Pod Insights Vision Pros Live Podcast Grow Leaders from Within: Blue Collar Leadership with Rich Ashton About this episode What if your best future leaders are already on your team, they just don't know it yet? In this episode of Vision Pros Live, Rich Ashton, 55-year business veteran, owner of a successful HVAC and plumbing company in North Texas, author of Growing Your Own, and leadership trainer, shares his proven framework for turning everyday blue collar employees into confident, capable leaders. With a 75% success rate and a company he retired from 3 months ago, now fully run by people he trained from within, Rich's story is a masterclass in intentional leadership development.
#VisionProsLive #RichAshton #GrowingYourOwn #LeadershipDevelopment #BlueCollarLeadership #SmallBusiness #PromoteFromWithin #Entrepreneurship #BusinessGrowth
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 All right. What's up Vision Pros? I've got Rich Ashton in the house. I'm going to put him in the hot seat and surprise him. We haven't met before, but I've enjoyed looking at his brand. I've enjoyed seeing his legacy. This man has tenure and that's super important. He's used his tenure well and well, and he, he looks like somebody who's not retiring anytime soon. He's going to continue to, to build according to the videos that I just saw. So let me share my screen real quick as I get ready to bring him on. He's in the backstage laughing a little bit about this process already, which I love. He's got this program called Growing Your Own. Go to growingyourown.net. You can see that really this is about helping leaderships grow from within, or in other words, your team members, specifically in the blue collar sector, but
0:41 Speaker 00 these principles apply over and over to businesses. I see it in the tech space. I see it in the startup space and the coaching and the holistic wellness space. You name it. Principles matter everywhere you go. So he's got testimonials on here. He's built a great brand for himself already. Let's go ahead and take a look at this tab as well, where it's got a little bit more information about who he is and his success in HVAC and plumbing industry. My friends, those are hard business models and their business models I've also worked directly with. And whether it was from ABC Pest Control out of Texas, phenomenal company. I got to learn so much about helping them pull their systems online and their, their paperwork, their paper processed leads. We created an app to help them submit those back
1:27 Speaker 00 through technology. But one of the greatest pieces was I learned from my best friend Spencer Hamilton, who launched a company for rather $180,000 software for manages general contractors. What we created was a software solution to survey employees who look, when it gets hot and you get hungry, you get hangry. And next thing you know, the relationships are blowing up and it was a great process to help recognize when tempers were starting to get out of storm and, and that helped us protect the lifetime value or retention rather of his team members. So Rich is going to teach us a lot about that process as well. Here's his book. You can find it on Amazon. Growing Your Own: Common Sense Advice for Developing Leaders Within a Small Business.
2:08 Speaker 00 And, and he's also got podcast appearances like crazy, which is why he's joined us today as well on Vision Pros Live. So Rich, thanks for letting me do the long introduction. Welcome to Vision Pros Live.
2:17 Speaker 01 You can keep going. I love that introduction.
2:21 Speaker 00 Well, you've earned it, my friend. Again, that tenure aspect, it's different when I'm talking to a 30-year-old. You know, these guys, they come out and you never know what they've actually done, but you've been through, you've been through some different eras of business.
2:34 Speaker 01 I've been through several. I've seen a lot of things invented and a lot of things improved in my, actually, total of 55 years in business, but 45 in small business.
2:43 Speaker 00 Absolutely. Tell me about your vision, Rich. What is your vision now?
2:47 Speaker 01 My vision now is that now that I've been through it, I developed a, this course, which you showed about where we took leaders out of blue collar industries, people who never dreamed that they would be leaders, built them into leaders or helped them become leaders. And the program was successful enough that I did retire about three months ago. The people I trained are now running the companies. And, and so now I'm marketing that vision, which is to, I really believe that this can be replicated throughout the, particularly the service industries, but really in any small company,
3:26 Speaker 01 where owners struggle with the idea of, do I bring in experienced, trained leaders when it's time to grow? Or can I promote people from within who may not be trained, probably are not trained in leadership? And, and either help them stumble through or have a failure on my hands. I did it both ways. I failed in both directions. And I finally decided that the, the uniqueness of a small business culture is worth preserving almost at all costs. And so the people who have been loyal to you, if they have any inclination to move in a leadership direction, I think you've got to pour as many resources into them
4:09 Speaker 01 to try to make leaders out of them as, as possible. It's a... It's a really exciting and ennobling pursuit because in our case, we had a 75% success rate. We, we took eight people out of production and put them into a leadership training program. Six of them survived and, and as I said, are now running the company. You know, I'll take 75% on a, on a training program anytime. So it's been, it's been wonderful to watch, wonderful to experience and it's, it's great fun for me now to look back at the company. I meet with the president every Monday and we met this morning, kind of get a handle
4:51 Speaker 01 on what's going on, see if there's anything I can help with. But other than that, I've not set foot back in the company in three months. And, and it's just, it's been a really interesting experience.
5:02 Speaker 00 Ah, man, I love this. We, I would love to just talk to you for hours. We, we don't have that time today, but I would love to bring you back for a 40 to 60 minute session as a starting point. But there's so much I want to learn. I mean, you, what you do and the way that you stand for it and the way you talk about it all reminds me of Patrick Lencioni. He's one of my absolute favorite leaders of the bunch. Michael Gerber, of course, John Maxwell, we go down the list, but you're a living, breathing example of this process. That is a beautiful backdrop, by the way. Where are you based out of?
5:32 Speaker 01 Arlington, Texas. And today is a sunny, a sunny, beautiful day.
5:36 Speaker 00 I'm from San Antonio. So I was like, I felt like I'm in, I'm in Ecuador, but I'm from San Antonio, born and raised. So I was like, man, that is just dreamy.
5:44 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's my, that's my back, that's my backyard. And so if I hang out in front of the backyard as much as I possibly can.
5:52 Speaker 00 Yeah, I would too. Absolutely. So my friends, we're going to come right back. I'm going to dive in a little bit deeper and see what, what type of rich golden nuggets can we pull out of Rich while we have some time with him and we'll see you guys on the other side. All right. Welcome into Vision Pros Live with Jackson Callum. I'm your show host. We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there.
6:24 Speaker 00 Hey, what's up everybody? Well, welcome into this episode of Vision Pros Live. I'm super excited to have Rich Ashton in the house. The more leaders that we can surround ourselves with, the better. We need so much perspective in the pursuit of building and scaling businesses. And this guy's got one that applies to every single one of our visions. As you grow a vision and scale it, more and more people are going to want to belong. And as they want to belong, you've got to figure out, how are you going to lead multiple people into safety, security, what we call in America, the American dream, something that has been so elusive for so many people. And I'm also excited to announce that today, we launched the blog, go dot firstclassbusiness.io/blog. My friends, check that content out. I am not
7:06 Speaker 00 kidding. I spent the entire weekend building 19 phenomenal formatted. Thank you Claude for helping me on this. I'm talking world-class knowledge has been stuck in my brain, in my brain and in my heart for like 12 years. And finally, I was able to get it all out and done. And it is phenomenal. I also want to invite all of you to join AI Mavericks. That's the incubator, or rather, the mastermind of Austin Armstrong and Scott Simpson. Those are two AI leaders that I connect with. And yes, we also have the AI marketplace, ai firstclassbusiness.io on our side. But I believe that it's so important to get in touch with more leaders who understand how to use these tools, because there's an old quote, that the power of the pen is mightier
7:47 Speaker 00 than the sword. Well, AI is like a nuclear pen, my friends. You have to learn how to use it well, in order for it to serve you. And one of the greatest, two of the greatest things you can work on for that are, one, leadership. Thank you, Rich Ashton, lean into him. And two, making sure that you learn to listen. That's also probably the best skillset that we can have as leaders. So again, Rich, welcome back. Are you guys diving into AI at all? And y'all's in, or have you guys ignored it completely?
8:14 Speaker 01 Oh, no, no, we, you don't have any choice, but you have to endorse and embrace AI. We use it primarily in the backend of the operation for streamlining and efficiency. In our opinion, we have not reached the point where AI AI is as good customer facing as we are. And so when when it is, I think we'll we'll move in that direction. Um, we exist to provide exceptional customer service to our to our employees and to our customers. Um, if AI can't beat us at that, then we need to continue to do it ourselves. But as I said, when when it's time that AI can help us be better at customer service, then then then we'll embrace it.
8:56 Speaker 00 I love that. As you see on your screen, Rich, and I I'm kind of dual promoting here, but there's a there's a really big reason why I'm doing that. Because it applies so much to what you do, and I'd like for all of your team to have honorary member access to what it is that we built. This particular shadow audit is a very important one to me. So we built two models, one for professionals who want to revamp their career and realize that they need to know that they already have the AI skills within them. They just haven't learned the lingo yet. And so this shadow audit takes professionals through that. On the right hand side, this takes people through practical business productivity and profitability bottlenecks. That if they fix those, their business would run more smoothly. I'm going to move real quick over to the ambassador grant.
9:38 Speaker 00 Guys, yes, it is an honor to extend that to Rich, but this is also for anybody who cannot afford to be in the AI marketplace with us. We created a grant program. We want, we do not want to leave people behind in the new world of AI. We want to help people come in, understand that we can create a win win victory process in this. And again, get you all trained up on how to use AI the right way. Rich, um, it's probably one of the greatest topics that we could extract from you. Do you have any secret sauces, any things that what what helps you make sure that you're maximizing AI and recognizing that that lethal edge of putting AI into a position to ruin your customer experience like Ring Central has, I'm going to call them out for last week's fiasco.
10:23 Speaker 00 They've spent millions and millions of dollars and they can't even get that process right. Why would I think that I could get it right? If I don't have millions and millions of dollars. So what are some of the secrets you've learned?
10:33 Speaker 01 Well, I think the one that I mentioned, and we, we read a book together called Start With Why by Simon Sinek, famous book, and it didn't, it didn't change our organization, but I think it gave us more confidence on decision making. Because we went back and said, who are we? And, and we knew who we were, but we didn't have it consolidated in a simple sentence. And we, we exist to provide exceptional customer service through empowerment and support of our employees. Every decision that we make is run through the filter of, are, is that going to make us better at our core mission? And as I said, there are parts of AI that make us better in the backend.
11:13 Speaker 01 There are things about AI that are not yet ready, but, but we will continue to ask the question. But we ask the question on non-AI things too. Does this make us better? Does this make us better? If it doesn't make us better in those two areas, then we're not going to adopt it. But we don't close the door. We're, we're open-minded, we're progressive. We continue to ask questions of ourselves every day about whether or not we're improving the customer too. And the employee.
11:41 Speaker 00 The customer experience, the employee experience, it reminds me of two very important books to me. One is Chip Conley's book. The, the book is called Peak, How to Get Your Mozlo, How to Get Your Mojo from Mozlo. And it's all about making sure that your team members, your investors and your customer Mozlo pyramids are supported by taking care of each one of those individuals really well. The other one that comes to mind is a good friend of mine named Craig Hanley. He has a Fortune 500 company, Visionaries. He wrote a book called Hired to Quit, Inspired to Stay. And that reality of like, again, how do we create cultures where people love being involved so much that they want to be with us? Those are the types of people that champion causes. Those are the types of people who show up and help us.
12:26 Speaker 00 We are one of the initiative I'll mention, Rich. I love your feedback on it as well. All this is, we've just had such an exciting weekend. We ended up launching a new offer and our new offer is our podcast guest can spend a hundred bucks with us to distribute their episode. And we will put $50 towards their, their specific episode. And the report that I ran with Claude, I'm very safe on projections. And so it said in six months with $1,200 in ad spend, one of the byproducts is we would end up with probably around 500 subscribers. I might figure it's probably two to three times more than that on the $1,200 spent. But the purpose is to drive the awareness for underprivileged markets who who don't get access to this type of training. They get overlooked. And so we're advertising
13:09 Speaker 00 to places that may not have as many prospects or people who can pay for our services, but it's people who need it tremendously. Well, in addition to that, the other $50 goes to a collective budget pool that my South American counterparts can utilize in order to switch from a VA mindset to an executive mindset. They get to decide what are we going to do with that budget. And that allows them to step into more of an ownership mentality with what it is that they're up to in the process. So get this, Rich, we launched the ads on Thursday night, they launched, no, sorry, Thursday morning they launched. And right now on $15 spent, we have over 1,000 new subscribers.
13:52 Speaker 00 On Saturday, I went to find an episode, I was in the middle of all the blog stuff, and I go to find an episode, and I saw 700. Whoa, what happened? And I was like, oh, okay. All right. I had to look at a bunch of things to make sure that nothing fishy was going on. But nope, it's just the content and the quality is just really, really crushing it.
14:13 Speaker 01 Maybe I should be interviewing you instead of you interviewing me.
14:17 Speaker 00 I'm kind of making you do that right now, Rich. But I want to, I want to get your professional expert perspective on this. Creating the budget pool for team members and allowing them to make the decisions and operate that. What are your thoughts?
14:31 Speaker 01 I think it's great. I think, I think when you push those decisions, you know, as far down in the organization, I think that's part of the empowerment process, whether you're talking about employees or you're talking about, you know, outside vendors. I mean, that's, I just, I think that's an interesting concept. And obviously, you've got something going for you. You wouldn't have had that kind of immediate success.
14:52 Speaker 00 It's been visionary. There's a couple of ways I protect myself on this too. So we use a bank called Mercury. We used to use RelayFi until they shut us down randomly. It didn't tell us why. That was weird. And so again, and I found out that that just happens with these with these pseudo banks, if you will. But the neat thing about Mercury is you can set up up to, I think, 20 bank accounts. And so you can have individual access for different bank accounts based on people's levels. And so if you're worried about somebody taking your finances and running with it. The nice thing is if you've got new team members and you want to test their loyalty with a $50 account. It's a really good way to find out that you don't have to make a $50,000 mistake or more. So
15:35 Speaker 00 there are ways to make sure that you set systems up to protect yourself and processes. But I agree with Rich. If the more we do to empower people that are down the totem pole in terms of decision making and allow them to step into accountability. The more likely they are to feel empowered to start climbing the totem pole as well and start making greater level executive decisions. So Rich, any any big hitting points that you want to dive into today about your vision about how to help leaders or off the cuff?
16:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, just picking up on what you just said.
16:11 Speaker 01 I think that we use delegation a lot as we bring leaders, would be leaders along slowly. And just as you just said. You don't have to take a big risk. You don't have to delegate a critical project. But if someone shows a little bit of interest in leadership, you can give them a small task. Take them through what delegation is all about, what your expectations are, what the timetable is. You know, one of three things is going to happen. You won't see them again, in which you get part of the answer or the full answer. They'll come back and do a so-so job, or they'll knock it out of the park. Well, the ones that knock it out of the park, obviously, those are the people that you're going to delegate something else to. So our leadership program is step by step because again,
16:56 Speaker 01 we're not dealing with people who are going to read a John Maxwell book.
17:02 Speaker 01 Going to they they don't learn that way. Right. And and you know, we're talking about technical people in general, but they also didn't think of themselves as ever becoming leaders. So when you introduce them to a leadership principle and you illustrate it, you know, with a with an anecdote or something from my life or something that we experienced in the company. You take it step by step and you begin to build confidence and they start saying, oh, my gosh, I didn't realize that that was involved in leadership and I didn't realize that was what communication was about. And I certainly didn't know that as I went higher in the organization, my level of accountability would increase. I actually thought maybe it would decrease. I thought that
17:42 Speaker 01 I was holding other people accountable, but I'm held accountable for the success of my division or my team or my company or whatever it is. And and so the you mentioned blogs and this book was not a book that I sat down and wrote start to finish. As a part of our leadership program, I decided I would start writing blogs to try to communicate casually about a variety of leadership topics. After two years of doing that every other week, I had 52 blogs written. I was about out of ammunition and and so I I read through the blogs one weekend and and said, this is good enough to publish in in book form. I consolidate consolidated it to 35 chapters.
18:27 Speaker 01 And the chapters are two and a half pages long. So anybody, regardless of how much they read or listen to the audio version or whatever, they can grab something this morning. They can grab a concept this morning, put it in place this afternoon and see results either today or tomorrow. And so it recognizes who the people are that we're trying to train and it trains them in a way that they can absorb the information. And I think that's the reason the program was successful.
18:56 Speaker 00 My friends, most people that I meet and that you meet that hear that type of a pitch, that type of a promise, they're full of it. I know that Rich isn't because I've lived in these experience, I'm blue collar, I'm from Texas. I know what it's like to work in the oil field and work in pest control and work in HVAC and all of that. And it's a different breed of training. And more importantly, I know that these lessons are universal and they're principles that I bring to every single type of, it doesn't matter if it's a restaurant, a hotel, manufacturing, all the different types of companies that I've worked with, all of them need these types of principles. And so I highly recommend diving in, taking a serious look at that book and the program as well, and always stay close
19:38 Speaker 00 to the authors of these types of materials. So you sparked my curiosity on another piece, Rich. And again, we're going back for a full episode, we're going to go long. If you're willing to, I would love to. Okay, good. I got you. I had to hook you while I'm on here so that you wouldn't go away afterwards. But no, my friends, this is just, this is just too neat. It feels like I'm interviewing Ken Blanchard.
20:04 Speaker 01 Don't go there now. That's, that's a leap too far.
20:07 Speaker 00 I don't think so. I think you're right there in his class, my friend. So the, so these, the blue collar workers and the common or average worker in America as well, I think a lot of people are worried about the fact that AI is going to be replacing jobs and taking jobs. And I want to, I want to help these people get inspired by that AI program I was talking about, where helping them realize you've got the skill sets within you. You just need to learn how to, to use them and you're empowering people in a way, like you said, these, these aren't people who are listening to Success Magazine's interviews for 10 years and they're not watching our podcast perhaps. There's a different way
20:50 Speaker 00 to reach them. And that unlocks a whole nother level of workforce and really an entire economy, for like a global economic impact that can be so positive. Do you also see people right now kind of scared of the AI transition? And what do you go, what do you do to go about helping them realize that there's, there's value in diving into it?
21:16 Speaker 01 With all the fear that there is throughout all industries about AI and what's going to happen, I think that in the trades, I think it has the opportunity to enhance the trades. I think more people will be going into the trades, more people come in, there's more opportunity for growth, there's more opportunity for leadership growth. So I don't feel like our people are scared like they are in some other industries. I mean, you've still got to lay hands on a machine, you know, you still have to talk to a customer and, you know, maybe 10 years from now, maybe that starts to go away, but gosh, the, just the growth in the trades from the growth in the data center business, I mean, that's a, that's
21:58 Speaker 01 a lifetime of opportunity, it looks like to me. So the basic leadership principles that we teach are good whether you're in a big company or a small company. They, they're about learning to communicate with people and lead, you know, if you're leading three people, you'll be better for having knowledge of these leadership principles. So whatever career that you're in, in the trades, or whatever level of career, a little bit of leadership understanding is a good thing. A lot of leadership understanding is a really good thing.
22:33 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. My friend's visionary is one of the things that you've seen throughout this process, and I'm being open with it for y'all's sake, even though it's a little bit awkward for Rich and I, I am actively recruiting Rich as well. I want his materials, I want his brain, his wisdom by my side and everything that we're building with the AI marketplace. That would be the coolest opportunity to have them involved because I don't know every leadership secret. The leadership things I do know is because I've stood on the shoulders of giants, and I want to constantly look for how do I get closer to those who are leading. We talked about the blogs. One more thing for you guys, visionaries, I told you about how excited I am. I'm going to show you one of the blog posts I am most excited about. And yes, Claude built this, and it did not take very long for me to be able
23:16 Speaker 00 to build it. This is a super sophisticated article, and it talks about how the SBA recommends that marketing and advertising, that the company Companies put seven to eight percent towards marketing and advertising. This is dead wrong, my friends. The BLS tracks failure rates, but nobody has ever connected those two realities. In other words, we don't know. Out of all the companies that chose to follow this advice, we have no idea how many people succeed and how many people lost. All we know is that sixty-six percent of businesses fail within ten years. So it's not looking very good in their favor. I don't want a sixty-six percent failure rate across those I teach. But there's zero studies that have ever been done on connecting these two.
24:00 Speaker 00 And so this has bothered me for years. Claude and I finally conquered it this weekend and it reveals so many important realities. But here's why I'm talking to you about this. You see how this is, this is what's called experiential learning, my friends. I've designed this to where you can't just read through it and not find, you have to actually like discover what the answer is. And that helps you know, are you actually learning something new or did you already know that answer? Now, in addition to that experiential process, if we go through this, this again, this is a very sophisticated piece that finally reveals for companies. Okay, if you're at this gauge, your budget should be twenty to fifty percent, not seven to eight percent and so on and so on. I've got one change to make to that, but here's what I'm getting to. I also designed this so that all of us could take action. And what type of action?
24:44 Speaker 00 We can petition the institutions, the research firms, the media organizations and the universities by sending this email template to them to say, hey, we want to know the data. And I asked Claude to include the government agencies with their email addresses, the research firms with their email. They're going to jump all of this. They want to be the first one to come out with this research. The AI companies, because AI is currently moving people towards institutional knowledge based on false authority, not based on actual outcome. And then the media publications, Fox, Forbes, CNN, et cetera, and universities as well, so they can get involved in this process. This is a super interactive piece. Any of you can model that same type of process and build out using Claude to, to build points and to build purpose for your industries.
25:29 Speaker 00 And to help people understand more transparently what it takes to win, what it takes to have a better life, et cetera. So Rich, again, thanks for letting me show that to the audience real quick on your time. Any thoughts further about your blog, your book, what we just talked about?
25:43 Speaker 01 Well, I, I want to share one story that made the, made the blogs come alive because when I first started reading them. I mean, writing them, everybody read them and they, I don't know what they did with them, but it didn't, it didn't have the, the desired effect, which was to get them talking about these blogs. So the general manager said, I'll tell you what, in the, the weekly management meetings, I'm going to allot 20 minutes every other week and we're going to talk about the latest blog and we're going to talk about it openly. And what, what reminded me of this is what you said about it being experiential. And, and as you go through that blog, they have to respond to it. That's what we found them reading the blogs together did.
26:25 Speaker 01 And they began not only to hold themselves accountable of the principles in the blogs, they held each other accountable. And when that happened, the whole program really took off. And, and so, I mean, it was, it was exciting to watch it happen.
26:40 Speaker 00 Oh, I love that. That's active learning, my friends. And I hope all of you are doing that while we've been talking, looking up these author names, going into the programs, connecting with us on LinkedIn and beyond. Rich Ashton is a professional at the highest level, my friends. He's humble about it, but growingyourown.net. These are types of resources that I had to look for, for a decade. Well, I'd look for, for at least five years. I had to process it and learn how to understand it. I'd eventually find the mentors. Eventually finally opened my ears to say, you know what? I should just like dive in full force with the leaders who understand this stuff. And, and Rich is one of those individuals. So Vision Pros, you don't have to be a world-class leader to be on the show. You might be starting out humbly with your vision. Go to visionproslive.com, the top right corner, click the button that says be our guest.
27:25 Speaker 00 Come share, come share your vision with us. It can be, again, humble, as long as you're out there serving and helping others. We want to hear about it and we'll see you guys all on the next episode. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun and we'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show and thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.
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