EntreLeadership - #137: Seth Godin—Dealing With Change

Episode Date: March 7, 2016

Join marketing guru and best-selling author Seth Godin and Dave for an unprecedented conversation on making a difference in the marketplace, the new economy, and why you need to connect with your customers, plus much more. We’re also going to Main Street to talk with EntreLeader Dr. Gary Mennie about his journey to pay off more than a million dollars of business debt in 36 months. He’s already more than one-third of the way there! Podcast Survey The Small Business Owner's Guide to Leadership InfusionSoft: Procrastination Course 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. This is the podcast of leaders, by leaders, for leaders, and we are broadcasting from the Music City. So glad to have you join the conversation. Our feature conversation of this podcast, you can never get enough of Seth Godin. So we're going to give you another dose of Seth Godin, but a different perspective. I'm not doing the interview this time.

Dave Ramsey is. Seth and Dave, long-time friends, and we're so glad that Seth is going to be joining us for Summit. I'll tell you about that. If you haven't heard about our Entree Leadership Summit, I'll give you all the details a little bit later. But Seth, one of our featured speakers, came in to do some planning and hanging out with Dave,

and we put them in the studio. How do you not put those guys together and just let them chat? So you're going to hear that. Also going to continue the free stuff. We have a small business owner's guide to leadership from our Entree team. as well as Infusion Soft, giving you a brand new tool to help you procrastinators out there. I'll be taking part in that.

My poor wife, she's going to be so excited that I'm going to take advantage of that infusion soft tool. More on that later. And then we're really excited. Another conversation for you. We're going to get on Main Street. Now, we've been telling you for months and months and months that we want to hear from you. We want to hear your success stories. And you have emailed us in, and we are gathering these.

So many of the leaders in our All Access community are. our online membership that brings so many people together with great content, great community, and amazing coaching. Well, so many of those stories are inspiring to you. We know this. We've heard them, and so we're going to be sharing those with you. So we've got one of our very first Main Street stories. Dr. Gary Minnie, this story is amazing.

I think this guy could be a pioneer in the medical world, not because of advances in medical practices, but because he's running his practice well and how he's doing it and what sacrifices he's making that will literally change the way he takes care of his patients. You're going to enjoy that. Also, we're in the final days for you to participate in our survey. We want to hear from you. We are not resting on our laurels. We want to make this the best free resource for leaders in America in the podcast space.

That's what we want to do. And so we can't do that if we don't hear from you. We're giving you a $100 Amazon gift card to one person, but we're going to give it to somebody, and the only way you can qualify is by taking our survey, so there's a little extra incentive. As you are listening to this podcast, we know people listen to this at different times. March the 11th, 2016 is the last day to get in to take the survey so that we can actually gather everything and begin to move forward on it. So here's what we want you to do. Go to entreleadership.com slash survey.

Entreleadership.com slash survey. It only takes 10, 15 minutes. Is that right? Eric the producer? Five minutes. That's even better. Five minutes. Fill out the survey. One of you wins a $100 Amazon gift card. And we really want to hear from you. So, entreeleadership.com slash survey. Or you can also find the link at entreleadership.com slash podcast in this episode. So a couple ways to get involved with that. Well, we had Seth Godin on about three months ago. It was episode 124. As I mentioned before, longtime friends with Dave, they both really admire each other and great friends. And he was here as we were getting ready for the Entree Leadership Summit. I'll tell you more about that as soon as the conversation is done. But let's get you to it. Get ready to learn. Get out something to write with. Pay attention. Here is Dave Ramsey and Seth Godin. One of the great joys of my life is getting to meet and sometimes getting to be friends with people who are world changers and who are so much smarter than me that just hanging out with them for a little bit makes me smarter.

And our guest today is no different than that. Seth Godin and I have known each other for a decade or so. And every time I'm around him, I leave with ideas and you're going to be the same as we spend this. time together. Welcome, my friend. Wow, what a pleasure. It's a privilege to finally be in the studio with you at the same time. We've done it a few times remotely, but you continue to light up for me from afar. Oh, bless your heart. It's good to see you in person. You're generous. Well, it's good to hang out with you again, and we're really, really excited about this Entry Leadership Summit. I mean, we have Seth Godin. We have Jim Collins. Wow. I mean, this is just, it's the best of the best. Let's be really clear. There will be no physical conflict between me and Jim,

because in any sport, he would destroy me. Well, we're probably not going to do that. We're probably just going to talk. So you're safe. That'll work. I can keep up with Jim on the talking front. So you and I were talking offline, I guess the last time we were together in person, maybe up in New York.

And I'm always asking you these eclectic Dave Ramsey questions. And I said, what's your favorite book out of the ones that you've written? And like most authors, usually, your favorite book is not necessarily the one that sold the most. There's one that your wallet has a favorite for, but yours was Lynchpin, you mentioned, if I recall. And that's talking about doing work that matters and doing it in such a way that you matter to the organization.

So talk about this importance of doing work that matters. Well, you know, Dave, I sold my first book in 1986. The book business was a good business to try to get it. into you didn't need anything but a money for a stamp, and if someone liked the book, you could write it. And so for 15 years, I was rejected and rejected and barely made a living at it, but I was in the business of figuring out how to make a book that people would buy. And one of the things that happened in the last six books that I've written is I shifted gears and tried to get into the business of making a difference. And whether or not someone buys the book is a side

effect. And the book is about that. The book is about choosing to make a difference, to make a difference to your boss, to the people who work for you, to the people you work with, and to the marketplace. And if we go in with that mindset, that we're going to create change that matters, that we're going to be missed if we are gone, it turns out in most situations, the business part takes care of itself. If you're wise and you watch what you're doing, you know, you have to manage the tactical stuff. Of course. You know, I heard Zig Zigler say when I was probably 17 or 16 years old, I heard the tape. And he said, if you help enough people get what they want, you'll always have what you want.

Well, I heard that as a manipulation the first time I heard it. It's like, okay, I'm always going to get what I want. So I've got to help them, you know. And boy, I tell you, as I've gotten older, it's completely flipped on me to what you were saying. Now the way we say it around here is if you're helping up people, you don't have to worry about money, which is what you were saying. So, you know, our economy is based on trust and attention. We can't manufacture any more attention because it's finite. And people have been beaten up and ripped off so often they don't trust.

So if you have trust and you have attention, you're going to have to be an idiot to not be able to make a living. And so the question is, where does trust and attention come from? And where they come from is contribution. That if you are contributing to the community and contributing to the solution and contributing to the environment, we're going to want more of that. we're going to trust the people that show up for others first. And we can tell when they're manipulating us. We can tell if they're saying, well, I've done enough for you now, do it for me.

Versus someone saying, well, of course I picked up that litter. It needed to be picked up, period. That's it. End of story. Yeah. Yeah, there's no turn with a handout in return. There's no twist and a dipsy doodle to that. You talk about in Lynchpin being the person.

they can't live without. Now, in that setting, you're talking about being that person inside of an organization, being a lynch pen. But if we look at that as business owners, as entrepreneurs, and we say, how does that apply to our relationship with our customer? Well, I think I put an asterisk here, which is it's easy to imagine that the Mike Bloomberg's and the Bill Gates's of the world have an easier time of this kind of thing. because they've already made it. But it turns out the kind of mattering I'm talking about isn't related to whether you have a PhD from MIT, nor is it related to how much you have in the bank.

It's related to bringing emotional labor to the table. And emotional labor is different than physical labor. We all used to do physical labor a thousand years ago. Dig a ditch. Emotional labor is the hard work of showing up when you don't feel like it, showing up when you're stressed, showing up when you've got other things to do. And if you show up in a way that helps somebody else feel differently in that moment,

we're hooked on that. That's what we need more than anything else. We live in a connection economy, and the connection economy is not driven by do you own a factory. It's driven by, did you touch me in that part of me that's lonely, or that part of me that's afraid, or that part of me that needs someone to see me. And so what I'm arguing here is that your customer says she wants a lower price. But that's just shorthand for, I'm assuming no one cares.

So if everyone cares not at all, yeah, I'll take the cheap one. But given a choice between something that matters, something that cares, or the cheap one, people always pick something that matters and someone who cares because that's what they really want, not more junk. And so it's about the relational connection with the customer, which is real. And we all kind of know this. I think sometimes we forget it when we're working P&Ls and metrics and business models. But it's about avoiding the default slide of just becoming transactional. And instead of being relational.

We want to avoid it. We want to hide from it. because if you can go to the board or your partner or your spouse or anyone and say, I made a lot of money today, there's a number. Conversations over. It's like, what's your SAT score? Conversations over. So we all fell in love with the SAT because it's a way to hide from, are you a good person?

It's a way to hide from, did you even show up emotionally for the last two years of high school, or are you just studying? Because the fact is that numbers, because they're easy to measure in our culture, we get hooked on them. But when push comes to shove, we never, ever care about them. We care about what they signify. Numbers are a symptom of a different thing, a story. And that's what human beings are all about. We've had millions of years to figure out how to be around each other

and only 200 years to figure out how to be pawns in the industrial economy. We all know someone that's transactional, and we always feel icky when we're with them. and so just our nature should be to run from that. But transactional is clean and it's simple, relational, and being other-centered is a little messier. Yeah, it's a lot messier. It turns out if someone is appropriately transactional, like an airline, that's the way we'd like it to be. We don't want to have an emotional relationship with the flight attendant. We just want to get there on time.

But it also turns out that if you can figure out how to stop being a commodity the way Branson did when Virgin first, showed up, people would go out of their way and pay extra because there was a human involved. And even in something as commodity and bus station oriented as an airline, he figured out how to build a billion dollar company merely by adding humans. The planes are the same. It was just the humans that were different. And Southwest has done it again. Exactly. Absolutely. So how should business owners think about risk in this current world? It feels like the Wild Wild West out there now, maybe more than ever before. And sometimes I think in a good way and then other times it feels like we're vulnerable,

like we're exposed, like there's risk around every corner that's, you don't know what the unintended consequence of this decision is because there's so many moving parts. Everything feels so technical and complicated. How do we look at that in the leap and the opportunity that you talk about? This is a great question. You know, if you're going to play the Goldman Sachs game of oil futures and real estate speculation, the risk can crush you instantly. On the other hand, if you play the human game of, I'm going to risk being vulnerable, I'm going to risk being personal, I'm going to risk working with people I trust, we understand how to do that if we've got the guts, and it scales, and it's sticky. And so what we have to avoid is trying to buy our way out of this uncertainty, buy our way out of this discomfort, and instead, embrace.

the discomfort. So, you know, the new book's called What to Do When It's Your Turn. And what I'm arguing in the book is that every person who has the wherewithal to read the book has more leverage and more power than they ever thought they would ever have. More ability to touch other people, more ability to lead, more ability to create. You know, you did this in your video the other day, right? That the fact is, we built all these tools and people are using them to watch cat videos. Right. That's not what the tools are for. What the tools are for. But the tools are for is it's a megaphone. It's a platform. It's a connection machine. And you can let someone else use it and they'll tell you what to do or you can use it and say, follow me.

What to do when it's your turn is important. But I think the rest of the title is more important. And it's always your turn. Exactly. It is your turn. And I just, I sometimes forget, you know, I read on the money subject, I read a philosopher one time that says sometimes people get from wealth only the fear of losing it. Yep. And sometimes you do that with businesses that, and I was challenging literally some of our leaders today. I was like, you know, just be the last thing we want to do is become protective.

We've bold got us here, guys. Let's keep writing this story. Let's, this is an adventure. Ride the roller coaster. Don't walk on the moving sidewalk, you know, and that's risky. It's hard to walk out there and put yourself out there and go, I'm going to do this. And then, because sometimes you don't. And you just fall on your face.

Yeah. Well, you know what's riskier, Dave? Not doing it. Because if the world, if the world wasn't changing, saying still is a brilliant strategy. But the fact is Blackberry ruled the world and then they were gone. Motorola ruled the world and then they were gone. Nokia ruled the world and then they were gone.

And it's not just smartphones. It's the music industry. It's a travel agent business. It's the business selling blinds to people in their homes. They're all changing, super fast. So you can decide to rest on your laurel. and if you're retiring in the next nine months, you'll be fine. But if you're here for a longer haul than that,

and you also want to have a life that you're proud to have lived, you've got to play a different game. And that game is, don't sit on the bench, play the game. The book is What to Do When It's Your Turn, and it's Always Your Turn. It's a new book. You need to check it out, and make sure, as you do always with Cuscoton Books, get it and absorb it. This book's different.

A lot different. Talk about it. Well, first before you even touch the book, it's not for sale in a bookstore. It's for sale at your turn.L-I-N-K, Your Turn. Link, and you can't buy one. I will not sell you one. You can buy three or five or 12 or 24 or 99, and they keep getting cheaper as you buy more. Because I want you to give it to other people, because what could you possibly do with an extra copy of a book? Can't read it twice.

You've got to give it to someone else. Because when other people read what you are reading, the conversation changes. When you share an example, when you share a story, you can both go forward. The other thing about the book is I designed it myself. There's pictures on every single page. You can read the whole book in 30 minutes if you want, but I'm hoping you're going to spend a lot more time than that because what I'm trying to do is simulate some of that feeling

that comes across in a live presentation, some of that feeling of getting both sides of your brain activated. It's not for scholars. It's not filled with footnotes. It's about getting under your skin and remembering what it felt like the last time you did something for the first time. That sense of exhilaration. I love that quote about entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs is the only person you can go from sheer terror to sheer exhilaration and back every 24 hours. And that's the ride you get to take with this. What to do when it's your turn? It's always your turn. And the place to buy it is your turn. Dot link. Your turn. Dot link.

Now, this is something else that I, I think it was part of the great lie that's tied to the student loan debt issue that we're dealing with. You say that competence is overrated. Oh, yeah. So the pathetic story of two days ago, there was a big snowstorm in New York, so I drove some people home a couple hours and was talking to a young woman who was in a very expensive culinary school. So she's going to be, I don't know, $50, $200,000 in debt for the rest of her life because she's going to get an associate's degree in culinary arts.

But she already has a job that she would have if she graduated. So her family is looking at this and saying, well, we'll just go into debt and get this piece of paper as opposed to saying, why don't we use those resources to help you reach even deeper into what you're capable of making? This idea that you're a competent cash register operator or a competent seamstress, no one's going to pay you extra for that because everything's a click away and if you're all the same I'm going to buy the cheap one

what we're going to pay extra for is someone who cares or someone who's got a different point of view or someone who's trusted you don't get those things when you get a diploma sometimes getting a diploma keeps you from getting those things so I am all for education more and more and more but we can learn so much for free online now we have access to more learning

but to go a quarter of a million dollars into debt, to get a piece of paper that says, you're better at binge drinking than someone who didn't go to college, and that you're competent, I don't get it. I don't think that's the future, and a lot of millennials agree with me because they're starting to realize that the game is rigged and that what they have to do is make a difference,

not just get a job. Well, the lie was that we said, if you are simply good at what you do, that that's enough. and what we were saying in the first part of the podcast is that good at what you do when it's all about you right is never enough and so i mean we've all been to the doctor that was arrogant and it was all about him or all about her their bedside manner was that of an arrogant jerk and then we've been to the doctor who actually cared and kind of an old country doctor so to speak and it doesn't matter

whether they went to medical school no neither time did i ask where they graduated from exactly And yet I know which one I will go back to instantaneously. And it had nothing to do with the location of their training. That's right. Or the thoroughness or the excellence of their training. So what I say to kids who are in college now is there's no better place in the world to start a business than when you're in college. Because either way, room and board is paid for. Either way, you got something to do four hours a day, go to class.

What are you going to do the rest of the time? What an opportunity to explore what it is to transact, to explore what it is to put something in. to the world. And that if you can do that week after week after week for two years, three years, you're going to graduate years ahead of someone who's just going to the placement office looking to fit into a resume bank. So you've written that you think everyone should have a blog. Yes, sir. Why? It doesn't matter if anyone reads it. It matters that you write it.

If every single day you have to write down something that you believe about the world, a prediction about what's going to happen next, an analysis of something that you know, noticed every single day. You will never get writers block because your subconscious will know it's due. And at the end of a year, you can look back to 365 things you contributed, contributed to the giant haystack of ideas. And at the end of a year, you will look back and say, I wouldn't have missed that for the world. Now, that makes a lot of sense when you're Seth Godin. It even makes sense of your day, Ramsey, and it's not my nature to do that particular discipline. It makes sense for a lot of the folks

on my team. We're a content producing organization. But there's a heat and air guy listening to us right now. I'm not talking, first of all, I'm being misunderstood here. I'm not talking about the fact that it's going to get you customers. I can talk about that too. Right now I'm just talking about the fact it's going to make a better, smarter, more

alert person. Okay. Right? That's number one. So if you're a baker and every day you write about the fact that you change something in the bakery and what happened to the loaf the next day, it will make you a better baker, even if no one reads it. But then beyond it, Let's talk about the heat and air guy.

So most people don't have a lot of affection for the folks who install in-ground pools in your backyard. A lot of people want an in-ground pool, but it's not known as being an upstanding industry. So this guy starts blogging every, he's in the industry, every secret and every rip-off he and his colleagues use. Everyone. He just gives away every secret he's got. Who do you think saw his business go through the roof? Because anyone who's willing to tell you all the secrets is probably the guy who, on your side.

Right? Car dealers can do that. Heating and air guys can do that. That's how you grow your business by telling the truth, by speaking up, by taking the other person's side in public on a regular basis

and not saying, you know, we're all together in this, my industry, but saying, guess what? I want to dance with you and I got to bring

something to the party. And what I'm bringing isn't my logo and my slogan. I'm going to teach you what I know. Because that makes me trusted. And if I'm trusted

and you don't feel like installing your own heater, you'll call me to install it for you. It doesn't have to be something that makes an English major proud. It should, on the contrary, just be authentic. Write like you talk. A little bit of visceral, a little bit of real you.

If you read it back and it doesn't sound like you rewrite it. Right. I mean, it doesn't take me very long to actually type my blog. It takes me a long time to write it because I'm thinking. But then when I write, I write like I talk. And it just in gusts of 200 words per minute. And it's done. And you have the largest red blogs in the world.

Well, that's because you don't have one yet. Yeah. So this is Seth's blog. Where do you find the blog, by the way? Just type Seth into Google. Type Seth, and it'll just show up. Right, or you can type blog, but Seth works better. You're big if you just type your first name into Google.

It's like typing Dolly into Google because you know who's going to show up right there. Oh, man, that's big. So when we're doing Entree Leadership this summer together in May, I'm so excited about that. In Dallas. Yes. When we do that in May, what will an attendee walk away from after hearing Seth?

Well, here's what I learned from our teacher Zig. It's almost impossible in a talk to change someone who's listening to you. But you can get under their skin. You can leave behind a different way of seeing the world and some questions. And I think I'm doing a good job. if two weeks later or five weeks later, you still discover you're talking differently, you're making different choices,

you're seeing the world as an opportunity. So what I do for a living is I notice things and then I try to explain what I'm seeing and do it in a way that won't let you go until you at least try on my pair of yellow glasses. The benefit I always get when I'm having a breakfast, a dinner, a lunch or a cup of coffee or whatever it is with Seth is,

I always come away going, this guy can see the future. It ticks me off. He can see the future. And it's just, it's like your, it's like your playground. The future is your playground. You love the future. You really do. It's pretty shiny.

You can see it. And you like dancing over there. I mean, it's pretty amazing. So that's what I always get when I'm hanging out with you. So the book is what to do when it's your turn. And it's always your turn. You get it at your turn. dot link.

You join us in Entreeleadership.com and you sign up for the summit. And you come here, Jim Collins, Seth Godin, Dave Ramsey, and a special guest. We can't talk about that you can see when you go to the website and all that kind of stuff. Sounds like something you and I dreamed up as a marketing plan, but it's actually contractual. I knew nothing about it. You didn't even tell me. It's just, well, I mean, you go to the website. I take it to the website.

It's very exciting. It's pretty cool. But it's just, you know, that's crazy. But anyway, so in addition to that, you know, it's crazy. You got some other things going on. Tell us what you're up to right now. The thing that's taking most of my time as the world has shifted is trying to take the way I teach into a different format. So we're running a four-week workshop called the Alt MBA. People have to apply. We only teach 100 people at a time. And it happens around the world with live coaching and a curriculum that's based on projects, not on lectures. So we tried pretty much to blow up every expectation people had of online. learning. We've run it three times so far. The next one starts in a couple weeks. It's expensive, but it's a great bargain. And we are changing people. It's really thrilling. Nothing I have ever done has changed a greater percentage of people who have touched it than this. And we're in no hurry to

grow it. We're just going to keep doing it until we get it right. You and I were again offline talking about this and you were saying this is not for everyone. Definitely not. We made it that way on purpose. It's intense. It's personal. It's transformative. And it's a lot of work. And it's expensive. Yeah. And where do they find out about that? AltmBA.com. A-L-T-M-B-A.com. Okay. Very cool. Well, it's an honor to have you, brother. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. It inspires me daily. Well, I'm inspired by you and taught by you every time I'm around you and honored to call you friend and honored to share the stage with you in Dallas this summer at the summit. Again, the book is, what to do when it's your turn.

And it's always your turn. I want to shout that last one with like an exclamation point. You get it at your turn. Dot link. And that would be a full Dave Ramsey endorsement right there. Thank you, sir. It's easy for me to endorse because it's got pictures in it. Your turn.

Dot link. Thank you, Seth. Oh, pleasure. Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as we did. If you want to see Seth on stage at the Ontario Leadership Summit alongside side, Dave Ramsey, Jim Collins, Dr. Henry Cloud, Patrick Lencioni, our very own, Chris Hogan, a number one national bestselling author and the force behind business boutique, Christy Wright. You can do that May 22 to 25 at the Entree Leadership Summit.

This is an unbelievable event. There's no leadership event in America like it. That entire lineup, they're on the stage. We'd love to see you there. It's going to sell out. We still have some tickets left, so headdo, Entreeleadership.com. slash summit, entreeleadership.com slash summit to get involved and be there. Now, our team is always working with the incredible resources we have to help you out.

We have a free small business owner's guide to leadership. In this guide to leadership, there are lessons from each of the speakers I just mentioned. Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin, Jim Collins, Henry Cloud, Patrick Lynchione, Chris Hogan, and Christy Wright. Lessons in this PDF, very simple to get, download, and even better, you can actually apply this stuff. This is a guide to leadership. Who doesn't want a little bit of help illuminating the path? So jump on this.

Text Dallas, Texas. Now, this is the phrase that pays. I've always wanted to say that, Eric, the producer. The phrase that pays. Remember that's like cheesy radio? Do you even remember radio, stuff like that? I kid. Text the phrase Dallas, Texas.

Dallas TX. Dallas TX. To 333444. Text Dallas TX to 33444 to get your small business owner's guide to leadership. This is a no-brainer. Very easy to download. Now, if you don't want to text it, you can always go to entreleadership.com slash podcast. Go to this episode and the link is there.

easy, easy click for you to get the free resource. And we're not done. InfusionSoft, our partners who help us power this podcast to help you, well, they've got another free resource this month. I am a recovering procrastinator. This really comes out around the house, the old honey-do list, you know what I mean? But my personality type, if I'm not careful, can procrastinate on things, especially things that I don't enjoy doing.

So we've got a great tool to help folks like me, folks like you, you procrastinators out there. You know who you are. You're already kind of looking to your left and right to make sure nobody hears me call you a procrastinator. But Chad Kirby, senior director at Fusionsoft, recently joined me in studio to talk about this free tool this month. So you're going to love this. Here is Chad and I talking about the Infusion Soft tool to help you stop procrastinating. Chad, if I were to ask you to pick one word, this is fun. one word that is an achievement killer for entrepreneurs, businessmen alike.

What would you say it is? If I were to say one word, it would have to be procrastination. Why is that? Well, you know, Ken, I speak with thousands of entrepreneurs, and when I get up on stage in front of them, I'll often ask them how many of you have mastered the art of procrastination, and, you know, 80% of them will raise their hand, and then I'll stop and say the rest of you will raise your hand later. And then they stop and realize, wait a second,

we all struggle with this. They all struggle with it. We all struggle with it. But the difference, Ken, is those who master it and those who are able to overcome it. Those are the ones achieving the highest level of success. But why within the entrepreneur space specifically is procrastination such a high? I mean, everybody's doing it. And there's a reason.

It's kind of the environment, right? Well, yes, because they have to pay their bills. And there are certain things that we know that will help us pay our bills immediately. we know there are things that if we did long term, they would be game changers for us, but we have those immediate needs. And so the key is how do we separate those immediate needs from our long-term ambitions and manage it in a way that we're able to achieve both? Yeah, that's good.

Because, you know, right now is not always right, you know? Exactly. But the challenge is you just, you can't do it alone. You know, we all recognize the problem. I promise you can. There was no one that listened to this and heard the word, procrastination and thought, oh, wow, I've never thought of that before. Exactly.

We all know that we struggle with it, but it's overcoming it that is key. And so what we've done at InfusionSoft is we've seen who's been able to successfully overcome it and how. And we've taken there thousands of experiences and we've put them all together in three consumable lessons to where you can sit down and go, okay, yes, that's how I do it. Three lessons to power through procrastination. Exactly. All right, folks.

who knew this was coming. In order to download this, you can't procrastinate. If you want to stop procrastinating, you must act now. Very simple. Go to infusionsoft.com slash 15. Infusionsoft.com slash 15 to take advantage of what you just heard Chad and I talking about. These are absolutely free. Three lessons, 15 minutes a day, kick procrastination to the curb and get productive.

Don't wait. Stop procrastinating. Go to infusionsoft.com. 15. That's the number 15. Thank goodness. You don't have to spell out the word. Infusionsoft.com slash 15. There's nothing that fires us up more than getting emails from you at podcast at ontrae leadership.com, meeting you at live events, whether it's the Entree Master series or Entree Leadership One Days, or hearing the stories that are coming from the community that is online called All Access. When we hear the stories of how you're winning, it fires us up. We hear a lot of negative news out there, but we know that entree leaders are winning and winning big every day, every week, every month, every year. And so we said to you, we want to hear your stories of success.

And we're really excited to bring you what we're going to call some Main Street leaders, right? These are people that every day are taking the entree leadership principles. They are producing results. Now, this story with Dr. Gary Minnie is really inspiring because this is all about sacrifice, making changes that could forever change the way he does, what he does as a doctor. But I think, as I mentioned, that this guy is a shining city on a hill. So let's get right to it. This is Dr. Gary Menning's story. Well, this is exciting, Gary, because as you know, we've been asking our podcast audience to share their stories. We are nothing if we aren't helping people like you, entree leaders, men and women,

who are out there on Main Street, working hard to win and to do business well. And so this is really fun. And so I want to start with, at what point did you come into the Entree leadership tribe? But when did you begin to experience and learn from what we're doing here? I went to the course in November 2014. But my wife and I had already done Dave's other stuff and got herself debt-free prior to going to that course. Okay.

I was looking at my business, which was in a tremendous amount of debt, I was like, I need to do something. Now, tell us about your business. I'm a physician. So I was a little skeptical going because I didn't know if it'd work for being a physician. Right, because you're thinking leadership stuff and you're hearing all this stuff, and then as a physician, you're going, what were you specifically skeptical about? In my mind, I had it wrapped more as, you know, when you think of business,

you don't think of being a doctor as a business. Right, right. I just didn't think it would work for a medical practice. But after I got going, you're able to look at your practice. It's a business. I may not be selling an item, but my item is me for the patients. And then once I looked at it that way, then I was able to take those business concepts and apply them to my medical practice. So here's what I find interesting. So here you go. You're a little skeptical, but you dive in anyway. Prior to you getting involved in entree leadership, you had paid off your personal debt yet. You mentioned just a minute ago that your practice was in enormous debt. Correct. So you walk into this entree leadership stuff and you drink the whole thing. And at some point, you realize I've got to attack this debt for my practice. And this is what's extraordinary. And I want to focus.

our time on, I want you to paint the picture. When you begin to really look at it, what did enormous debt look like? Give us some specifics. My enormous debt, you know, when you get home and you write it all down, I was over a million dollars. Whoa. So it's huge, right? So it's humbling. It's terrifying. So once you wrap your head around that and you get over that fear and you can sit down and start thinking about it, I decided I came up with a plan where I was going to to try and get rid of it all in 30 and 36 months. Wow. Now, before we go into this, I want to stop you for a second. I find it amazing that you were debt-free personally. Here you are doing the Dave Ramsey debt-free plan, personally. And it's almost like this $1 million snuck up on you because it was kind of a compartmentalized

area of your life, right? How could you be so disciplined on one side and the other kind of just creep up on you? Is that what happened? It's really, basically, that is what happened. Because in the business, You know, I'm taking care of patience. And my manager's giving me bills to pay, and you're just paying a bill here or a bill there. I never really wrote it down like I did for my personal life. That's how it sneaks up on you. Oh, yeah. So here you are.

You're overwhelmed. You have some context, obviously. You know how to do this, at least from a personal standpoint. You've done it. And you set this goal to get out of debt in 36 months. So give us a snapshot. As we talk right now, where are you on that goal? So it's been 14 months, basically, since I attended the course. So I've paid off a third of that goal. You know, once I broke it down into thirds, then the numbers get smaller and it didn't, it wasn't as overwhelming.

Right. It's still overwhelming, but not like that initial number. So what are you doing? What are the practical steps you're taking to pay off? I mean, I'd, well, first off, you know, I'd listed all my debt. just like you do personal, you know, put it in a snowball. But then I started looking at creative ways for my practice. So I'm sitting in my office one day, and I'm looking at old patients charts that are sitting in my office, 2013, 2014, patients that haven't been here.

And I'm thinking, those are people I can get back in here. So I offered my girls, basically, I pay them $20 per chart. if they get one of those patients to come back in for their visits, for their yearly exams, as a way to just get my patients back, because you just sort of let them go. We used to buy our gowns or rent our gowns from a linen service, and I started getting online, and I was able to get gowns, you know, on eBay, Amazon from hospitals going out of business or outpatient centers going out of business. You know, instead of paying $7.95 a gown, I was able to give patient gowns for $2.37. I bought my own gowns, and we do them now ourselves. My wife and I and our kids, we clean our office. We got rid of our cleaning crew, and we do it.

Just looking at ways it's saving so I could put more money towards the debt. Just those type of creative things that you have to do. It's like an albatross around your neck, and I want to get rid of it. Yeah. Well, a couple other things here that you told us your story before. And you've already listed out some really practical things that show your commitment to get out of this debt. But you looked at every contract with vendors. One point that you told us was that you found an electronic medical records company that was free.

That saved you. About $60,000. $60,000. So here's what's amazing. When I hear you list that out, and this is so great for our audience, because your goal is to get debt free. And the way you're doing that is, this is so hilarious. I wish our Washington leaders could hear you share that, but you found ways to increase revenue and you found ways to decrease expenses. And you're just doing some crazy things.

I don't know of many doctors in America who clean their own office. That's commitment. But when you're cleaning your own office and you're thinking back to the way it was, the way most people do it, what fires you up when you're doing that? because you realize you're getting to a place that many, many doctors may not ever get to in having a debt-free practice. Give us that perspective as you're in the middle of this journey and you see the mountaintop. Well, what fires you up is, you know, each month I go through there and I've got it all on a spreadsheet and that number's lower and lower and lower. I mean, because my goal, I've got really 24 months left and other everything. All my debt will be on my business, building.

being paid, everything. It'll be zero. That's what fires you up. Best of your knowledge, how many doctors, physicians in America who run their practice, many of them have partners, some of them may be on their own, how many of them are debt-free would you guess if you had to just- I, God, I don't know, probably not many. Not many is the point. I think that some live, you know, you think they're, listen, I was living paycheck to paycheck while knocking down really great money. We're not going to share that with our audience, but you're knocking down good money, right? Right. And still living paycheck to paycheck. Right. And so that's what got me looking. I'm like, how can I be making this much money?

And I have no money. And then you start looking at what you're paying out for your practice, your bills, and you've got to start looking at ways of bringing that down. Because unfortunately, for us in medicine, our rates don't go up. Our rates keep going down every year, right? Insurance wants to pay you less and less and less. So you're actually losing money. Right. So, that's how I looked at it. Plus, I wanted to show my kids, you know, I'm no better. I can clean an office. Right. You know, I can sweep the floor. I can clean a toilet. Yeah. And if that's what you have to do to get yourself out of that situation, that's what you do. I love that. Let me ask you this. Given the snapshot you just gave is the reality of the debt that many physicians carry, the fact that in this current environment in 2016, insurance companies are paying you. you less and less, which means your costs are going up. At the end of the day, yes, you are in a business, but none of us forget that physicians are there to serve people, to serve patients in one of the most important areas of their life, their health. You're midway through this.

So I'm asking you a forward question, but how do you think your practice in the way that it can and should serve patients will change once you're debt-free? It allows you to do a lot more. because you can get newer things. It allows me to do more for my staff that stuck with me through this whole thing. You know, it's pretty rare for doctors' offices to keep. I've had the same girls for 10 years since I opened. You know, you have to think about that too because you're also providing for, at least for me, five other families. So, yeah, it will.

That's a fundamental question there. Debt freedom for you allows you to do more for your patients and still be winning in your practice. Correct. Well, we're so excited to have spent a little time with you because what you're doing in your practice is a lighthouse for so many in the medical community, to get debt-free in your practice, to be an entree leader within the medical community. That is something to be so proud of. We're so thrilled to just be a little teeny part of your journey. And you have inspired our audience and you have inspired us. So Dr. Gary Minnie, thank you so much for hanging out with us. And thank you for. modeling the way for entree leaders. Thank you, Ken. Many thanks to Dr. Gary Minnie for taking time out of his schedule to share his story with us. And again, it's a great reminder. We would love to hear how you're winning.

How are you taking the entree leadership principles and changing the game? We want to encourage others through your empowering stories. Podcast at entreleadership.com, drop us a note. And we would love to share your story. What was great having Seth Godin, we always love when Seth stops by, so we're grateful to him, Chad Kirby and the team in Infusion Software, everything they're doing to make your world better. As entrepreneurs, small business leaders, we're grateful for them. On behalf of our producer, Eric Anthony and the entire Entree

leadership team, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.