#191 Dave Ramsey - CEO, Ramsey Solutions

Dave Ramsey is a personal finance expert, bestselling author, and radio host known for his no-nonsense approach to money management. After experiencing financial ruin in his twenties, Ramsey rebuilt his wealth and launched a mission to help others avoid the same mistakes. He created Financial Peace University, a step-by-step program that teaches people how to budget, eliminate debt, and build wealth. His “baby steps” plan and debt-free philosophy have guided millions toward financial stability and independence. Ramsey is the host of The Ramsey Show, a nationally syndicated radio program and podcast where he offers practical advice on money, relationships, and personal growth. Through Ramsey Solutions, he’s built a media empire focused on financial education, reaching audiences through books, courses, events, and digital content. Grounded in Christian values and tough love, Ramsey’s message continues to inspire a grassroots movement of people choosing to live debt-free and take control of their financial future. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://www. AmericanFinancing.net/SRS NMLS 182334, nmlsconsumeraccess.org https://www.identityguard.com/srs https://www. BetterHelp.com/SRS This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://www.bubsnaturals.com/SHAWN https://www. ShawnLikesGold.com https://www.drinkhoist.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://www.hometitlelock.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://www. Moinkbox.com/SRS https://www. PrepareWithShawn.com https://www. PatriotMobile.com/SRS https://www. Shopify.com/SRS Dave Ramsey Links: Build a Business You Love - https://ter.li/1izvr8 Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@daveramsey IG - https://www.instagram.com/daveramsey FB - https://www.facebook.com/daveramsey X - https://x.com/DaveRamsey Website - https://www.ramseysolutions.com Show - https://www.ramseysolutions.com/shows Coaching - https://www.ramseysolutions.com/life-and-career Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 0:44Speaker 02

  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 gonna be a millionaire. And we went across a railroad track and a muffler fell off my car.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  By the time I was 26, we had about $4 million of real estate, and a little over $1 million net worth.

• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  By 26, you had $4 million in real estate?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 1:28Shawn Ryan?

  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. Been trying to make this happen for quite some time, and it's just, you know, it's awesome to have you here. We've got a lot to talk about. Kind of ridiculous it was so much trouble, because I'm just right there. I know. I know you're right, literally right down the street. Stupid schedules, yours and mine. But, yeah, here we are. Here we are. But, 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 of mine since before, way before we ever met. And I was doing a... I was doing a contract, anti-piracy stuff off the coast of Yemen.

• 2:10Shawn Ryan?

  And my dad had given me your book, and he wanted me to read it. And I 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, changed my life.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:46Shawn Ryan?

  And um, I was making pretty good money back then contracting, but I was spending it all on bullshit. I bought like a thirty thousand dollar chopper and all kinds BMW, all kinds of shit that I didn't need. And I read that book on that little deployment is about three weeks long. Came back home, sold everything I had, paid all my debt off.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  No way.

• 3:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yep. And I've lived like that, paid my house off, sold everything, all the shit that I didn't need that I had loans on and. And um, it had, you know, I guess equity and some of it and uh.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  So what the, the switch flip, you just, you realize it's not giving you joy, it's not. The, the, the stress of the debt didn't offset the fun of it.

• 3:28Shawn Ryan?

  Exactly. And then, I mean, I was hesitant, but uh, cause 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, credit card debt and all the other shit. Car payments, it just, that was shit, that was probably fifteen, sixteen years ago. And I've just lived like that ever since.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 3:57Shawn Ryan?

  And uh, and even today, you know, I'm debt free. I built 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 seven thousand square foot studio out in the woods and all of it, uh, there's zero debt. And uh, so I just want to say thank you.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Thank you. That's a great story. I didn't know that part.

• 4:28Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  I've been friends for a while, I never heard that part.

• 4:30Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  Well, and then, you know, you continue to be a mentor of mine and, you know, we had a discussion at your house, what, a couple of 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 have to be the CEO." And I think you mentioned you're probably looking more for a COO. And you just met Eric downstairs. This is the beginning of his third week, so I wound up hiring a COO. Okay. So I just want you to know that, you know, everything you say, you know, I take it in, and I know a lot of people do, and so this, you know, what I've built here is, you know, somewhat of a product of your mentorship. Wow.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  So. And 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. Here 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 Ramsey Show, a nationally syndicated radio program that's been teaching money management for over thirty years. You're an eight-time bestselling 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 fifteenth, Tax Day.

• 6:02Shawn Ryan?

  Is that an accident? Ah, who knows? It 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, no-nonsense, financial advice. You were introduced into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2015. You've been a husband to Sharon for the last forty-three years. You've 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 forty-three years. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. So let's kick it off. What's, what's the secret to a successful, to a successful marriage?

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  Well, well, the joke that I always use, which is accurate, I tell her if she leaves, I'm going with her.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  So, and then she just giggles, but the, you know, the truth is, I met God about two years after we were married. And she probably wouldn't, we still wouldn't be married if I hadn't. Because the guy that she married was a twerp. He was a hell raising beer drinking hillbilly with a big temper and wasn't much of a man, much less much of a husband. But he's a good salesman because I talked her into marrying me. But, but thank God she's not still married to the same guy that his life has been transformed by Christ.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And so, every year a little better, every year a little less dumb, every year a little whatever. It's not, nothing perfect, obviously, but we've both grown in our faith and in our relationship steadily over those years. And went through hell, losing everything in our early days. And, you know, that, that was a defining moment in relationship and everything else. But, 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 Lord.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Who wouldn't want to just sit in the same poop all time and not change anything, right? I mean, you gotta, you gotta change, you gotta get better. And the thing that has impacted that is just, you know, is, you know, trying to figure out how to do those things and the instruction manual I used was the Bible. So, because I didn't know anything else. So, but I didn't, I was pretty much a wild animal.

• 8:44Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:46Shawn Ryan?

  I can't see that with you.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Well, it's a long time ago.

• 8:51Shawn Ryan?

  But, well.

• 8:53Shawn Ryan?

  So you didn't grow up, you didn't grow up?

• 8:56Speaker 02

  No.

• 8:56Shawn Ryan?

  Going to church, Christianity, none of that?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  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 eighteen hundreds. That's pretty cool keepsake, but um, and uh, my parents were just, you know, 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.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  If you asked them, they would have said they were. 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, ten dollars to memorize the Lord's Prayer. That's the closest I've ever came to, you know, and if we went to her house, we went to church. 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 ten times in my life, maybe. But no, I didn't know anything. I was just a character.

• 10:02Shawn Ryan?

  Where did you grow up?

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Uh, just over the tracks over here in Antioch, Antioch, Tennessee.

• 10:07Shawn Ryan?

  Antioch, Tennessee?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:09Shawn Ryan?

  What were you into? What was it like growing up?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Uh, it was, uh, it was, uh, nowadays it's a very 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'd bought all these little, you know, some nice little suburban homes and it was a little suburbia. Leave it to Beaver and um, so, uh, but I mean, this was a neighborhood where this, uh,

• 10:46Speaker 02

  Uh, blue collar, maybe some white collar, but um, I mean, it's a different world, long time ago. Yeah. But the neighborhood where little boys got in fights and uh, big boys got in fights. And it wasn't, it wasn't, it wasn't like we have anything today. You wouldn't, you wouldn't even, I can't think of one of my grandkids being in that situation today at all, but it was a, um, it wasn't horrible, but it was just tough. Just tough neighborhood, you know? What did your parents do? The 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 three weeks after I turned eighteen. That's what I was gonna do. I was gonna be a big real estate guy.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Did they, were they, was, were they successful realtors? Yeah, yeah, I mean, they were in it for many, many years. Uh, they had finally closed it in one of the downturns, but, and went on to other stuff, but I guess they were in it for probably ten or fifteen years. Most of my, you know, growing up years, that's what they did. And um, so that's, that was the good news, cause 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, twelve years old, listening to Zig Ziglar, you know, and uh, you know, uh, talking about attitude and I'm like, yeah, okay. Um, but I learned to sell early and uh, that's, that's, I was a grip in a salesman's household.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  So there's a lot of wonderful qualities come out of that and, and also you get grit, you know, out of a situation like that. You don't, you, 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. Mm-hmm. Um, so, it's a little, little. Yeah, I think that's a.

• 12:36Shawn Ryan?

  Good lessons that seems like we're starting to lose these days.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you can, you can, you can learn them without them necessarily be in that environment. But yeah, it's, it's something that moms and dads, we have to be really intentional with our kids to let them fail, let them get a bump, let them develop some grit, some character, some courage.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  You know, how do you handle a high intensity conflict situation, you know, and not something like you've done, I don't mean that, but I mean, just in, you know, and just in business. If you've just got somebody that's gonna bow up, what are you gonna do?

• 13:11Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  You're just gonna walk away every time? Um, but sometimes walking away is a good idea, but sometimes metaphorically busting them in the nose is a real good idea, too.

• 13:20Shawn Ryan?

  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? Totally different environment.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. And, but, you know, we just, again, we, we, in our house, we were doing it through the lens of scripture, through the lens of, okay, you know, 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 art, 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 around in 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 the compassionate aspect of this?

• 14:23Speaker 02

  And, you know, what'd you learn? And what was God talking to you about while you were sitting there in this, 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, 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 Ramsey and you're a 12 year old working the book table or shipping department or whatever,

• 15:07Speaker 02

  you gotta work twice as hard, three times as hard as everybody else. And you gotta be three times as cheerful as everybody else and kind as everybody 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, we were tough on them around the business. And so, you know, my middle daughter, Rachel was working the book table and one of the events and, um, one of my guys, 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 he corrected her, you know, and she's like, she tells that story.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  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 gotta put them in there. It's a big deal.

• 16:04Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 16:15Speaker 05

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 16:21Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped growing? You starve, you freeze to death. That's what.

• 16:25Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 16:28Speaker 06

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 16:34Shawn Ryan?

  When did you, you grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit. When, when was your first business?

• 16:40Speaker 02

  12.

• 16:41Shawn Ryan?

  12 years old.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I told daddy, I said, I want to go down to the quick sack, get a I C. I need some money. He said, you don't need money. You need a job.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  He said, "Lawnmowers in the basement, go knock on the closest fifty doors." And I said, "Oh, I don't know." He goes, "Get in the car." And he took me down on Nolan'sville Road over here. Little print shop printed up five hundred business cards, said, "Dave's Lawns." I said, "Dad, that's a little overkill. I just wanted an icy."

• 17:11Speaker 02

  He, uh, came home and he said, "Go knock on the closest fifty 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 throw your shoulders back and you smile and you give them service and they'll hire you. And Dad gummed it didn't work. I had twenty-seven yards to cut at twelve years old.

• 17:35Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  Which, you know, I think it's called child abuse now, but, um... But it made me keep a profit and loss statement on my business. My income minus his lawn mowers I tore up equals net profit. But, uh, it was, it was, you know, and I loved it. I, I, um, cause I've always kind of been a little business nerd, I guess. And so I'm cutting Slugger Carnahans yard for three dollars and my buddies are working at Burger King Whopper Floppers. And, you know, they're making this lawn, this is seventies, right? So they're making buck and a quarter an hour. So I'm figuring out, I gotta cut this grass in faster than two hours or I'm making only what they're making.

• 18:16Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding. You were thinking like that already?

• 18:18Speaker 02

  While I'm mowing, I'm like going, looking at my watch going, "I gotta, I gotta get these dollar per hour. I gotta keep this, I gotta make this work." And that's how I priced the yards out so I could 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 gonna go, if I'm gonna sweat like that, I need to make some money.

• 18:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. So twelve years old, you're going, that, that taught you confidence, that taught you responsibility of business. You're, you're, and you're already thinking?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Interacting with adults, you know, and acting like you have a, you're crap together.

• 18:52Shawn Ryan?

  How long did that last?

• 18:54Speaker 02

  Uh, I guess the rest of my life. Oh, the yards?

• 18:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, the yards.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Oh, man, I cut enough grass by the time I was eighteen. God said I never had to do it again. 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, cause 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, sixteen years old, to paint it and change the dishwasher out and that kind of stuff. So I did all that. So I paid cash for my first car, doing that. And, uh, and then, um, that's how I actually paid for the first, uh, couple of semesters of college, just working my butt off, swinging a hammer and turning a screwdriver. No kidding? Did your, would, did your dad instigate that or?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, he could do it. He could fix it. 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 teat, 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,

• 20:21Speaker 02

  but it's, um, I'm not uncomfortable. I remember when I was taking my wife out on a date in college, I think it was about our third or fourth date, I think I had a dollar sixteen in my checking account. I was so broke, I couldn't pay attention. And I had a nineteen seventy-four 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 two hundred something thousand miles on it. It was a piece of crap. And, uh, uh, I was explaining to her how someday I'm gonna be a millionaire. And we went across a railroad track and muffler fell off my car. And, uh, but I had a crap, I had a, crashed my toolbox in the trunk with a towel to lay on and a towel to pick the muffler up and a nine sixteenths wrench to run the U-bolt

• 21:06Speaker 02

  up. And, uh, it had fallen off before, so I knew how to fix it. And, um, um, just rolled up on there, fixed it and dusted my hands off when we went on the date. She's like, you just fixed the car and got back in right after you tell me you're gonna be a millionaire? Yeah, okay.

• 21:21Speaker 02

  She thought I was full of crap because I was.

• 21:24Shawn Ryan?

  What, you know, just like we were talking about before the interview, I mean, I've 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, 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?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:51Shawn Ryan?

  So what age do you, what age did you start instilling that into them? What?

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Well, I just, um, sometimes people get, um, from a job, working for someone else, the,

• 22:08Speaker 02

  uh, illusion, and it is a, 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 because you know you gotta run this whole thing right, or, or, oh my God, we're gonna, 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.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  Your safety mechanism, and so even if you're working for someone else, you're self-employed, you just have one client.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  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, and so if you're gonna 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 self-dependent. And then what that does automatically leads you into wanting to run your own thing. You know, you wanna, you, you don't wanna work for somebody else because you wanna go, you know, I'll, I will take the risk of, I will accept the fact that there is risk. I'm not delusional about it and I'm gonna just do it anyway. And so, um, you don't necessarily,

• 23:41Speaker 02

  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, 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 approach to that. But they're just not under the illusion that someone else is gonna do it for them, um, or that, uh, their success is dependent, uh, are entitled, or it's none of that. It's, um, sowing and reaping.

• 24:13Shawn Ryan?

  What age did that start? And, and how did you, how did you instill that into them? How did you show them?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Um, well, you wanna be age appropriate. I mean, you've got babies, so don't send them to the salt mines. You know, it's, um, but, you know, uh, three or four years old, we start to go, okay, there's consequences and cause and effect going on. Again, Bible talks about sowing and reaping. You're gonna 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. It's like, all kids need to age appropriately, need to learn to work, to give, so that they're not self-centered,

• 25:02Speaker 02

  they're other-centered, to save, so they're future oriented, not just present oriented, which is emotional maturity, which not gonna have much of that at four. Um, and, um,

• 25:14Speaker 02

  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. 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. Mm-hmm. 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 toys in your room, which when you're four usually means mom and dad clean up eighty percent of them. And we make a game out of it and we sing songs. And, but you're the best room cleaner in the world.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  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's simple. Uh, so it's positive reinforcement, but emotionally you're starting to tie work equals money. Work equals money. Cause I meet fifty year olds that don't know work equals money. Yeah. They haven't 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, and you know, and by the time they're ten or twelve, it starts to get pretty sophisticated. And then we said, okay, we're gonna do.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  The money aspect, we said, we got, you know, your, your car, when you turn sixteen is your responsibility. But we're gonna help. We're gonna have four oh one Dave. We're gonna match. So whatever you save, I'll match it. If you save nothing, get ready for a real nice bicycle.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  So you, you, your little butt's gonna be walking. Cause you're gonna pay for your car, but I'm gonna, whatever you save. Now I will tell you, you know, you're starting young, uh, make sure you put a limit on that. Cause it, the third one figured it out. Yeah, he had fifteen grand. And I'm looking to buy a thirty thousand dollar car for a sixteen year old. Not a chance.

• 27:19Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  So, uh, we talked that down and we worked that out and, um, he ended up giving some of that to a ministry. And 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's still thirty thousand freaking dollars. But I had to keep my word because 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 care of my car. I worked for this.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  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, you know, they're 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 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'll 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.

• 28:42Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that's great advice. And so you started, you start, back to you. You started. You were a real estate agent at age eighteen?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:52Shawn Ryan?

  How did that start?

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Well, I turned eighteen and, uh, passed my real estate test like two weeks later. Um, and I sold a house like three weeks later, which who buys a house from an eighteen year old? What kind of? But I talked some guy into it, a guy from high school. Forty-two thousand, seven hundred and fifty dollars on East Ridge Drive off of Haywood Lane, right over here in Antioch. And, uh, that house today would be eight hundred grand probably, you know? But, um, I went off to college and, um, uh.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  I was to take to get a degree in real 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 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, Marville, Maryville is how it's spelled, but over there we call it Marville, Tennessee. And, um, drove back and forth to UT and sold real estate there. And while, and to get through school, I made enough to get through school. And, um, then I graduated from there. And when I got home, I had a couple of jobs and then I ended up, uh, working for a home

• 30:10Speaker 02

  builder and then I left that and started buying houses and doing flip this house. And that's when I got wealthy.

• 30:16Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 30:24Speaker 02

  Uh, well, I mean, I sold houses all the way through college. And when I got out of college, I went to work for a home builder selling houses and I worked there like a year.

• 30:32Shawn Ryan?

  So how old?

• 30:33Speaker 02

  I bought my first house probably to flip when I was, um, I was twenty-two or twenty-three, something like that. And I flipped it. But there wasn't cable TV to tell you how to flip this house. There wasn't TikTok 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 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 I was twenty-six, we had about four million dollars of real estate and a little over a million dollar net worth.

• 31:09Shawn Ryan?

  By twenty-six, you had four million dollars in real estate?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Made two hundred and fifty K 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 dollars. 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 twenty-eight, I bankrupt. Made two hundred and fifty K one year and the next year I made six thousand. 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 buddy.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  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 gotta, I, I wanna be him. So, okay, here's the five things I wanna learn from him for, 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.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  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, that's it. That's all we got. No, there's one more thing. He said, if you don't know this man named Jesus, you need to get introduced because it will change the way you do business. You change the way you do relationships and business is all relationships. You're gonna 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'm gonna go to church. Um, she's like, we're going to church. I'm like, who are you? She, we got married and she remembered she was a Baptist, you know?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And so she forgot that prior to marriage, but, um, then she comes on, oh, we're 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 her 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 doing? My husband? And so we went into a couple of churches and they were boring as crud and like if God's here, if he was here, he left. Cause nobody here is excited about it. And if there's got a God, you gotta be excited about it. I mean, come on, hell of. And so we go in the back door of this little church over on, uh, O'Hare Boulevard over here, Christ Church and, um. You know, you sit on the back row so you can eject in case they get weird.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  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 it. I'm, I'm gonna be able to eject. And um, couldn't get away from that place because of old school pastor. He's standing at the back door and shaking everybody's hand as they left. Only about 400 people in there. And his wife was a big squishy woman and 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. And if you don't agree with that, you're what's known as wrong.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  And he would call out stuff in the political spectrum and say, this is morally wrong. Our nation, you know, stuff. And I went. You know, that's 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, man. This is eighties, 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, a hat, you know? But nowadays it's what I wear to church. But um, but then you certainly didn't. But there's a woman in the choir starts waving her hand. Raising her hand. I'm like, Sharon, if they get snakes out, I'm out of here. This is crazy. You know, and it's like, so, yeah. And um.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  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 kid and we were making money, but you know Jaguars and Rolexes. Weren't satisfying. It wasn't enough.

• 36:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I'm sorry to interrupt her, but you know, I see, you know.

• 36:13Shawn Ryan?

  It didn't take me long to figure that out. And, um, you know, but 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, the flash and all that. And I think it, uh, I think it actually detours a lot of people from...

• 36:38Shawn Ryan?

  They, 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 run whatever, and they just put all this shit out on social media. And I, I think it, it, it, it makes people think that this becomes unreachable. And, and so, you know, when I finally started making money, I bought some dumb shit. I mean, I just talked about, you know, the BMW.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  We all did.

• 37:11Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 37:23Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know that it was a, um, a singular moment. It was probably on a gradient, truthfully. Um, because that was my deal. I'm gonna 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 use built a house of cards. But, but the concept worked of, I'm gonna go get some stuff and I went and got some stuff. And, um, but you start to realize pretty quick, it's like, hey, you know, if you eat enough lobster, it tastes like soap. I, I love lobster, but I never had lobster till I was 12 years old and Red Lobster came to town. And I thought, man, I'm gonna eat all that I can get.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  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, it's not, it's unfulfilling. And it doesn't take a genius to grasp that. Um, but, and, and so 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 and they're talking about being, oh, it's not all about you. It's, you know, the 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.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  But, um, so I, I'm in there for other reasons, 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 gonna change that. You're, 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 Guber. You know, I mean, it's like, obviously I don't have my crap together. So obviously I need a new instruction manual and I need a, someone else running my life other than just me.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Because I'm pretty self-sufficient, but I need, I need a, I need some instruction. And so, um, because when I went broke, I wasn't just broke, I was broken.

• 39:45Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  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 that's not the point. Uh, the house you're building is really nice. The house I live in, you've been there, it's nice. There's nothing, nothing wrong with that, but what's wrong, 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 twenties. And then I've been able to rebuild from losing everything over the last 35 years.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  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 a, you know, a guy, I gotta... 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 and 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.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Kid, you have no idea.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  I come out there, there's a little ding about like this on the thing, but that's probably, you know, gonna be fifty grand or something. It's like, and he's like, I don't, I don't, I don't know my insurance. I don't, my parents are gonna kill me. He's like seventeen years old and I'm like, here's what. There you go. I said, just, I'm gonna go over here and puke in the bushes and you're just gonna go home and we're not gonna worry about it. He goes, you're letting me go? 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 I, and I'm, and I got home and Sharon's like laughing at me and she's like, yeah, your problem is you just don't care.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  You, you like the car, but you don't, you don't love the car. You know, you're not, it's not, you're, you're not worshiping the car. It's just a fun car. Yeah. You know, and um, it's a ridiculously cool car, but it doesn't, it doesn't, it's not a, I'm not attached to it. And so I can just go let the seventeen year old go home and not kill him and.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Cause it's not, it's not gonna, 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. They, they're gonna fail miserably. Your husband's gonna leave his underwear on the floor and you're gonna 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, to be God that aren't capable. That's the problem with idol worship. That's the core of it.

• 42:50Shawn Ryan?

  When you mentioned that your, your business mentor, the, the guy that you saw spoke said you need to, basically you need to implement Christ in your life, into your business. What did he mean by that?

• 43:05Speaker 02

  I think he just was saying your character's changed and you become other centered rather than self centered. You become, when you're selling, if you're a taker, the people buying can smell it on you.

• 43:19Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  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 so, uh, again, selfless or selfless or self-ish, other centered, self centered. And, um, so we teach the sales team at Ramsey, 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 mean, when they leave doing business with Ramsey, that they've had an, an experience, 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.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  And so, um, you know, if you're in that kind of a setting, the server makes all the difference. Uh, because they're gonna, they're, they're not just slapping stuff on the table and, uh, you, you can have the finest food, the finest wine and list in the world and, and still have a crummy experience because you weren't served.

• 44:21Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. So how, with that being said, how would a sales pitch have gone without, without that implemented? And then how did it, what, what, what did it look like next?

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's manipulative without, because my goal is for me to win.

• 44:40Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 45:14Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Are they there to help you? Or are you just another dip? You know, and so it's are they there to, you know, because you ever you meet someone and they light up, you know, uh, you think about it. It's very contrived now, but it's welcome to mows, 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 you went to his home.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  You meet medicine, 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 in the, in the moment that he created, you know? It's just fabulous. I love that kind of stuff.

• 46:03Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool. So, yeah, it sounds like, so be personable, listen, listen to what they want, help them.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Be, yeah, you know, what would you do if it's your little brother? What'd you do if he's your mama? You make sure they took, got took care of.

• 46:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  And treat like, treat every one of them like that.

• 46:23Shawn Ryan?

  It's a great.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  Blow their mind.

• 46:26Shawn Ryan?

  What went wrong? What went wrong in your business that you went bankrupt?

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Uh, we had a, I had a one point two and ninety day notes because again, I was buying a property, fixing it, you know, had a rehab crews running, and so I'd buy a property, fix it up and flip it. And so at the end of ninety days, you've got to pay the whole thing. Or you can renew the note, pay the interest and renew it for another ninety days if the bank allows that.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  And they did because I'd never lost money on a deal. But if I had a house that we didn't get it finished and it, you know, it took six months instead of three months to get it fixed and sold, I paid 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 due for a million too, and it's all tied up in real estate. You've 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 obligations. And, and so the income stopped because the income was from the profit and the profit all went away because 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

• 47:39Speaker 02

  at 75% loan to value ratios and the things. So that was all working. 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. But I had built it on, on this fragile, unsustainable 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 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

• 48:21Speaker 02

  do. And anyway, big argument. And, 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 because Dave was in trouble. And so they, they, you know, we spent one year making 250,000, the next year I made 6,000 because 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 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

• 49:04Speaker 02

  money, but they would stick me again, you know. So I, I was, I was bleeding out on every pore. And, and I, I was, I was just bound and determined I was going to make it. And I almost made it, but I didn't. I ran out of emotional and spiritual fuel and I couldn't.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  I was really struggling with that. 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, there's nothing about bankruptcy in the Bible, you know, and so 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 gonna 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-

• 49:49Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, so you had kids when this happened?

• 49:51Speaker 02

  I had-

• 49:52Shawn Ryan?

  Two kids?

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Rachel was born in April. We filed in September. So she was a little baby and Denise was a toddler. And Sharon would have left, but she didn't have a car.

• 50:01Shawn Ryan?

  (laughing)

• 50:05Speaker 02

  She, I mean, it was awful. And I stood in the shower as hot as I could stand. I just stood there and cried. I was so scared I couldn't breathe. I didn't know what to do. And, um, yeah, so, but I just, I ran. My tank ran dry. My emotional, spiritual, courage, whatever you wanna call it, was dry. I just, I didn't know what else to do. I just did. And finally, they like, are coming to take the furniture. And I'm like, then I got all redneck, like, they can't, I took everything else. They can't have the baby bed. Like, I couldn't get another baby bed. But I was like, so, so we filed on Thursday night, Thursday afternoon, to keep them from, the truck from backing up at the house on

• 50:47Speaker 02

  Friday morning. I took it that far. Two and a half years of hell.

• 50:51Shawn Ryan?

  That was two and a half years?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:55Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 50:57Speaker 02

  And it was, water got cut off. And (laughing) 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 (laughing) because 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 was my fault. All of it was my fault. And there's no, the shame and the condemnation. And then you start to heal. And those scriptures, there is therefore now no condemnation.

• 51:32Shawn Ryan?

  So how, so was it, was it a two and a half year long process of them taking everything? Or did it-

• 51:38Speaker 02

  From the time they called our first notes, from the time they called our first notes, we filed it. We said, okay, you know.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  And I gave him the middle finger, 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 them all off and be done. And then figure out something else to do, or whatever. But I couldn't get it all moved. And then they started foreclosing. And I had unsecured notes out, too. And they started suing me on those. I got sued like 78 times. Yeah, we were on a first name 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 no wonder Dave Ramsey doesn't borrow money.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. 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 is 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 stupid enough to do it again. You're gonna put me back in shackles.

• 53:00Speaker 00

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• 53:29Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 53:40Speaker 05

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 53:46Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped going? You start, you freeze to death, that's what?

• 53:50Speaker 07

  With great power, comes great deniability.

• 53:54Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 53:55Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 out of 10 without parent.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Interesting. Well.

• 54:03Shawn Ryan?

  But 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 that?

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 54:12Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 54:13Shawn Ryan?

  Everything's built grassroots?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  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 started talking about opening up a business again, after that, when I was 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.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  But a couple of years later, I started learning the 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 Sharon and I started, I said, okay, we're gonna handle our marriage by the book. We're gonna handle our kids by the book. We're gonna handle our finances by the book. And, you know, the beautiful thing about going broke is you no longer care whatever my thinks. So I'm not taking a poll. I, I know, I love you, I appreciate you, but you don't really get a vote. You know, we get one vote, Jesus's vote gets a vote, that he's the only one gets a vote. And so this is how we, you know, submit yourselves one to another. This is how we're gonna be married. That means I gotta dry dishes.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  And that means I gotta serve my wife and as a, as a high quality husband, you 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 gonna do it this way. Whatever this book tells me, this is what I'm gonna do. And these people in my life that are new, 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 gonna listen to them. And so I had like one friend who had an incredible marriage. He wasn't a great business guy, but I could learn how to be a husband from him. And I had another guy who was 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.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  And so 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 King James is steward. I'm a steward, which just means I'm a manager of other people's property. And so I don't own Ramsey. God owns it. And so when I started it, I'm like, okay, God, what do you want to name your business? And 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 gonna do is we're gonna help people. We're gonna give hope. We're gonna, you know, we're gonna help people that are hurting like we're hurting. And, you know, and so I sat there with a yellow pad.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  I'm like, okay, God. Next morning, an hour sitting there with a yellow pad, nothing on it. And I wrote down a couple of 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 Spirit and pepperoni, right? And so, and finally I wrote down light. And I honestly looked up and I went, you're just really not good at marketing. Light consulting? I mean, light? Light? That's awful. I'm having this argument with God, like he's worried about me. And, and I was over at the church doing something, helping, helping this little couple that had their car payment behind.

• 57:49Speaker 02

  And they had these concordances in the church, these books that you can look up what the Greek or Hebrew meaning is. And I thought, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna open this business. We're gonna help people and we're not gonna rub their nose in our Christianity, but they're gonna at least know where we got the information. This is where we're coming from. Okay? So, you know, and so.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  We're gonna 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 opened 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, 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.

• 59:01Speaker 02

  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 light under a bushel. Put on a lampstand for all to see," which is what we were promising to do, that we were gonna, you know, be a light to people. Okay, that's you, God. And so the company that actually owns Ramsey is called Lampo. No kidding? Yeah. The Lampo Group, Inc. is the actual corporation, DBA, doing business as Ramsey Solutions. Ran it that way publicly facing for a long, long time, but we started doing some branding shifts. And, but, uh, so God named the company. It's his company. He runs it. I don't own it.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  And if he decides to, uh, bankrupt it by deciding, or it's not gonna 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 people to be compensated? How are you gonna treat the girl that gets cancer that works on the front desk? Oh, we paid her, and she wasn't at work for three years. For three 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 would, he would taking care of her, her family, wouldn't he? Oh, you got cancer.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  We're gonna write you up for not being at work. And you're getting reeled up three times, you're gonna get fired, right? I mean, I don't think that's how God run a business. So we've done stuff like that. And we had a kid get hit in the head with a ball at camp over in North Carolina. And his daddy, I was in Scotland, but my leadership team did this. And, um,

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  They called me to tell me they chartered a plane to send Dad over there because the camp called, the hospital called and told the Dad the kid's got four hours to live. You can't get to Asheville, North Carolina from here in four 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 send him over on a jet. And the good news is, again, kid made it.

• 1:01:12Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:01:35Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I run this very, very similar to that. Uh, I really got a great relationship with everybody that works there. I care about them. I consider this like a family to me.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can feel it when you walk in.

• 1:01:50Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, I got, 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 people's, people see the generosity that I have. And there have been a handful of people that come here and they take advantage of that. 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?

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Um, that and even worse, they, um, you find out later that somebody's betraying 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,

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:03:11Speaker 02

  It's like, I wanna 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 thirty 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 have been friends for twenty, thirty years through this whole spiritual journey. And so I'll, I'll just vent with those guys. I'm like, you know, and they go, okay, look,

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  you got

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  two thousand, fifteen hundred people or so that used to work at Ramsey. You've got eleven hundred that work there now. Four of them are twerps.

• 1:03:58Speaker 02

  Keep the ratio of how much you're, get, how much rent you give in your brain to those four, correct? Because it really should be about one percent of your thought pattern instead of twenty-five percent of your thought pattern. Cause 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 and I can do this and I shut that Facebook group down. And I've, 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, it's a real human emotion, uh, but it doesn't invalidate the idea.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  You're not gonna get to the end of your life and go, you know, I regret helping that lady who had cancer. Yeah. You're not gonna 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, you used some of God's money that he lets you manage to do something for somebody, one of his other children, is what it amounts to. And, um, and, and, you know.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  God has some crazy kids, man. Some of them ain't right.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  And so, you know, you just gotta go, ah. 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 gonna quit hurting when somebody does you wrong.

• 1:05:29Shawn Ryan?

  Is it transformative?

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  But it doesn't mean you don't be generous.

• 1:05:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  That's the point.

• 1:05:33Shawn Ryan?

  But I got, I can't stop that. That's just part of who I am.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Shawn Ryan?

  At the same aspect, I mean, is, is that, I mean, has that transformed you into somebody who's a little more guarded?

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably. Uh, and, and I'm probably a little wiser, uh, about the generosity. You know, I, I, cause I don't wanna throw good money after bad. That's not, obviously, I'm not gonna, I don't wanna be a blessing to somebody who's gonna 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.

• 1:06:28Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

  And I'm gonna go, I, I think about the unintended consequences of this and I kinda sometimes I think, well, if I do all this and then they, you know, decide they're gonna be nasty later on social media about Dave Ramsey or something, how am I gonna feel? Am I still gonna be glad I did it? And I'm like, yeah, cause 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, 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 could tell I have this conversation with myself a lot, but yeah, I'm probably more guarded. I'm not, not cynical. I don't want to get cynical, but I do want to be more, I do want

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  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? Cause 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 gonna do, this gal. You know what they're gonna 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.

• 1:07:43Shawn Ryan?

  So backtracking just a little bit, so was, I'm sorry, what, what was the like, what was the original name of the business?

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Lambo.

• 1:07:51Shawn Ryan?

  Lambo. Is that what was born out of the, out of the downturn?

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:56Shawn Ryan?

  The consulting business?

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. I first started helping people stop foreclosures because I was a foreclosure and I used to buy foreclosures. And so I know how to stop foreclosures and I, house is three payments behind. I know how to work the, you know, the deal with the bank, the deal with the mortgage company and get them 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, because they're, they're complete twerps.

• 1:08:36Shawn Ryan?

  How did you market that?

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  I'd

• 1:08:38Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, coming from somebody that's making $6,000, $6,000 a year.

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Shawn Ryan?

  To a consulting business.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Well, I, number one, I, again, I went back to doing some real estate deals. That's what we were eating on.

• 1:08:50Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  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. 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,

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  And then we could say, okay, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna sell this car and we're gonna do this and, you know, I'm gonna get you out of this, but it's gonna 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, uh, a guy from a restaurant chain that went to our church called me and said, um, "Hey, one of our managers has got an IRS lien. Can you help him? The company's gonna 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

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  guy goes, "Hey, I want you to come over at one of our manager's meetings and teach this 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 manager's 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, you know, sat down, 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

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  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. "WWT and we're talking Nashville." I mean, it was awful, so bad. But the answers to the questions where people were in pain, the phones stayed lit up every day. And in a 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 ending, do with the broadcast quality. You know, I mean, do with the ability to speak or enunciate or properly form a vowel, you

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  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 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. I wanna get off the air to feed my family and...

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  We told the guy run the station, you know, if we're really bad, you can cut our pay in half because he wasn't paying us anything. But it just, it took off and then 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. Then we started getting paid because the, we could sell ads because of our ratings and we're getting paid for the ads. And we could, 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.

• 1:12:34Shawn Ryan?

  So it was, it was the, it was the company that bought them out of bankruptcy that kind of you turned it into a business?

• 1:12:43Speaker 02

  Well, that's when we actually started making some money at it. And 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 because 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 because nobody wanted to buy on this station. You know, we thought three people were listening to them, we're in our family, you know? But we, the phone was ringing, we knew that. And we, we said, we're going to do a little seminar at the Ramada Inn and 600 people showed up.

• 1:13:21Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit.

• 1:13:23Speaker 02

  And I'm like, oh my God, there's people out there under this radio.

• 1:13:26Shawn Ryan?

  What time span are we talking here?

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Oh, you know, we were on the air for maybe a year and then we just, 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 flamethrower. So it covered from Alabama to Kentucky, all of middle Tennessee. It was, and all of a sudden this thing's like a blowtorch. And they started telling us, you gotta say the call letters. As a matter of fact, we're going to change the phone number, 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 phantom cume, meaning it was there, but nobody knew

• 1:14:13Speaker 02

  it was there. Mm-hmm. And then we activated it with proper handling of the stupid radio. And we ended up doing. And they took us to three hours and the guy running the thing, he goes, I'm gonna 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. He's freaking Elvis. He invented rock and roll. I mean, you, there's no way, because 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. It gave us a story to tell with ratings. We didn't beat him anywhere else hardly, ever.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  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 ratings came in, went, this is wrong. And they're, it's not wrong. We have a huge radio signal. It's FM. He's on AM. We've got this other great lineup around you. Gordon, G. Gordon Liddy. 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, alright, we're gonna, uh, we're gonna stay on your station, but you don't own, we don't wanna 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 wanna syndicate this thing. Someday I wanna put it on other radio stations.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  And I'll take no money right now. And I'll make my money selling books and doing seminars and doing some consulting work. Uh, I can make my money doing that. And, you know, radio lost money for ten years on our P and L. They 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. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, put us on. Jackson, Tennessee, put us on. Then Jackson, Mississippi, put us on. And then Spokane, Washington, and then Seattle. And we just, one at a time. Wow. And there's six hundred and forty stations now in the network today. Wow.

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  It's the second largest talk radio network in America. Sean Hannity's number one. Or number two.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  Wow. But it just, it was thirty years of scratching and clawing, fighting, and pushing and pulling and putting up with radio business. What did 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, ten or fifteen years ago, the internet and broadband is starting to have market penetration and, um, he goes, we need a podcast. And I said, what's, what's a, what's a podcast? And he goes, well, a couple of 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 paywall. And I'm like, nah, I don't think I want to do that. And he goes, oh, man, we gotta try it.

• 1:17:13Speaker 02

  He goes, this is where it's gonna go. And I said, 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 would put out a podcast, but they put it behind a paywall. I mean, 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.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  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 it since we were on both of them. And they ended up giving us a whole channel for a while on, 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 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, I'll never forget, I was with, uh, Brian Mayfield was one of our, uh, say, 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

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  thing's kind of working. And I'm like, what do you mean? And 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 ads. You can put just a couple ads on there an hour. And, um, so we made a million dollars? He goes, yeah. I said, well, why, why aren't we making three 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, YouTube started popping up and people started putting stuff on YouTube. So put it on there. And then, you know, Spotify joins the 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

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:19:36Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, rewind it a little bit. When, so you're doing the radio show, but this developed into books and coaching and in-person coaching and, and courses. And when did all that start happening?

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  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 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 not, 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

• 1:20:30Speaker 02

  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, um,

• 1:20:41Speaker 02

  At the end of the year of 93, I told Sharon, I said, 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, 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 all in on Financial Peace. The book was called Financial Peace, the class was 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

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  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 she said, man, I mean, she was hurting, we were still bleeding out of every pore. We were eating, but we're making 130 grand, and 1993 is a lot of money, but we talked about it and fretted over it and prayed over it. And then one morning she woke up and she said, I think God's saying you need to do this, I think you're supposed to do this. And I went, game on. And I stopped doing all real estate and dove all in, January 1, and that year I made $61,000.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  I was pretty close on my estimate. And I don't make that anymore. That was the worst year I ever had.

• 1:22:19Shawn Ryan?

  Damn. Damn. When did, I mean, the book that I read was Total Money Makeover.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  That was the second one, yeah.

• 1:22:29Shawn Ryan?

  That was the second one.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  Well, it's actually the third one, technically, but yeah. Financial Peace, the book, was the first one. It took off that year. And I, what I did was, I kept, every time I got a call on the radio that the book didn't answer their question.

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  I wrote it down. 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 I would do is anytime anybody would call, go, okay, here's the answer to your question. Here's exactly what you need to go do, and I'm gonna mail you a book. Because it's gonna 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, well, 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."

• 1:23:32Speaker 02

  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 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, Viking Penguin, wants to come down and visit with you and 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 gonna buy this book, they need to bring a really big truck full of money." Because, uh, and I'm gonna keep control of every bit of it, because 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 this. And so, I said, "I don't think they got enough money to buy this book." And turns out, they did.

• 1:24:17Speaker 02

  They did. And we did this very unusual contract where I controlled 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 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, the thing, the whole world changes. And, um...

• 1:24:59Speaker 02

  That book is now done 3.2 million total.

• 1:25:03Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  Since nineteen, including the ones I used to carry in the trunk of my car in 1992. And so it's a long time and it's still in hardback and it still looks exactly the same because I control all that. So, 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 that was a two book deal. The other book didn't do that well. And then Total Money Makeover came from Thomas Nelson here in Nashville. Mike Hyatt 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 what I say every day on the radio. Why don't I do enough, tell somebody like something new? And he goes, well, that book's what to do.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:25:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  That's the biggest thing we've ever done. It's nuts.

• 1:26:03Shawn Ryan?

  It's a damn good book. I hope everybody listens.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I didn't want to do it because I thought it was insincere because I had this other, I'd already said all the, 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.

• 1:26:22Shawn Ryan?

  What other, what other aspects of the business did you start developing? You, you started with the coaching, went to radio, went to podcasts, books.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just kept looking and going, okay, where is there a need? Where's somebody, uh, that we can get help with this material? And so a guy, a coach up here 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 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 didn't want y'all to think I'm stealing something. I just wanted you to know we're doing it. And I went, you know, that's really cool because ever since I've had a single book, first thing people pick up a book off the table, they look at me and go, why isn't this taught in high school?

• 1:27:16Speaker 04

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:27:20Speaker 07

  On October 2nd.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:27:25Speaker 07

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:27:30Speaker 07

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:27:33Speaker 06

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:27:37Speaker 07

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:27:40Speaker 06

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:27:41Speaker 07

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without terror.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  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 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 developing 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 we filmed a little thing and put it on BHS. And put it in his class. And then we put it a couple of other places. And then we got thrown out of three or four places because I said Jesus in the video, and they freaked out. And so then I got to learn a whole new thing about law,

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  which I didn't know, the 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 but we fixed all that. And we've got it to where we can, actually, side note, you can actually use scripture and talk about God in public school. As long as it's instructive, not, 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, whatever debt. And you can, you know, it's instructive, but you can't say Jesus is the way, the truth and the light. So you can't proselytize.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  And there's very clear stuff on that. Now, a lot of hot, a lot of public school. Administrators are cowards and they think anything that says Jesus should be thrown in the street 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. And that was 25 years ago we started that. It's a massive business. Wow. And now we opened up a full econ curriculum to go with it because apparently we need to teach what capitalism is. I know that was a problem, but we need to. So we're now doing that too. So, um, and there's a lot of Texas, Florida are the latest two that have just passed mandatory personal finance class in a high school.

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  And guess what? We can help them with that. So, yeah, and we've got a, then we had, okay, the financial piece class, we ended up going through 50,000 churches and 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's taught in church and very in your face, not subtle at all. And corporate America didn't want that much in your face, which is understandable. 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, reconfiguring all that in a much more palatable way called

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  Smart Dollar. And now U-Haul and Costco and many, many other companies teach that, 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 budgeting app. Um, gosh, almost 10 years ago now and iterated every day almost, updated, updated, updated. And it's freaking incredible. Every dollar and I think 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.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  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 too.

• 1:31:43Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever, I mean, I know that, you know, back at the beginning, you said that the money kinda came to you. People just came to you and offered you $250 uh to go speak to their, to them and, and their employees. But, I mean, when did you, when did it have to start kinda transitioning from a, from hey, people coming to you to somewhat of a sell? And did you find that?

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, like if we're, we have a sales team that sells the curriculum to high schools.

• 1:32:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  We have a sales team that sells the smart dollar to corporate America.

• 1:32:12Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  So we're going after, they're not calling, they're not lining up around the block. We gotta go get them.

• 1:32:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  Um, we gotta tell them where they're, a lot of times they don't even know where they are. 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 wanna buy it or not. And so you gotta 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. And like, hey dude, you need to actually read the curriculum. You're kinda sounding foolish. Um, because 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 oughta, before you just start being a left-wing Barker. But, um, anyway, we just work our way through that stuff. And yeah, there, we have to be proactive in sales.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  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, because pastors aren't comfortable usually talking about money. Because they don't wanna 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're, you know, if you're pastoring, you oughta 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.

• 1:33:36Shawn Ryan?

  What does God say about money?

• 1:33:38Speaker 02

  I mean, there's 2,500 scriptures 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, borrow or 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 debt are negative. And so it's your heavenly father who loves you, who's crazy about you saying, "Son, this 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.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  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." And, 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 are stores of choice, food and oil. Wise people save money, saving, investing. Uh, Ecclesiastes 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, the scriptures like that, that sound like grandpa. It's not like grandma. It's common sense. Uh huh. You know, there's nothing in here that's like, "Ooh."

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  You know, you're right. I mean, there's just, it's just like, 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'm, 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 a loan. You're lacking in sense. The contemporary English version, the CEV says, um, "If you cosign for someone else, you're an idiot." That's what that version says.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  And so, you know, but and guess what? I've cosigned some loans and a hundred percent of the time they turned out bad back in the day, you know? And when I was going broke, my old boy stepped in, tried to help me and cosigned 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 costs you a hundred percent, you know, you cosign a loan for your little boy and then your little boy is an idiot and runs a car in a ditch with no insurance and now you're stuck with a thirty thousand dollar bill because 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?

• 1:36:23Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. How are you at the, how are you at the work-life balance? I mean, you have, you have a, a business empire, your husband, your father, are you a grandfather too?

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  Oh, eight kids, eight grandkids.

• 1:36:36Shawn Ryan?

  Eight grandkids. And so how, I mean, how do you balance it all? Are you able to switch it off?

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:41Shawn Ryan?

  You are?

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  How do you switch it off?

• 1:36:46Speaker 02

  Well, full disclosure, let's go back to launching the thing. When we opened that first little office at sixty one thousand dollars, right? 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 eleven o'clock at night.

• 1:37:09Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  You work. And on Thanksgiving, we waited Thanksgiving dinner on her daddy until he could get the store closed at noon because he opened for breakfast. They sold biscuits and he opened for breakfast and he closed at noon on Thanksgiving, came home. But Thanksgiving, Christmas, the only time he closed. He was there all the time. So that's the family she grew up in. So she's not gonna 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 so, but the first two years, um, were

• 1:37:47Speaker 02

  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 seven thirty. I get home at eleven o'clock at night for two years. So I didn't have work-life balance then. But it was agreed upon that that's what it took to get the ball moving. Yeah. And it was not gonna be forever. We've got to figure this out. We gotta staff it. We gotta change the business model. We gotta do something to get it where we can. But 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.

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  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 still, you know, this guy, still freaking out. And, um, but, uh,

• 1:38:52Speaker 02

  we quickly figured out that, uh, work-life balance is, um,

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  i- i- i- is not a true thing. Yeah. What you need to do is wherever you are, you need to be a hundred percent there.

• 1:39:10Speaker 02

  And so what happens is people that say they want work-life balance, they go home at five o'clock 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 the floor playing and rolling around. Um, 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. Yeah.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  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 gonna work my butt off. And I might go on like a Total Money Makeover book tour is forty-two days. I was gone. I was like a some kind of musician or something living out of a bus. And um but we knew that going in. We said, okay, at the end of forty-two days, we're taking everybody to Disney. But there's gonna 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 gonna be a time that we're all gonna 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.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  No birthdays and no proms and no uh hockey, ice hockey 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 gonna be doing a 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 there are none of them over my daughter's prom date because I need to be standing there when that young guy comes in.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  So he he understands I'll be cleaning my gun when he gets home. And so, you know, nine o'clock, I'm not kidding you and uh you know, so he needs to and and my daughter, you know. We're gonna be there and I'm gonna be there for that picture and I'm gonna be there for that thing. And so I didn't miss those things, but I didn't make every hockey game. Yeah. And I didn't make my daughter's Richard Leirs. I didn't make everything, but we were there a lot. And we but we put it on the calendar. 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 hockey for a while and my son. And so uh you know, we put it on the calendar.

• 1:41:46Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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. 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 cul-de-sac where our house was. And I would stop at the bottom and I would play two praise and worship songs.

• 1:42:28Speaker 02

  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 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 mantle, I have to put my musket above the mantle, I gotta quit using the same mental gymnastics and processes, because it's a different skill set.

• 1:43:08Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  To run a business or win a business or to, you know, the rough and tumble of what you and I do every day, that you, you don't use that on a three-year-old.

• 1:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  And so, I had, those three things helped me a lot.

• 1:43:19Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, you know, I'm, I'm, that wasn't a general question, I'm asking for myself, because I, I struggle with that, and I've, you know, I, I think I'm through the sixteen, eighteen-hour days of lifting this thing up, and, and, you know, I mentioned I'd, I'd hired a COO, and we had a producer now, and, and, you know, the team that we have is, is amazing, but...

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Well, 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 could delegate, in other words, because I had high-quality 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.

• 1:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  I think that, you know, for me, it's, it's not just, it's not just a worry of not being here, and I know these guys can run this without me, it's, it's...

• 1:44:18Shawn Ryan?

  I fucking love what I do.

• 1:44:20Speaker 02

  Oh, me too.

• 1:44:20Shawn Ryan?

  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 a thousand 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 and and just engineering the engineering the business to to grow and to grow and to grow and I find it.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  And obviously it's working.

• 1:44:50Shawn Ryan?

  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 a hundred percent present with with your wife and kids and um. So.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it's not nothing's perfect. I've gotten emails when I'm on vacation. I mean, that happens. There's not none of this is pure. But it's just a series of intentional acts. And, you know, my dad used to say ninety percent solve a lot of 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 worried about every little diaper needs to be changed while you're down here trying to get your work done.

• 1:45:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  And, you know, I had one old boy working for me, his wife called him fifty two days, fifty two times in one morning.

• 1:45:38Shawn Ryan?

  Oof.

• 1:45:38Speaker 02

  And I'm like. I'm like, the receptionist came in and she goes, this is nuts. And all I'm doing is answering the phone for this guy's. And I said, what is going on? When I sat down at his desk, I said, man, she called you fifty times. And 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.

• 1:45:59Speaker 02

  That's not bad. But, you know, that's the other side of it, right? You gotta be able to leave your home at home.

• 1:46:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:04Speaker 02

  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, I've never gotten stuff dumped in my lap from family problems in the middle of the day. She's not a high maintenance woman, quite the opposite. Uh, 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 because I was able to concentrate and I didn't have a wife that called me fifty two times and wasn't needy. You know, that kind of stuff.

• 1:46:36Shawn Ryan?

  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 me is, you know, Sean, you you need to be present when you're here.

• 1:46:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:45Shawn Ryan?

  You cannot be at work.

• 1:46:47Speaker 02

  And she's right.

• 1:46:48Shawn Ryan?

  And um, making that mental switch has been it's been tough. I'm still working on it, but.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not hard. It's just worth it.

• 1:47:00Shawn Ryan?

  So how many so you grew from doing this out of a church? How many employees does Ramsey Solutions have now?

• 1:47:08Speaker 02

  Uh, just under eleven hundred.

• 1:47:10Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Eleven hundred employees. And your your facilities.

• 1:47:16Shawn Ryan?

  It's incredible.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've got a great campus. I'm real proud of it. God has blessed us beyond our wildest imaginations.

• 1:47:24Speaker 02

  Crazy, out of control.

• 1:47:28Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about culture.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 1:47:30Shawn Ryan?

  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 since the beginning and 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.

• 1:47:53Shawn Ryan?

  Everybody complains about their work, almost everybody. And so I'm really curious and to to hear how you built the culture of Ramsey. I never hear anybody.

• 1:48:04Shawn Ryan?

  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 they work. We've never had one person apply from Ramsey.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:48:13Shawn Ryan?

  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 to hear how you built the culture and 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.

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  Well, I uh, number one, it's not perfect. Um, we need to say that out loud. Um, but again, much like the other discussion we're just having, it's a matter of being very, very intentional about it. The first thing I think that I remember is we got to about. I think we were sixty 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, far as I'm concerned. I, I don't want them to have the power, I want them to just help us get the work done.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  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 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-da-da, I have the answer, I, because 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

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  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, a, an exercise with a ministry thing, uh, with SEAL Team Six 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, the guy, you know, the guy said, sure. And I, don't, don't say anything, just listen, I wasn't planning on, I don't have anything

• 1:50:39Speaker 02

  to say, but I, I didn't know who was the senior officer, by body language or by input or by criticism. They all took down problems.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  They were very blunt, very clear, very kind, but you couldn't tell who was the leader. It was very democratic, so to speak, when I watched 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, was 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 so everybody's more than welcome to argue with me. As a matter of fact, it's preferable if you argue with me because if you don't have anything to add, why are you here? And so 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 an HR director and we

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  would go, okay, we got it, here, 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 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 core value that drove this decision? Why did you all come to this decision? Because all of you seemed to, you went around and around and around and boom, you landed on it. Why did you do that? And he'd 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'd get up and go on our way. He started collecting those and he wrote down like 16 or 18 things. He said, this is how Ramsey makes decisions. This is who we are. It's not who we wish we were, it's who we are.

• 1:52:17Speaker 02

  It's not aspirational, it's, this is it. This is 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 and went, 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 do if we're not there. You will know that if I'm in Scotland, you can send a jet. For the guy, his kid, you know. You, you, you will know that's what Ramsey 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 Ramsey do?

• 1:53:01Speaker 02

  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. 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 help enough people, you don't have to worry about money.

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  No gossip. Um, 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 gonna have problems. Human beings are in this building. You're not gonna like one of them. Something's gonna happen, it's gonna hurt your little freaking feelings. Or you're gonna get frustrated with leadership or you're gonna 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 cooler, water cooler with a coworker and go, leadership's a bunch of idiots. Because that's disloyal and I will fire your butt. I have no tolerance for that crap. If you're gonna do that, you need to do it in a Facebook group after you quit.

• 1:55:12Speaker 02

  Leave me alone. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna 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 shit in your own backyard. Exactly. And people do it all day long at jobs. All they do is sit around and 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. Don't let the door hit you in the butt. And we have this talk all the time. And about once a year, we gotta fire somebody. But most of the time, there's no gossip.

• 1:55:52Speaker 02

  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 three 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 the leader because I can't help you with that. If you're sharing negatives with somebody who 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 fourteen. 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 don't have to watch your back, somebody not knifing you in the freak from behind.

• 1:56:34Speaker 02

  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 stuff like that, we just kept doing that and it's just reinforcing, reinforce. And, 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?" And he said, "Yeah." He goes, "Yeah, I know what you're gonna say." And I said, "Good. What am I gonna 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 fixing, you know? You you get what you tolerate. And so I can be kind, be clear and be gentle. But sometimes your job is that you don't get to work here anymore.

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

  Uh, because you're not a we and 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. And we just talk about that with that kind of ah in the voice, you know, all the time. And we have for thirty freaking years. And so people choose, they run out of steam, they choose, they start to think we're incompetent. And 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?

• 1:58:04Speaker 02

  And that's our stuff we talk about.

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  Until everybody's sick of hearing it.

• 1:58:10Speaker 02

  But then it sticks.

• 1:58:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, it's it's interesting too that you, I mean, you you've always done it, but you picked 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. It is, everybody's vested, everybody has ideas.

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  Somebody dies if you don't.

• 1:58:29Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

  I mean, nobody dies at Ramsey. That's serious.

• 1:58:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. 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 it a hot wash.

• 1:58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:43Shawn Ryan?

  And and and I lo- 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.

• 1:58:56Shawn Ryan?

  It's just, thank you for sharing that. It's reassuring to hear that.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  But then sometimes folks that you thought were gonna be with you a long time, their brain goes and leaves and then you gotta sit down and have a hard conversation and go, you know, that's not, can't be here. And, you know, I've had 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, because 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 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

• 1:59:46Speaker 02

  time and then after 20 years, they decide that they're not gonna 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. So we're gonna keep doing it this way. And so somebody's got to leave and it's not gonna be me. So that's not how this 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,

• 2:00:31Speaker 02

  now they got cancer, that's different, right? But I mean, you, you don't sanction someone that's just a half butt. Because all the other studs are looking at the half butt going, wait a minute.

• 2:00:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 02

  That's okay? 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, uh, we're playing to win the Super Bowl. You better, you better take your block and hit it.

• 2:00:54Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Well, Dave, let's take a quick break.

• 2:00:57Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:00:58Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, when we come back, we'll get, we'll dive into your new book.

• 2:01:01Speaker 02

  Okay.

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• 2:02:13Shawn Ryan?

  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 gift. Love your gummies, man. Vigilance League Gummy Bears, legal in all 56. I think I got 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,

• 2:02:56Shawn Ryan?

  interest rates are high. What advice do you have for Gen Z'ers? A lot of them seem...

• 2:03:06Shawn Ryan?

  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 get ahead financially in today's economy.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  You know, I'm actually in love with Gen Z. It's one of my favorite generations. We've got about 450 of them on our team.

• 2:03:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:30Speaker 02

  And they are, they do share one characteristic with the millennials. 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 answer any question instantly. They've grown up with influencers that aren't real, that haven't earned the right to influence. And so they're very careful.

• 2:04:13Speaker 02

  They're wise beyond their years in that sense. 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 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 couldn't do that. I was 22. I borrowed it, but I couldn't do it." They're very impressive, very serious-minded. And then there's another group that's entitled and victim-based, and they're like, "Capitalism has failed me," you know, all bull crap. But, you know, there's kind of been that in

• 2:04:56Speaker 02

  every generation. There's always a group of entitled whiners, and there's victims, and there's always the ones that are victors. And there's always a percentage of each. So, but anyway, the overall answer is that I give to folks that are struggling with the ability to afford life or to afford to buy a home, those kinds of things, is 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 not a single frame. It's a film strip. And a hundred percent chance, the next frame's gonna be different than the last frame and the next frame.

• 2:05:40Speaker 02

  And you're, you're gonna go through this thing. Because if I, you know, when I went bankrupt and I was in my twenties, if I had said, okay, that's the definition of Dave, now that is my identity. I'm an idiot.

• 2:05:53Speaker 02

  You know, I would've been still sitting there, right? And instead I go, okay, no, wait, that's just where I am 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 thirty-three years ago, there was a large number of people that could not afford to live in downtown Manhattan in New York City. Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:35Speaker 02

  Thirty-three 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 twenty 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 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 gonna choose to live somewhere else or do something different. And when you make those choices, the frames change. And you're gonna be okay. But you have to say, instead of, I'm gonna sit here and whine, and I'm gonna be a victim

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  of the circumstances, I'm, instead I'm gonna control the controllables, which is what I make, where I live. And what am I doing to better myself so that I make more and choose to live in a place that I can buy a house? I had a couple on my radio show do a debt-free 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 Wichita, which means there's nothing there but groundhogs, right? Prairie dogs.

• 2:07:58Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds like where I grew up.

• 2:08:00Speaker 02

  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 debt-free scream. They're 37 years old, have a paid-off house. But they they're not sitting in the middle of San Diego going, oh, I make $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

• 2:08:41Speaker 02

  change, then you'll go on to the next frame and you'll be just fine. So make more, move both. Wait on 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 gonna do. A hundred percent chance that it's gonna be different five years from today.

• 2:09:01Shawn Ryan?

  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, I believe the Trump administration just put some into the, what is it, the the reserve? Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum, and is it XRP?

• 2:09:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 2:09:19Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, I'm just curious, you know, that

• 2:09:24Shawn Ryan?

  The space just seems to be getting bigger and bigger and evolving and more people are taking it seriously. I was just curious.

• 2:09:31Speaker 02

  I think it's gonna continue to get bigger and I think it's gonna continue to get better. And it's gonna continue to stabilize. I mean, it was a volatile Wild Wild West crap show for a long time. And it kinda still is, really. But it's not nearly as bad as it was 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 even when it stabilizes and becomes more normalized, so to speak, and it's got a little track record to it, and you can look back and go, okay, the last 15 years is what it's done, not the last 15 days. Then you've still gotta say, okay, what do I want to invest in? And what happens

• 2:10:14Speaker 02

  with people with gold, or crypto, or a lot of other things, is they confuse the concepts of speculating versus investing. And that's why I've come out so hard on crypto. Because I have people calling and saying, I'm not doing investing, I'm doing, 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. 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

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  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 a home builder and you build a home that doesn't have a buyer, they call it a spec home. They're speculating. It's a short-term play. They didn't build a rental property they're gonna keep for 25 years. They built a piece of 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, you're not betting

• 2:11:41Speaker 02

  the farm, you're not betting your quality of life, you're not betting your wealth-building portfolio on it.

• 2:11:48Speaker 02

  You know, I've got friends that are worth a hundred million dollars 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. Ratio wise. That's speculating and that's a proper view of that. If you want to do that, I'm not gonna yell at you about it. But the reason I've come down so hard on it in the public eye is because I've got people not putting money in their 401K and good mutual funds. They're not buying a house. Instead, they're putting a hundred percent of everything they have in the middle of the roulette wheel. And that's stupid. You know, that's just ridiculous. You wouldn't do that with anything that doesn't have a long, wonderful track record.

• 2:12:31Speaker 02

  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 more. It's not creating anything. It's what's called a commodity. 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? It's kind of funny.

• 2:13:16Speaker 02

  But, you know, if you want to play the, you know, if you want to day trade in stocks, that's speculating. You're, it's a short-term play, and it's just right over here next to 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 you can talk about, okay, how does Bitcoin work? What is Bitcoin, what is the actual chain? How's the whole thing? 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 dead gum deal, man.

• 2:13:59Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, if you're pretty good at Texas Hold'em, you probably got as good a shot as you do at Bitcoin. So, you know, it's gonna be okay. But, I mean, if you chart Bitcoin and you don't see risk, you're dumb. Cause 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 because it's technology and everybody wants it's a fad and everybody wants to be in on it and all that kind 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?

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  They're like Ramsey's Ramsey'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. It's like George Camel, one of our guys says, it's like Mary Kay for young 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.

• 2:15:07Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. Back to Gen Z. I mean, what you got 400 and something Gen Zers working for you?

• 2:15:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, how over half our team is in their twenties.

• 2:15:15Shawn Ryan?

  Very, very innovated.

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:15:19Shawn Ryan?

  Generation.

• 2:15:19Speaker 02

  Very passionate. We're 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 something work that matters and we're helping people and they get enthused about it. It's that they're crusaders. They're wonderful for Ramsey.

• 2:15:36Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 2:15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think we do. I think all of them are in their, maybe early 30s, but yeah.

• 2:15:57Shawn Ryan?

  We contract some stuff out and time and time again, you know, we we, I think Gen Z is very entrepreneurial mindset as well.

• 2:16:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:16:10Shawn Ryan?

  It seems to be. And

• 2:16:12Speaker 02

  Because they've lost faith in the traditional systems. They're cynical about

• 2:16:16Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:17Speaker 02

  Traditional systems. And some way, sometimes in a toxic way, sometimes in a good, healthy way.

• 2:16:22Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:23Speaker 02

  Suspect of the man.

• 2:16:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:24Speaker 02

  Almost like old hippies or something.

• 2:16:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. One of the things that I see is

• 2:16:33Shawn Ryan?

  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 stack, they seem to stack too much on their plate. Whereas, whereas is, like, they wanna, they wanna, they wanna do our stuff, and then they add more, and then they add more, and then they add more. And then we see, we see productivity and quality of the content creation start to diminish. I'm, I'm just curious if you, if you have any insight on that, or any advice?

• 2:17:17Speaker 02

  No, I think it's, um, just back to, uh, probably some real clear guidelines and accountability to certain behaviors that we want.

• 2:17:25Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 2:17:26Speaker 02

  And so, um, what we've had to do with, um, it's not just Gen Z, but it, it does appear there, is in content creation, um,

• 2:17:39Speaker 02

  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 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 do it. 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, and so sometimes we run into some arrogance with that.

• 2:18:22Speaker 02

  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 life, I'm gonna tell you how to do this. No, no, no, now we got confused. You work here and so now we gotta start again. You're really good, 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 gonna conform to ours if you wanna stay here, so. And it's just, it's accountability and it's, um, but it, it's very seldom with, it isn't a level of kind of arrogance, but it's not malice. It's not like they're being belligerent about it.

• 2:19:06Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:07Speaker 02

  They just, it's, it's native to them. And, and so, um, it just requires some, uh, so, some kind, clear leadership and accountability. And so, you know, in the instance, what you talked about, what I might do if I was facing that is I would like go, okay, look, if you wanna take on some other projects, that's fine. Other than just ours, you're, you're freelancer, you don't work for us. Uh, 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 gonna 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 gonna bring it up again. And if I bring it up two times, it's starting to be a real issue.

• 2:19:49Speaker 02

  Uh, you know, and I'll 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 wanna 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.

• 2:20:10Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:10Speaker 02

  They think they could do anything because they can, they can just push a button, crap happens. And our minds are like, wait a minute, they, they have an, uh, it's an abundance mentality, but it's a weird one. It's, versus a scarcity mentality.

• 2:20:24Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:20:24Speaker 02

  Where you and I are like, okay, resources are limited, act like it. And there, it doesn't even occur to them that you can't get something automatically because they have their whole life.

• 2:20:34Shawn Ryan?

  It's a damn good point. Let's talk about the Trump administration, the first, what, first couple of months here.

• 2:20:45Shawn Ryan?

  How do you think it's going with the economics?

• 2:20:52Speaker 02

  Well, economics, um, the reason you and I and Joe and Theo all did interviews with President Trump, and, um, obviously Joe's the 800-pound gorilla in that, but the, uh, we all have major top 10 podcasts and we all, uh, and then Joe came out and entered, and, 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 about some of the same things other people were, border, woke, all that stuff, but, um, happy about all

• 2:21:34Speaker 02

  that stuff. But the, um, economics, and I said this on the show, oh, on our, because I knew I was gonna get flooded with anti-Trump hate, um, because a fair portion of my audience are not conservatives, um, but the, uh, uh, economics oddly enough is as much 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

• 2:22:17Speaker 02

  I, I, um, 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 psychology. And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if enough people believe things are gonna 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 capitalism, I believe in capitalism, and...

• 2:23:02Speaker 02

  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 gonna cause that to happen, he's gonna create an environment where that works, and so I'm gonna go do it. And that's what we did under Reagan, and that's what 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 believe it, they'll go do that. On the offside, 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, and the stock market's down. Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:46Speaker 02

  Uh, since he's in office, and it had been up considerably before that. Uh, but there may be a method to that madness, I don't know, I'm not privy to the inside 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 their interest rates down, which also will drive the economy. So if you drill baby drill, which is about somewhere around one-seventh of the national economy is energy-related, if you get one-seventh 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

• 2:24:28Speaker 02

  market 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. Mm-hmm. 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 companies, uh, countries have, the trade deficit and the, you know, they're charging us a hundred percent tariff and we don't charge them any, and we're all sitting around, and now we decide we're gonna charge them something, we act like we're the bad guys, which is ridiculous.

• 2:25:07Speaker 02

  So, politically or policy-wise, that's ridiculous, but the, the offside is, is that it's destabilizing the markets, because people are worried instead of inspired. If you 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 gonna happen. Uh, I think the offset has just been the destabilization of all the tariff 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 gonna get really good over here, but I don't know what these tariffs are gonna do to us. And so, instead of hiring and buying equipment, they're kinda, kinda wait and see how that happens.

• 2:25:49Speaker 02

  So, we've had a delayed effect on Trump having a positive effect on the economy and it's probably because of all the yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck, yuck around the tariff. Cause the actual physical tariffs that have actually happened is almost zero. Not, it's just been discussion.

• 2:26:04Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, I didn't realize that.

• 2:26:06Speaker 02

  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. Cause they get right up to it and then they go, oh, wait a minute, they conceded and we're gonna wait, we're gonna give it another thirty days and, oh, well, that one, we're gonna do that, but we're gonna take out all these others. And, you know, if you, it's hard to follow, even if you'd charted it all, exactly what all 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 gonna fool with it. But, uh, but I, I, I'm really excited about where we'll be in twelve months.

• 2:26:41Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:41Speaker 02

  Still am predicting that. I really, I, I, Ramsey's gearing up, we're getting ready. We, we think there's a wave coming and we wanna ride it.

• 2:26:49Shawn Ryan?

  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 the shit. On the flip side too, you know, I also really like Doge and what they're doing.

• 2:27:04Speaker 02

  Oh, man, that's just incredible.

• 2:27:06Shawn Ryan?

  But, you know, in, in, look, I don't know shit 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 had-

• 2:27:24Shawn Ryan?

  Nobody likes the VA. And it's overstaffed and you know, just for some context, there's 480 something thousand employees at the VA. The US Army has 450,000 active duty members. So they're definitely heavy and they've gone through USAID and all these other places and

• 2:27:44Speaker 02

  It's a good idea gone bad.

• 2:27:45Shawn Ryan?

  They're cleaning out, 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 looking to slash 83,000 jobs here. So when you look at the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are gonna get cut from government positions, are we gonna see, I mean, that's, is that gonna affect us?

• 2:28:16Speaker 02

  No. No, because it's not enough in total jobs to cause like an unemployment crisis or something, which you would have to have, you know, that would lead towards probably a recession, a contraction of the economy, because there's not enough people that have money from their job to spend, so they're spending, and that contracts, and that's what a recession is. So, but I think it's small enough, you know, it's a little bit like, 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, you don't really care what the unemployment rate is, and you really don't care about the philosophy of the Trump

• 2:28:59Speaker 02

  administration or Elon Musk's ideas, you just lost your job. And so, for that person that's losing their position, it's huge, but in ratio in the entire economy, the number of jobs, it's not gonna be the end of the world. And it's offset by the savings, the deficit and the debt going down, and the chance we could actually get a balanced budget again, that's very productive for the economy. Because every time there's a deficit, remember what happens is, okay, those jobs are harmed, 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?

• 2:29:43Speaker 02

  When you spend more than you make, they finance it by debt. That debt is sucking money out of the economy. And so they 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 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 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 the other things, we're we're moving the money around. They put it on shelf. And now the economy's smaller. And so that's not as bad because of all these lost jobs. So there's an offset there. Okay.

• 2:30:26Speaker 02

  So, you know, again, I 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 domestic 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 a heat and air company, that's got 400 people and a little small fleet of trucks and they fix heat and air on people's houses, what's he looking

• 2:31:07Speaker 02

  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 their job. Okay. And again, he's the one making the decision to spend or to hold his cash because there's a storm coming. 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 windows and pile cash and get ready? Because he pile when when he piles cash in macro, when a whole bunch of he's piles cash because they think a storm is coming, that freezes the economy shut.

• 2:31:49Speaker 02

  But when they believe the sun is coming and they believe more in Elon causing Doge causing the cutting, the sun is coming than he does those lost jobs.

• 2:31:58Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:59Speaker 02

  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 gonna lose your job. I'm not happy for you personally. I'm happy for our, that our nation is addressing, addressing waste though, because a hundred percent of the intelligent human beings walking around realize that the waste is really freaking ridiculous.

• 2:32:21Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, I'm with you. It's just, I think it's something we have to go through no matter what.

• 2:32:30Speaker 02

  Oh, God, it's like, uh, and the fact that they're actually doing it, not talking about it.

• 2:32:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:35Speaker 02

  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 dad gun machete and, and a bunch of Gen Z's with algorithms and start stacking those cash flows and looking at this going, oh, look at there. You know, we've got a transgender college that we just put a hundred fifty million dollars in, in India or whatever. I made that up. But I mean, this stuff is coming out. It's just, it's, it's not even.

• 2:33:11Shawn Ryan?

  It's insane.

• 2:33:12Speaker 02

  It's like, science fiction. It's so bizarre.

• 2:33:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:15Speaker 02

  It's not even quite, it's not even a debate about how whacked it is. It's just whacked.

• 2:33:21Shawn Ryan?

  Let's move into your book, Build a Business You Love. What's the, what's the premise of it?

• 2:33:27Speaker 02

  Well, um, you know, we talked early, eh, eh, earlier, eh, eh, 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 and debt, to wealthy.

• 2:33:51Speaker 02

  If you follow those seven baby steps, it's a clear path and it's proven. Tens of millions of people have done that now. And so when we're working with small businesses 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 they're no nonsense. They get crap done, you know? And the same things make them afraid or mad that make me afraid or mad. And so I just connect immediately. And again, I am one. I've been running a business almost my whole life.

• 2:34:32Speaker 02

  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, you know, the basic, some basic marketing stuff, some basic accounting stuff, some basic finance stuff, 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 I have a number one bestselling book called Entree Leadership that was the playbook. It was the Super Bowl playbook that we used to run our business, to grow it from a card table 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.

• 2:35:16Speaker 02

  And been doing events for them for years and big leadership events and that kind of stuff we've been doing. You know, again, the bestselling book, we've got software, we've got all kinds of stuff to help them, apps, all that. So 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.

• 2:35:43Speaker 02

  And there are six drivers of business that drive you through those stages. And it helps immensely. It becomes the baby steps for business. Uh huh. 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 maturation of the business cycle as you go along.

• 2:36:25Speaker 02

  And, um, and it is what we went through. And then we started observing is 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 at stage two. What do I need to do to get three? Okay, this is what you do. And here's your six drivers and here's, here's how that applies in this situation. And we figured we've gone around those six drivers at Ramsey in 30 years.

• 2:37:07Speaker 02

  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 three, 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 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 gonna get better with culture. I'm gonna get better with hiring and firing. I'm gonna get better with attracting the right talent. But then I move around it and I, and I, that leads me into planning, which is another one that leads me

• 2:37:51Speaker 02

  and you go start going through it. Then you go, okay, well, when I go up as another stage, it's a whole different set of 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. And if you're planning a small thing, it's not as hard as planning a bigger thing, obviously. So, um, you know, the, the drivers cycle through and we end up going through those. So, 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 it sounds like, your own treadmill. This is the drivers or the stages? No, this is stages.

• 2:38:34Speaker 02

  Stage one is, is the treadmill operator. And so when you start, all of us are treadmill operators. And the treadmill operators run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, don't feel like you're getting anywhere. Um, but we're real passionate about it and 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 worked my butt off. You know, and you're just working like a 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.

• 2:39:20Speaker 02

  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, makes you important for a minute. It's also exhausting. Mm-hmm. 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. A hundred percent. 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 go around on a business and so you're better at time management. But the thing you do to level up from treadmill to Pathfinder, which is the next one, is you have to get time management going. And you start talking about stuff like, I was talking about earlier that I was doing 16-hour days.

• 2:40:04Speaker 02

  And 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 had to finish the lesson. Then I didn't finish the lesson, I just started giving refunds and I couldn't give refunds, I had to get the money. And so I finished at 11 o'clock at night and went the emergency room. And so that's what you do in the treadmill stage, right? You suck it up, buttercup, and you get it done. But you can't stay there. It's not sustainable for your family, it's not sustainable for your health.

• 2:40:48Speaker 02

  It's not a good business model. So you start to learn to manage time and get intentional. And go, I'm gonna switch it off when I get home and I'm gonna hire some people. So I'm not the Messiah. Other people can be important too and bring ideas and carry some of this weight. And 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 to that next stage. And so that's what this whole thing's about, is just walking through those stages. And what's the next stage? You go from there to Trailblazer. And Trailblazer is a, it's a fuzzy middle. It's the middle stage and it's kinda whacked.

• 2:41:37Speaker 02

  You're really kinda 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 gonna get her done. And, you know, all that stuff, but you really suck at systems. You suck at processes. Too much stuff is manual and it could be automated. Your accounting software 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.

• 2:42:21Speaker 02

  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 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 dead 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 know, 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 mean, what's the, you know, and all this kinda stuff. And we're just, it's just like, there's a lot of chaos. But there's a lot of business happening.

• 2:43:05Speaker 02

  So it's kind of an exciting, but it's very chaotic. And so you gotta put the systems in place. You gotta 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 wanna be corporate America. Negative parts of corporate America. I mean, there's big companies that are good companies. But corporate America, I mean, is bureaucratic bull crap. And, you know, some little- Twerp is, his little domain over here is interrupting business getting done because 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. Bullcrap, get it done, you know? The legal teams, no, they work for me. You know, they don't, I don't work for them.

• 2:43:47Speaker 02

  And so that's the kind of guy I was, 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 and 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 dad gum 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 master's in business, and I don't have that.

• 2:44:28Speaker 02

  I've, I've 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 a hundred percent of the MBA 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 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? You gotta get above it to see that though.

• 2:45:12Speaker 02

  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 gonna go, you oughta have a map. And, and so that's their thought. And so I always laugh and say, the MBAs that we hired, um, they taught me strategic thought. It was not my nature because I'm very much in your face, in the moment entrepreneurial tactical. Go mow the grass, collect the money, you know, that kind of thing. And, uh, so they taught me strategic thought and I taught them how to work.

• 2:45:43Speaker 02

  But anyway, that's our joke around there, but it's also true. But so we, you know, because we work our butts off. 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 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,

• 2:46:28Speaker 02

  we're 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. So we start adding a high school curriculum, or we add, you know, 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 because you're making more money at this stage than ever in, you never dreamed you'd make this much money when you get to this stage. It's a lot. And, um, you can make good money in the others, but this is like, and I can go home at five, 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.

• 2:47:11Speaker 02

  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 a team of leaders, and, um, you know, we've 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 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,

• 2:47:55Speaker 02

  constantly changing, constantly looking for a new thing to add while you're being successful. But if you keep running the same play, all the other teams figure out the play. And so it doesn't, you can't, you can't rest. And the problem is you're so dad gum 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 gotta 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 gonna break it before it's broken, baby. We're, we're gonna, we're gonna reset, reset, reset. And you gotta constantly re-energize the whole place to raise this level of excellence. And then the last one is just legacy stage.

• 2:48:38Speaker 02

  Um, and so, uh, succession planning. How are you gonna hand this off? Are you gonna sell it? Are you gonna quit and shut it down? What's the end game? And you start planning for that. I started doing that 16 years ago. Uh, started our succession planning and, and our, uh, you know, how are we gonna hand this off? How's it gonna 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 because I died. Um, that's a bad idea. And so we gotta start working on legacy. Uh, and, um, you know, so that's really the five stages you go through. But there's leveling up and a lot of detail.

• 2:49:20Speaker 02

  You know, a lot of little nuanced 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 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, uh, it'll increase the speed of success and the quality of life for the guy

• 2:50:04Speaker 02

  and gal running a, a small business right now. Well, you had mentioned the six drivers. 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 gotta, 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 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, 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

• 2:50:48Speaker 02

  that's usually the thing that gets you out of bed and causes you to go do the business idea.

• 2:50:54Speaker 02

  But it really does, before you get the product, it really does backtrack all the way to the top, what the first driver's personal. And the personal issue is this, John Maxwell talks about, um, in his book, 21 Irrefutable 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. Uh, 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 we started this. I'm 64. Okay. And so

• 2:51:37Speaker 02

  obviously the guy that started this couldn't run this today. That is 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 they were good, good enough friends to tell me the truth. And 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, oh, 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're get better, get better, get better, get better, get better. So, you know, when you, uh, listen to Sean Ryan podcast.

• 2:52:19Speaker 02

  Interviewing some of the neatest stories in the world. My, if you're a business leader and you're watching this, mine that podcast for the leadership principles that you're hearing in that, or the life principles that you're hearing in that. If you go to 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 them. And so, the problem with my business is always the guy in my mirror. That's the bad news. The good news is, the solution of my business is always that guy in my mirror. That's very personal.

• 2:53:03Speaker 02

  And, you know, that's kind of what you and I were talking about 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 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. And that's my job. It's not to learn to be a coder.

• 2:53:43Shawn Ryan?

  Does it scare you when you don't know an aspect of your business?

• 2:53:47Speaker 02

  Yes. It scares the crap out of me. But, but it doesn't keep me from being responsible for it. And so, like, I dropped into one of those meetings, because those are all Gen Z's just about, writing that stuff, and they're smart. And I dropped into those meetings, and freaking like the military, they've got acronyms for everything, three-letter words, five-letter words for everything in there. And it's a whole different language. And I'm sitting in this meeting for about 10 minutes, and I think they might as well have been speaking German. And finally, I raised my hand and said, hey, guys, I'm just gonna be really transparent right now. It, I'm a little bit scared because I pay all y'all and I have no idea what you have said for the last 10 minutes.

• 2:54:32Speaker 02

  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 drinking 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 dropping on this particular webpage. We weren't, we weren't converting. We were losing the customers. And, uh, because of the way the thing was built, it was poorly designed and they're like, okay, this is this and, you know, and, 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.

• 2:55:16Speaker 02

  So, yeah, it's scary and, but it's also, I don't have to know, but 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 know enough about accounting to make sure the accounting team's doing their job. I gotta 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, it's low quality. You know, I don't have to be a social media expert, but I gotta go, I'm not cool with this video. It's jumping around all over the place. It's bothering me. It's half butt quality.

• 2:56:01Speaker 02

  I know you, you quick edit it or whatever, it's driving me nuts. That's a discussion I had yesterday. And so, um, That's why everybody's doing it. And I said, well, that's exactly the reason we shouldn't. 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 gotta bring team people to know how to do stuff you don't know how to do. So I need a good kicker. I need a good, uh, right guard, left guard. I need a good defensive lineman, even if I'm the quarterback.

• 2:56:36Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:56:37Speaker 02

  And I don't have to do all that. And so 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's dad gum 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 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. Next one's purpose. And purpose

• 2:57:17Speaker 02

  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 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.

• 2:57:45Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:57:46Speaker 02

  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 because it's really fun. And by God, it was the right thing to do. These are stories people needed to know. It's 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 gotta have purpose and you gotta identify it. And then you gotta 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 not have been told were you're not here.

• 2:58:30Speaker 02

  And if the guys on the camera don't understand that, if they think they just run a camera, then you're screwed. Yeah. And so you gotta 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 because somebody met Jesus, because that's our purpose, one of them. Our purpose is, 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.

• 2:59:13Speaker 02

  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 gotta have that and you gotta say it and you gotta look at it and everybody's gotta 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 going in somebody's house and turning on their thermostat, you're not gonna stay in business. And you think, oh, this is a great way to make some money. You're not gonna stay in business because 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 gonna 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

• 2:59:58Speaker 02

  Jim Collins says, and book good to great, get the right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus, 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 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 from the people that have been on my team.

• 3:00:32Speaker 02

  But it's part of it, man. Your other choice is don't dance. Man, I want to dance. I'm gonna 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 a constant thing and they really are a great joy by and large. But you always got that, you know, that one or two story, like we talked about earlier, there's one or two or three that, man, I must have been an idiot. I hired them. And worse than that, I kept them. And so, yeah, you know, I have one guy tell us in, Andre, we were standing in the hallway, he goes, "Yeah, man, my team," 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

• 3:01:17Speaker 02

  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?

• 3:01:34Speaker 02

  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 wringer. It used to be a whole bunch. It got to be too many interviews. We got it up to about the average 15 interviews before you got hired. That was silly. Fifteen? Yeah, we got it down to about seven now. That, we got it out of control, but 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

• 3:02:14Speaker 02

  now. The first one is a 30-minute, quick, not 32 minutes, not 31 minutes, 28 to 30 minutes, cultural review.

• 3:02:28Speaker 02

  And we spend 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 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 spent about 20 minutes listening to them. So two ears, one mouth is the ratio.

• 3:03:12Speaker 02

  There's 30 minutes, 20 minutes listening, one 10 minutes talking. And they don't let me do those because I talk too much, but uh, um, I'm not that good at it, but you listen and you try to determine is this person going to fit? 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.

• 3:03:41Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:03:42Speaker 02

  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. It's probably, you know, we're probably done. Or if they, you know, they go, you know, I hate Christians. You probably won't want to work here because the guy that owns this 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 uh, 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 know, our CEO carries a gun. I've never seen it, but he carries a gun everywhere he goes.

• 3:04:27Speaker 02

  That's legal that he can do that. And how do 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 decided 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 as 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 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.

• 3:05:11Speaker 02

  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 an 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 that little 30-minute interview, that gets rid of, um, we either can 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.

• 3:05:50Speaker 02

  Uh, skill is important, but it is trumped by cultural fit, value system, 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 and make them an A-plus player. But I can't take an A-plus player, they'll perform at a D level if they don't fit in. Yeah. And if they're not, if they're not, if they think it's just a job. If you're here to collect a check, a J O B, how little, how, how 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?

• 3:06:33Speaker 02

  Instead of getting my freaking work done, and then I want to leave early too? Oh, and I need extra PTO because my dog needs his toenails done. Oh, jeez, 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 gonna fit in." Because the people here, we work and we care and we love each other 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

• 3:07:18Speaker 02

  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 need to talk about, you know, getting a raise. And 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. It's like, this is not a thing. So we, you know, and a sweet guy, and he worked there probably, I can see his face right now, I know his name. But

• 3:08:00Speaker 02

  he's a good guy. I still talk to him occasionally. He'd 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 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 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

• 3:08:41Speaker 02

  valuable. So that's the hiring. And, and we're looking for people that fit in, that are a we, 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 by working on the team, there it's a crusader. That's a really good indicator that you're going to get on up in the interview process. And, and then the last thing we do is very controversial.

• 3:09:18Speaker 02

  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, whatever you want to do, honey, Southern belle, 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 gonna 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 virtuous wife?

• 3:10:02Speaker 02

  For her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her. Cause 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 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.

• 3:10:45Speaker 02

  I said, okay, I don't make major decisions without sharing. We'll fight about it, we might not agree about it, but we're gonna talk about it and we're gonna come into agreement, or we don't move forward. When in doubt, don't. So we're gonna, I'm not gonna go, uh, make a $10,000 investment and she says that's a bad idea. Never doing that. Um, it sounds like I'm henpecked, but I'm not. Cause 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 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.

• 3:11:27Speaker 02

  We do it 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.

• 3:11:56Speaker 02

  And then when I got ready to hire our first person, I don't know about you, man, but when I hired the very first one, that was scary as crap. Yeah. 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 scared the pee out of me. And the second one was easier. The third one was easier. The three thousandth was really easy. But the first one scared me. And I went, this is a big decision. Sharon doesn't work, has never worked at Ramsey. She's never worked at the office, ever. 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,

• 3:12:38Speaker 02

  like, I remember one time in the early days, we bought a phone system for fourteen thousand dollars, and that was like, woo, nobody has phone systems anymore. But 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 fourteen thousand dollars back in the day. Because that was a lot of money. That 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 dead 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

• 3:13:23Speaker 02

  to dinner informally with the person we're hiring and their spouse and the leader 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's taught me, I don't know where it came from, not to ask my wife as we were driving away how, what she thought,

• 3:14:06Speaker 02

  I ask 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 her, let's get, let's get it, you know, and, and she's like, you 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 a hundred percent of the time. But go ahead. But go ahead. Don't worry about it. I just, I just tell you, I got a bad feeling. And a couple of times I would say, okay, you think we ought to do it or not?

• 3:14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, go ahead. A hundred percent of those were gone in four months. No shit. Something blew up. Her, and, and 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 "'cause he's smart enough to get her." You know, and so she just, you know, that's the conversation. "All right, let's pray about it tonight." So we pray about it, and he changed tomorrow morning, let me know, and then we'd call him. We'd 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 want you to tell her if you have a bad..." Whoever it is we're interviewing, right?

• 3:15:33Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 who was a party guy, and, you 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's a fun guy. He was a great guy.

• 3:16:15Speaker 02

  But, um, we kinda 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'd know it. And I ordered key lime pie for dessert. I'll never, my fork went to the key lime pie. In other words, we'd been there an hour and a half. The woman hadn't 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."

• 3:17:00Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 3:17:03Speaker 02

  I started laughing. The guy that had another leader and his wife with me, they started 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, because he was a friend that the leader and I knew from the broadcast business. And we really wanted him to come on because he's a fun guy, he's real creative. And we were just overlooking the fact that, hey, I ain't gonna 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.

• 3:17:46Speaker 02

  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 heard, will speak into it and it's fabulous. That's our best part of our hiring process.

• 3:18:02Shawn Ryan?

  And I love to hear that.

• 3:18:04Speaker 02

  But it gets, it ticks, it ticks people off. They're like, you don't have any right. I got all kinds of rights. My name's on the side of the building. What are you talking about? I got rights. But, oh, well.

• 3:18:14Shawn Ryan?

  I'm gonna implement that. I love that. That's a great idea. That is a great idea. What about firing? How fast do you fire?

• 3:18:27Speaker 02

  Uh, for 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.

• 3:18:56Speaker 02

  We have an accountability system where leaders always are meeting with their team, 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 going on with the actual work. You hear the 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? And here's some things we gotta work on. You gotta, you gotta 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 how's it going? And, you know, you're a salesman, you're not making any sales calls. Not gonna work. You need 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

• 3:19:40Speaker 02

  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 o'clock in the morning. That's not cool. We actually work here. And you get your butt into the office, you know, and what's the problem? What, you got an issue? Childcare 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. But you just, I didn't get out of bed, ain't cool, you know? So you, basic stuff, right? You're talking about it 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

• 3:20:21Speaker 02

  seminar bit on it that we teach, but it's just, you sit down and say, hey, we're both currently sitting on the same side of the table. I'm on your team. I'm not across the table from you. This is not a correction or a negotiation, but this is gonna be a difficult conversation. No one's getting fired today, but if we don't correct some things we're gonna talk about today, we're gonna have to move towards that direction. And then you say, here's the things. Now, here's a program, and we're gonna meet, and here's the things I expect from you, and we need these things done by this date. And I'm gonna check with you a couple of times, and then by that date, we're gonna look and see, did you do it?

• 3:21:05Speaker 02

  And then if it's something fairly simple, and they correct it, you know, the 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 missed, you're talking to someone in a way you shouldn't be talking to them, and that kind of stuff, then... You know, um, a- and then they either do it or they don't. If they don't do it, then you go, "Okay, now we're gonna have another difficult conversation," and now it's gonna get a little hotter. And nothing is gonna 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 a ten,

• 3:21:48Speaker 02

  ten-minute meeting. It's not, it's just gonna tell you, "Here's what we're doing," and, and this is not thing. And so, "I'll help you. I'm here to support you. I'm gonna work on..." But, a- and then we would come in if they, uh, and say, "All right, now we're gonna put you on a ninety-day plan. And during this ninety days, you and I are gonna meet every other day, and we're gonna work on every one of these things. And at the end of that ninety days, you're going to have solved this problem permanently. We're never gonna revisit it again, um, or we will be done. Or, if you don't wanna enter into this very intense ninety-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 severance package today." Um,

• 3:22:31Speaker 02

  I would say when that's put on the table, probably seventy percent of the time, they take the severance 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 wanna engage to stay and 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 people that we save at that point is fairly low. Almost all of them are saved prior to that, that conversation that starts a ninety-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 to give everybody a chance. Because I got

• 3:23:15Speaker 02

  fired one time, when I was twenty. I was working for this company, and this guy was just a, he was a character. And, um, his, he was a, one of the leaders. He wasn't the owner of the company. And I was doing site 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 operation's 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, and he fired me. And he came in my office one day and just started, "You little effer, eff, eff, your mother's an effer and all these effers and all this stuff." And he's yelling and 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?"

• 3:23:59Speaker 02

  And he goes, "It doesn't matter. You're fired. Get out of here." And honestly, that was forty something years ago. I still don't know what I did. I probably did it. I probably deserved to be fired. I don't know what I did. I mean, I wasn't like 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 Ramsey that if someone left, they would always know why. They would never be surprised and they would always know why. Not surprised is, "You're not getting fired today, but we gotta fix this. We gotta fix this. We gotta fix this. We gotta fix this." They're not gonna be surprised and they're always gonna

• 3:24:42Speaker 02

  know exactly why. And so it's not unusual at Ramsey for someone to, I've heard this multiple times, um, they tell their spouse on Monday morning or Tuesday morning, "This is probably gonna be my last day." Cause 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

• 3:25:25Speaker 02

  working. And we've talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. So today's, the decision's been made. Today's your last day at Ramsey. And, um, what I want you to do is, uh, I'm gonna, I've got a person, my HR director's sitting outside. They're gonna walk with you to your car and collect your 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 they get your stuff from your desk. Is 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, ten 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

• 3:26:10Speaker 02

  or something. And so they come back later. We're not trying to hurt somebody.

• 3:26:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:14Speaker 02

  It just didn't work. And, um, but, you know, people are funny. I mean, the stuff that people come up with, oh, but it, yeah, I'm not gonna surprise them though. And I never have. And I've never fired anybody angry while I was angry. I've been angry, but I didn't, I've never fired someone while I was angry. I'd go home, talk to Sharon, think about it, come back in the next morning, and 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?

• 3:26:44Shawn Ryan?

  I just learned a lot from that segment. Thank you.

• 3:26:47Speaker 02

  (laughing)

• 3:26:48Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I did. I did. And, um, Dave, we're wrapping up the interview here, but, um, you are the money guy. So, last question. Where should be, where should people be putting their money in today to invest?

• 3:27:04Speaker 02

  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 gonna leave it alone a long time. We did at Ramsey Research, a research team, an airtight study, the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America. It's in the book, last bestseller I had called Baby Steps Millionaires. White, white paper's in the back of it, on the research. The research is airtight. We had another company outside

• 3:27:44Speaker 02

  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 group would, uh, not like the results of where millionaires come from, because they have a, an anarchist communist, uh, wealthy quality agenda that's absolute bullcrap. And 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 eighty-nine percent of

• 3:28:28Speaker 02

  America's millionaires, that's nine out of ten, 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.

• 3:28:50Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:28:51Speaker 02

  I'm so stupid, I had to do it twice. So it's possible, I promise you it's possible. Seventy-nine percent inherited precisely zero, five percent inherited a small amount, like five thousand dollars from the grandmother, which mathematically makes it impossible for that to have caused them to be a millionaire. And another five percent inherited a substantial amount after they were already millionaires, like maybe they got two-hundred-and-fifty grand when dad died, but they were already worth two-and-a-half million. So it didn't cause them to be a millionaire. So seventy-nine, five and five is eighty-nine. That's an example of that study. Now, in that study, the sad thing was, the process that people had used and the demographic data, the breakdown of wealth of who had become millionaires, again, not, they'd done

• 3:29:36Speaker 02

  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 there had, now this is the first one-to-five million dollars of net worth, this is not somebody worth a hundred million, it's not a billion, a billion's a thousand 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 six-hundred, eight-hundred-thousand-dollar house that's paid for.

• 3:30:14Speaker 02

  And they have eight hundred, nine hundred thousand in their 401k. Cause they've been putting money in mutual funds in their 401k for 15 years. And the company matches and it's in a Roth and they did some Roth IRAs and they, they had retirement investing and a paid for house. And the two together was a million and a half to two million dollars, 1.6 million, 1.4 million, whatever. Like 80 something percent of them looked 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 five million dollars. And it's like all of them.

• 3:30:54Speaker 02

  It wasn't like a statistical, I mean, it was, and when you're doing statistical analysis on 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 had 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 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.

• 3:31:38Speaker 02

  And pay your Roth, 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 five million dollars and he had a hundred percent 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 they'd buy a few acres and they'd pay cash for it. And he had like 10 million dollars worth of dirt. That was all he had. He didn't have any money. He just had a bunch of dirt. But so he had a 10 million dollar 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, thirty-three percent of them, one-third, never made six figures. Wow. Number one, uh, career was engineer, number two was accountant, get this, number three,

• 3:32:23Speaker 02

  teacher. No kidding. Number four, exec, business 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 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 the athletes, the same thing, all that, but um, that was very interesting and what we figured out was, okay, what, what have they got in common? Teachers, I'm sorry, uh, engineers, accountants, teachers, business executive, lawyer. They all are process people.

• 3:33:07Speaker 02

  You have to use a process to build in it, build a bridge or it falls and it's a set of principles, you don't get to make up, it's no creativity involved, you gotta do the right thing or it falls, 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 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's, you do certain things in a courtroom a certain way or the judge puts you out, they don't,

• 3:33:50Speaker 02

  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 people, so what they did is they figured out the money process and they did it, which is save and invest, live on less than you make and 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, 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 gotta adhere, you have to submit yourself to a proven process and you don't get to make up your own version.

• 3:34:30Speaker 02

  And that that's who wins. And so my investments, I I've studied wealthy people for thirty 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 family, partnership, double backflip trust. Then none of them have that. That's that's something on a movie or something. These guys just put money in their 401k, paid off their house.

• 3:35:10Speaker 02

  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. And I love real estate. I'm buying a piece right now. I'm working on LOI today. A letter of intent today 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 ninety to two hundred 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

• 3:35:56Speaker 02

  and I'm not taking a poll. I went broke. I don't care what your opinion is. I'm I'm gonna do this. And I don't need to impress anybody with the with how cool I am because I'm not. I've ceased to be cool a long time ago. So that's how we do it.

• 3:36:13Shawn Ryan?

  Pretty damn cool.

• 3:36:13Speaker 02

  That's how we do it, dude.

• 3:36:16Shawn Ryan?

  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 of of of wisdom in this. And I just, I really appreciate you coming on and

• 3:36:36Speaker 02

  I'm honored. I've been wanting to do it a while. I'm sorry it took so long to get around to it.

• 3:36:39Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:36:41Speaker 02

  I treasure, I treasure our friendship, too. Me, too. And I'm, I'm enjoying watching your, your spiritual journey. It's a lot of fun. Thank you. Real proud of you. Thank you. Well, God bless. You, too, sir.