind of took some of the shame off of them so they could start to heal and um and then we could okay here's what we're going to do we're going to sell this car and we're going to do this and you know I'm going to get you out of this but it's going to be painful but you can you can make it you can make the turn on this and you can get on back on top of it and then um a guy from a restaurant chain that went to our church
• 72:30 - 73:00 called me and said um hey one of our managers has got an IRS lean can you help him the company's going to pay you a $250 fee to go help him and it's the first time I ever got paid to do that and I was doing real estate deals to feed the family back after being broke and so I went over to that guy at that restaurant and sat down with that guy and we refinanced his house and paid off the IRS which was really not rocket science i don't know why they didn't know how to do that but anyway I helped him get out of that and then the guy goes "Hey I want you to come over at one of our manager meetings and teach this
• 73:00 - 73:30 stuff that you're teaching in that Sunday school class this get out of debt get on a budget stuff that you're teaching in that Sunday school class." I went "Okay." He goes "We'll give you $250 to do that you know pay me to talk oh yeah i'm in and then we then he paid me uh $250 plus $500 in restaurant credit to go to the another city to do one of their other managers meetings and I'm like "Oh I this is this is so fun." And uh Sharon and I and I started doing a little bit more of it and just kept and I sat down
• 73:30 - 74:00 wrote a little book and so started nobody would buy it and uh there was no internet you know there was no platform to launch something on and um then I went on a broke radio station that was in bankruptcy and agreed to work for free and they allowed us to come down and do this horrible talk radio show it's like a Saturday Night Live skit two hillbillies Daryl and his other brother Daryl wwtn we're talking Nashville i mean it was awful it was so bad but the answers
• 74:00 - 74:30 to the questions where people were in pain the phone stayed lit up every day and in matter of months we had one of the highest rated shows in the city are you serious and we were awful but it was it was anything to do with the broadcast quality didn't have anything to do with the ability to speak or enunciate or properly form a vowel you know it had to do with we love people and we were just helping them we were doing it for free we were just doing it for fun we weren't
• 74:30 - 75:00 getting paid it was just kind of kind of a ministry kind of a cool thing and I'm go do a real estate deal when I get off the air feed my family and uh we told the guy to run the station you know if we're really bad you can cut our pay in half because he wasn't paying us anything and uh so but it just it took off and then um Gaylord bought it out of bankruptcy and it was a big FM station it's a huge FM station here today in Nashville and we were on there for 20 years and that launched the whole thing
• 75:00 - 75:30 then we started getting paid because the uh we could sell ads because of our ratings and we're getting paid for the ads and um and we could uh you know but it was all about just again helping people and just showing them these common sense things and it turns out common sense as Ben Franklin said is not very common so it was it was the it was the company that bought them out of bankruptcy that
• 75:30 - 76:00 kind of you turned it into a business well that's when we actually started making some money at it and um we didn't even know we had ratings because they didn't show up in the book because we were in bankruptcy and so we didn't we were illegal cuz we didn't even say the call letters you're supposed to say the call letters once an hour on radio it's FCC guideline you know and so we're just talking and there were no commercials cuz nobody wanted to buy on this station you know no we thought three people were
• 76:00 - 76:30 listening to them were in our family you know but we the phone was ringing we knew that and um uh we we said we're going to do a little seminar at the Ramada in and 600 people showed up holy [ __ ] and I'm like "Oh my god there's people out there under this radio." What time span are we talking here oh you know we were on the air for maybe a year and then we just launch and we said and then they'd buy the thing and the they the tower was broken they fixed the tower and it's 100,000 watt FM
• 76:30 - 77:00 flamethrower so it covered from Alabama to Kentucky all of Middle Tennessee it was and all of a sudden this thing's like a blowtorrch and um uh they started telling us you got to say the call letters as a matter of fact we're going to change the phone number and make the phone number the call letters so we just started we went from never saying the call letters to every 30 seconds saying them which drives ratings because people would know the call letters to write down the ratings books and so the thing went it was there it was what we call
• 77:00 - 77:30 phantom [ __ ] meaning it was there but nobody knew it was there and then we activated it with proper handling of the stupid radio and we didn't know what we're doing and they took us to 3 hours and the guy running the thing he goes "I'm going to put uh two of your three hours against Rush Limbaugh rush is on the other station." And I was like "Are you trying to shoot us in the face i mean we're you can't beat Rush Limbaugh that's freaking Elvis he invented rock and roll i mean you there's no way." Cuz
• 77:30 - 78:00 Rush was the man i mean he was king of the hill and uh we beat him you beat him in Nashville and that was the beginning gave us a story to tell with ratings we didn't beat him anywhere else hardly ever um and he became a friend later but oh my gosh we were like "Woo!" You know the king and and so we couldn't believe it the radios came in went "This is wrong." And it's not wrong we have a huge radio signal it's FM he's on AM we got this
• 78:00 - 78:30 other great lineup around you gordon G gordon Litty you remember that guy he was on in the mornings before us and so the thing blew up and um then we we were smart enough somehow to say "All right we're gonna uh we're gonna stay on your station but you don't own we don't want to be employees don't pay us you don't own the show we own the show even though it's worth nothing but um because someday I want to syndicate this thing someday I want to put on other radio stations and
• 78:30 - 79:00 I'll take no money right now and I'll make my money selling books and doing a seminars and doing some consulting work uh I can make my money doing that and yeah radio lost money for 10 years on our P&L it didn't we couldn't sell enough ads to cover our costs for radio well we we started syndicating it meaning we got other people other we went to Russellville Kentucky and that guy put us on oakidge Tennessee put us on jackson Tennessee put us on then Jackson Mississippi put us on and then
• 79:00 - 79:30 Spokane Washington and then Seattle and we just one at a time wow and there's 640 stations now in the network today wow it's the second largest talk radio network in America sean Hannity's number one we're number two wow but it just it was 30 years of scratching and clawing fighting and pushing and pulling and putting up with radio business what did
• 79:30 - 80:00 that develop into where did you go from radio well as we're going in radio you know then the guy walks in my office what 10 or 15 years ago the internet and broadband is starting to have market penetration and um he goes "We need a podcast." And I said "What what's the flips a podcast?" And he goes "Well a couple people are doing them and they're they're they're like charging like a subscription thing and you can make money on it and you put it behind the pay wall." And I'm like "I don't think I want to do that." And he
• 80:00 - 80:30 goes "Oh man we got to try it." He goes "It's where it's going to go." And I said "I got this huge talk radio thing why would I want to do that?" And he goes "Well just take the same exact show and let's just put it on the internet." I said "All right but we're not going to charge for it put an hour on there and let's see what it's doing." And um and we ran it that way and talk radio people were freaking out about podcasts they were afraid it was going to put them out of business or um Rush refused to do one he didn't want to be disloyal to the radio business and other people
• 80:30 - 81:00 would put out a podcast but they put it behind a payw wall and you had to pay for it now we just put it on there if you help enough people you don't have to worry about money so we just put it on there just put it out there see what happens and then XM radio before that you know XM and Sirius were two companies and we went up on both of those as soon as they came in and then they combined and they couldn't figure out what what to do with us since we were on both of them and they end up giving us a whole channel for a while on the on the pair i think we've got probably half a channel right now on there and um so we just jumped on
• 81:00 - 81:30 anything and everything because we weren't in the radio business we were in the helping people business so we're platform agnostic and so you could jump to anything so then the podcast we were I never forget I was with uh Brian Mayfield was one of our uh he was our top he was our top sales guy and he had been promoted to run all of our broadcast stuff and we were in New York and we got off the plane we're heading over to do a thing in there and he goes "Hey you know that podcast thing's kind of working." And I'm like "What do you
• 81:30 - 82:00 mean?" He goes "I think we made a million dollars on it last year in ad revenue." And I said "For an hour?" And he goes "Yeah you can't run many ads on them they're not like radio radio's full of ads you can put just a couple ads on there an hour." And um said "We made a million dollars." He goes "Yeah." I said "Well why why aren't we making 3 million and put all three hours on there?" And he goes "Uh we'll do that when we get home." So we put all three hours on there and then we you YouTube started popping up and people started putting stuff on YouTube so we put it on there and then you know Spotify joins the
• 82:00 - 82:30 scene and we jump on Spotify so anybody comes along we jump on all of it and some of it is better than others and some of it's you know for a time one of them will shine and then it'll dim you know there was a time we thought Sirius XM was going to own the world and obviously they don't and um so we're we're just trying to help people and wherever they are that's where we're going to go and that's worked out really good for us i mean rewinding a little bit when So you're doing the radio show but this developed
• 82:30 - 83:00 into books and coaching and inerson coaching and and courses when did all that start happening uh we started on the radio in June uh 25th of 1992 i kept doing real estate again because we were doing that for free we did a couple of little seminars here and there and I wrote a little book and I started selling a couple of those i mean we sold maybe 10,000 of them or something i couldn't get bookstores to take it i couldn't get anybody to take
• 83:00 - 83:30 it i'd sell it on the radio and then we had to they had to mail me a check to a P.O box and I had to cash the check and mail them the book that's how hard it was talk about friction oh my god it was ridiculous and so that's how but everything was analog so that's the only option you had and you couldn't get the bookstores to take it because I was a little self-published author and the little book was ugly and um it worked it was a good book but um and so that you know I had that working and
• 83:30 - 84:00 um and at at the end of the year of 93 I told Sharon I said I I I ran some numbers and I said I think I think we could do between seminars and launching a class which I hadn't launched at that point um and the sale of these books and some one-on-one coaching I think I can make $65,000 next year and quit doing real estate and go allin on financial peace the book was called Financial Peace the class was
• 84:00 - 84:30 going to be called Financial Peace i think if we go all in that year I made 130,000 and I said I think if we take a pay cut in half I think this is what God's telling us to do we're doing God's stuff we're helping God's people god owns the company he's running this i think it's time to take this and do this and and she said "Ma'am I mean she was hurting we were still bleeding out of every pore we were eating but making 130
• 84:30 - 85:00 grand in 1993 is a lot of money but um we talked about it and fredded over it and prayed over it and then one morning she woke up and she said "I I think God's saying you need to do this i think you're supposed to do this." and I went game on and um I stopped doing all real estate and dove all in January 1 and uh that year I made $61,000 that was pretty close on my
• 85:00 - 85:30 estimate and um I don't make that anymore that was the worst year I ever had damn damn when did uh I mean the book that I read was Total Money Makeover that was the second one yeah that was the second one it was actually the third one technically but yeah Financial Peace the book was the first one it took off uh that year and um I what I did was I kept every time I
• 85:30 - 86:00 got a call on the radio that the book didn't answer their question I wrote it down i I kept a little log of it and okay so I updated the little financial peace book and put in five more chapters that answered our most frequently asked questions there was no such thing as FAQs in those days but you know I just okay the book needs to be the answer to every question and so what what I would do is anytime anybody would call go okay here's the answer to your question here's exactly
• 86:00 - 86:30 what you need to go do and I'm going to mail you a book because it's going to tell you exactly what I'm telling you right now and I'll give it to them on the air but that gave me a mention on the book every day and I sold 148,000 of them that year uh when I once I started doing that with a new cover on it little green cover and an agent called me and said "You need a publisher." And I'm like "No I don't you don't know the difference between margin and royalty do you margin big royalty little." And uh she's like "I don't need a
• 86:30 - 87:00 publisher." I said "I need a publisher when it's in the trunk of my car and nobody would take the book." Now everybody takes the book and I'm cashing the checks and she goes "Well I got a big company a Viking Penguin wants to come down and visit with you from New York." And I'm like "I I'll always sit down and talk to somebody i'm not mean about it but if they think they're going to buy this book they need to bring a really big truck full of money because uh and I'm going to keep control of every bit of it cuz it's not my book it's God's i'm supposed to manage it not some New York publisher i'm in charge of
• 87:00 - 87:30 this." And so I said I don't think they got enough money to buy this book and turns out they did they did and we did this very unusual contract where I control every aspect of the book and um and they did a lot of stuff for me I was not sophisticated enough to do at the time i didn't understand and so I was still so primitive and green but they got a world class uh publicist and you know I'm on the Today Show i'm in People magazine um um you know uh all these other major
• 87:30 - 88:00 national hits and uh to to launch the book and relaunch the book in hardback now and uh we sold 293,000 of them that month and it hit the New York Times and all of a sudden thing the whole world changes and um that book has now done 3.2 2 million total since 19 including the ones I used to carry in the trunk of my car in 199 uh2 and so it's a long time then that
• 88:00 - 88:30 and it's still in hardback and it still looks exactly the same cuz I control all that so um and I still get royalty checks from those fine people they're sweet as they can be and um you know and then we went on and did that was a twobook deal the other book didn't do that well and then Total Money Makeover came from Thomas Nelson here in Nashville mike Hayyatt was the CEO of that and he comes over and he goes "You need to do another money book it's been seven years." And I'm like "I don't really have anything else to say everything I said is in that book that's
• 88:30 - 89:00 what I say every day on the radio why do I do another tell somebody like something new?" And he goes "Well that book's what to do this is how to do it you need to do a book on the baby steps and show people tactically you know how to do this." And that book's done 14 million now it's crazy that's the biggest thing we've ever done it's nuts well it's a damn good book i hope everybody listen I I didn't want to do it cuz I thought it was insincere because I had this other I'd
• 89:00 - 89:30 already said all a lot of the same stuff but I didn't talk about how to do it and so Total Money Makeover legitimately was how to do it and obviously that was needed what other what other aspects of the business did you start developing you you started with the coaching went to radio went to podcast books yeah we just kept looking and going okay where is there a need where's somebody uh we can get help with this material and so uh a guy a coach up here
• 89:30 - 90:00 at the Catholic school Father Ryan here in Nashville Coach Carson uh dropped by the office one day and he goes "Hey I just want y'all to know um I don't I don't I I feel like I ought to tell y'all I've been buying these Financial Peace books and I'm taking my high school seniors through it i'm showing them how in my math class how to do this stuff." And he goes "I I'm didn't want y'all to think I'm stealing something i just wanted you to know we're doing And I went you know that's really cool because ever since I had a single book
• 90:00 - 90:30 first thing people pick up a book off the table they look at me and go "Why isn't this taught in high school why didn't I know this stuff before I was a broke 30-year-old?" You know why didn't somebody teach me this stuff and it's I I've heard that my whole career and I went "Okay hey coach why don't we work together and we'll kind of use you as a guinea pig let's start develop an actual curriculum for high school students out of it instead of you having to use an adult book for kids and the kids don't have to know what some of that crap is and so um we filmed a little thing and
• 90:30 - 91:00 put it on VHS and put it in his class and then we put it a couple other places and um then we got thrown out of uh three or four places because I said Jesus in the video and they freaked out um and uh so then I got to learn a whole new thing about law which I didn't know the uh Supreme Court rulings on what can be taught in public school and what can't be taught and ended up in this big legal mess and um
• 91:00 - 91:30 but we fixed all that and we've got it to where we can there actually side note you can actually use scripture and talk about God in public school uh as long as it's instructive not not uh uh you're you're you're not trying to convert them and so you can say Jesus said don't build a tower without first counting the cost and you can say Ben Franklin said save money and you can say Mark Twain said this about you know what debt and you can you know it's instructive but you can't say Jesus is
• 91:30 - 92:00 the way the truth and the life so you can't procilitize uh and there's very clear stuff on that now a lot of a lot of public school uh administrators are cowards and they think anything that says Jesus should be thrown in the street uh and so they haven't done it but now we've gotten 6 million students through it and 48% of America's high schools have now taught that curriculum um and that was 25 years ago we started that it's a massive business wow and now we I opened up a
• 92:00 - 92:30 full econ curriculum to go with it because apparently we need to teach what capitalism is i didn't know that was a problem but we need to so we're now doing that too so um and there's a lot of uh Texas um Florida the late latest two that have just passed mandatory personal finance class in high school and guess what we can help them with that so yeah and we've got a then we had okay we the financial peace class ended up going through 50,000 churches and
• 92:30 - 93:00 about 10 million people went through it and we said okay let's take that class which is a very religious class it's all about what God says about money and it was taught in church and uh very in-your-face not not subtle at all and um corporate America didn't want that much in your face which is understandable uh but they wanted to teach their team that because your team if your team's worried about their money they're not thinking about work while they're at work their productivity goes down so we ended up you know
• 93:00 - 93:30 reconfiguring all that in a much more palatable way called smart dollar and now U-Haul and Costco and many many other companies teach that uh buy it from us as a curriculum an HR benefit to the team they can go through the class and so we just keep doing stuff like that something pops up and we launched a a budgeting app um gosh uh almost 10 years ago now and iterated every day almost updated updated updated and it's freaking incredible uh every dollar and I think
• 93:30 - 94:00 we've got 56 million downloads now on that or something holy cow it's just um it's just but you know again none of it's easy you just stumble backward into it look confused and stumble forward and uh but we just keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing but yeah you just monetize the connectivity and the service that you're providing and um and sometimes you do stuff just because you need to help people and you don't make any money on it and that's okay
• 94:00 - 94:30 too did you ever I mean I know that you know back at the beginning you said that the the money kind of came to you people just came to you and offered you $250 uh to go speak to their to them and and their employees i mean when did you when did it have to start kind of transitioning from a from hey people coming to you to somewhat of a sell and did you find that well I mean we have a sales team that sells the curriculum to high schools yeah we have a sales team that sells the smart dollar to corporate
• 94:30 - 95:00 America okay so we're going after they're not calling they're not lining up around the block we got to go get them yeah um we got to tell them we're there a lot of times they don't even know we're there and so you have to go through the whole process of being approved as a curriculum before the school board at the state level and then the local county can decide whether they want to buy it or not and so you got to go and then some character will stand up and go you can't have Dave Ramsey here because he likes Jesus and we don't have Jesus anywhere and all this stuff i'm like hey dude you need to actually read the
• 95:00 - 95:30 curriculum you kind of sound foolish um cuz it's really not a preaching curriculum son it's just a teach little kids not how to get into debt and you probably wished your kid had learned it so you probably ought to before you just start being leftwing barker but um anyway we just work our way through that stuff and yeah there we have to be proactive in sales and when we were doing the church uh thing we had 38 people calling churches all day long and you know putting the pastor through the thing for free and so he would see what it is cuz pastors aren't comfortable
• 95:30 - 96:00 usually talking about money cuz they don't want to be like one of those churches that talks about money all the time and so they're they're they end up going too far the other way and never talking about what the Bible says about money which is also a disservice to their congregants um because you you know if you're pastoring you ought to teach people what God says about marriage what God says about money what God says about leadership what God says about that's your job as a pastor and so you know what does God say about money uh I mean there's 2500 scriptures
• 96:00 - 96:30 dealing with money and possessions um some of it's very nuanced and almost funny um and uh I mean the four or five main things that you think about is debt you know borrower slave to the lender there's not a debt is not a sin in the Bible not even close um and uh but 100% of the scriptural references to that are negative and so it's your heavenly father who loves you who's crazy about you saying
• 96:30 - 97:00 "Son it's dumb." That's what it amounts to and there's a lot of scripture about planning and budgeting you know the mind of man plans his ways but the Lord directs his steps and I already quoted the one from Jesus don't build a tower you know don't build a build you're building a house don't do that without a blueprint you know and don't don't handle your money without a detailed thing of where the freaking money's going and so have a plan get out of debt the house of the wise or stores of choice food and oil wise people save money saving investing uh Ecclesiastes
• 97:00 - 97:30 says "Spread your portions to seven yes to eight for disaster may come upon the land." Diversification's in the Bible don't put it all in one place um foolish man devours all he has if you spend everything you make you're a fool god said that not me um and so you know there's scriptures like that it sound like grandpa it sound like grandma it's common sense you know there's nothing in here is like you know right i mean there's just it's just like
• 97:30 - 98:00 no kidding dummy and but I didn't know any of it and I didn't I thought you just borrow all you can that's what I thought and I did and I And it cost me um and so and people don't people don't know and one of my one of the funny ones is almost nuanced is um uh Proverbs 17:18 says "One lacking in sense cosigns for another." Cosigning alone you're lacking in sense the contemporary English version the CEV says um if you cosign
• 98:00 - 98:30 for someone else you're an idiot that's what that version says and so you know but and guess what but I've co-signed some loans and 100% of the time they turned out bad back in the day you know and when I was going broke one old boy stepped in tried to help me and co-signed for me and it cost him i had to go back and pay him later and his wife still don't talk to me it cost you 100% you know you co-sign a loan for your little boy and then your little boy is an idiot and runs a car in
• 98:30 - 99:00 a ditch with no insurance and now you're stuck with a $30,000 bill cuz you were trying to do a nice thing for someone and you did it a dumb way that's cosigning that's in the Bible who knew you know interesting how how are you at the How are you at the work life balance i mean you have a you have a a business empire your husband your father are you grandfather too oh eight kids eight grandkids eight grandkids and so how I mean how do you balance it all are you able to switch it off oh yeah you are
• 99:00 - 99:30 yeah um how do you switch it off well uh full disclosure let's go back to launching the thing when we opened that first little office at $61,000 right um my wife grew up in a hardworking farm family in East Tennessee her daddy owned a market and when you own a market um a convenience store you work you come home at 11 o'clock at night mhm you work and on Thanksgiving
• 99:30 - 100:00 we waited Thanksgiving dinner on her daddy until he could get the store closed at noon cuz he opened for breakfast they sold biscuits and he opened for breakfast and he closed at noon on Thanksgiving came home that but Thanksgiving Christmas the only time he closed he was there all the time so that's family she grew up in so she's not going to whine she's quite the opposite she's kicking my butt out go get some work done you know what are you doing sitting here and so we're hungry you need to go do something and uh so
• 100:00 - 100:30 but the first two years um were maybe two and a half years from the time we opened that second office under Lampo and we start teaching financial peace with an overhead projector and a bad suit and I'm teaching it at night every night i'm doing the radio show every day in the afternoon and I'm in the office in the morning doing counseling and so I get up go to the office at 7:30 I get home at 11:00 at night for 2 years so I didn't have work life balance then but
• 100:30 - 101:00 it was agreed upon that that's what it took to get the ball mo moving and it was not going to be forever we've got to figure this out we got to staff it we got to change the business model we got to do something to get it where we can but you it takes oomph to get the thing over the hill once you get it rolling then you can start to back off a little bit so from then on I start learning and I'm again I'm a young guy at that point trying to heal emotionally and financially and spiritually from this horrible event we've been through so I'm
• 101:00 - 101:30 still you know this guy right still freaking out and um but uh we quickly figured out that uh work life balance is um I is not a true thing what you need to do is wherever you are you need to be 100% there and so what happens is people that say
• 101:30 - 102:00 they want work life balance they go home at 5:00 in the afternoon which is fine but then they turn on Netflix or they open up their stupid computer and they're looking at their Instagram account they're not interacting with their family and so they're or they're doing work emails once they get home and they call that work life that's not work life balance work life balance is when you get home game on i'm looking at this little three-year-old's eyes yeah i'm in
• 102:00 - 102:30 the floor playing and rolling around i'm you know my wife and I are actually having a conversation without a phone laying there you know and so that's you know be where you is is a big deal and so um you know that's the first thing we did the second thing we did was as the kids start as we start going along then we said "Okay I'm going to work my butt off and I might go on like a total money makeover book tour is 42 days." I was gone i was like a some kind of musician or something living out of a bus and um
• 102:30 - 103:00 but we knew that going in we said "Okay at the end of 42 days we're taking everybody to Disney." But but there's going to be a period of time here Dad you're all you little people's part is don't drive your mom crazy because there's going to be a time that we're all going to be right together and there's on and then on and when we're at Disney we weren't worrying about the book gotcha you know and so we're there so then the next thing we did was we said "Okay no birthdays and no proms and no uh hockey ice hockey
• 103:00 - 103:30 championships." They're on the calendar first no events during those days so we did a lot of live events in those days we traveled a lot doing events but if I'm going to be doing live event I may do six or seven in a spring or something like that i'm getting ready to do a six city tour right now um but they're none of them over my daughter's prom date cuz I need to be standing there when that young guy comes in so he he understands I'll be cleaning my gun when he gets home and so you know
• 103:30 - 104:00 9:00 I'm not kidding you and uh you know so he needs to know and and my daughter you know we're going to be there and I'm gonna be there for that picture and I'm gonna be there for that thing and and so I didn't miss those things but I didn't make every hockey game and I didn't make my daughters were cheerleaders i didn't make everything but we were there a lot and we but we put it on the calendar and we said "Okay that's and when we're there we're not sitting and doing emails on our phone in the stands while they're doing it we're watching the freaking game." And you know I coached Daniel in
• 104:00 - 104:30 hockey for a while and my son and so uh you know we put it on the calendar and then lastly um we went to a marriage conference and uh I picked a Christian marriage guy teaching it was really good and I picked this up from him he said "You have if you're going to turn it off when you get home it's a uh it's an intentional act to turn it off this doesn't happen automatically."
• 104:30 - 105:00 He said "Two things one is when you and I started doing this i would turn into the uh street the the where our house is the culde-sac where our house was and I would stop at the bottom and I would play two praise and worship songs switch and he said "The other thing is you don't use the same tools on your family the same weapons on your family you've been using to fight the wars all day long." He said "When that pioneer comes in from hunting all day he takes a
• 105:00 - 105:30 musket he puts it over the mantle and he turns around and there are no bears in the room to kill these are children there are no things to be done here and this is my wife." And so I have to put my sword above the mantel i have to put my musket above the mantel i got to quit using the same mental gymnastics and processes because it's a different skill set to to run a business or win in business or to you know the rough and
• 105:30 - 106:00 tumble of what you and I do every day that you you don't use that on a three-year-old and so I had those three things helped me a lot yeah you know I'm a I'm I'm that wasn't a general question and I'm asking for myself cuz I I struggle with that and I've you know I I think I'm through the 16 18 hour days of lifting this thing up and and you know I mentioned I' I'd hired a COO and we had a producer now and and uh you know the team that we have is is amazing but well
• 106:00 - 106:30 I started getting enough people on the team that were better at stuff than I was that I went I don't really need to be doing that i suck at it he's good at it let him do it and you know I can delegate in other words cuz I had highquality humans working on the team that helped a lot and then occasionally Sharon would go "Um you're not the Messiah that's Jesus's job you cannot be somewhere and people will survive." I think that uh you know for me it's it's not just it's not just a
• 106:30 - 107:00 worry of not being here and uh I know these guys can run this without me it's it's I [ __ ] love what I do like I love this and it's it and I also love my family and it's but I'm just always I'm all my mind is just going 1,000 miles an hour all the time and I it's really hard for me to shut it off i mean new ideas are popping in my head new business verticals are popping in my head new guests are popping in my head and and
• 107:00 - 107:30 and and just engineering the engineering the business to to grow and to grow and to grow and Mhm i find it and obviously it's working really it is working and I I just find it really hard to to make that mental switch you know where you go home and and you are 100% present with with your wife and kids and um so well nothing's perfect i've gotten emails when I'm on vacation i mean that happens there's no none of this is pure but it's
• 107:30 - 108:00 just an a series of intentional acts and you know my dad used to say 90% of solving a problems realizing there is one and so just the idea go okay if I can just turn off a whole lot of it but not all of it at night and you know the inverse is true too by the way you can't be constantly worrying about every little diaper needs to be changed while you're down here trying to get your work done and you know I had one old boy working for me his wife called him 52 days 52 times in one morning o and I'm like I'm like there's a receptionist
• 108:00 - 108:30 came in and she goes this is nuts all I'm doing is answering the phone for this guy's and I said what is going I went and sat down his desk i said man she called you 50 times he goes yeah i said you probably ought to just go home it'd be easier take the day off go figure it out and he goes I don't want to not bad but yeah that's the other side of it right you got to be able to leave your home at home yeah and truthfully you've got the kind of wife that I do um to where you know I'm not getting even when the kids were little
• 108:30 - 109:00 I've never gotten stuff dumped in my lap from family problems in the middle of the day she's not a highmaintenance woman quite the opposite um my wife did not say "Wait till your father gets home." She took care of it i can just tell you so um and that's one of the reasons we were able to grow and do things cuz I was able to concentrate and I didn't have a wife that called me 52 times in the morning wasn't needy you know that kind of stuff yeah it's My wife's very much on board with this it's it's it's but the one thing she says to
• 109:00 - 109:30 me is you know Sean you you need to be present when you're here yeah you cannot be at work and she's right and um making that mental switch has been it's been tough i'm still working on it but yeah it's not hard it's just worth it so how many So you grew from doing this out of a church how many employees does Ramsey Solutions have now uh just under,00 wow 1100 employees and your
• 109:30 - 110:00 your facility is it's incredible yeah well he's got a great campus i'm real proud of it go God has blessed us beyond our wildest imaginations crazy out of control let's talk about culture mhm so I know culture is extremely important to you in your business as is to me i I'm building out our culture i I've been building it
• 110:00 - 110:30 since the beginning and I And you know I want I just want everybody to be proud of where they work enjoy coming to work not going home and going "Oh shit." You know everybody complains about their work almost everybody and so I'm really curious and to hear how you build the culture of Ramsey i never hear anybody when we do a hire we get a lot of people from different networks around the area that apply that that can't stand where their work we've never had
• 110:30 - 111:00 one person apply from Ramsey no why because they love what they're doing there and they believe in in what you're doing and and so I'm just curious to hear how you built the culture and how you keep your employees so proud of of what they're doing i've only seen a couple of places like this and uh well number one it's not perfect um we need to say that out loud um but again much like the other discussion we were just having a matter of being very very intentional about it the first thing I think that I remember is we got to about
• 111:00 - 111:30 I think we were 60s something people and I hired a an HR director which I didn't want that felt like corporate crap you know I didn't want I didn't want to do that right it sounded like and one of the first things I told him is you're not hiring anybody manager the leaders are going to hire their own people that's not your job but your job is just to help us understand some of this HR stuff and because HR has in corporate America has way too much power as far as I'm concerned I I don't want him to have
• 111:30 - 112:00 the power i want him to just help us get the work done and so the guy's name was Rick Perry he was brilliant and he retired from Ramsey not long ago he worked there for many for decades and um we would have something blow up and we uh some kind of a problem with the team or with whatever and um the way I've always done everything is we just the leadership
• 112:00 - 112:30 team makes the decisions um in in a collaborative style we just all get in a room and we argue about it and we figure it out i don't walk in and go da I have the answer i cuz I don't a lot of times um or I may and but I don't go I'm the I'm the guy that owns it you have to do what I say it's it's not because I'm uh afraid to tell somebody what to do if they need to do it I'll tell them but um it's very much a uh a thing and uh I told you I did a an exercise with a
• 112:30 - 113:00 ministry thing uh with Seal Team 6 one time and you and I talked about that offline one time and I just loved watching those guys get together at the end and debrief and I'm they I asked if I could stand you know just got in a circle there was um one squad or whatever and um I asked if I could stand there with them and the guy you know the guy said And I don't don't say anything just listen i wasn't planning on anything to say but I I didn't know who was the
• 113:00 - 113:30 senior officer by body language or by input or by criticism they all took down problems they were very blunt very clear very kind but you couldn't tell who was the leader it was very democratic so to speak uh I want to watch them debrief that mission or that exercise we had done and what went right what went wrong all that kind of stuff right and to learn from doing the exercises I guess
• 113:30 - 114:00 is the point so that's kind of what we do but I didn't know that that was a common thing i just did it and um so everybody's more than welcome to argue with me as a matter of fact it's preferable if you argue with me cuz if you don't have anything to add why are you here and so um let's get in a room let's do the same thing let's debrief this thing so we would debrief it and Rick would sit in there because he's the HR director and we would go "Okay we got it here's we drive it take it to ground here's what the answer is here's what we're going to go do." And then Rick
• 114:00 - 114:30 would say "Whoa whoa let me make sure because I'm going to write it down what the value was what was the value system the the core value that drove this decision what why did you all come to this decision?" because all of you seem to you went around and around and around and boom you landed on it why did you do that and he write it down and he goes "Okay that's a core value i don't even know what a core value is but okay sure." And we get up and go on our way he started collecting those and he wrote down like 16 or 18 things he said "This
• 114:30 - 115:00 is how Ramsay makes decisions this is who we are it's not who we wish we were it's who we are it's not aspirational it's this is it this is the the way we decide to do stuff." And the stuff he wrote down I mean it was accurate but it was horribly worded and so we got in a room after a few years of looking at that stuff yeah that is how we make decisions and this is a training tool we can show everyone in the organization this is how we make decisions these are our core values and if you get these core values then you will know what to
• 115:00 - 115:30 do if we're not there you will know that if I'm in Scotland you can send a jet for the guy you know you you you will know that's what Ramsay would do you can finish my sentences because these are the core values that cause my sentences to come out of my mouth and this is what Dave would do what would Dave do what would we do what would Ramsay do what would God want us to do in this situation write it down and and so we some of them were a little bit redundant so we ended up with um 15 and later 14
• 115:30 - 116:00 and we put little better titles to them and a little better stuff and then we use those to say this is who we are and we reinforce those i taught one of them uh for 30 minutes in staff meeting to all 1100 people yesterday i do that we do it over and over and this is who we is this is who we is you want to be a we this is it if you're not this you're not one of us this is who we is this is who we is this is who we is and the one I taught yesterday was marketplace service if you
• 116:00 - 116:30 help enough people you don't have to worry about money and so your job is to blow the customer's freaking mind if you help enough people go make sure they get help they called you they came in contact with us god sent them to us because they were hurting or they had an opportunity and we need to give them hope in that area with a biblical common sense answer your job no matter what you do here is to blow their mind if you're shipping a book if you're uh writing a line of code uh if you're in HR and
• 116:30 - 117:00 you're recruiting your job is not like crazy in the building your job is put people in a seat that are going to be crusaders because our job is to help people because and we won't have to worry about money and we haven't had to worry about money so that's one you know another one is we don't you know gossip no gossip um you hand your negatives up and you're going to have negatives there's 1100 opportunities in the building for you to be pissed off so you're going to have problems human beings are in this building you're not going to like one of them something's
• 117:00 - 117:30 going to happen is going to hurt your little freaking feelings or you're going to get frustrated with leadership or you're going to have this welcome to life hand your negatives up you can have your negatives don't be belligerent but you can come into any leader's office and sit down and go I don't understand i'm really frustrated help me you can do that anytime you cannot do that at the water water cooler with a co-orker and go "Leadership's a bunch of idiots." Cuz that's disloyal and I will fire your butt i have no tolerance for that crap if you're going to do that you need to do it in a Facebook group after you quit
• 117:30 - 118:00 leave me alone i'm not going to I'm not going to give you money to run me down henry Cloud says "I don't understand why people pee in their own cereal and then gripe because it tastes bad don't [ __ ] in your own backyard." Exactly and people do it all day long at jobs all they do is sit around talk about how stupid the place they work is and these are the people that give them money to feed their family you ought to be ashamed of yourself if the people you work for are stupid and you stay what's that make you stupid so hit the road
• 118:00 - 118:30 don't let the door hit you in the butt and we have this talk all the time and about once a year we got to fire somebody but most of the time there's no gossip because we don't do that and if someone starts to say something they go "Uh wait a minute we don't do that." And you don't have to have even a leader it could be somebody that joined the company 3 weeks ago and they go "Hey wait a minute they told me in onboarding "We don't do that." If you got a problem you probably ought to take it to leader cuz I can't help you with that if you're sharing negatives with somebody who
• 118:30 - 119:00 can't help you fix it that by definition is a bunch of crap and we don't do that that's one of the 14 and it's weird it's very weird very strange but it's very clean the air is clean in the place there's no bad smells everybody holds each other accountable yeah we just love because everybody wants to work in a place where you're you don't have to watch your back somebody's not knifing you in the freak from behind in most places you know you're you're trying to get your work done while looking over your shoulder and that's just counterproductive you know and so it's
• 119:00 - 119:30 stuff like that we just kept doing that and it's just reinforcing reinforce and you you know I was having lunch with my son who's our president yesterday and he was telling me about a thing that's going on i said "Yeah you know what that guy says that we we all talk about?" I said "Yeah." He goes "Yeah I know what you're going to say." And I said "Good what am I going to say?" He goes "We get what we tolerate." And I said "Okay then don't freak you're gonna let that go on you know you don't sit here and tell me how frustrated you are about fix it you know you you get what you tolerate." And
• 119:30 - 120:00 so I can be kind be clear and be gentle but sometimes your job is that you don't get to work here anymore um because you're not a wei and you you're more concerned about your little toxic problem or whatever it is you've got than actually being a part of this team and getting work done and helping the people that aren't here this organization's been blessed and we are blessed to be a blessing like Abraham that means that we exist for the people that are not inside the walls of that campus at Ramsey we exist for the people outside those walls and if you don't be centered on them you're not one of us
• 120:00 - 120:30 and we just talk about that with that kind of in the voice you know all the time and we have for 30 freaking years and so people choose they run out of steam they choose they start to think we're incompetent that happens all the time and they leave they quit they go do something else that's okay that's fine just you know if your spirit leaves for God's sakes take your body with it you know and that that's our stuff we talk about until everybody's sick of hearing it but then it sticks you know it's it's
• 120:30 - 121:00 interesting too that you I mean you've always done it but you pick that up when you when you did the exercise with Seal Team Six is you know I wasn't at six but that is that is the culture of the SEAL teams is everybody's vested everybody has ideas everybody y nobody dies at Ramsey that's serious you know and so uh you know that's that's something that I brought here is I I I love to hear ideas I love to hear the to flush it all out we call
• 121:00 - 121:30 it a hot Yeah and and and I and I love to hear critiques i don't want I don't want Yes men that are just like "Yes yes yes yes." We we flush everything out all the positives all the negatives and so it's just Thank you for sharing that it's reassuring to hear that that But then sometimes folks that you thought were going to be with you a long time their brain goes and leaves and then you got to sit down and have a hard conversation and go you know that's not
• 121:30 - 122:00 can't be here and you know I've had uh some of my best friends that work there because they've been with me for 20 years i mean these are band of brothers band of sisters we fight together we take on freaking COVID idiots and we take on all this other crap that we all have to deal with out here in the marketplace and all the haters and you take on all the whatever the negative press or cuz somebody's always got something to say you know and you take on all that stuff together and you fight and then you win and then you fight and
• 122:00 - 122:30 then you go to the Super Bowl and you lose in the last play but you almost got there and then you you know and you do that for a long long time and then after 20 years they decide that they're not going to be there or that they don't want to participate in this culture anymore and it's really painful but you can't they can't stay because I'm not quitting mhm so we're going to keep doing it this way and so somebody's got to leave and it's not going to be me so it's not how this
• 122:30 - 123:00 works so and and it's uh but man we just have to have those difficult conversations we call them and they're a regular part of the rhythm too um you can't uh John Maxwell says you can't sanction incompetence because if you sanction someone not doing their job now if they got cancer that's different right but I mean you don't sanction someone that's just a half butt because all the other studs are looking at the halfb butt going "Wait a minute." Yeah that's okay
• 123:00 - 123:30 no that ain't okay now you can give somebody some grace if they're going through a personal thing or you know lots of grace but I'm talking about just in general we're playing to win the Super Bowl you better you better take your block and hit it yeah well Dave let's take a quick break all right and uh when we come back we'll get we'll dive into your new book okay if you're like me health and wellness is extremely important to you but how do you know who to trust when it comes to
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• 126:30 - 127:00 threemonth trial period at shopify.com/srs all lowercase go to shopify.com/srs to upgrade your selling today shopify.com/srs all right Dave we're back from the break and uh man I got so excited to talk to you that I forgot to give you your gift here oh everybody gets a gift all right gummies the same love your gummies man vigilance League gummy bears legal and all things i got
• 127:00 - 127:30 anything left from the last time we met so this is perfect i'll refill my stash we'll send you a whole bunch but um Love it thank you yeah you're welcome you're welcome but um you know I did have before we do dive into your book I just had a couple of questions just random questions one is about Generation Z and you know I'm sure you hear it a lot more than I do but a lot of grumblings on it's tough to buy a house now interest rates are
• 127:30 - 128:00 high what advice do you have for Jenzers they a lot of them seem how do I say this a lot of them seem to think that it's impossible to be able to afford a home and to to get ahead financially in in today's economy you know I I'm actually in love with Gen Z it's one of my favorite generations um we've got about 450 of
• 128:00 - 128:30 them on our team wow and um they are um they they do share one characteristics with the millennials they're they're very bifurcated meaning they're either awesome or they suck there's no middle ground they're not posers gen Z's really not posers they're really not they don't do facade they've grown up with a magic wand in their hand that they can push a button and stuff happens they've grown up being able to
• 128:30 - 129:00 answer any question instantly they've grown up um with influencers that aren't real uh that that uh haven't earned the right to influence and so they're very um careful they're wise beyond their years in that sense um and so what we end up with is the ones we end up talking to in the money space i'm talking to ridiculous 22 year olds that are
• 129:00 - 129:30 calling in that have this guy called me the other day he's got $150,000 saved he's 22 years old i'm like how the freak did you do that man i didn't I couldn't do that i was 22 i borrowed it but I couldn't do it this is imp they're very impressive very seriousminded and then there's another group that's entitled and victim-based and they're like "Capitalism has failed me." You know oh bull crap um but you know there's kind of been that in every generation there's always a group of
• 129:30 - 130:00 entitled whiners and there's victims and there's always the ones that are victors um and there's always a percentage of each so but anyway the overall answer is that I give uh to folks in that are struggling with the ability to afford life or to afford to buy a home those kinds of things is the you you're making the mistake of thinking that because something today is your situation that it's going to be your situation tomorrow life is not a still shot it's
• 130:00 - 130:30 not a single frame it's a film strip and a 100% chance the next frame is going to be different than the last frame and the next frame and you're you're going to go through this thing because if I you know when I went bankrupt and I was in my 20s if I had said okay that's the definition of Dave and now that is my identity I'm an idiot you know I would have been still sitting there right but instead I go okay no wait that's just where I am
• 130:30 - 131:00 today that doesn't necessarily define tomorrow and and so maybe today you can't afford a house with current interest rates uh and your salary your income uh that does not mean that's the case tomorrow uh interest rates will change house prices will go up and hopefully your income will go up and maybe you need to adjust where you live because when I started the radio show 33 years ago there was a large number of
• 131:00 - 131:30 people that could not afford to live in downtown Manhattan in New York City mhm 33 years later there's a large number of people that can't afford to live in downtown Manhattan some of the most expensive real estate in the world you can't live in Silicon Valley and make minimum wage today you couldn't 20 years ago you can't live in San Diego and buy a home which would be double the national median average on homes if you
• 131:30 - 132:00 live there making entry level and you throw boxes at Costco you can't do it mathematically by the way you've never been able to do it so you're going to choose to live somewhere else or do something different and when you make those choices the frames change and you're going to be okay but you have to say instead of I'm going to sit here and whine and I'm going to be a victim of the circumstances I'm instead I'm going to control the controllables which is what I make where I live and what am I doing to better myself so that I make
• 132:00 - 132:30 more and choose to live in a place that I can buy a house i had a couple on my radio show do a debtfree scream yesterday they paid off their home at 37 years old he is a middle school math teacher and she is a stay-at-home mom how in the world did they do that they live in a town that is in the middle of nowhere in Kansas it's outside of Witchah which means there's nothing there but groundhogs right prairie dogs
• 132:30 - 133:00 sounds like where I grew up but and I said "What's your home worth?" $125,000 and they paid off their home but he's a middle school math teacher makes $65,000 a year his wife stays at home with the kids and they've chosen to live in that location for whatever reason they may have started there i don't know how long they were there i didn't get the full history and bio on the family but they did a debtree scream they're 37 years old and have a paid off house but they they're not sitting in the middle of San Diego going "Oh I make
• 133:00 - 133:30 65,000 as a middle school math teacher and middle school math teachers are underpaid so I can't buy a house." No you doofus you're sitting in the wrong place with the wrong number of wrong set of numbers you've got to change something here and and when you change then you'll go on to the next frame and you'll be just fine so make more move both wait on the interest rates to come down save some money pile up some money get ready for the market to slow down pick up whatever the market's going to do 100% chance that it's going to be
• 133:30 - 134:00 different 5 years from today what do you think about crypto i mean I've I've heard you speak on crypto you hate it i don't know if that's changed at all i mean uh I believe the Trump administration just put some into the what is it the the reserve mhm bitcoin Cardano Ethereum and is it XRP yep and um you know I'm I'm just curious you know that the space just seems to be getting bigger and bigger and evolving and more
• 134:00 - 134:30 people are taking it seriously i was just curious i think it's going to continue to get bigger and I think it's going to continue to get better and it's going to continue to stabilize i mean it was a volatile Wild Wild West crap show for a long time and it kind of still is really but it's not nearly as bad as it was what when we first started talking about the subject so I think it's getting better it's getting more sophisticated it's probably therefore getting safer but here even when it stabilizes and becomes more
• 134:30 - 135:00 normalized so to speak and it's got a little track record to it and you can look back go okay the last 15 years here's what it's done not the last 15 days um then you still got to say okay what do I want to invest in and what happens with people with gold or crypto or um a lot of other things I is they confuse the concepts of spec speculating versus investing and that's why I've come out
• 135:00 - 135:30 so hard on crypto because I have people calling and saying "I'm not doing investing i'm doing cry investing in crypto which is an oxymoron you can't the only thing you could do in crypto is to speculate the only thing you can do in gold is to speculate speculating is a short-term play um because if you look at a long-term play on something that doesn't have a track record crypto you can't look at a long-term play you're you're you're really you know gambling
• 135:30 - 136:00 is here speculating is I'm I'm I'm putting some money in playing with this i think I might make some money but I'm really not thinking 40 years i'm not thinking 25 years i'm not thinking I want to retire from this but this is speculating even if you're bu a home builder and you build a home that doesn't have a buyer they call it a speck home they're speculating it's a short-term play they didn't build a rental property they're going to keep for 25 years they built a piece of
• 136:00 - 136:30 inventory that they want to turn right now into money so speculating is short-term investing is over here is long-term they're not the same thing if you want to speculate which would not be your not betting the farm you're not betting your quality of life if you're not betting your wealth building portfolio on it you know I've got friends that are worth $100 million and they've got you know they put a million dollars in crypto but if they burned a million dollars in the middle of their kitchen floor they won't miss it
• 136:30 - 137:00 ratio-wise that's speculating and that's a proper view of that if you want to do that I'm not going to yell at you about it but the reason I've come down so hard on it in the public eye is because I got people not putting money in their 401k and good mutual funds they're not buying a house instead they're putting 100% of everything they have in the middle of the roulette wheel and that's stupid you know it that's just ridiculous you wouldn't do that with anything that doesn't have a long
• 137:00 - 137:30 wonderful track record and so and generally where you want to be with investments what Buffett talks about is true i want an investment that is creating wealth not changing in price there's a difference so when Home Depot stock goes up or Apple stock goes up it's because they made a profit it's because they put products in the marketplace there was wealth created when crypto goes up or gold goes up it's just because somebody else wanted it
• 137:30 - 138:00 more there's it's not creating anything it's a it's a what's called a commodity and and so you speculate on commodities if you wanted to buy futures in corn or if you remember the old movie with Eddie Murphy trading places right you know frozen orange juice futures or something stupid was that what that was or it's kind of funny but you know if you want to play the this you know if you want to day trade in stocks that's speculating you're you're it's a short-term play and it's it's just right over here next to
• 138:00 - 138:30 gambling it's not what you would do for your long term and so it should be money that you could set fire to okay and you'd be okay with it if you do that then we can talk about okay how does Bitcoin work what is bit what is the actual chain how's the whole thing yeah yeah sure i get all that that's not the issue the issue is I talked to 26 years old 26 year olds who go I've invested everything I have in Bitcoin and it's 200 or it's 50,000 bucks and I don't have anything else but that well why didn't you go to Vegas same dad gum deal
• 138:30 - 139:00 man i mean you you know if you're pretty good at Texas Holdem you probably got as good a shot as you do at Bitcoin so um you know it's going to be okay but I mean any if you chart Bitcoin and you don't see risk you're dumb cuz it's all over the freaking world and that tells you it's a highly volatile short-term play and you're you're trying to trying to ride this thing out it's got a cool factor to it cuz it's technology and everybody wants it's a fad and everybody wants to be in on it and all that kind
• 139:00 - 139:30 of stuff and the funny thing is in my world I get so much hate because these guys they they it's like a cult it's like if you don't do if you don't believe in it you're going to hell you know you know what I'm saying they're like "Ramsay's Ramsay's completely invalidated everything he's ever said because he doesn't believe in this and I'm so emotionally and psychologically sold out on this one particular thing." And it's like George Camel one of our guys says "It's like Mary Kay for young
• 139:30 - 140:00 men." But you know I don't care if you want to do it but just be able to burn the amount of money you put in there in the middle of your kitchen table and not miss it makes sense back to Gen Z i mean what you got 400 and something Genzers working for you yeah half over half our team is in their 20s very very innovated yes generation we were talking about culture earlier i mean they'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol man they're passionate they're missional and you give them a mission you give them
• 140:00 - 140:30 something work that matters and we're helping people and they get enthused about it it's they're crusaders they're wonderful for Ramsay what do you what are some things that they you think they could work on i'll I'll tell you a frustration I have is is our social media department it's always you have to have a Gen Zer running your social media in my opinion you shouldn't have anybody over under over 30 years old doing that yeah I don't think we do i think all of them are in their maybe early 30s but yeah we contract some stuff out
• 140:30 - 141:00 and time and time again you know we we I think Gen Z is very entrepreneurial mindset it does well yes it seems to be and because they've lost faith in the traditional systems they're cynical about traditional systems and some way sometimes in a toxic way sometimes in a good healthy way suspect of the man you know almost like old hippies or something yeah
• 141:00 - 141:30 one of the things that I see is when we contract stuff out to somebody from Gen Z is is they seem to be in in my experience which is very limited it's not like we've gone through a million of these people or anything is but they st they seem to stack too much on their plate whereas whereas is is like they want to they want to they want to do our stuff and then they add more
• 141:30 - 142:00 and then they add more and then they add more and we see we see productivity and quality of the content creation start to diminish i I'm just curious if you if you have any insight on that or any advice no I think it's um just back to uh probably some real clear guidelines and accountability to certain behaviors that we want mhm and so um what we've had to do with
• 142:00 - 142:30 um it's not just Gen Z but it it does appear there is in content creation um I I don't understand this because I did not grow up with this thing in my hand it's not native to me when I was a kid there was a rotary black dial phone on the wall with a cord you know and so if you're talking to your girlfriend the rest of the family was hearing it you know i mean it's But these guys they've
• 142:30 - 143:00 been content creators since they were six and now you're asking them to create content and so what we've run into sometimes is they're just so accustomed to doing it's just part of their psyche it's not it's it's a developed skill set just to exist in their in their generation and so sometimes we run into some arrogance with that like because I've been doing this my whole life you're I got socks older than you but because I've been doing this my whole
• 143:00 - 143:30 life I'm going to tell you how to do this like no no we're got confused you work here and so now we got to start again you're really good and that's why we brought you in here but you're not the only one who ever had an idea and no you just stepped out over the line with that piece of content and that's not it's not in our voice it's not in our brand and and it's in your brand but your brand's now going to conform to ours if you want to stay here and it's just it's accountability and it's um but it's very seldom with it
• 143:30 - 144:00 isn't a level of kind of arrogance but it's not malice it's not like they're being belligerent about it they just it's it's native to them and so um it just requires some uh some kind clear leadership and accountability and so you know in the instance what you're talking about what I might do if I was facing that is I would like go "Okay look if you want to take on some other projects that's fine other than just hours you're a freelancer you don't work for us uh
• 144:00 - 144:30 but uh let me go ahead and warn you that we're looking at the quality of our stuff and the instant you get too much on your plate we're probably not going to be able to work with you anymore so you really need to temper this and you need to manage it and as soon as I see it I'm going to bring it up again and if I bring it up two times it's starting to be a real issue uh you know I just be real clear like that and just not mean but just go I'm not okay with you filling your plate till the food falls off and that's not cool and I don't want
• 144:30 - 145:00 to be the food that falls off and I've had that we've had that um and again it's comes from a positive place because they're so empowered they think they could do anything because they can and they can just push a button and crap happens and our minds are like wait a minute they have an it's an abundance mentality but it's a weird one it's versus a scarcity mentality where you and I are like okay resources are limited act like it and it doesn't even
• 145:00 - 145:30 occur to them that you can't get something automatically because they have their whole life it's a damn good point let's talk about the Trump administration in the first what first couple of months here how do you think it's going with the economics well economics um the reason you and I and Joe and Theo all
• 145:30 - 146:00 did interviews with President Trump and um obviously Joe's the 800 lb gorilla in that but the uh we all have major top 10 podcasts and we all uh and then Joe came out and in um endorsed him and um probably three weeks before that I did um and I don't do presidential i don't do politics i don't do endorsement but I did it mainly based on the economy it was not the only thing but I'm concerned
• 146:00 - 146:30 about some of the same things other people were border woke all that stuff but um happy about all that stuff but the uh um economics and I said this on that show an hour because I knew I was going to get flooded with anti-Trump hate um because a fair portion of my audience are not conservatives um but the uh uh economics are oddly enough is as much
• 146:30 - 147:00 psychology as it is math let me give you an example if I as a small business owner believe that things are going good and they're going to go good I hire I buy equipment i if I I uh stock up on inventory so I create an economy hiring people creates a positive economy so I'm acting based on my feeling based on my
• 147:00 - 147:30 psychology and so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that if enough people believe things are going to be good and they start taking actions as a result they cause things to be good and that's what I felt like and I still think the Trump administration is going to deliver it's what Ronald Reagan delivered when he turned the economy around it was more about hope than it was some tax change okay it was more about I this guy believes in America i believe in America he believes in
• 147:30 - 148:00 capitalism i believe in capitalism and I believe that the free enterprise system and freedom and the ability to go open a business and live my dreams i believe in that he believes in that he's going to cause that to happen he's going to create an environment where that works and so I'm going to go do it and that's what we did under Reagan and that's what uh Trump is delivering when he's making these fabulous vision casting statements about we're going into a golden era you know he's speaking it into existence almost you know he's trying to and if he makes enough people
• 148:00 - 148:30 believe it they'll go do that on the off side then uh he's doing that fabulously and then the um the games he's playing with the tariffs uh are scaring the crap out of the stock market the stock market's down mhm uh since he's in office and it and it had been up considerably before that uh but there may be method to that madness i don't know i'm not privy to the inside
• 148:30 - 149:00 workings of this administration i don't play in that world um but you know there's one benefit that'll come from that is the bond market could prices could go up which will drive the interest rates down which also will drive the economy so if you drill baby drill which is about somewhere around 17th of the national economy is energy related if you get 17th of the economy boom and you get interest rates down and get real estate moving again even if the stock market goes down the stock market
• 149:00 - 149:30 will come back because that'll stimulate everything it'll get it'll get to moving and it's not him physically doing anything it's all of these words and I know he's I I think it's obvious he's trying to do some other things with the tariffs other than tariffs he's trying to get compliance on borders being shut down he's trying to get compliance on them dropping their tariffs down which they've ridiculously cut our throats for years a lot of these compan countries have the trade deficit and the you know
• 149:30 - 150:00 they're charging us 100% tariff and we don't charge them any and we're all sitting around and now we decide we're going to charge them something we act like we're the bad guys which is ridiculous so politically or policy-wise that's ridiculous but the the offside is is that it's destabilizing the markets cuz people are worried instead of inspired if you can get more of them inspired than worried the thing will pick up and it'll get moving and I still think that's what's going to happen uh I think the offset has just been the destabilization of all the tariff
• 150:00 - 150:30 discussion has destabilized and offset some of the positive feelings that would have caused so in other words a business person sitting today is going "Okay I think all this stuff's going to get really good over here but I don't know what these tariffs are going to do to us." And so instead of hiring and buying equipment they're going to kind of wait and see how that happens so we've had a delayed effect on Trump having a positive effect on the economy and this probably because of all the yak yak yak yak yak around the tariff cuz the actual
• 150:30 - 151:00 physical tariffs that have actually happened there's almost zero not it's just been discussion wow i didn't realize that he's just throwing grenades over there and shaking things up and you know I mean actually how much have prices actually already been affected by a tariff almost zero so far cuz they get right up to it and then they go "Oh wait a minute they conceded and we're going to wait we're going to give it another 30 days and oh well that one we're going to do that but we're going to take out all these others." And you know if you It's hard to follow even if you chart it at all exactly what all
• 151:00 - 151:30 is really happening uh I guess if you're in the middle of it you would but I don't care enough to chart it so I'm not going to fool with it but the um but I I I'm really excited about where we'll be in 12 months okay still am predicting that i really I Ramsay's gearing up we're getting ready we We think there's a wave coming and we want to ride it nice what about you know and I I agree with what he's doing with the tariffs and and I like to I like to see us like stand up to this [ __ ] on the flip side
• 151:30 - 152:00 too you know I also really like Doge and what they're doing oh man that's just incredible but you know in in look I don't know [ __ ] about economics or the economy or anything but but I do see you know I just had Secretary of the VA on um earlier this week and you know VA nobody likes the VA and it's overstaffed and you know just for some
• 152:00 - 152:30 context there's 480 something,000 employees at the VA the US Army has 450,000 active duty members so they're definitely heavy and and they've gone through US A and all these other places and it's a good idea gone bad they're they're they're they're they're cleaning out i I I get what they're doing they're trimming the fat i think the fat needs to be trimmed you know the national debt understand all that my fear is I mean the VA Secretary of the VA is
• 152:30 - 153:00 looking to slash 83,000 jobs here so when you look at the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are going to get cut from government positions are we going to see I mean that's is that going to affect us no no cuz there not it's not enough in total jobs to to cause like an unemployment crisis or something um which you would have to have to go you know that would lead towards probably a
• 153:00 - 153:30 recession contraction of the economy cuz there's not enough people that have money from their job to spend so they spending and that contracts and that's what a recession is so but I don't I think it's small enough you know it's it's a little bit like um you know the old joke major surgery is surgery that I had minor surgeries you had and so I mean when you lose your job you're 100% unemployed um you don't really care what the unemployment rate is and you really don't care about the
• 153:30 - 154:00 philosophy of the Trump administration or Elon Musk's ideas you just lost your job mhm and so that for that person that's losing their position it's huge but but in ratio in the entire economy the number of jobs it's not going to be the end of the world um and it's offset by the the savings the deficit and the debt going down uh and the chance we could actually get a balanced budget again that's very productive for the economy because every
• 154:00 - 154:30 time there's a deficit remember what happens is okay those jobs are harm lost jobs are harming the economy but also if you don't have the lost job and that job creates extra debt deficit is financed by debt right when you spend more than you make they finance it by debt that debt is sucking money out of the economy and so they be it becomes a parasite it's a tick on the butt of the economy sucking the blood out of it and so that that That's the problem with the overspending is it pulls money out of
• 154:30 - 155:00 the currency which if it's out here moving around between your business my business and and we're buying you know we're we're buy we're spending money at the restaurant and we're going on vacation and we're buying a Southwest air ticket and we're doing all these other things we're we're moving the money around they put it on the shelf and now the economy is smaller and so that's not as bad because of all these lost jobs so there's an offset there okay so you know again I
• 155:00 - 155:30 think what what little trouble would be would be more than offset by that and the other thing it has to be offset by what we're talking about earlier okay what does the average business person like me that's got you know a substantial business but not a huge business i'm not General Motors okay i'm not Apple but somebody running a business like mine which 54% of the domest of the economy is companies that are 500 people and smaller small business is the mathematical backbone of the American economy so the guy that has
• 155:30 - 156:00 a heat and air company that's got 400 people and a a little small fleet of trucks and they fix heat and air on people's houses what's he looking at okay he feels a lot more positive about government waste being chopped off at the knees than he does negative of some of those folks losing a job oh good and again he's the one making the decision to spend or to hold his cash because there's a storm coming
• 156:00 - 156:30 am I going to invest because there's sunshine coming or is there a tornado coming and I got to put a put plywood on the wind windows and pile cash and get ready cuz he pile when when he piles cash in macro when a whole bunch of he piles cash because they think a storm is coming that freezes the economy shut but when they believe the sun is coming and they believe more in Elon causing Doge causing the cutting that the sun is coming than he does those lost jobs okay
• 156:30 - 157:00 so again I think it's an offset both are very real and they're very personal if you're in them i'm not trying to discount if you work for the VA and you're going to lose your job i'm not happy for you personally i'm happy for our that our nation is addressing addressing waste though because 100% of the intelligent human beings walking around realize that the waste is really freaking ridiculous yeah yeah yeah you know I'm with you it's just I think it's
• 157:00 - 157:30 something we have to go through no matter what oh god it's like uh and the fact that they're actually doing it not talking about it for the first time in modern history everybody's talked about it no one's ever done anything not in the GOP and not in the Dems none of them have ever done anything it takes this wild animal to go in there with a dadum machete and and a bunch of Gen Z's with algorithms and start stacking those cash flows and looking at this going "Well
• 157:30 - 158:00 look at there." You know we've got a transgender college that we just put $150 million in in India or whatever i made that up but I mean the stuff is coming out it's just it's it's not even It's insane it's like science fiction is so bizarre it's not even qu It's not even a debate about how whacked it is it's just whacked let's move into your book Build a Business You Love what's the What's the premise of it well um you know we talked early earlier
• 158:00 - 158:30 when we first started talking about the total money makeover that you read and it goes through the seven baby steps if you'll go through the the follow that clear path it's the shortest distance between normal finances which is broken in debt to wealthy it's the short if you follow those seven baby steps it's a clear path and and it's proven tens of millions of people have done that now
• 158:30 - 159:00 and and so when we're working with small businesses and and Entree Leadership is one of our brands that we work with small businesses i love small business people and I am one i've been one my whole life i believe it's the free enterprise system and I just like the type of man and woman that does that they're just they're my people you know i just like them and um they're no nonsense they get crap done you know and they they the same things make them afraid or mad that make me afraid or mad and so I just connect immediately and
• 159:00 - 159:30 and I again I am one I've been running a business almost my whole life so we started working with these businesses and we in most cases what we were teaching them was stuff like core values or how to hire and fire or um you know the basic some basic marketing stuff some basic accounting stuff some basic finance stuff that they weren't doing because they were too busy doing the business rather than actually running the components of the business so we're teaching them all of that and have been for almost 20 years and a number one bestselling book called Entree
• 159:30 - 160:00 Leadership that was the playbook it was the Super Bowl playbook that we used to um run our business to grow it from a card table on in my living room to where it is today how did we do that we did these things and so we've been teaching them and coaching them about 10,000 businesses now we've worked with and um been doing events for them for years and big leadership events and that kind of stuff we've been doing um uh you know again the bestselling book we've got
• 160:00 - 160:30 software we got all kinds of stuff to help them apps all that so um one of the things we figured out about four or five years ago we started working on it was that businesses that win go through five distinct stages and there are six drivers of business that drive you through those stages and um it helps immensely it becomes the baby steps for business
• 160:30 - 161:00 if you know what those are and what it takes to level up and go through them um you don't necessarily want to go through them super fast that's not the point uh on baby steps you'd want to go through them as fast as you could you know uh like you said sell all your junk and you know we move on get out of debt now we move on up a step now we start saving and investing and that kind of stuff with this it's more the m maturation of the business cycle as you go along and um and it it it's what we went through
• 161:00 - 161:30 and then we started observing it's what they were going through and then we figured out that if we can show them that these that this clear path exists that it gives you hope that you could go through it when you're just out there wandering along and you don't real even realize there is a path or you don't even realize there is a stage you don't do the stuff to level up to get better and and so once we start showing them this system these five stages and they go okay I'm I'm I'm in stage two what do I need to do to get three okay this is what you do and here's your six drivers
• 161:30 - 162:00 and here's here's how that applies in this situation and we figure we've gone around those six drivers at Ramsey in 30 years pro probably um we've as we went through the five stages we probably went around that those drivers probably uh somewhere around 10 times 10 times yeah in in 30 years um and because every time you go through you get a different version of it okay um and so you know driver number three is people and so you
• 162:00 - 162:30 know the the way we hired and fired when we started was way different than the way we hire and fire today so every time you come around to people and you go "Okay I'm going to get better with culture i'm going to get better with hiring and firing i'm going to get better with attracting the right talent." But then I move around it and I I and I that leads me into planning which is another one it leads me and you go start going through it then you go okay when I when I go up as another stage it's a whole different set of
• 162:30 - 163:00 problems with people that I didn't have before and so I have to have a whole different level of skills with that that I didn't have before or a whole different level of planning than I had before you know if you're planning a small thing it's not as hard as planning a bigger thing obviously so um you know the drivers cycle through and we end up going through those you know stage one is is when you open a business when you first start and sometimes people stay there the whole time God help them is the treadmill operator which is what
• 163:00 - 163:30 it sounds like you're on a treadmill this is the drivers of the stages no this is stages stage one is is the treadmill operator and so when you start all of us are treadmill operators and the treadmill operators run run don't feel like you're getting anywhere um but we're real passionate about it we're going hard and you get home at night and you flop back on the couch and your wife says "What'd you do today?" And you go "I don't know but I work my butt off." You know and you're just working like a
• 163:30 - 164:00 crazy person and you're responsible for all the producing of everything if you if you don't do it it doesn't get done producing you're responsible for all the revenue if you don't come to work place doesn't make any money so in a sense you don't even own a business you just own your own job because if you take a vacation everything falls apart if you're not there that day if you're sick everything falls apart and uh so it's very self-dependent which is kind of gratifying it makes you important for a
• 164:00 - 164:30 minute it's also exhausting mhm um and you don't want to stay there it's not a good you you will flame out if you stay in that one but everybody starts there 100% now you may only be there two weeks you may be smart enough to start hiring people or have enough capital to start hiring people immediately you may be this is not your first goound on a business and so you you're better at time management but the thing you do to level up from treadmill uh to Pathfinder which is the next one uh is you have to get time
• 164:30 - 165:00 management going and you start talking about stuff like I was talking about earlier that I was doing 16- hour days and I'm I'm on the radio and I'm doing overhead projector teaching financial peace university at night and I'm at work all day long and my wife was like a single mom for a short period of time there for a couple of years and we're talking about work life balance and that's treadmill if I didn't go do the radio there was nothing if I didn't go do the teaching that night and I remember standing in that Holiday Inn one night and I had a kidney stone and I'm completely covered in sweat but I
• 165:00 - 165:30 had to finish the lesson i didn't finish the lesson i just start giving refunds and I couldn't give refunds i had to get the money and so I finished at 11:00 at night and went to the emergency room and and so but you that's what you do in the treadmill stage right you you suck it up buttercup and you get it done but but you can't stay there it's not sustainable for your family it's not sustainable for your health it's not a good business model so you start to learn to manage time and get intentional and go I'm going to switch it off when I get home and I'm going to hire some people so I I'm not the Messiah other
• 165:30 - 166:00 people can be important too and bring ideas and carry some of this weight and they can I can have other people that produce revenue and other people that produce the actual goods and services so I don't have to be the producer and the revenue producer and then you get you know you get to that next stage and and so that's what this whole thing is about is just walking through those stages and um what's the next stage uh you go from there to Trailblazer and Trailblazer is a it's a
• 166:00 - 166:30 fuzzy middle um it's the middle stage and it's kind of whacked um the um you're really kind of getting your traction things are starting to happen you've actually got some other people on the team that are intelligent and you can count on you're starting to build your band of brothers and sisters and that are going to get her done and you know all that stuff but you really suck at systems you suck at processes too much stuff is um manual and it could be automated your accounting software
• 166:30 - 167:00 usually sucks at that stage you're not really keeping good books the books aren't automated they don't automatically produce the payroll at the end of the month you're having to pull stuff out we had we had like 22 spreadsheets going and an accounting system and then we would take the numbers off of those and stick them in the accounting system and then try to create payroll once a month and it was this ridiculous thing it was just very unsophisticated but it was just all it was was we had scaled up a very primitive system and it was now a very
• 167:00 - 167:30 large primitive system and so we had our systems and processes were broken and we weren't doing hardly any planning we were very tactical it was much it was just like whatever's in front of us get it done whatever's in front of us get it done we didn't think about a year from now we didn't think about two years from now we had to make payroll Friday and we're just trying to make sure get the dad gum receivables collected i need the money in here that advertiser hadn't paid us why is he still on the air you know this is stupid and I don't you know and why we got a collections problem we we did we sell them wrong did they understand that they had to pay us i
• 167:30 - 168:00 mean what's the you know all this kind of stuff and we're just it's just like there's a lot of chaos but there's a lot of business happening so it's kind of exciting but it's very chaotic and so you got to put the systems in pro place you got to put the processes in place and entrepreneurs like me we this is the part where I really push back i didn't want to I never want to be corporate America negative parts of corporate America i mean there's big companies that are good companies but corporate America to me is bureaucratic bull crap
• 168:00 - 168:30 and you know some little twerp is his little domain over here is interrupting business getting done cuz he wants to protect his little thing and we're not doing that so you know well the you know accounting said we can't do that bull crap get it done you know the legal teams no they work for me you they don't I don't work for them and so that's the kind of guy who's I push him back in the middle of that trailblazer stage but we still we had to get enough governance to get things to get the quality consistent
• 168:30 - 169:00 and to to get the uh systems that were broken fixed and get we were we were like filling out pieces of paper we were killing trees and it should have been in a dadum computer program you know and that kind of stuff so we kept pushing and pushing and pushing the other thing we didn't do is we didn't do any strategic thought as I said we were all tactical there's everything's hands- on hands-on hands- on hands- on so I I started I hired some guys that were and some gals that had an MBA had a masters in business and I don't have that i've
• 169:00 - 169:30 just I've got an undergrad but um and I started realizing as I had talked to different MBAs at other companies that we were coaching and I was talking to these guys that there's I don't know all the details about getting an MBA i mean I know basically what it is but I did figure out that roughly 100% of the NBA programs do a really good job of teaching strategic thought get above the problem and get the 30,000 foot view then you know how to navigate and
• 169:30 - 170:00 rednecks like me I'm just plowing through and the guy goes "Look if you would turn right and then turn left you don't have to kick the barn door down every time you could just It's easy right and you got to get above it to see that though." And and so you know you just took off put the pedal to the metal and hope you find Florida how about a map you know and if you're going to go you ought to have a map and and so that's their thought and so I always laugh and say the MBAs that we hired um
• 170:00 - 170:30 they taught me strategic thought it was not my nature because I'm very much in your face at in the moment entrepreneurial tactical go mow the grass collect the money you know that kind of thing and u so they taught me strategic thought and I taught them how to work so but anyway that that's our joke around there but it's also true but so we you know because we work our butts off and and so that kind of stuff then started to help us move to the next stage which is the peak performer stage and that's the fun one man you're just
• 170:30 - 171:00 printing money you're just bailing money this stuff starts to come together it gels the culture in the team starts to come together you quit hiring doofuses because your hiring process gets better you quit keeping them because your firing process is better you um your systems and processes you start to realize the importance of them but they work for you you don't work for them you're not a bureaucrat um you know we we stand on principle we've got our core values we know what we're doing we're
• 171:00 - 171:30 serving the customer and now all we're doing is making each product better or new products that are even better our concepts and we start we can add things to the portfolio say we start adding a high school curriculum or we add you know a a budgeting piece of software an app and um you know we can start doing that because we're we're working in just strength now we've got cash cuz you're making more money at this stage than ever and you never dreamed you'd make this much money when you get to this stage it's a lot and um you can make
• 171:30 - 172:00 good money in the others but this is like and I can go home at 5 and I don't there's stuff happening in the organization that I have no idea happened and it's all the exact right stuff and I'm happy about it i don't have to be in every little detail because I've got a team of leaders that I've trained that have trained in a team of leaders and um you know we got a bit of a chain of command so to speak going and I I need to know what's going on and I get reports on different things i've
• 172:00 - 172:30 got accounting reports coming in but I don't have to be in every meeting i don't have to make every decision because they can already finish my sentences they know what Dave would do they know what that owner of that business would do the only downside of peak performer is you start to believe your own clippings and if you're not careful you keep doing only the same thing and you don't iterate because if you don't iterate in this market you die if you're not constantly getting better constantly changing constantly polishing constantly changing constantly looking for a new thing to add while you're being
• 172:30 - 173:00 successful but if you keep running the same play all the other teams figure out the play and so you it doesn't you can't you can't rest and the problem is you you're so dadgum good right now and there's so much money stacking that you start to think I'm I'm really good and that's dangerous so you got you got to constantly give the old shock to the system get the cattle prod out and just go okay reset we're going for excellence we're going to break it before it's broken baby we're we're going to we're going to reset reset reset and you got
• 173:00 - 173:30 to constantly it re-energize the whole place to raise this level of excellence and then the last one is just legacy stage um and so uh succession planning how you going to hand this off are you going to sell it are you going to quit and shut it down what's the endg game and you start planning for that i started doing that 16 years ago uh start our succession planning and and our uh you know how are we going to hand this off how's it going
• 173:30 - 174:00 to survive after Dave um because it's not mine i'm just the manager so it really shouldn't quit god's whole thing that he built here shouldn't just dry up just cuz I die um that's a bad idea and so we got to start working on legacy and um you know so that's really the five stages you go through but there's leveling up and a lot of detail you know a lot of little nuance things that you do in there to go to work through the and that's in 34 years that's the five stages we've been through and we've
• 174:00 - 174:30 watched as companies are going while we coach them they go from treadmill you know to Pathfinder to Trailblazer and and when they're sitting in Trailblazer it's really obvious to us then that you know here's your problem you don't have a system you know you're doing this thing you're pulling this out of your ear all the time instead of this is a replicatable process you don't have to make it up brand new every morning and so we just know how to coach them and know how to sit them down so we said we better put that in a book because that clear path gives people hope and it'll
• 174:30 - 175:00 uh it'll increase the speed of success and the quality of life for the guy and gal running a a small business right now well you had mentioned the six drivers mhm let's go through those real quick okay first one's personal when you start a business most people think that the thing you start with is product and you can and that's normal you got to okay I got an idea i want to start a podcast i got an idea i want to build a widget uh I want to go into this
• 175:00 - 175:30 certain kind of a business i want to be in the heat and air business i want to be a veterinarian um you know you got a certain idea that's product the service or the actual physical gummy bears that you create right um but you don't you you don't really start there if you do you're going to have a problem but you it's okay to have that in mind because that's usually the thing that gets you out of bed and causes you to go do the business idea but it really does before you get the product it really does backtrack all the way to the top what the first driver
• 175:30 - 176:00 is personal and the personal issue is this john Maxwell talks about um in his book 21 laws of leadership which is his bestselling book and my favorite of his uh the number three law is the law of the lid i'm the lid on my business and so that's personal personal growth it my the growth of my business is dependent upon my personal growth it will never get bigger if I don't and so I was 33 when
• 176:00 - 176:30 we started this i'm 64 okay and so obviously the guy that started this couldn't run this today that he's not the same guy i've read a bazillion books over those 30 years i've had a bazillion experiences i've had a lot of smart people yell at me and tell me how stupid I am and I need to do this different and they were right and there were good good enough friends to tell me the truth and
• 176:30 - 177:00 I fixed things and stuff would break and we'd do a CSI on it and go "Okay why did the patient die?" And you know what's the autopsy results and well that's what happened or how did crazy get in the building put a lock on that door and so you know we go through that stuff and we get better get better get better get better get better so you know when you uh listen to a Sean Ryan podcast uh interviewing some of the neatest stories in the world m if you're lo a business leader and you're watching this mine that podcast for the leadership
• 177:00 - 177:30 principles that you're hearing in that or the life principles that you're hearing in that if you go to um a leadership conference for God's sakes take 7,000 notes and be going to a leadership conference read a book this year on what you want to get better at like leadership or business structure or who's writing in the business space that's smart learn from that a and so con the problem with my business is always the guy in my mirror that's the bad news the good news is the solution
• 177:30 - 178:00 of my business is always that guy in my mirror that's very personal and you know that's kind of what you and I were talking about uh when it was just you and me in the room at the house one night or one afternoon is that that never stops you can hire a CEO or a president or a COO but still if you're the guy you still got to get better and one of the ways you can get better is hire people smarter than you i mean I got we've got somewhere around uh
• 178:00 - 178:30 400 people that do software engineering i've never written a line of code in my life i don't even know what they do but I know that they are creating things that create revenue and help to other people mhm and I that's my job it's not to learn to be a coder does it scare you when you don't know an aspect of your business yes scares the crap out of me me too but but it doesn't keep me from being responsible for it and so like I dropped into one of those meetings cuz
• 178:30 - 179:00 those are all Gen Z's just about right in that stuff and they're smart and I dropped into those meetings and they're freaking like the military they've got acronyms for everything threeletter words fiveletter words for everything and they're and it's a whole different language and I'm sitting in this meeting for about 10 minutes and I think I they might as well have been speaking German and finally I raised my hand i said "Hey guys I'm just going to be really transparent right now it i'm a little bit scared because I pay all y'all and I
• 179:00 - 179:30 have no idea what you have said for the last 10 minutes would y'all take a minute and humor me and tell me what you've been talking about i might be able to add value but I might also just be a little calmer if I actually know what you're doing and I don't have to know every detail and I'm not asking you to I'm not getting down your business i just want to learn from you what have you all been discussing and they said "Oh." And then they told me and I understood and I went "Okay." And it was something about um uh the friction and the conversion rates were
• 179:30 - 180:00 dropping on this particular web page we weren't we weren't converting we were losing the customers and uh because the way the thing was built it was poorly designed and they're like "Okay this is this and you know and they were dropping all these acronyms around basically making the sale now I know how to make the sale i can help with that but I can't help you if I don't know what you're talking about." So yeah it's scary and but it's also I don't have to know but I in that case I was just curious and I wanted to learn but I wasn't really holding them up i wasn't the bottleneck and if you're the bottleneck that's where you get the problem in personal and so I've got to
• 180:00 - 180:30 know enough about accounting to make sure the accounting team's doing their job i got to know enough about the results of the software engineers to know that I'm actually getting an ROI on that freaking $50 million in payroll right i've got to know enough about marketing to be able to look i got to know you know enough to look at the social media and go "This is low quality." You know I don't have to be a social media expert but I got to go I'm not cool with this video it's jumping
• 180:30 - 181:00 around all over the place it's bothering me it's halfb butt quality i know you you quick edit it or what driving me nuts that's a discussion I had yesterday and so um that's the way everybody's doing it and I said "Well that's exactly the reason we shouldn't do it." And so you know I can bring that to the table still but I don't so so yeah that that's um but it's normal for something to feel uh but if you only do stuff that you know how to do it'll never get big you got to bring team people know how to do stuff you don't know how to do so I need
• 181:00 - 181:30 a good kicker i need a good um right guard left guard I need a good defensive lineman even if I'm the quarterback mhm and I don't have to do all that and so I I'm I need a my CFO is and I'm the this freaking Dave Ramsey i mean I know the money stuff but my CFO is dadum genius he's smart i mean he I comes in we get to do math riddles and stuff together i just love it but um but thank God that I
• 181:30 - 182:00 got somebody like that on the team so I can hand off hand off and that gives me the ability to scale the ability to grow but I've got to grow enough i've got to be willing to learn strategic thought to take me up i've got to be willing to get better at those things that's the personal the next one's purpose and purpose is why are you here and I tell leaders all the time in business if the only reason you're in business is to make money you will not make it you will quit you've got to have
• 182:00 - 182:30 something beyond that um you and I have both talked off camera that we thoroughly enjoy what we do and one of the reasons we enjoy it is we're making a difference mhm i mean you brought some stories to light in this room that needed to be done and that was not You didn't do that for money you did that cuz it's really
• 182:30 - 183:00 fun and by God it was the right thing to do these are stories people needed to know because it was ridiculous that they weren't told and Sean freaking Ryan is who told the story and that's that's your purpose right i mean and you got to have purpose and you got to identify it and then you got to hire people that plug into that purpose and that some of the stuff on the walls around this room are they're they're keepsakes from people whose story got told who would
• 183:00 - 183:30 not have been told were you not here and if the guys on the camera don't understand that if they think they just run a camera then you're screwed and so you got to have purpose and the same thing at Ramsey man i mean if if we hear somebody met God because they went through one of our things and they got out of debt and then they heard we were Christians so they investigated it that everybody at Ramsey cries it makes us cry cuz somebody met Jesus cuz that's our purpose one of them our purpose is
• 183:30 - 184:00 you know we teach somebody teach number one cause of divorce in North America today is money fights and money problems we can get you on the same budget and get you out of debt and get the stress out of your house and then you walk in our office and you go "You guys saved our marriage." Yeah and game on we didn't save your marriage you saved your marriage but we by God showed you how that's awesome that's that's our purpose and you got to have that and you got to say it and you got to look at it and everybody's got to be plugged into it and that's a driver of the business if you think you're in the heat and air business and all you do is make money by
• 184:00 - 184:30 going in somebody's house and turning on their thermostat you're not going to stay in business and you think "Oh this is a great way to make some money." You're not going to stay in business cuz you're in it for the wrong reason you're in it to to extract rather than to add value to the world that you live in and so yeah we're going to get to product but and you can start there but you better go back and take care of you you better go to purpose and that'll bring you to people and you start adding the right ones the right hiring and firing get the right as my friend Jim Collins
• 184:30 - 185:00 says in book good to great get the right people on the bus wrong people off the bus and the right people on the right seats on the bus and that is like a full-time job it's like I spend 80% of my calories on that really yeah it's people man they're our greatest blessing and our greatest curse it's a constant thing and um some of my greatest most wonderful things are the people that I've gotten to do this journey with that are on my team and some of the biggest pains and scars I have in my life are
• 185:00 - 185:30 from the people that have been on my team it's but it's part of it man your other choices don't dance man I want to dance i'm going to get out there i don't care if I look foolish let's have at it so yeah you know let's do it so um yeah that's uh people are uh a constant thing and they really are a great joy by and large but you always got that you know that one or two sto like we talked about earlier there's one or two or three that man I must have been an idiot i heard
• 185:30 - 186:00 them but worse than that I kept them and so yeah you you know I had one guy tell us and we were standing in the hallway he goes "Yeah man my team," I said "They're" He said "They're awful." And I said "Well you suck don't you?" And he said "What do you mean you hired them and then you kept them and then you're sitting here whining about them whose fault is this it's yours." So yeah leader has to deal with the people you don't have a choice people's the deal what is your strategy with hiring and firing
• 186:00 - 186:30 [Applause] um our hiring is ridiculous might not be funny in here but the line we always use is it's harder to get on with us than it is the CIA or the FBI i mean it's hard we put you through the ringer it used to be a whole bunch of It got to be too many interviews we got it up to about the average 15 interviews before you got hired that was That was silly 15 yeah we got it down to about
• 186:30 - 187:00 seven now that that we got out of control we just got so paranoid about making a bad hire that we wanted to spend the ridiculous amount of energy and time to get a good hire and um but we do about seven interviews minimum now the first one is a 30 minute quick not 32 minutes not 31 minutes 28 to 30 minutes cultural review
• 187:00 - 187:30 and we spend uh about 10 minutes telling them who we are here's our 14 things here's who we are and if you don't want to do this you're not going to want to be here uh one is we work at work we don't we don't have remote work we work at the office we're we're believe being in the proximity of each other is valuable and productivity creativity communication everything is enhanced when you're physically in the same space and so even now it's kind of being
• 187:30 - 188:00 popular because like Elon's telling everybody to work at work but um we work at work and if you don't want to do that you can opt out right now we only got 28 minutes invested in this discussion so and then we spend about 20 minutes listening to them so two ears one mouth is the ratio there's 30 minutes 20 minutes listening one 10 minutes talking and they don't let me do those cuz I talk too much but uh um and I'm not that good at it but you listen and you try to determine is this person going to fit
• 188:00 - 188:30 are they engaged in behaviors that don't fit here are they you know for for instance if all they can do is whine about how horrible the last place they worked is then they're going to do that about you so you know if that's how you spend your first 10 minutes in an interview talking negatively about the last place you're probably going to do the same thing with us probably we're probably done or if they you know they go you know I hate Christians you probably won't want to work here cuz the guy that owns this
• 188:30 - 189:00 place and you know I'm a gun guy as you know but not everybody knows that and because I'm supposed to be the get out of debt guy but I mean I I'm a firearms enthusiast i'm not um anywhere near some kind of in elite level or anything like that but I like to shoot and I like to collect and all that kind of stuff and so and I carry every day all the time and so they ask you know our guys will ask you go "Our CEO carries a gun i've never seen it but he carries a gun everywhere he goes that's legal that he
• 189:00 - 189:30 can do that." And how you feel about that and you know some people go "I don't want to work here." And that's good it's good we decide that right then you're not a culture fit because I do and I'm not changing that for you to come to work here so and a matter of fact a whole bunch of people in the building carry so um and we actually have this wonderful training program and we do tactical training and fun stuff and it's great team building and go to my farm and you know run a thousand rounds and learn how to actually handle
• 189:30 - 190:00 a handgun and all that it's kind of fun but not everybody wants to do that and that freaks people out and if you're one of those people that's gun freaked out then I'm I'm a Tennessee redneck i've had a gun in the back window of my truck since I was 12 i mean come on so that's just the way I grew up and I'm not worried about it i'm not freaking not making a political statement it's just a actual fact so do you want to work here and so we throw that out we'll throw out different things like that and just ask a question it's not like saying you have to do it but this is who you're coming to work with so you need to know and so
• 190:00 - 190:30 that little 30 minute interview that gets rid of um we either canned them or you know that get I don't think one in 10 make it through that no kidding yeah because they they thought that we were something that we're not and or we thought they were something they weren't and uh we don't hire people based on skill uh skill is important but it is trumped by cultural fit value system
• 190:30 - 191:00 um enthusiasm crusader um yeah i I you know I give somebody that actually freaking cares deeply and they lean in and they've got medium level skill we can take a C player like that make them an A+ player but I can't take an A+ player they'll perform at a D level if they don't fit in and if they're not in if they're not if they think it's just a job if you're here to collect a check a J O how little how how
• 191:00 - 191:30 late can I come to work how much can I steal while they're there how many times can I be on my Facebook account instead of getting my freaking work done and then I want to leave early too oh and I need extra PTO cuz my dog needs his toenails done oh geez get out of my life life's too short and how much can I take how much of a parasite can I be and the odd thing is people will reveal that pretty easily and you go you ain't going to fit in because the people here we work and we care and we love each other
• 191:30 - 192:00 and we got each other's back and we're getting this crap done and you know pretty quickly you go there so we get past that and then we start actually getting into it but we've never hired anyone based on the number of degrees i had one guy working for me a long time ago he said he came into my office he said you know I've got he had three graduate level degrees he was a smart dude and he goes I've got this degree this degree this degree and he goes "You know in corporate America I could make double what I make here." And I said "Good you should." And he said "Well I
• 192:00 - 192:30 need to talk about you know getting a raise." I said "We don't give raises based on degrees dude this is a small business your raise is effective when you are when you kill something drag it home i'll share it with you but collecting degrees is not you're not a thermometer i mean this is not this is not what we do you're not a thermometer." I mean come on man i mean it's like this is not a thing so we you know and sweet guy and he worked there probably I can see his face right
• 192:30 - 193:00 now i know his name but um he's a good guy i still talk to him occasionally he's been gone probably 10 years but he really had bought into that lie and a lot of people when you're hiring buy into the lie that the degree matters or the certification matters or what I made at the other place matters it doesn't it doesn't what matters more is it it matters only to the extent you can add value to the place you're coming so you know four year I've got a four-year business degree it's a wonderful degree i'm glad I got it i use components of it
• 193:00 - 193:30 almost every day but the actual degree itself has never made me a dime the tools it put in my belt now those tools are valuable extra knowledge that I didn't have that's valuable so that's the hiring and and we're looking for people that fit in that are a wee and that are fired up we love it if it's not necessary but if if they've gone through something we do and it's changed their life and they want to do that for others
• 193:30 - 194:00 by working on the team that's a crusader that's a really good indicator that you're going to get on up in the interview process and um and then the last thing we do is very controversial weird but um I figured out when I went broke I we've owned real estate that my wife never saw i was out doing deals and she's like
• 194:00 - 194:30 "Whatever you want to do honey southern bell right?" And you got it man and I didn't i did some stupid butt stuff and there were other times we did stuff and she's like "Well I knew that wasn't going to work." I'm like "Well why didn't you say something you know and and she always had an opinion after I told you so?" You know like where where were you when we were making the decision so I found that in scripture and I didn't when I went broke and I was studying this money principles and a money principle is this who can find a
• 194:30 - 195:00 virtuous wife for her worth is far above rubies the heart of her husband safely trusts her because she's virtuous she's not a barking chihuahua not a nag she cares she's wise the heart of her husband safely trusts her and he will have no lack of gain you want to build wealth listen to
• 195:00 - 195:30 your virtuous wife okay I wasn't doing that and I went broke so maybe I need to add that to the get out of debt list or the be on a budget list or whatever there's a thing I do so we quit when we went broke and I found that when I was studying all this stuff i said "Okay I don't make major decisions without Sharon we'll fight about it we might not agree about it but we're going to talk about it and we're going to come into agreement or we don't move forward when in doubt don't so we're going to I'm not
• 195:30 - 196:00 going to go uh make a $10,000 investment." and she says "That's a bad idea never doing that." Um it sounds like I'm hp but I'm not because we argue about it sometimes but um not much anymore but back in the old days we did and so if we get ready to do a large gift uh with some generosity moves with our foundation our family foundation Sharon and I look at it i don't do that she doesn't do it by herself we do it
• 196:00 - 196:30 together we're a unit we're married and now you are one you know the preacher said he didn't say "And now you are a joint venture." And so I was running it like a joint venture like I'm smart i can just go do this i don't need my wife and she would say "I'm an independent woman i can do whatever I want." Yeah you are but this is stupid you know maybe we ought to work together hello and the people that build wealth work together that's the data actually shows us nowadays so we quit making big decisions without that and then when I got ready to hire our
• 196:30 - 197:00 first person the I don't know about you man but when I hired the very first one that was scary as crap i felt the weight of the responsibility for that family that was counting on me to give them the money in payroll that I had promised them that it scared the pee out of me and um the second one was easier the third one was easier the 30,000th was really easy but the first one scared me and I went "This is a big decision sharon doesn't work has
• 197:00 - 197:30 never worked at Ramsey she's never worked at the office ever." Um but we don't make big decisions at the office without Sharon getting involved so if we got ready to do a huge purchase at the office like I remember one time in the early days we bought a phone system for $14,000 and that was like woo nobody has phone systems anymore but um like Sharon has to come down to the office and sit and look at the phone system with my three leaders and me and we make this decision and she signs off on $14,000 back in the day cuz that that was a lot
• 197:30 - 198:00 of money then it was a big decision i don't make big decisions without Sharon so we don't hire people without Sharon in the early days so when we got ready to get hired that's interesting the last step today still is what we call the spousal interview and so the last step is after we're pretty dad gum sure this is God we're pretty sure this is a good move for everybody god's got us all together but we're going to go out to dinner informally with the person we're hiring and their spouse and the leader
• 198:00 - 198:30 and their spouse in the old days it was Sharon and me would take you to dinner we probably did the first hundred hires that way with just me and Sharon wow and we go to dinner and my wife is not she's I'm the talker obviously so she's pretty chill kickback and the video I've seen on your wife would be similar you know you'd have a lot to say about this place and your wife would be watching and listening and learning and then I would I learned I was somehow somebody taught
• 198:30 - 199:00 me I don't know where it came from not to ask my wife as we were driving away how what she thought I asked her how she feels and her holy spirit women's intuition she could smell crazy a mile away and I'm like a Labrador retriever i'm like I like everybody so I'm hiring let's get let's do it you know and and she's like you
• 199:00 - 199:30 know I like the guy and his wife's sweet but I just got a bad and she's from East Tennessee it's southern right so it's a seven syllable word i got a bad feeling 100% of the time but go ahead but go ahead don't worry about it i I just I just tell you I got a bad feeling and a couple times I would say "Okay you think we ought to do it or not?" "Yeah go ahead." 100% of those were gone in 4 months oh [ __ ] something blew up her and
• 199:30 - 200:00 the other thing is she almost never said that i mean three times out of a hundred something like that most of the time she said "Yeah this is great let's just do it how you feel?" "Oh I feel really good i like it i actually like his spouse better which is probably means he's probably a good person cuz he's smart enough to get her you know." And so she just you know that's a conversation all right let's pray about it tonight so we pray about it any change tomorrow morning let me know and then we call him we tell the couple y'all go home pray about it and talk about it and I would look at their spouse and say "I want you to tell him if you have a bad feeling i
• 200:00 - 200:30 want you to tell her if you have whoever it is we're interviewing right and for some reason that is very controversial with some of the people out there in the hate land um but I don't know why it's controversial it's just like I love my wife and I trust her and I like her better than I like anybody I've ever hired and so I'm going to want her on the team you know and but that's weird but I've had some funny stuff happen we had one old boy was a party guy and you
• 200:30 - 201:00 know we're not we we are regular people but we're not like wild animal party people and this guy was drinking and doing drugs and doing all this other stuff at a at a real high level apparently but he was smart and he was really good and he was a fun guy he was a great guy but um we kind of went through all this stuff and his wife was country as cornbread and she didn't say a thing all night and I'll never forget we were at the steakhouse right down here i could name it and I won't but it's right over the hill here you would
• 201:00 - 201:30 know it and I ordered key lime pie for dessert i'll never for my fork went to the key lime pie in other words we've been there an hour and a half woman had said a word and she she says "Y'all are real religious ain't you?" And I said "Well if you mean like the Pharisees or jerks about Bible or something no if you mean we love Jesus Christ yes he ain't gonna fit in
• 201:30 - 202:00 oh man i start laughing the guy that had another leader and his wife with me they start laughing my wife is looking at me like I've lost my mind we're just laughing because me and my leader and even the guy starts laughing because she just spoke truth you know she kept us cuz he was a friend that the leader and I knew from the broadcast business and we really wanted him to come on cuz he's
• 202:00 - 202:30 a fun guy he's real creative and we were just overlooking the fact that hey I ain't going to fit in and this woman spoke she dropped a grenade in the middle of the table dropped a bomb in the middle of the table it was fabulous we didn't hire him we're still friends to this day friends with her to this day and but that's what it's for because we all get all excited about the positives that can happen and we overlook the obvious things and the spouse will sometimes if they're if they're wise and strong and their voice is used to being
• 202:30 - 203:00 heard will speak into it and it's fabulous that's our best part of our hiring process and I love to hear that it ticks it ticks people off they're like "You don't have any right." I got all kinds of right my name's on the side of the building what are you talking about i got right but oh well i'm going to implement that i love that that's a great idea that is a great idea what about firing how fast do you fire uh for
• 203:00 - 203:30 extreme misbehavior instantaneously but that almost never happens um somebody steals I don't really need to negotiate that's just you know just sad day we're done um but most of the time it would be misbehavior or incompetence would be one of the buckets and those things are things you can work on and so um we have an accountability system
• 203:30 - 204:00 where leaders always are meeting with their team and doing one-on- ones once a week you do one-on-one or once every two weeks for an hour and that's where you listen to what's the going on with the actual work you hear things personal about the person how can we help you how can we support you what's going on you know how can we love you well um and here's some things we got to work on you got to you got to course correct so there's never anything that's just like once a year we do a review no we're once a week or once every two weeks we're talking about life and business and
• 204:00 - 204:30 how's it going and you know you're a salesman you're not making any sales calls it's not going to work we have to get the sales calls up how can I help you get that done what can we Is there an issue with your technology what's the problem let's get it going let's get it going let's get it going and so we begin some basic course correction and confrontation there or you know you can't seem to get here before 10:00 in the morning that's not cool we actually work here you need to get your butt in the office you know and what's the problem what you got an issue childcare
• 204:30 - 205:00 problem what how can we help you what's the Tell me what's going on if there's a real reason let's talk about it just I didn't get out of bed ain't cool you know so you basic stuff right you're talking about all the time and then the next thing you would do is you would escalate it and begin what we call a difficult conversation and a difficult conversation without going through the whole seminar bit on it that we teach but is just um you sit down and say "Hey we're both currently sitting on the same
• 205:00 - 205:30 side of the table i'm on your team i'm not across the table from you this is not a a correction or a negotiation but this is going to be a difficult conversation no one's getting fired today but if we don't correct some things we're going to talk about today we're going to have to move towards that direction and then you say "Here's the things now here's a program and we're going to meet and here's the things I expect from you and we need these things done by this date and I'm going to check
• 205:30 - 206:00 with you a couple times and then by that date we're going to look and see did you do it and then if it's something fairly simple and they correct it um you know show to work on time or they get their sales calls up or whatever the issue is i don't know what it is or you know you're m you're talking to someone in a way you shouldn't be talking to them and that kind of stuff then you know um and then they either do it or they don't if they don't do it then you go okay now we're going to have another difficult conversation and now
• 206:00 - 206:30 it's going to get a lot hotter and nothing is going to happen today but we're probably one meeting away from you not working here so we're just real clear real kind real direct these meetings are about this long we're not going on for two hours with a bunch of emotion it's uh these are 10 10-minute meeting it's not it's just going to tell you here's what we're doing and and this is not thing and so I I'll help you i'm here to support you i'm going to work on but and then we would come in if they uh
• 206:30 - 207:00 and say all right now we're going to put you on a 90-day plan and during this 90 days you and I are going to meet every other day and we're going to work on every one of these things and at the end of that 90 days you're going to have solved this problem permanently we're never going to revisit it again um or we will be done or if you don't want to enter into this very intense 90-day period here's a severance package today if you would rather do that if you say "My time at Ramsey's done here's a
• 207:00 - 207:30 severance package today." Um I would say when that's put on the table probably 70% of the time they take the seance and walk out the door because you've already talked about whatever it is up to this point and they either think they can turn it and want to turn it and really want to engage to stay and part be part of the team or they're like you know screw this i'll just take the money and go and we would rather give them a little money and not have to deal with the because you're taking up a leader's productivity too through that whole time to try to make a save and the number of
• 207:30 - 208:00 people that we save at that point is fairly low almost all of them are saved prior to that that conversation that starts a 90-day plan but when you get there it's it's a fairly low save ratio but we'll try it i mean we we want give everybody a chance cuz I got fired one time when I was 20 i was working for this company and this guy was a just a he was a character and um his he was a one of the leaders cuz he wasn't the owner of the company i was doing site
• 208:00 - 208:30 locations uh for a company called Mr transmission it's out of business now i think there's a few of them still open but the actual franchise operations gone and the guy was that I reported to I was doing real estate right out of college doing site locations for him i worked there for three whole months he fired me and he came in my office one day and just started you little effer f your mother's an effer and all these effers and all this stuff and he's yelling screaming and he goes "Get a box and get your ass out of here." You know all this and I'm like "What did I do?" And he
• 208:30 - 209:00 goes "Doesn't matter you're fired get out of here." And honestly it that was 40 something years ago i still don't know what I did i probably did it i probably deserve to be fired i don't know what I did i mean I wasn't like a the champion character wonderful person or something so it's very possible i just don't know what I got fired for and so that scarred me and I promised when we opened Ramsay that if someone left they would always
• 209:00 - 209:30 know why they would never be surprised and they would always know why not surprised is you're not getting fired today but we got to fix this we got to fix this we got to fix this we got to fix this they're not going to be surprised and they're always going to know exactly why and so it's not unusual at Ramsay for someone to I've heard this multiple times um they tell their spouse on Monday morning or Tuesday morning "This
• 209:30 - 210:00 is probably going to be my last day cuz they know when they come in that they're done because it's been so clear and gradual it's on a gradient up to that." And then they don't feel their dignity is not stolen and um I remember and they're not long meetings when you do finally say today's your last day that's a six-minute meeting it's like you know we've worked on this up to this point we know we love you but this is not working and we've talked about it and talked about it and talked about it so today's
• 210:00 - 210:30 the decision's been made today's your last day at Ramsey and um what what I want you to do is uh I'm going to I've got a person my HR director sitting outside they're going to walk with you to your car and collect your uh fobs and stuff and collect your computers and your access is already shut down and then they'll also make a time for you to come back in uh late in the day or after hours to sign the paperwork and to get your stuff from your desk cuz there anything you need right this second before you go home and that's how long it takes and they're in their car uh 10
• 210:30 - 211:00 minutes after we open and they're on their way home and they don't have to do a walk of shame back to their team and clean out their stuff and have a box and go through like something from office space or something and so they come back later we're not trying to hurt somebody it just didn't work and um but you know people are funny i mean the stuff that people come up with but it Yeah i'm not going to surprise them though and I never have and I've never fired anybody in angry while I was angry
• 211:00 - 211:30 i've been angry but I didn't I've never fired someone while I was angry i go home talk to Sharon think about it come back in the next morning then I kind of by then it's almost usually kind of humorous how stupid the whole thing is and they just can't work here anymore you know I just learned a lot from that segment thank you yeah I did i did and um Dave we're wrapping up the interview here but um you are the money guy so last
• 211:30 - 212:00 question where should be where should people be putting their money in today to invest first thing is you should never put money in something you don't understand don't put it because Dave Ramsey said do it or anybody else said do it um the second thing is if you're investing that means you have a long view of money you're putting it in something you're going to leave it alone a long time we did at Ramsey Research research
• 212:00 - 212:30 team an airtight study the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America it's in the book last bestseller I had called uh baby steps millionaires white white papers in the back of it on the research research is airtight we had a another company outside from New York look over our shoulders on our methodology to make sure that the research process was not confirmation bias that it was detail airtight because we knew that the left-wing communist
• 212:30 - 213:00 group would uh not like the results of where millionaires come from because they have a an anarchist communist uh wealth equality agenda that's absolute bull crap we knew that would come at us so we had to make it airtight so if you disagree with the conclusions of this study that is hard data that are known as facts you would be what's known as wrong in other words and so one of the things we found was that um 89% of
• 213:00 - 213:30 America's millionaires that's nine out of 10 are not millionaires because of inherited money the great lie is is that the rich have all the money and so the poor little people can't get any money this is the greatest country in the history of the world the greatest economic system in the history of the world for the little man to get ahead mhm i'm so stupid I had to do it twice so it's possible promise you it's possible 79% inherited
• 213:30 - 214:00 precisely zero 5% inherited a small amount like $5,000 from their grandmother which mathematically makes it impossible for that to have caused them to be a millionaire and another 5% inherited a substantial amount after they were already millionaires like maybe they got 250 grand when dad died but they were already worth 2.5 million so it didn't cause them to be a millionaire so 79,5 and 5 is 89 that's an example of that study now in that study the sad thing was the um process
• 214:00 - 214:30 that people had used and the demographic data the breakdown of wealth of who had become millionaires again not they'd done it themselves they were not inherited money was unbelievably boring there's just zero sex appeal it's just devastatingly stupid and it's just here's what they did the average person in their head now this is the first one to5 million of net worth this is not somebody worth a hundred million it's not a billion a billion's a thousand
• 214:30 - 215:00 million that's people with jets and seven cars okay but this a millionaire drives a Toyota okay and here's what they did they have a 600 $800,000 house that's paid for and they have 800 900,000 in their 401k cuz they've been putting money in mutual funds in their 401k for 15 years and the company matches and it's in a
• 215:00 - 215:30 Roth and they did some Roth IRA and they they had retirement investing and a pay for house and the two together was a million and a half to $2 million 1.6 million 1.4 4 million whatever like 80 something% of them look like that it was ridiculous so pay off your house put money in a 401k and mutual funds and that that's your first million to $5 million and it's like all of them it wasn't like statistical i mean I when you're doing statistical analysis on
• 215:30 - 216:00 stuff like that if you can get something at 56% like a like a poll on politics I mean you know you get 48 to 42 to 52 you know you get a 56% of the vote you had a landslide right we have 56% of anything all this stuff came in in the 80 percentile wow and it's like all of them so it was it was not only statistically significant it was ridiculous it was actually fact to fact and so yeah put money in a good
• 216:00 - 216:30 growth stock mutual fund that has a long track record and fill up your 401k with that take the match do a Roth IRA and do the same thing and pay you all pay off your real estate and some of them then would start buying other real estate there were some other cool stories in there one guy had was worth $5 million and he had 100% of it in farmland he was a dirt farmer in Kansas he had a big farm in Kansas and he'd been just he'd buy a few acres and he'd buy a few acres and he'd pay cash for it and he had like $10 million worth of dirt and that was all he had he didn't have any money he
• 216:30 - 217:00 just had a bunch of dirt it was but he had a $10 million net worth it was great but that was the that was the weird ones they were that was kind of fun but most of them are a guy that you know he's a mid-level 33% of them one-third never made six figures wow number one uh career was engineer number two is accountant get this number three teacher no kidding number four exec business
• 217:00 - 217:30 executive number five lawyer medical doctors didn't even make the top five no kidding they're notoriously bad with money and arrogant with their money but uh almost like a music artist or something but um you know I mean they're they're either really good or they're really bad like the music people and so or actors or athletes the same thing all that but um yeah it was very interesting and what we figured out was okay what what have they got in common teachers I'm sorry uh engineers
• 217:30 - 218:00 accountants teachers business executive lawyer they all are process people you have to use a process to build it build a bridge or it falls and it's a set of principles you don't get to make up there's no creativity involved you got to do the right thing or false there's one set of math you don't get to oh that's a new way of doing it no that's the way you build the bridge accounting there's not four methods of accounting there's one there's accounting done right and accounting done wrong teachers lesson
• 218:00 - 218:30 plan they often were married to policemen that was very interesting law enforcement number four account uh um lawyer i mean business person they're running a business they're you know have to have a system lawyers there's a system of law even though we all laugh about it but um I mean there you do certain things in a courtroom a certain way or the judge puts you out they don't you you don't have six different ways to uh try a case there's a set of standards it's a process these are all process
• 218:30 - 219:00 people so what they did is they figured out the money process and they did it which was save and invest live on less than you make pay off your house and they just and they just worked the process and so um if you're you know if you have a master's degree in art appreciation you're you know you're at a disadvantage because that's all creative subjective not objective and you're not process driven so you can do it but you got to adhere you have to submit yourself to a proven process and you don't get to make up your own
• 219:00 - 219:30 version and that that's who wins and so my investments I I've studied wealthy people for 30 years they invest in things they understand like the guy with the dirt he understood dirt so he bought dirt and um they avoid debt by and large not all of them but most of them and um their investments are usually fairly boring it's not some super sophisticated
• 219:30 - 220:00 family partnership double backflip trust that none of them have that that's that's something on a movie or something these guys just put money in their 401k pay it off their house i mean so I that's what I do i buy mutual funds and I buy real estate that I pay cash for and I own Ramsey those are my three assets and you've been on my farm you've been on my house but I I mean everything we just pay cash for it and this campus I pay cash for it you know everything
• 220:00 - 220:30 and I love real estate i'm buying a piece right now i'm working on LOI today uh letter of intent today on on a nice piece of commercial i love real estate but I pay cash for it and um and I put money in mutual funds because I believe in the American economy mutual funds are 90 to 200 of America's best and brightest companies that are growing i just don't think you can beat that and so I do and that's why I don't do the fad stuff and and I'm not taking a poll i went
• 220:30 - 221:00 broke i don't care what your opinion is i'm this i'm going to do this and I don't need to impress anybody with the with how cool I am cuz I'm not I've ceased to be cool a long time ago so that's how we do it pretty damn cool that's how we do it dude thank you well Dave there's I mean there's just so much knowledge and wisdom in here i mean everything from you know how you run your business how to be a father how to be a good husband i mean just hiring firing all kinds of
• 221:00 - 221:30 of of of wisdom in this and I just I really appreciate you coming on and I'm honored i've been wanting to do it a while i'm sorry it took so long to get around to it no I treasure I treasure our friendship too me too and I'm I'm uh enjoying watching your your spiritual journey it's it's a lot of fun thank you i'm real proud of you thank you well God bless you too sir cheers [Music]
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