Dave Ramsey - Billionaire Founder of Ramsey Solutions | Why Most Entrepreneurs Are Miserable Running Their Own Companies

Why do so many people build businesses they don't love? They're trying to do a thing that they love, but they forgot that you have to do business to do the thing. Today's guest went from bankrupt to building a $300 million company without ever touching debt again. I'm talking about Dave Ramsey, founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions and host of The Ramsey Show, reaching an estimated 20 million listeners every week. What's the issue when you're starting? Because that's setting you up for success or failure right from the get go. A lot of chefs open a restaurant. A lot of guys that do heat and air open a heat and air company. But that's different than fixing the air conditioner. I think that's what bites us is we back into the business acumen part. Those things not going well, again, can steal your soul. It really is bad. When you look at what you've built, you've been doing this for over 30 years. Did you always love the business you were building? Yeah, no, I haven't always loved it. But I do know that... My fitness pal is a success story partner. Now I want to talk about something I do every single day that I almost never bring up on the show, how I actually keep my health from falling apart while I'm running everything else in my life. When I first started my own health and wellness journey, my fitness pal was like the first app I ever downloaded to help me figure out my nutrition, my calories, my macros, all of it. When you are moving at 100 miles a minute, your workouts get sloppy, your eating gets random. Don't even talk to me about when you're on the road. I mean, there's days where I look up at 4 p.m. and I realize all I've had is a coffee and whatever was sitting on the counter. And for years, I told myself, like many of you, that this was just the price of being ambitious. You're grinding, you're building, you don't have time to think about lunch. And that's a story that I kept telling myself, but it's not true. It's just being disorganized about the one thing that you can't actually replace, which is your food, which leads to your health. Food is a foundation for your energy, for your sleep, for your recovery, for your performance, for your life. Basically, food is the one input. You can have the best morning routine on earth. You can meditate, you can journal, you can cold plunge, you can do whatever you want. If your nutrition is off, everything else stays. suffers. I see it everywhere. It doesn't matter if you're optimizing for the perfect body, or you're optimizing to win the championship, or you're optimizing your brain to be at 150% and always be cognitively dialed in. Whatever it is you're trying to optimize for, it starts with food. If your nutrition is off, everything else suffers. Over the last week, Not only am I working with MyFitnessPal, but I've been back in the MyFitnessPal app on the premium plan. This is the app that started off my own health and wellness journey years, years, years ago. And the first step that I took towards getting my own health back was downloading MyFitnessPal. years and years and years ago. I scan a barcode. It pulls everything up. It remembers my regular meals. It's done. There's no friction. And that matters because the second something is annoying or there's a lot of friction, I stopped doing it. And that's just the truth with me. This one stuck because it doesn't feel like work. Now, the moment I started logging what I was really eating, not what I thought I was eating, and there's a big difference there. I was way under on protein and I was eating most of my food after 8 p.m. And I was telling myself that my nutrition was fine because I wasn't eating junk, but not eating junk and actually eating right are two very different things. And with premium, I can see all of this, right? I can see trends over the weeks. I can see the macro breakdowns by gram, by meal. I can see where my energy dips in the day. It lines up with what I ate. And I can set custom goals for different days, which is useful because my training days and my rest days obviously don't look the same. Turns out that I wasn't feeding myself properly. And it's embarrassing to say, but it's true. It's not about obsessing over a number. It's not about punishing yourself for eating a burger. It's about awareness. You cannot fix what you refuse to look at. The MyFitnessPal app just makes you look. I just want you to start with one week. Just log what you actually eat for seven days and look at it. And I promise it'll tell you something you didn't know. And whatever it's telling you is going to help you function better today, tomorrow. And most importantly, it's going to help you live a much longer and healthier life. So go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com. That is podcasts.myfitnesspal.com. And use code Scott. That is S-C-O-T-T, Scott in all uppercase letters. And you're going to get 15% off MyFitnessPal premium. Again, this is so you can start living a healthier life. happier, longer life, go to podcasts.myfitnesspal.com, code Scott. Links in the show notes too. Check it out. You won't regret it. I want to start off with build a business you love. Why do so many people build businesses they don't love? I think we're sometimes accidental entrepreneurs, and they're trying to do a thing that they love, but they forgot that you have to do business to do the thing. You know, so, you know, I hate accounting. I hate hiring and firing people. I hate, well, those are things you do to run a business, you know. And so if those things are sapping the, you know, pulling the strength out of you, pulling the marrow out of your bones while you're trying to do the thing that's... that you love in the business, then it becomes a business that you hate. Do you think that people don't start with the end in mind? They just start to start. They follow a passion. Like, what's the issue when you're starting? Because that's setting you up for success or failure right from the get-go. Yeah, it's, you know, we all start with a great idea and something that we have some semblance of talent at. And so the chef. He's a great chef, but he had never run a restaurant. He's running a kitchen and knows how to cook or she knows how to cook, maybe at world class level. But that's different than I got to make payroll. I got to pay my taxes. You know, that's different than making sure the logistics of the stuff is ordered and all that. So a lot of chefs open a restaurant. A lot of guys that do heat and air open a heat and air company, but that's different than fixing the air conditioner. And so I think that's what bites us is we back into the business acumen part. And then those things not going well, again, can steal your soul. It really is bad. When you look at what you've built and, you know, like I said, I'm walking around this, this office and it's absolutely beautiful. And yeah, how many employees do you have now? You have about a thousand, thousand employees. You've been doing this for over 30 years. Did you always love the business you were building? No, no. And I think that's one of the reasons we brought that up in the title and everything is because there's times that when I sucked at some particular area and it was causing drama and we couldn't get the work done because we're dealing with the whatever, you know. You know, again, it's personal experience as I did a lot of I've survived all of our mistakes. I mean, you know, it's. people talk about mistakes oh my gosh i mean we have a phd in dumb around here we've done it all and so uh but but yeah no i haven't always loved it and um but i do know that if i'd had a few more tools in my belt about i had a little bit better knowledge in some of those areas some of the stuff i did i didn't have to be that dumb you know i didn't have to be that dumb that's the cost that's the cost of success yeah it's like it's like you know Now we're fortunate because we have books like these. We have YouTube channels like yours. We have all these resources we can go to to figure out how to do it. Which is interesting because everybody still makes the same damn mistakes. Exactly. which I can't quite wrap my mind around. Like why do we have so many resources out there? Because you're gonna put this book out, build a business you love, people are gonna read it, they're still not gonna listen to it. So what's the advice that you gotta give that, why are they having so much trouble accumulating all this information about building a business, being an entrepreneur, and they still make these dumb mistakes? Well, I think you gotta, I'm getting old now, so I can think back in the decades ago, I could hear one piece of information when I was 30 and the exact same information comes to me 10 years later with 10 more years of mistakes and experience. And I hear it differently. Yeah. I'm, you know, when the teacher, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear kind of thing in the lesson that will appear again. Uh, and so it's like reading the Bible. I read it one time when I'm, and it says one thing to me and I read that exact same verse five years later and I'm in a different situation and it, It's like it's almost a whole new sentence, you know, and I think that that's because of our our points of perception on how we're able to receive that, receive the information. One of the points you make, which I love, is a lot of people end up building themselves a job, not a business. Explain I go deeper on that idea. So what does it mean to build yourself a job, not a business? Well, you know, the first stage, we go through five stages of business in that book. And the first stage is the treadmill operator. And it's where we all start. You know, it's I got an idea. I go make some revenue. We have some expenses. We pay the expenses and we net out the profit and we've had a good day, you know, and there we go. We game on. But if it's just you, you're on the treadmill all the time, because if you if you if you get sick or you take a day off, no revenue. You get sick or you take a day off, no production of the thing. And so if you're the sole means of production and the sole means of revenue, then you really don't yet own a business. You own your job. And that's okay. That's where you start. But you don't, you know, you can't, you don't want to be there for 38 years. So it's the guy, you know, it's the guy with the heat and air truck. And he's still by himself. Yeah. 38 years later with one truck. He just has owned his job all that time. And that's okay. Again, that can be his choice. He doesn't want it to be bigger. He doesn't want to put up with the hassle of employees and stuff being stolen. He don't want to put up with all that. Instead, he'd just rather depend on himself, and he'd rather not work for somebody else. So he's decided to stay at that stage of business intentionally or by default on the two. But that's where you start. And then the trick is, how do we get above it? And as Michael Gerber said so long ago in the book E-Myth, and it's a classic book now, is how do we learn to work on the business, not just in it? I feel like that level where you're on this treadmill, that's the worst kind of life though, because you don't have, so bear with me for a second here, because when you work a job, at least you know when you clock in and you clock out and you can get paid a lot to work a job, if you're strategic about your career. But then this kind of business where you're stuck in it and you can never escape and you don't have balance and you don't have a life, I think this is probably the most depressing place to be in because if you never get it to the next level, I don't think that's a great life. I think that's a really stressful life. And I think that that can ruin relationships with all the people around you because that's the entrepreneur that is working 24 hours a day and they don't stop that season of their life ever. And that's when it starts to impede your marriage, your relationship with your kids, like all of it. And I don't think that people ever think about, okay, I'm just a hard worker, that's all it's gonna take. And then they never get themselves out of this sort of season of exceptionally hard work and doing everything themselves. And that's what I don't want people to fall into. Like everything you say in this book is what I believe in and subscribe to as well. And it's something that I'm working through myself with like my own little business. But I don't think that's where people should ever stay. No, I think that's the issue is, are we staying or have we been there too long? You're going to start there unless you're like got venture capital and somebody hands you $10 million and you staff up or something. Right. Yeah. But most of us that start a business in our living room on a card table or in your garage at the workbench, whatever it is, most of us that start there start on the treadmill stage. And it's it's exciting. Because your prototype sucks and you're doing new stuff every day. And it's really, there's a lot of adrenaline. It's a lot of fun. And I remember getting home and working on a 16-hour day, claps on the couch. And my wife would say, what did you do today? I have no idea. But I did a lot of it. And I've been putting out fires all day. I'm a fireman. I don't know what. But you can't. That's not sustainable is your point. That's okay for a period of time with this business. I did that, you know, launching this thing, opened the office. I'm teaching Financial Peace University with an overhead projector and a bad suit at night. I'm doing a radio show in the afternoon. I'm in the office at 6 a.m. And, you know, I'm taking a shower in the middle of the day to get ready to go speak on stage that night. And I'm running like my hair was on fire. Look what happened. But that was like. Two years. Two years. Year and a half to two years. And I started hiring team members. I started working my way out of it. But Sharon, to my marriage, to the point, we sat down and we said, okay, it's going to take a minute to get this thing rolling. It's not going to be like we started and three weeks later I get to work nine to five. You know? You don't. You're going to pay a price to win, baby. You know, if you're going to play big, you got to play big. But I'm also not going to do this for 10 years. But she will tell you in that 18-month period of time she felt like a single mom. Because I literally was in the office at 7, and I would leave Financial Peace University coaching some young couple up, getting them out of debt at 11 p.m. at night. And I did about did that 18 months to two years. And then I finally started getting enough hires and we started shifting some of the business models. We took the class that I was teaching live, put it on videotape, VHS. That's how long ago it was. Right. And but still, that was the first business model shift and some hiring that allowed me to get up on top of it and run it this way rather than being the only horse pulling the plow. Yeah. You said before that there was a point where you were successful on paper, but exhausted in real life. And I think that that resonates with a lot of people that are stuck in this stage. And I keep going back to this stage because I think that is the hardest. This treadmill stage is one of the hardest spots for people to get out of. Of course, every stage has their own difficulties. Yeah, your first hire. is necessary to get out of it. Yeah. You got to have somebody to delegate some of this crap to. Yeah. Otherwise, you're the only one shoveling, right? And that's terrifying. Your first hire is terrifying. It's like, am I going to screw this up? Spoiler alert. Yes. You know, do I have the money to pay this person? Spoiler alert. Hopefully, you know, and those are terrifying questions that a person of honor, you're not going to ask someone to come in here and work on the team. And, you know, there is no team and it's me and you, babe. And here we go. And that first hire is really super scary. Who was that first hire for you? Russ Carroll. And he stayed with us so long that he retired here. And he was a, he was a financial coach, financial counselor. And I had too much counseling going on and that was a very limiting, we couldn't sell any more of it cause I didn't have any more hours to book with doing the show and then doing this thing at night. And so I'm like, Hey Russ, if you come on, you can have all the overflow counseling. As a matter of fact, I'll probably give you some of what I was doing so that I can get some other work done. And so he came in and started generating revenue from the very, very first day. And, uh, And then we hired a lady named Patty, who was our first, I don't know, receptionist, bookkeeper, did everything that we couldn't do thing, person, you know, whatever her job description was. And the three of us were in an office not much bigger than this studio. How do you not screw up that first hire? Yeah. Um, Patty was not a good hire. She's still a friend of this day, but I, she was making a lot of money somewhere else. And she came to work for us for less money because she believed in the crusade. Dumb idea. Because then she couldn't pay her bills. And so that didn't work. And, um, but she's precious. She's a neat person, but she had to leave because she had to go pay her bills. And that was really distressing. But Russ, uh, man, we spent so much time together talking about what it would be like to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, uh, to, And his wife, Joy, where they would come to the Christmas party years later and there'd be 500 people or 800 people or whatever. And she would say, I remember that first time we had lunch, you said you didn't want any employees. When you think about when you think about scaling, a lot of the time you become the bottleneck. Big time. How do you remove yourself? So obviously hiring is one of those ways. But if you think about all the other things you've got to do to get out of that season of your life and have a little bit of normalcy. how do you remove yourself and not be the bottleneck in your own business so that the people that even hire can do their jobs properly? Well, I'm a, um, I have this incredible, um, I'll say it a positive way, passion for excellence. Um, some people might call that being a control freak. Yeah. Um, you know, I mean, I can't stand it. If Ramsey does something wrong in the marketplace, because that means we lose customers and it means we're going to lose profit and we lose reputation. And we spent a lot of money building that marketing plan that built that reputation and that brand. And then we screwed it up. You know, it drives me bananas to this day. It still does. Uh, And so turning loose of... Giving someone the power to rock your baby for you is also terrifying. That's a form of delegation that's beyond just simply do that task, shovel that. You know, that's different. Now we're asking someone to help me not be the bottleneck, right, which is your point. And so that form of delegation, it took me a while. And for a while, I thought I had a couple people accuse me of being a control freak. You're a micromanager. And I'm like, yeah, yeah. Maybe, but I did hire you to do something because I wanted somebody else to help me. So how does that, if I was a micromanager, I probably wouldn't even have written those checks to pay you. So I kind of had a little self, you know, I had a kind of introspection moment there. And I finally realized, you know, I'm really not a control freak. I'm just demand excellence. And so if I can't believe that you're going to do it right, I'm not going to turn it loose. We're not done training. And so I can't delegate to you until I can trust your competency and your integrity. And when I know you'll do it right and I can trust you, then you're going to do it as good or better than I would have done it for the customer. Then it's easy for me to turn it loose because I got plenty of other stuff to do. Yeah. But the issue is that all entrepreneurs are that super ambitious. They care so much. If you didn't care, you shouldn't be doing it. Yeah, you've got to care. But you've got to find other people that can do something better than you on your behalf. And again, you trust their competency, their talent, their ability to do something. I mean, I've got, you know, we're in the digital world. I'm a boomer, you know. And so I've got 400 programmers in this building that I don't even know what they do. I've never written a line of code in my life. They do a good job, though. They do a good job. And they do an incredible job. We put out some digital products that are world freaking class, you know. But, again, I'm delegating to someone. I trust their competency. They're aligned on our values in general. So I can manage the philosophy around the business product and the business acumen. And I can drive the values into it and not know how to write a line of code. amp is a success story partner now most people don't fall off their fitness routine because they're lazy they fall off because life gets in the way the gym is a 30 minute drive equipment takes over your living room some days you got 20 minutes not two hours amp fixes that it is the smart home gym that actually looks good in your space it's sleek it's premium barely takes up any room here's how it works there's one smart dial that controls all the resistance you twist it and the weight adjusts instantly and that's your entire setup You pick a workout, five minutes or 60, and the app walks you through it step by step, like having a trainer right there with you. There's over 500 movements. There's strength. There's HIIT. There's Pilates. There's yoga. There's mobility. And it keeps things fresh. So you actually stick with it. And that's the real win, right? It removes the friction. 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They aren't just optimizing their business and their calendar and their team. They're paying attention to what they eat. And the ones who aren't, they're usually the first ones to burn out. And this pattern is consistent enough that it actually got me thinking about my own nutrition, not whether I was eating well, but whether I actually knew what the big picture looked like, what's going into my body and how is it fueling me. That's why I started using the MyFitnessPal app. I wanted to see what I was actually eating, not what I assumed I was eating throughout the day, but the real numbers, what my protein looked like, how my macros, macronutrients were broken down, where my calories were actually going throughout the day. and the app gives you all of that. Now, what kept me using it is that there's zero friction. I can scan a barcode on something I eat and it pulls everything up. I can also voice log what I ate. It also remembers my regular meal. 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You can set up. automatic purchases with zero fees, or you can buy larger amounts also with zero fees. You can start small, you can go bigger. It is designed to be simple either way. And for a limited time, new customers can get $10 added to their balance. Just use code cash app 10 when you sign up and don't forget this part. Send at least $5 to a friend in the first two weeks. Terms apply. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners. Bitcoin services provided by Block Inc. brand. For additional information, see the Bitcoin disclosures at cash.app slash legal slash podcast. You've written how many books now? You've written... How many total books have you written? I think there's eight on the bestseller list. Eight on the bestseller list. So this would be the ninth? No, this would be the eighth. I think this is the eighth. I think it might be ninth. Why did helping people build a business they love, why did that need to be a book? Why did that need to be sort of the next phase? And I... I think my personal belief is that entrepreneurship is the way. I think entrepreneurship is the way. My origin story is me looking at my dad and he worked for the government for his whole career and he bought his first house at 25 cash. And I don't have that reality if I'm just gonna go work a job at a high school or college. Like that reality doesn't exist to me. And now we don't have the pensions like we used to and like what we got 401k matching or Canadian RRSP matching, but that's pretty much the extent of it. Cost of living has gone up. Homes are more expensive. And this was in Toronto, mind you. You can't buy a home in Toronto for under a million now. No, that's an expensive market. Very. So I realized looking at how my parents lived their life and the playbook that they subscribed to, it wasn't going to work for me anymore. Right. So I think entrepreneurship is like the safer route than a nine to five for most people. If they can bet on themselves, they can learn the skills. And I'll tell you one more thing, and then you can disagree or debate all day. No, I completely agree with everything you're saying. But... Even if you act like an entrepreneur and you adopt the mindset of one, you'd still be a more valuable employee somewhere else and you future-proof yourself there as well. But that's, so when you say build a business you love, I'm like, yes, everybody should be an entrepreneur. Everybody should go build a business. But I wanna understand from your perspective, after teaching people about finance, about responsibility, about common sense for like 30 plus years, why is the next chapter, okay, now I want you to focus on building something that's actually yours. Well, what happened was I did not have any leadership development training internally. It was just like, I'm going to teach you how to do this, and when you can finish my sentences, I can turn you loose, right? Yeah. So it was very much a discipleship or mentorship style. There was no... written playbook so to speak and uh the guys kept going dave if you will just teach us this stuff you you can turn us loose a lot faster all right i'm going to start teaching a class on how to run a business the way we run our business and i'm going to teach it to our team on tuesday night and we close at 5 30 so i'm gonna start teaching at five and i'm gonna teach till six you can have 30 minutes on my clock and 30 minutes on your clock i'll teach you how to run a business And you can go run one for yourself or you can stay here and run one with us. And we'll be all together entrepreneurs. And I called it entree leadership, entrepreneurs that are leaders internally. And as soon as the first night I finished teaching, you know, there's 15 or 20 of our guys sitting, gals sitting out there. And the guy says, hey, my husband, my lady says, my husband's in real estate business. He wants to come listen to this. Is it okay? I'm like, sure, Tom, come on. We'll print off one more set of pages. Another guy says, hey, my pastor is trying to figure out how to run the business aspects of the church. Can he come sit in on this? Sure. And I looked up in a few weeks and there were more people sitting there that didn't work for me than did. And I went, oh, people want to know this. And so we started doing seminars with that same set of material for the public to come and learn how to start and run a business. That became a number one bestselling book called Entree Leadership, which was the playbook of how we run Ramsey. how we grew it from a card table in my living room. And then we now are coaching about 10,000 small businesses, and we do these huge leadership events all under that Entree Leadership brand, and we have an Entree Leadership podcast as well, all this stuff in that whole brand. And the guys that are running that whole thing, and I speak at all those, and I do those podcasts and everything, and they came in and go, look, we have an actual system here that we're using to coach these people that is also what we have done at Ramsey, and we need to write that down. And so we're going to do another book. I went, okay, let's do a book. So that's how build a business. It's the actual system. Like Financial Peace University is our, I'm sorry, Entree Leadership. The first book is what to do. Build a business you love is how to do it. Hmm. It's the principles applied in a tactical process where you go, oh, yeah, I'm at the treadmill stage. Oh, I'm at the legacy stage. Oh, I'm at the pathfinder stage. Oh, that's where you recognize real quickly when you're reading the book, this is where I am, and here's the three things I've got to do to level up To keep moving and keep, you know, moving through these stages because, as you said earlier, we don't want to get stuck in any of the stages. I think, I think, this is my personal opinion, that that first treadmill stage is the hardest. But in your opinion, is it or are there other difficult pieces that you have to move along? It's the most difficult from a fatigue standpoint and a strain on your day. work-life balance, all those things. It's the most difficult in those. It is the easiest emotionally because it's all up to you. You know, you don't have any... hiring problems. You don't have, you know, you've hired a hundred, we've hired, you know, 40 or 50, a hundred people. And you look up and you got crazy in the building and geez, now I got to stop and deal with crazy. And I got drama, drama, drama. And you know, over the years we've showed them different levels. There's different types of problems is all I'm saying. So I'm not sure I would say that I loved any of the problems at any of the stages more than the other problems. But I, So emotionally letting go and maturing to bring people on that you count on is the only way to actually get out of the treadmill stage. And I would say emotionally, that's real difficult. You're right. Entre leadership. So this is so the way that I understand it, this is a great mental model to build your own business. It's a great mental model to lead within an organization as well. It's just again. So it's like acting like an entrepreneur. Yeah. And if you work for someone, you are an entrepreneur, you are self-employed, you just have one customer. The guy you work for. That's it. The guy you work for. That's it. And so make the customer happy. So your line is you don't need more hustle. You need clarity. A lot of people worship hustle. I think that that was very toxic. I think that, and I've always thought, you know, there's a big difference between just working hard and like hustling versus working on hard things, huge difference there. And I think that people can fight to myself included when I started my, like my show and my, you know, all the things that I've worked on in my life. Um, So how do you find clarity? Because that could be the key. Yeah. I think you take steps back and, you know, let's take a breath and have a cup of coffee at 5 o'clock in the morning. It's fine. And nobody around on the back porch and the mist is rising off the pond over there. And you go, okay, Lord, what? Am I doing? What is it you want done today? And what is, what is this whole thing? And when you can get really crystal clear on your mission and your why, as my friend Simon Sinek would say, start with the why. When you say, this is why I'm doing this, then that'll get you up in the morning and that'll keep you going and that'll keep you growing. So it's not just raw hustle. Yeah. But if you've got clarity, this crystal clear thing of, we know what we do. And we're going to be the best at it. and we're going to get after it. And if you're not a we, then get on another bus because this is who we is. And, you know, it gives the team clarity. It gives the customer clarity. And otherwise, you're just running around, you know, chasing squirrels in the street. You're just like ADD, right? You're just, yeah, I'm really out of breath, but I am not making any forward progress because I'm just going side to side because I have no idea what my destination is. Now you're approaching world class because very few people have those two things. Where do you find that clarity from when you're first starting out? I think you have it. If you usually there's something that boiled up inside, something pissed you off in the marketplace that said, this is wrong. This is unjust. This is missing. This is why is it you're doing the thing? Because, you know, otherwise there's no reason to do it. And so you kind of know down and deep. But real quickly, the busyness of the day and dealing with the little fires and ordering the product and, you know, checking the comments and all the other bull crap we do. Right. That can take over and you lose that clarity of why. But it'll come back to you if you screw something up and the pain starts coming in. And you'll have to go, okay, really, why am I here? You know, why am I putting up with all this? And then all of a sudden, and then you can push away all the voices and the critics, and you can push away all the stuff. It's like, this is what I do. You know, I'm not here for everybody. I'm here for that guy. One of the things that you say, which I actually, I love is that businesses drift towards chaos naturally. Right. And I think that's a little bit of the fault of the entrepreneur because they love that shiny object syndrome. But I think that you're, you're a hundred percent right. And you have to be at the end of the day, you have to be the one that creates clarity for the whole organization. Yeah, one of my buddies, he says, I'm the CRO and I'm the chief repeating officer. I just have to say it over and over and over because this is what we do. This is what we do. This is what we do. And sometimes people get confused and go, this is what we do. It's like, you can't. No, no. This is what we do. And, you know, we're not. Well, there's a lot of profit over there. I don't care. Somebody else will have to get that because this is what we do. What? I think it's an Amazon story. It could be an Amazon story where Jeff Bezos always had all these ideas. And then Andy Jassy kept saying like, no, we're not doing that. We're not doing that. We're not doing that. And like, it's like the COO now he's CEO, COO's role to sort of put the brakes on what the CEO is doing. But the CEO always has all these ideas. And I think that, it's a little bit of self-awareness to understand like, if you're old, cause I think that the issue is like the CEO or the founder, they're so excited. They could overwhelm their team with lack of clarity by accident. Cause they're so excited about all these different things. I've done that multiple times in our career, multiple times I've done that. But the only thing that saved me was we had a clearly defined set of values that are written down. We had a clearly defined mission that is written down that we're all in agreement to. And then someone raised their hand and go, what does that have to do with that mission? I go, oh, crud. Now you're getting me off my shiny object again. I'm not just a bass. I can't just chase everything shiny. Yeah. Is that the answer at scale? Is it the mission, the culture that reinforces the clarity? Yeah, you got a plumb line, something. What is true north? Yeah. What's the compass? And if you're not, then there is no reason to not go over there and do the shiny thing. Because it's shiny. Let's go do it. Why not? But it's not who we are. We've already stated in the quiet of the morning together in an offsite that... We've restated. We've reset and re-wordsmithed it. That's fine. But this is who we is for this season, which means by definition, we're not these other things. Yeah. And that's the clarity. How do you get people on board with that mission? You just say it over and over and over and ask them if they want to be on board with that mission. And if they don't, they need to be somewhere else. Simple as that. It's a we. We at Ramsey, this is what we do. These are the 14 core values of what we believe. And this is the mission of what we do. And if you don't want to do that, you're not a we. It's okay. You can go to heaven and not work here. It's okay. But we are doing this. the people that work with this system, the ENTRE leadership system, what are the biggest struggles that they have? Hiring and firing. Hiring and firing is the number one? Yeah, yeah, by far. At any stage? Yeah, yeah, well, especially the first three, but- But by the time you get into the final stages, and we're down to Pathfinder at that point, I mean, Peak Performer at that point, and Legacy, those are two stages where the thing's humming. You got other issues then. But you're still going to have hiring and firing. I mean, we've got 1,000 people, and the stuff we deal with every week here just amazes me. And we're really good at it. And I'm like, how in the world did that guy get in the building? I'm just like, what did we... He's a pathological liar. I don't know how we got him in here. But yeah, that happened this week. And we're like, gee, get him out of here. This is crazy. And so anyway, yeah. So yeah, it's always there. But... Getting them getting all the, you know, the ducks in a row, you know, trying to herd cats, whatever analogy, whatever animal metaphor we want to use. Right. But getting everybody pointed within the values at something and keeping them pointed at that and removing those that aren't and hiring for values, first and foremost, and talent. Secondly. you don't hire people for a function. If you hire people just for a function, you should have just bought equipment. A function, the equipment will do a function, right? And so you need people that will do the function, but that have the cultural gravitas to plug into your culture. And they're going to do the function the way we do it. And that's different than other people do it. And maybe not, it may not even be right, but it's what we do. And again, if you want to be a week, so that hiring and firing thing is a constant thing for leaders. And part of it is, is that we can never quite get a hundred percent on it. I mean, like if you're writing programming or you're developing a product line, you can get that thing where it's 96 or 98%, you know, but the hiring and firing piece, you're dealing with human beings and it's just an imperfect process. I was listening to a Brian Chesky interview and then he was talking about, he's echoing what you're talking about, how hiring and firing is the most important. And he says, even at the level that he's at now, all that he focuses on is hiring the right people. And I think he's something along the lines of, he still likes to get involved. I'm curious if you still like to get involved in hiring, but he still likes to get involved. And he says, if we're hiring somebody and you don't feel like you have to bring me into the conversation to at least review who this person is, they're not the right person for the organization. Like he wants somebody who's challenging every single member on the team who he's hiring. And then I think he does, as much as he can still get involved at some point just to review and final sign off. And he's like, that's the litmus test for if this is a good person for the organization. But he's like, this is my full-time job, just recruiting, hiring all the time. Yeah. Do you still get involved? Um, I get involved with, uh, A senior leader hire of some kind. We just hired this week. A guy accepted the position of our general counsel. And so he'll be part of the exec team, obviously. And, yeah, I personally was involved in those interviews. I have never, since I had more than three people, done the interviews by myself, though. because I want other people looking at it also. And let's build a consensus here, because sometimes you'll hear something I didn't hear when you talk to them. Or they'll be a little more relaxed with you, and they'll say something they shouldn't have said, and you go, oh, yeah, we don't want that. Yeah. Or whatever. But so, yeah, we have we go through multiple interviews and when it's a senior person, I'll be involved if we're putting in a senior role. But we do so few senior roles from outside. I mean, general counsel is an exception because obviously we're hiring a stinking lawyer. Right. So but the hard to grow that off the bench. Right. You know, hard to have bench depth on that. But the but most of our business unit leaders and those kinds of things are people that have grown internally organically. That's your that's the preference. Oh, by far. Yeah. And you find like a higher success rate when you when you grow people in New York as opposed to. Yeah, we call it Ramsey Soul. They've got Ramsey Soul because they've been here and they know how to finish my sentences for 10 years. And then we put them over an area that's making our $50 or $100 million. And they're running a huge business for our organization. But they've run a whole lot of little businesses inside of here. Or they were involved in growing that one to what it is. And we've got a sharp young guy that we just moved into the vice president's role this week. And he's been here 11 years. Odoo is a success story partner. And yes, it is Odoo. And they made sure that I pronounced that right. A few years ago for the podcast, I was paying a video editor in one city, a designer in another city, a VA overseas. And every Friday, I was logging into three different platforms just to pay people. Different fees, different invoice formats. I had a Google sheet that I was updating at midnight some nights to track who got paid and who didn't. That was the whole system. 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Your domain, the site, your business email, all in one account, so you're not duct taping five different tools together and hoping it works, and it's priced low enough, then money isn't the excuse anymore. So if you've got something sitting in your notes app right now, trust me, it's way easier to start than you think. Go to hostinger.com slash success and use code success for 20% off. That's hostinger.com slash success code success. How do you know when that person to say now we're past the treadmill stage, obviously. So now we're talking to somebody who has a business, who's running, who has a couple of employees. How do you know when they're ready for the next stage? I mean, you'll see it in their tactical movement, what they're doing every day. They're proving themselves. For instance, if they're running a small business unit that for us would be, you know, $5 to $15 million or something like that. And if they're managing the team, leading the team well, the team is aligned. The product's getting out. The customer's happy. There's profit on the bottom line. We're managing expenses. They're running a P&L. They're running a small business there. Mm-hmm. And, you know, then, as a matter of fact, this young guy we just moved, that's what he was doing. He was a, you know, number two guy, but he was doing most of the actual tactical work of running it. So it was easy to go, okay, tap him on the shoulder. Let's move him into this other thing that's, you know, it just... raised his income way up and it also raises responsibility, but he was really probably a year overdue for the right to do that. But also the business had to have a place to slot him. Yeah. But it's the person showing you that they're ready for the job. Yeah. They're getting it done, man. I mean, it's a proof text. It's social proof in the marketplace. No, it's so interesting. This is totally, this is an aside, but I'm sure you'll have an opinion on this. I feel like, and this is going to be a gross generalization, uh, But I feel like a lot of younger people are skewing towards doing the bare minimum in companies, more so than when I first started. Like, I feel like people have gravitated away from doing hard work, doing above and beyond. This is a gross generalization, but I have experiences hiring people. And I feel like they don't do more than what's on the JD. And when I was starting my career, I would work extra hours. I would stay late. I would do whatever it took to get to the next level. And I feel like that's becoming rarer and rarer. And I don't, I'm looking at you and you're probably disagreeing. I don't know what the percentages are. I don't have the data behind it. I just feel like there's a shift in people wanting to do hard work to get their career off the ground or to get to the next level. But my point was, I think that it's rarer than when I feel like I was starting my career. And I think that actually creates a huge opportunity for people who- Will hustle. 100%. That's true. I am, have become a huge fan of the millennial and the Gen Z generations. We've got, of the 1,000, probably 700 fall in those two generations. I've got a building full of puppies. I mean, they're young. And one of the reasons I'm a huge fan of them is a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is there is no middle ground. There's only two kinds of Gen Z, awesome or sucks. which is what you're talking about. You've hired some that suck. Very much. But the ones that are missional, they're driven, they've grown up with this thing. They're not known a day that it wasn't in their hand. And so they have pushed a button and stuff has shown up on their porch as long as they can remember. They have pushed a button and have been able to answer any question that the world's base of knowledge has at any moment. And so they've grown up with a magic wand. And so they're tremendous abundance thinkers. They think anything's possible because anything has always been possible. And so it much more than our crusty old generation. Mine is the worst on that. I mean, we get set in our ways. It's like it's a very limited world and not unlimited world for them. The downside that they have is and what leads them into what you're talking about is they are incredibly impatient. They have no because they've always pushed a button and stuff's on their porch. You know, the idea of ordering something from Europe and it took a craftsman two years to make it before he sent it over here. It doesn't even compute in their brain. That's not even a possibility. And take that concept and apply it to their job. The idea that they have to build an apprenticeship. And become a craftsman to get promoted, not just show up and breathe the air. If I just show up and breathe the air, stuff happens my whole life. Now this guy's making me prove myself. He's making me work. He's making me get better. He's making me cry. He's making me laugh. And I'm having this joyous thing called life. And you get one of those. And you've got the best employees you've ever had in your life, and we get them. But we just have to ask them. We say, listen, guys, we don't just work at J.O.B. here. If you want to come in late and leave early and work from home and you want to do all these things, you're in the wrong place. Because this is going to be the hardest job you've ever had in your life. But it's going to be awesome. Because you're working with the smartest people, the hardest working people, and the work we're doing is changing people's lives. Now, if you want to get on that boat, you're going to be exhausted when you go home to your little wife, your little husband. But it's going to be the best kind of tired. So you just lay it out. I lay it out there. And you know what? They self-select. They go, nah, not for me. I'm like, good. I found you. That's what I was trying to do in the interview. I want to make sure you don't get in here. Because if you come in here and you're just clocking in, clocking out, you stand out. Because I got a whole building full of thoroughbreds and you look like a donkey in the Kentucky Derby. No, I think that's the answer. I think that's really the answer. Because I think that as, you know, sometimes it's always on the hiring manager, the CEO, the founder. Like, I think sometimes they hedge. I need the work done, so I try to hire a body. Yeah. And again, you're hiring function, not cultural fit. All that stuff I was just describing is our cultural fit. Yeah. We're very visceral, very driven by the mission. That little couple over there, their marriage may be saved because you wrote that line of code and put that marriage piece out about how you get your own budget together. And if you don't get that done, those people are – they're by themselves out there. It's your job to help them. And if you can't get crusade mentality with that – then you don't fit in around here. So even comes back to, you know, the hiring, the hiring, but the employee that you're hiring, they're acting like the entrepreneur. Oh yeah. Yeah. They got to care. One of our 14 core values is act like you're self-employed. Because at the end of the day, you are. Okay, one second. I'm just going to check my... So, I'll break the fourth wall for a second. What other stuff do you want to go into for entourage leadership? I don't care. You're fine. Everything you're doing is fine. Cool? Okay, cool. I don't want to have any issue. No, no. It's all good. That sounds good. I just want to lay out the four stages and just one piece of advice for entrepreneurs that are listening to this at each stage. So we have treadmill operator. We've gone to that a lot. Stage two is pathfinder. Stage three is trailblazer. Stage four is peak performer. And stage five is legacy builder. Actually, I'll ask you this. Is it a revenue number? Is it a headcount number? Like what is the thing that puts somebody at stage two, three, four, five? Well, treadmill operators, the primary problem is too much the business requires is you. Yeah. So you can be making $10 million. Yeah. Or you may be making $2. But if all of it's coming from you, you're stuck on the treadmill. If all the production and all the revenue is stuck on you. So it's not a dollar amount. It's not a number of employees. But usually it's a lower dollar amount there and a lower number of employees. So you pretty much get over this. You get burnt. And you're like, I'm toast now. So then you go up. You start actually where the... Having some of the production of the revenue and some of the production of the good or service by someone else. So you move off of that and you move to the Pathfinder. Then what happens is you start to have all these people in the room. You know, there's a lot of times eight or ten of them. And what you said earlier, how do you get clarity? Well, now it's time to get clear direction. Because if we're not all pointed at the same thing, then this thing just starts pulling apart at the seams. Everybody just running off doing their own thing. And this is like... chaos it's out of control it's very stressful for everyone involved because there's no common point there's no we don't know if we scored a touchdown because we don't even know where the freaking goal line is right so we've got to have they've got to have some clarity this these are Put the ball across that. You can run it. You can pass it. But we're going to put the ball across that. That's what we're doing. When you start doing that, then you have to learn this thing. And it was really hard for me because I'm very tactical. I'm a sales guy. I believe if you go kill something and drag it home, that's what you're supposed to do. That's simple, right? No, it's not. I started hiring guys and gals that had MBAs, Masters in Business, and I don't have one. And 100% of those programs teach strategic thought. And so they're all in here, we need a strategy. And I'm like, no, we need to get work done. You need to go to work, and we'll talk about your little strategy later. But they finally convinced me that I was doing everything the hard way because I didn't have a plan. If you want to go to Florida, get a map. If you want to go to Toronto, get a map. And it's shorter that way. You know, instead of like, stop a second, download the GPS, okay? And so that's strategic thought, and I learned to get above the problem, and I could see much more efficient. gratifying because there's better traction. So you move from that along and Now we've got clarity and we've got a plan. And now we're really starting to delegate and things are starting to move. You really move into probably one of the more joyful for me was the peak performer stage. And that's where you've got the systems in place. You're working on your systems, your processes. Everybody's aligned on those. We're upgrading technologies. We're increasing efficiencies. And you're really just stacking cash at this point. There's some money coming in the building. It's awesome. And, you know, and when you walk out there, the customer smiling and they're so happy you're alive because you change their life. And this is a good day. And you can run at the peak performer stage a long time. The only downside of peak performer is it's real easy to get a little hubris, as my friend Jim Collins would say, and start to believe that you're as cool as everybody says you are, and you're not. Because something's going to change. AI is coming. Hello. Something's going to disrupt. And so you can kind of go like, oh, it's always going to be this way. No, it's not. You need to constantly be, you know, so how do we stay scrappy when we're so stinking successful? That's the challenge at Peak Performer. And then the last stage is the legacy or the legacy builder stage. Legacy Journey is a book I did. But and this is all about, OK, well. How am I setting the business up to run completely without me? Because what's your end game? Are you going to sell? Are you going to hand it off? Is there going to be a succession planning within it? How are you going to work through all this? Because, again, I'm 65, so you start to get – I started working on that 17 years ago at 48. And because I woke up at 48 years old and realized, I'm going to die someday. And this whole stinking thing is going to fold up like a Walmart tent if I don't have a plan, right? And so we teach people to have a plan, so maybe we ought to do it. Hello. Don't be hypocrites. So we started planning, you know, how do we hand the brand off? And so the Ramsey Personalities model was born. And the other people sitting at this desk with me doing the show and now gets better ratings when I'm not on. And it's unbelievably distressing. But the – but, yeah – And, you know, who's going to handle leadership? And my son four years ago moved in the president's role. I'm the CEO. He and I run the company together. And it's been a joyous, wonderful father-son thing to get to do. We have a lot of fun because he's way different than me. So we have a great – we have great lunches and conversations and arguments. But by when we started he was carrying 50% of it. I was carrying 50. That was four years ago and now I'm at about Probably 15% is all I'm doing in the office And so I'm if something's really bothering him i'll jump in and help him on it you know um like we were having this conversation yesterday you know the old thing you're going to get what you tolerate so let's not tolerate this let's go and you and i are going to step on this together so and then someday it'll be handed off to him so the leadership transfer the brand transfer the ownership transfer how are you going to do that for the next generation if it's a family handoff in our case that's what it is but maybe you're going to sell it Um, or, uh, you know, or maybe the employees are going to buy it out or what, what, what's your end game, but that's your legacy stage. Um, do you think that, you know, going back to that person who's just starting, do you think they should think about the legacy stage when they first start out just to figure out where it's going to go, sell it, raise money, family handoff? Yeah. I mean, it, it's good to know where you're taking it. Um, because it does change. the rules of the game a little bit. Simon Sinek wrote a book called The Infinite Game. And if you're playing a finite game, meaning that, you know, we're going to run this thing for five years and we're going to get EBITDA where it is and then somebody's going to write us a check and we're going to have a liquidity moment, that's a different set of strategies internally and operational guidelines than if we're going to run this and I hope my grandkids are running it. which is more of an infinite game, just out in, you know, Buzz Lightyear to infinity and beyond, right? And so, you know, where are we going? And so that's kind of our game because – so we're playing long ball all the time. We don't really have any short term mentality because that's what the thing's set up for. So it's good to have that. So it's kind of like when you first start getting out of debt and you start going, I got too much debt. If I got rid of this debt, I'd have some money. I could have some money. I'd be more generous and I could do investing and then I could be a millionaire. And so it's good to see what millionaire looks like while you're in debt. So you kind of you're aiming at it. So in that sense, yes. Yes. When you look at what you built with Ramsey, what was the hardest stage for you? Hmm. You know, I just, I have had a wonderful ride. So every stage has been a glorious pain in the butt and every stage has, there's been just incredible victories. When I look back at, you know, when we were just starting, what we considered a victory then is kind of laughable today by scale or even by just emotional maturity. Just go, you know, that's so primitive or childlike compared to where we were 30 something years ago. Right. And, but then it was cool. right in the moment you know and so yeah i didn't know what i didn't know and so i i've enjoyed the whole ride i don't know that i have a favorite i'm currently deep in the legacy stage obviously and the difficulty there has been planning to be less important and damned if it didn't work and so um you know i made myself less important and it's kind of distressing Well, I was going to say, you know, I think the biggest issue that people have with the legacy stage, this is, you know, speaking out to the late stage entrepreneur, is that their identity. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, your name is on the door. Yeah. You couldn't find a person whose identity is more like intertwined with the business and the guy whose name is on the door. Exactly. And I think that's something that people have to come to terms with. I had to make the decision, and I made it about 15-plus years ago. When we started studying best practices on family businesses that were successful in their succession planning, one of the things we found was that Gen 1 to Gen 2 is the most difficult process. emotionally because gen one's the guy who started the card table in his living room. He's got the dirt under his fingernails and emotionally turning loose of that baby is the hardest for that person, me in this case. And so I recognized that and I went, okay. And so some of them don't turn loose of it. And so it's an 85 year old guy with a 68 year old son who's never run the company. And he goes, I'm gone. And he tosses the keys out. And that's his plan. Well, that sucks, you know, for everyone. And so there's two things I love here. I love my family and my kids and my grandkids. And I love this business. I'm going to hurt both of them by me being a self-centered twit and all worried about my little ego. And so I've got to be a little bit more noble to get really what I want at the end of the day. Build a business you love is available everywhere and anywhere. Sure. Where do you want to send people? Where do you want to send people to like learn more about you? If they haven't for some God forbidden reason ever discovered you on the internet. That's easy. You can find Instagram, YouTube everywhere. Yeah. It's on, we're on all the platforms and the websites, Ramsey solutions.com. But yeah, we're, I mean, a billion downloads on YouTube. You're doing, you're doing all right. 2 billion on Spotify. You can find it. It's fine. Yeah. you know, people know your origin story. They know like the bankruptcy years, you know, like the, it wasn't always like rainbows and sunshine. No, no, skittles and rainbows. So now you're in your legacy phase. You have this accrued body of knowledge and wisdom over your years doing this. If you could go back and tell that struggling, stressed out Dave Ramsey bankruptcy stage person, one thing, what would that thing be? And why? You know, we've all heard that success literature say success is a journey, not a, you know, it's not a destination. And, yeah, that's true. But it's worse than that. There's not going to be one thing that fixes it. It's going to be a thousand things that fix it. So you win. You win death by a thousand cuts. I kept waiting to be discovered. I kept waiting for someone to come along. I heart was going to make it all easy or, you know, some publisher was going to make it all easy or some format or platform was going to make it all easy. Yeah. And still hadn't found that one. But I have found a whole lot of little ones that knitted together, turned into a wonderful fabric. And so one singular event is not going to change everything. One singular deal is not going to change everything. It's going to be the tapestry of the thousand little things that you did. And that's what you'll look back on. And the cool thing is there's a real richness of soul to that idea. you give a lot of finance advice, you give a lot of business advice, but if you could pass on one lesson, a human lesson to your kids or your grandkids, what would it be? Well, it's, it's born in our, um, in our Christian faith and walking with Christ and what that has caused the Ramses to learn and do generationally, um, From me on, is that the people on your team, the people that are your customers, the people that are your vendors, they deeply matter. Be careful with them. They're God's kids.