EntreLeadership - #106: Darren Hardy–Surviving the Wild Ride of Entrepreneurship

Episode Date: August 3, 2015

Darren Hardy, publisher of Success magazine, mentor to CEOs and entrepreneurs, and best-selling author, joins the program this week to discuss the emotional roller coaster ride of entrepreneurship and how to survive it.  entreleadership.com/podcast 7-Day Plan to Triple Your ProductivityAnother great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. We are coming to you from the Music City, and this is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, and four leaders. So happy to have you on board with us. We know you have a lot of options, so we appreciate you downloading us. Great episode coming to you. Darren Hardy, the publisher of Success Magazine, and multi-best-seller.

author is our feature conversation. Got a brand new book out called The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. You're going to enjoy that. Also, Jeff Mask from Infusion Soft stops by, and we let you hear a few calls with Dave's answers from a recent entree leadership business hour of the Dave Ramsey show. So that's all coming to you.

Now, folks, you know we have been partnering with Infusion Soft for a while. We love these folks. Are you ready for this? 30,000-plus thriving small businesses are using Infusionsoft because they are the only all-in-one automated sales and marketing software built exclusively for you, the small business man and a woman. So we're really excited about this series. We call it one question with Jeff Mass.

Jeff, when we look at the mind of the business owner, one of the biggest demons we have to fight, right? It's a monster that's always there, and that's the monster called fear. It can paralyze, literally shut a dream down. down, just lock it up. What have you guys learned about fear and how to conquer it? That it's real and that it can be your friend and not your foe. When you look at fear and you recognize that it's there, everybody has it, but when you can learn how to master fear and understand that really the only place that fear exists is in your mind. Fear does not exist outside of your head. And when a human being in particular an entrepreneur can recognize that,

you can actually leverage fear to be your friend. You can leverage fear to help you be your best. Fear is really just what you think it is. Instead of going, you know what, I'm going to declare a future. I'm going to actually tell myself and everybody else in this world, we're going to make this happen. Back in 2003, we were kind of in those crazy days of starting the business, and people thought we were crazy. And they said, you know, you can't really start a software company in Arizona, you're not in Silicon Valley, all the reasons why not. You don't have venture capital, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we said, you know, our passion is so strong and so personal.

We know this is for millions of people, and we're going to actually declare that. And we're going to write it on a wall, and we're going to say, by the end of 2016, we will be a $200 million company with 100,000 customers, and it'll be global. You should have heard the laughs. You should have heard the ridicule. But talk about your own ridicule, because I don't want to get away from this. I love that you were facing the critics, but what about when you say that out loud and what's going on inside your head? I'm so glad you said that because at first what we said was, who are we kidding? Are we crazy?

There was honestly, there was a moment of pause where we said, are we serious about this? Because as soon as we articulate this, let alone write it down. Oh, yeah. We are true to our word with a capital W. So can we? And the voices that quickly came were, are you crazy? And we just smiled, recognized that fear and said that's in our heads. we have a purpose to fulfill here in this life and here we go let's go summit that mountain and we're going to do it

and yeah you bet there was all kinds of fear internally and externally and that's what fueled us that's what helped us keep going to go we know we can do it and we literally would say things aloud we would recognize that fear and replace it with something optimistic and recite it out loud to ourselves to others to let them know where we were going who we are and what we were doing instead of staying in our minds and staying consumed within our own dark thoughts that just inevitably don't help anybody. I'm telling you, folks, Infusionsoft will help you grow yourself, your team, and your profits. That's what we believe in. Check them out. Infusionsoft.com slash entree. That's infusionsoft.com slash entree. All right, before we get to our feature conversation with Darren Hardy, very excited about yet another amazing tool that the Entry leadership team is giving you for free. Here's the tease. It's all about productivity. Who doesn't want to be more productive?

stay tuned because after the conversation with Darren, I'm going to tell you how to get it for free. And you are going to love this. It's efficient. It's effective. And did I mention it's free. So that's coming right up. Well, Darren Hardy is the publisher of Success Magazine, one of my favorite magazines. And we were really excited to get him to talk about his latest book, The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. Why Now is the time to join the ride. This will hit you right where you're at. So let's get to it, Darren Hardy on the Entry Leadership Podcast. Well, Darren, I want to, before we get into the book, which I'm very excited about, I think it'd be fun to revisit your earliest days as an entrepreneur, as early as you want to take us back. Because for everybody that defines themselves as an entrepreneur, that time starts at a different era and season for different folks.

So at what point did you really realize that you had this entrepreneurial spirit and you said, all right, I'm going to go start something. What were you doing? Well, I think I first realized that I didn't think I had it. I had accidentally found myself into a business where you bought products and you sold them door to door and, you know, at wholesale, he sold retail, you kept the difference. But my first day was a miserable failure. And that's when I questioned whether I really had it in me to be an entrepreneur. But I had to get the product out of my dad's garage by the, you know, him having me in my shirt at the ball of his fist.

So that was motivation to persevere. and that ended up actually turning into a $5 million business that I built starting at age 18. But, you know, frankly, I started out as every entrepreneur does. I started out afraid. I started out nervous. I started out with a clue of what to do or what to expect as an entrepreneur. Had no prior experience, no training, no guidance. You know, I mostly did it wrong.

I got lots of skin, knees, bloody nose, lots of bruises on my pride and ego. But that's also how I figured out how to do it right. You know, my life for the last several decades has been a living laboratory. of trial, error, failure, and then ultimately success. And that's really why I wrote the book that we're going to talk about, to try to help save would-be entrepreneurs and veteran entrepreneurs, lots of unnecessary headache, heartache, and walletache, and to hopefully significantly accelerate your success by helping them do it right the first time. Absolutely. And what you've done here is compile a wonderful book of practical wisdom. But before we dive into some of the chapters,

I'm going to pick some things out here that I've read, and I think it will help our listeners. today, but folks, you need to run and get the book. But this is interesting because I think one of the questions that a lot of people ask authors is why did you write the book? And you just described why. If we knew anything about you, we know you're passionate about why successful people are winning and how you can pass it on to others. And what's interesting is I was reading about the book before I cracked it open. And when you dove into this project, you were trying to figure out why the data of 66% of small businesses failing, why that's actually. happening. And what's interesting is it's not because of the assumptions and the reasons that I think

historically have been quoted. What is the reason for all the failure, the 66%. Yeah, well, even to your question, I don't write books. You know, I think it's a terrible business and a bad idea for most people, but I do launch mission. And I am kind of on a personal crusade here. As publisher of success magazine, our audience are entrepreneurs, and our personal mission is to empower entrepreneurs globally. And when I learned that two-thirds of every business that started, these people have finally mustered the curse to step away from the herd of 90% who are employees, to become an entrepreneur, step on the entrepreneur ride.

Two-thirds of them fail. To me, this was unacceptable and not something that I could stand by and just let happen and continue to perpetuate, particularly in an era where millions and millions, and millions of new people are becoming entrepreneurs, either by inspiration, because now finally it is cool to be an entrepreneur. It wasn't that way when I first started. If you were an entrepreneur, that means you weren't smart enough to get a good, get into the right schools and talented enough to get the right job. So you're on the outside circle of society if you were an entrepreneur. But now,

last five, eight years, Silicon Valley, Airbnb, Uber, all these companies have made it cool to be an entrepreneur. So inspiration or millions will become entrepreneurs by desperation. Job are gone, been outsourced, companies doing more with less, and now your alternative to provide for your family is to figure it out, become self-responsible, joining the ranks of entrepreneurship. So we're seeing millions move into this, I call it, reversion back into entrepreneurship,

but they're not ready. People are not prepared. They haven't been conditioned, you know, academia, and the authority figures that they grew up with, for the most part, weren't entrepreneurs. They're not properly equipped. They haven't developed the skills that are unique to entrepreneurship versus being an employee.

and they certainly haven't been prepared emotionally for what this journey is going to be about. So what I found in researching why most that start fail, it was not due to outside factors, and that's what's assumed by most, capital, bad location, you know, inventory supply issues, whatever, all those sort of complex internal or external factors for success, that the real reason were internal. You know, they weren't economic, they were emotional. It's the unexpected and terrifying emotional roller coaster and entrepreneur experiences. That's the greatest factor to why most quit and ultimately fail, because when they experienced the dips, the loop-de-loops, the hard turns,

they think that there's something wrong with them, that maybe they're not cut out for it or this isn't right for them. But if they just knew that that was part of the journey, that's part of the process, that these fears, these doubts, these worries, these anxieties, you will face them. And if you just hold on, grip and tuck and go with the roll, you get to the other side of it. And it not only does the terror that you'll experience, it's part of what makes the ride so thrilling and at the end so victorious. And all you want to do when it ends is to get back on ride again.

That's so true. I love this analogy, Darren, because I've got a nine-year-old and two-seven-year-old. So I'm smack in the middle of that range of emotions when we take the kids to an amusement park. They're terrified. And when we're in line, they get on, they're terrified, and then they realize two minutes into the ride on a three-minute ride. This is really fun. And then they want to do it all day long. And what's interesting is this analogy, I want to get to the starting point. Because you said something at the very beginning of our conversation where you said, I want to help people do it right. And so if we're going to talk about winning and not failing, we've got to talk about starting well. So give us some thoughts on what you've found out, what you've learned, what you've gleaned from your head, your heart, from others. about how we can start well. Because we have some men and women that are listening right now that are still in that starting phase and they can still recalibrate,

or we have some folks that they have a passion inside their chest that's just pulsating and they want to do it. Yeah, so there's three parts that the way the book was designed. And the first one is that you need to be warned about what's ahead. It is the unexpected dips in turns that knocks people out. I have a friend who's a CEO out of Salt Lake City. He's a Mormon, and we were talking about the trials and tribulations of entrepreneurship,

And he said, it reminds me a lot of when I was 18 years old and I was going to be spent 4,000 miles away to go on mission. He said, you know, I hadn't been that far from my mother's bosom. I'd never been three miles outside of Salt Lake City. And I was going to be spent 4,000 miles away. The elders called me in before I was sent and sat me down and told me every ugly, nasty, horrible, wretched thing that people would say about my religion, about me, about why I was there. And he said, thank God they did. Because if I'd gotten 4,000 miles away and people had said those things to me, unexpectedly, it would have devastated me, and I might not ever have recovered. But when they did, when I got 4,000 miles away, because I was warned, I was able to point at them and laugh and snicker and go, isn't it funny? You said it just like they told me you would say it. Isn't that funny? They were

emotionally bulletproof because they understood what to expect, and when it happened, it was evidence of progress rather than the out-of-left-field smack-and-head defeat. So first is to be, to be warned about the feelings, the emotions, the difficulties, the challenges, the naysayers, the haters, the people that will snicker and give you sarcasm, the rest of that, if you know that that is part of the journey when it happens, it won't knock you out, then you do need true unique skills, not 50 skills, not 25 skills, but four skills to master to be successful as an entrepreneur. Number one, you need to know how to sell. Number two, you need to know how to recruit and get the best out of top talent. Three, leadership, particularly

21st century leadership, which is very different than the century we've just left. And then lastly, personal productivity in this era of epic distraction, how to control your attention, keep your focus, and drive a high performance team through personal productivity. Those four skills will be essential. Then the last of the three components is there's one thing that can conquer you. No matter how much you're warned and how skilled you are, one thing can crush you in entrepreneurship. And it's fear. It's the one block from, releasing and realizing your great potential, it always comes down to fear. So we have a very ancient system on how we have a nervous and brain response to fear.

And inside the book I talk about there's six ways to hack your system. You have to hack your system in order to overcome fear. And there's specific ways in which to do that because it will be the one limiting factor that can kill you from realizing the dreams you have in your head and your heart, particularly on the road, the bumpy road, as it can be at times of entrepreneurship. Well, I love that. Okay, so let's stay right there. And I want to come back. So, folks, you're taking notes. We're going to come back and talk about recruiting because Darren takes a good amount of chapter four to talk about that. But because you just mentioned the six hacks,

I've got the book here in front of me, folks. So this is a little bonus content here, because it's chapter seven where you talk about the hands in the air, which is wonderful. And the six hacks are, I'm just going to list these out real quick, you just jot them down and go get the book. They are, number one, get real. It's the fear of fear that you feared. Three, 20 seconds of courage. Four, focus on tasks, not outcomes. Five, habituate yourself to fear.

I love that. And six, making fear and failure fun. And again, because we don't have the time to let Darren unpack those six, I'll just give you the six. Let me stay there on fear for a second. Because I think you're absolutely right. This is the dream killer. And we all face it on some level. I just want to ask you very, very personally here.

I mean, you launched a magazine. You've done so many things. How have you learned to mitigate fear? Because you can't eliminate it. So how have you personally learned to deal with fear in your life? And maybe you've taught the folks you lead as well as maybe your kids. Let us inside there. So if I use the habituate one that you've,

pointed out of the six. You know, when I went from playing t-ball to free pitch as a young kid, when they started throwing that flying orb at my head, I would just jump out of the batting box like, you know, like a... I did too. A girl on the playground, right? Oh, yeah. The first game, my father, you know, I got on the car, my father smacks his hand on the steering one and says, no kid of mine is going to be a sissy. We're going to the ballpark on Saturday, and he drew a box with the butt of the bat and said, your feet don't leave here no matter what. And standing there, shaking my knees, knocking.

He says, we're going to start with a wulfa ball. And he just started throwing the wulfa ball right at me, right at my head. And, you know, the first couple times I was flinching wildly, but then it hit me, and I was like, oh, that doesn't hurt. And he just kept throwing the ball right at me and just hit me with the wiffle ball, and none of it hurt. He got me used to seeing the ball coming up my head. Then he went with a tennis ball, and he said, just try to hit it.

And so I'd hit it, even if it hit me, it didn't hurt. And then he said, now we're going to use a baseball. And now I really started to get scared. But he said, look, if I hit you by accident, I won't try to hit you, but if I do, we'll go to pizza. If I hit you three times, we'll go to pizza. Well, I don't eat pizza today, but there was a time in my life when I really love pizza. We almost get to the end of the session, and he's only hit me once. And I start leaning over the plate.

Right. And the third time he hit me, I dropped the bat, you know, in a big cheer. We're going to pizza. Ran to the car, right? And so in my little league career, I got on base more times than the number one hitter on our team getting hit by the baseball. I would drive pitchers crazy because I would just lean over the plate. They'd try to sweep me off and I had no fear of getting hit by the baseball because I had habituated myself to that fear. And so I have taken that tact with everything.

Whatever is the key discipline I need to be successful at anything, whether, you know, at real estate, whether it was cold door prospecting, I would just submerge myself into a litany of just unending contact with that particular endeavor, particular fear. And over time, it loses its power over you completely to the point where you start turning it into a game and making it fun. And now the one thing that was your greatest detriment becomes your greatest strength. And most people are not willing to go through that short period of time of habituation to get on the other side. It's like the reason why we have teenagers who are sloppily, you know, teenagers that barely get out the couch with their Xbox, and yet, you know,

we send them 8,000 miles away in Afghanistan, and when the bullets and bombs are flying, they're running at the bullets and bombs, which is the opposite, the way the brain works. Well, how? How did you turn this slottomily teenager into this war-fighting machine? Well, you send in the boot camp, and in boot camp, they're submerged with an amazing amount of stress, pressure, and constant overload of fear, fear, fear, fear, until the point where they don't fear anymore. Now when the bombs and the bullets start flying, without fear, they're run towards it. So, no matter what it is that you fear, if you literally just submerge yourself into it, attack it headlong for a long enough period of time, the illusion of fear, because there's no sustained actually as fear,

it's an illusion we make up in the mind, it dissipates, it's gone, and now the weakness becomes your great strength. So that's the one that I, every time I figure out what's the thing that I fear, usually it's the most important. I need to do to make it successful. And then I just go into, you know, like a 90-day, just completely submerged myself into just relentless contact with that particular activity. And by the end of 90 days, I no longer fear it and kind of find it fun and an interesting little game.

Wow. That really is a game changer so that you can be surrounded by something that previously crippled you from fear, and now you can operate in the midst of it. That's really strong. Yeah, not that difficult, yeah. Yeah. All right. So I want to go back in the book, folks.

The conversation is rolling along here. But I want to go back because in the book, Chapter 4 specifically, I love the title of the chapter, filling your empty seats. And so we were talking about starting. And that's where Darren led us to, obviously, the six brain hacks. And I wanted to go with that. But, Darren, this is huge because this is a difference maker when people are starting. And they think, well, I don't have all the capital.

I don't have all these other advantages. but finding good people, keeping good people, that really can level the playing field. Can it not? Entirely. And particularly in this day and age where we're building businesses on collaboration and networks of people that are sourced from all over the world, the greatest talent now is available with virtual connection and so forth. So recruiting top talent is the number one separator between success and failure

between the level of success between you and your competitors and so forth. It's the battlefield of business success now is a fight for talent. And whoever can recruit the best talent and then draw the best out of them by building a culture of performance inside your organization will win. Inside any great company, the reason why Apple wins is they've got and recruited the best people. The reason why Google wins is they've gotten recruited the best people. Facebook, same thing.

And the difference between whether those companies go on to continue to win or not will be the people they recruit. When I interviewed Jack Welch, he said, you know, we were talking about innovations and change and so forth, and he said, you know, of all the innovations and change that we're all experiencing the world's going through, the one thing that hasn't changed is whoever feels the best team win, for every brand, every corporate monolith or whatever, you know, you deem as a company inside that company are people, and the success of that company will be determined by the quality and talent of the people in it. So, That's the as leader, as the owner, as the CEO, as the lead dog out in front of the football team.

Their number one job and priority is to recruit the talent and then assess the talent and continue to upgrade the talent. And that's the bottom line. The talent will do the job. Talent's going to throw the ball, catch the ball, block and tackle. They know what to do when they're in the job. But the head coach job is to get the right people in the right positions working together, which is the culture and the drawing out of that talent and turning it into a culture of performance. So it's the number one job. It is. It's the separating factor between success and failure of any companies is the talent acquisition.

In the final chapter of the book, you challenge us with several do's and don'ts. I want to focus on just one of those as we wrap our conversation. I thought this was so wonderful to see you write it this way. But we've all heard this before, but you just wrote it very simply. don't forget why. And I think that is such a vital reminder, almost a daily reminder that we as leaders, we as men and women who believe that something could be and something should be, and we dedicate so much of our talent and passion to make it happen. We can't forget the why. Will you challenge us on that, Darren? Yeah, I ask a lot of the CEOs that I mentor, you know, is bigger better? If you build your business bigger, is it going to make your life better? And if it does, let's go for it with passionate pursuits, right?

Is it going to create more freedom? Is it going to allow you to give greater? Is it going to create more fun and zeal and excitement? But a lot of times, bigger only makes you beholden to bigger problems, greater complexities, more liability and the rest of it. In the end, what we're here to do is to experience the greatness that this life offers us. But not to... The issue is that our ambition is a...

double-edged sword. It's incredible to get you out of bed and get you to stretch your skills and seek your greatest potential, and that's the best of ambition. The other side of ambition is it can push you out of your life to where you're chasing things and the pursuit or the obligations that those things bring with that pursuit takes you out of your life. Now you're beholden to the things that your ambition has pursued rather than actually living the way you want to live and doing the things you want to do and being with the people you want to be with and the rest of it. So in the end, when you decide to pursue an entrepreneurial direction, make sure that you not only are pursuing a destination that you like, but that the journey itself is going to be

the way you want to live. What you want to do when you get out of bed every day is this particular pursuit, because in the end, all we've got is minute by minute, power by hour, day by day, to enjoy this thing that we called life. So have passion, have purpose for. what it is that you're doing, enjoy the journey, and as well as where that destination is ultimately going to lead you. Well, Darren, this is a special treat for me. I've been a long-time fan of Success Magazine, and recently I got my latest edition. I opened it up and your editorial staff, I presume, picked our podcast, the Entry Leadership Podcast, as one of nine podcasts that your readers should listen to. So we're grateful for that. That meant a lot to us. And this is a treat to have

the success founder on with us. And it's just really neat to have you with us. We really appreciate it. That's my pleasure. And obviously, you earn that spot. We endorse the great work you're doing. He is Darren Hardy. The book is The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster. Run and go get it. It will really encourage your heart and also give you some practical wisdom so that you can do what you have been called to do. Thanks again, Darren. We're all better for it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. We are so grateful to Darren Hardy for taking time out of his very busy schedule to add value to us. What if I told you that we could help you happen to your day versus your day happening to you? Let me say that again.

What if I told you that the Andre leadership team can help you happen to your day versus your day happening to you? And so our team at Entre leadership here has come up with an amazing tool called the seven-day plan to triple your productivity. I don't know anybody that, if I ask the question, would you like to increase your productivity that wouldn't say absolutely can? But this is what I love about this. We're not going to increase your productivity. We're going to triple it. We don't do anything small here. We're going to triple your productivity.

And here's what I love. In seven days. Now, I have the attention span of a squirrel on narcotics. And so anything that's seven days or less, I'm in. Did I mention that it's free? You know how to qualify. We've been giving you these amazing tools. It's free to everybody.

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Why wouldn't you do this? If you doubled your productivity, people would be really impressed. Now you get to triple it. Very simple. Textwork triple to 33444. All right, we're now going to go into the Dave Ramsey Show Vault. I love the Dave Ramsey Show business hours, where he basically says, no money calls unless they are relating to your business.

And he lets America's entrepreneurs call in and ask questions. We've got three questions for you that were pulling. pulling from the recent Dave Ramsey business hour. You're going to love these. Get your pencil and paper out and learn with these callers. Live from the conference center at Financial Peace Plaza. It's an entree leadership version of the Dave Ramsey show today. Thank you for joining us. We're talking leadership. We're talking business. We're taking your questions from all across America because 60 some odd percent, depending on who you read and who you believe, somewhere

around 64% of Americans work for a company that has 500 or less team members. Small business is the backbone of America. It's not a philosophical statement. It's a freaking fact. And that's how that works. And so we're proud to be small business people, those of us in this room. We're proud to be business people and to be leaders, those of us in this room. And we want you to be, too.

This is how things are taking care of in America. This is how people get served. When someone opens a great restaurant in your neighborhood, you go eat there. When someone opens a great place to get your car worked on in your neighborhood, you go get your car fixed there. That's how this works. This thing called capitalism. And it is a wonderful plan. It is the best way for the little man to get ahead, to start from nothing and to become somebody, financially speaking.

I've become a millionaire twice in America because I'm so stupid. I had to do it two times. So it's possible. It's definitely possible. And we are excited about the idea of entrepreneurs in America today, of small business people and business people. And I don't even care if you're a big business person if you still got that thing going on inside of you. You still got that idea that people matter. You still got the idea that customer is a person. You still got that idea that the team you work with are people, that they have lives and you care about them as part of the transaction. It's not just about Q1 and Q2. It's not just about PR1. It's not just about PR. profit. It's not just about stock price. So regardless of your company size, you've got to have that sense that your business has a soul and start treating it that way. And that just makes the operation and the going to work every day not be so transactional. And it does. It has a sense of life to it. All right, time for us to jump to Huntsville, Alabama and check in with Glenn. Hi, Glenn. Welcome to

Dave Ramsey Show. Hi, thanks Dave, for taking my call. It's certainly an honor to speak to you to day. It's a formed a small business outside of my day job to use investor capital to purchase. And I have a partner in this that we are thinking about taking this, you know, kind of to the next level in terms of gathering investor capital. But you are that small voice on my shoulder telling me that partnerships don't work. So I'm excited about the venture in real estate, but I'm just concerned about moving forward in a partnership, even though it's someone that I trust wholeheartedly, I want to know your advice on how I can move forward in this business relationship without having any sort of a

partnership that might drag us down. I appreciate that. I've been called a lot of things. Small voice is not usually one of them. Well, as you know, I'm not a fan of partnerships. I always say the partnership is the only kind of ship that won't sail. And so, and I learned that from real estate. actually. Because what I did before I went broke was I was making a ton of money in real estate and I would

buy a house or a piece of property at a bargain and I would fix it up and flip it or I'd fix it up and refinance it and put it into the rentals. Either way, I'd pull cash out of it coming and going and dump it into the rentals. That was when I borrowed money and did partnerships. And of course, what happened was pretty quickly I was able to find more deals than I could borrow money for. And so since I was making money on every deal, I brought some of my good friends in to bless them. And it was a blessing as long as everything went up. And when it went down, it was no longer a blessing, and they were no longer friends. And usually it wasn't the guys I brought in.

It was somebody in their family, like maybe their wife, who realized that she was not only married to a doofus, but he was hanging out with doofuses. And she's mad at all of us and with good reason, really. And it just became a disaster as soon as there was a stress point. Partnerships work as long as there's no problems. and there's never been a business on the planet that doesn't have problems. So I would, what do you need a partner for? Well, initially I thought I needed that because of maybe my partner's connections with more potential high dollar investors.

But the further I get into it, it just, you know, it's just worrisome to me that, you know, I'm sure Bernie Madoff had wonderful friends. Yeah. You know, you just, you know, when you have a family, and you have children, you just start looking at every possible scenario that could go wrong. So you could do this without a partner because you're using investor capital, you keep saying. So you've got. You're right.

You've kind of got an angel in the background that's taking a cut for putting up the money in some way or another, almost on a joint venture basis, but the partner was just some connectivity that you don't even require now to do business. Sure. Yeah. I don't think you need a partner. I think you're right. Okay. All right.

That was easy. I already was hearing that, as I said, that little small voice of yours on my shoulder. But, you know, and I certainly, I think my sit down with this friend is to say that I value the friendship enough not to see a partnership ruin it. Yeah, well, and it's not only that. It's, hey, we can do some deals together from time to time as long as they're drive-bys, and that's more of a joint venture. I'm not afraid to go. I'm not afraid for the Dave Ramsey organization and the publisher, Simon & & Schuster, to go into a joint venture. and launch a book, a New York Times best-selling book called Entree Leadership, right?

And that's a venture. That's a joint venture. It's a business, in a sense, you could use the phrase partner. But it's not like a general partnership where they own half of my business, I own half of their business. We just did that deal together. And that's kind of a drive-by in that sense. And so you could look at one property and do a drive-by on one property, but you don't necessarily,

then you're not obligated to every stinking thing you touch. He gets a cut of. and vice versa. That's what you're trying to avoid here. So if he brings a certain investor or a certain value to a certain deal, yeah, you could drive by that one deal with somebody. And that's not a big deal. But this idea, you know, you don't need a partner. That's what we just ascertain as a general partnership. And general partnerships, I guess, are the biggest problem I've got with the whole idea. Joe Leavitt is in the audience here,

talking with some of our new graduates and taking questions from our live studio audience as well. Joe, who's up? We have Andy from Grand Rapids here with a question. Cool. Hi, Andy. Hey, my company is WorkSmart Database Masters of the Islam in Grand Rapids. A few months ago, you spoke with a small business

that the guy was just incredibly busy. He just had way too much work. He told them to raise his rates. I did the exact same thing. I actually raised my rates 20%. I'm still incredibly busy, but I don't think I'm quite ready to hire that first employee. So my question is,

is how much money should I have set aside in retained earnings in order to make sure that I have money set aside just in case we hit a couple bumps in the road? Well, I mean, that's a great question. And I would almost back into it rather than give a set formula of mathematical or dollar amount. Let's back into the first of the week where we just said the very basic definition of a leader is someone who serves. And the way we treat our

team then is we're serving our team. Before we add a team member, we've got to think about how we can serve them with integrity and how we can treat them like we'd want to be treated. Now, obviously, I wouldn't want to get hired somewhere, and then four weeks later they couldn't pay the payroll. That'd be a little bit, that might make me a little angry. And so I would want to reverse that. I need to look at my cash flow, what the normal patterns of cash coming into my business are, and how long those have been going on. I mean, if you've got six months of business operations, you can't predict based on that. I mean, you can predict a little bit off of that six months.

But if you've got six years of cash flow, then you can really predict that, and you can kind of count on that to pay that person. So you wouldn't need as much. But I want enough retained earnings to know that I can know that I'm, responsible for that person that's coming on my team and I can pay them even if that receivable that we're all dreading doesn't come in. So, hey, Andy, it's good to have you this week from Grand Rapids. I've enjoyed getting to know you, brother. Entree Leadership Master's Series. It's a special theme hour right here on the Dave Ramsey Show.

Well, it is that time. Yet another podcast has come to its conclusion. Very grateful for Darren Hardy giving us of his time. We always love when Jeff Masked from Infusion Softstop. by and to you, our listener, as I always say, but I truly mean, on behalf of Eric the producer and the entire Entry leadership team, thank you for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.