EntreLeadership - #265: Dave Ramsey—Live From Summit

Episode Date: May 23, 2018

We’re continuing our bonus content from EntreLeadership Summit with a lesson from Dave Ramsey on something that affects every single one of us: market disruption. Regardless of the business you’re in, change is the only constant in today’s marketplace. And if you want to survive, complacency is not an option. Tune in as Dave details the three things to avoid if you want to stay a step ahead of your competition. We’ll also hear incredible testimonies from two of this year’s 2,300 Summit attendees. The first comes from Christian Staples, owner of Arctic Spas, who has grown his business over 300% since discovering EntreLeadership five years ago. Next, PDG + Creative owner Andrew Oleson will explain how attending multiple EntreLeadership events has helped him transform his company’s culture and more than double his business. Get ready to be inspired! entreleadership.com/podcast Success Formula Challenge from EntreLeadership Want expert help with your business question? Call 844-944-1070 and leave a message or send an email to [e-mail]. You could be featured on a future podcast episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there's an industry set of best practices and you do the industry set of best practices, expect no more than about a 3% win rate over what they're doing. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is Andre Leadership. Now, here's your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from San Antonio, Texas. This is the broadcast of leaders by leaders for leaders. Thanks for joining the conversation. Here we go.

Summit Day 2 in the books, and we are bringing you another daily podcast from San Antonio, Texas. In just moments, we're going to bring you some of Dave Ramsey and his talk about market disruption. But first, we want you to hear from an attendee who isn't following industry best practices and is succeeding. My name is Christian Staples, and I own Arctic Spas. I've been doing this long time. I've had to reinvent the company multiple times. times. I kind of have a little bit of a different scenario than most people because I've been doing this a long time. I actually started doing it when I turned 17. I wasn't old enough to actually

get a business license. I'd have my mom take me and get the business license under her name. The company is very different now than what it was. This year we celebrated 29 years. And five years ago is when I really got involved with entre leadership. That was a pivotal point in my company. Since then, we've probably grown like 300%. When I look at my company, and what I do, there's two things that really stick out that I think that I don't follow my industry best practices. And I have had so many people call me that I'm just crazy, but this is what I really believe in.

And I think coming here, Dave just helps me understand that I'm really on the right path with this. And one is I only sell one brand of Hot Tub. And most Hot Tub stores, they just sell Hot Tub. It doesn't matter which brand. There's no brand loyalty. They will sell whatever they can get a deal, on or they have multiple lines or anything like that. And my company is named Arctic Spaws,

because that's the brand of Spaws that I sell. I just deal with one manufacturer, which is very different from every other store out there for the most part. I really believe that how can I expect my customers have any more loyalty than what I show and have? So if I'm loyal to my one brand, my customers are also going to be loyal to the one brand as well. The other thing is we have about seven service techs, and we have three sales guys. And they say, how in the world do you have more service techs than sales guys? And that's because the service aspect, you know, really makes a difference. So probably about 60, maybe even 70% of our service is actually optional stuff. And so we have the techs to be able to take care of that because that's what people, you know,

want. Most people in my industry don't do that. Did I want the 3% now that Dave just told me? Maybe I'm on the right path. You know, when I started the business, it was just me. didn't have other people who were dependent upon me. And then the company quickly grew into something that it was really managing me. I just went wherever the flow went. And there was nothing where I'm like guiding the company. Then, you know, we had this great recession hit. And all of a sudden, I had to shrink the company.

I'd never done that before. I had to come up with all these other, you know, ways of guiding the company that I'd really never had to do before. So that's when I started listening to the podcast. after that kind of initial shock, you're trying to dig yourself out of it now. And so I really realized that I needed more guidance in what I was doing. And, you know, when you hear the cliche of, you know, you need to not just work in your company, but you need to work on your company, that's what I really had to make this transformation to become. And that's why a reason why I'm here today at Summit, instead of just being home doing, you know, serving customers or something.

You know, my whole entire team is depending upon me to be able to come. back and guide them, guide our customers, guide the company, I need something to help me to know where to actually take the company too. You know, one thing that we really concentrate on is developing individuals. So I had somebody asked me the other day, they said, you know, I'm kind of running out of things to do. And I said, well, you know what? One of your responsibilities isn't just to do stuff. It's also to figure out, what are you going to put on your task list? You're just starting this conversation in their mind, and that's where people come up with these ideas. And so this person has never asked me since then what I'm running out of stuff,

what should I do? They're finding problems and they're finding solutions. Around the five years ago, Mark, when I started getting involved more and more with on trade leadership, that's when I started thinking about all these processes that I need to like have in place to help inspire people to do better than what they do or would do if the customer is just telling them what to do. One of the things I took away from Dave's talk is that if you follow the industry best practices, there's lots of advice that you should go after, and this guy is successful to exactly what he does, and you'll be successful. But the only thing that you're going to get is what Dave said is a 3% gain.

And is that really what we want? It's just 3%. And then the other quote, you need to know where you want to be in five years and what you need to become to be able to get there. And so how are we going to change to be able to get to where we want to. want to be in five years because we're not going to get there being the same person that we are right now. We need to be able to change. That's what I really appreciate about, you know, coming to something like this that I can hear other people that it just starts the conversation in your mind, gives you these ideas. They're not telling you exactly what, you know, Arctic Spaws is going to look like

or what Christian Staples is going to look like, but it's starting the conversation in my mind. and over time that conversation develops all those details and then pretty soon, you know, I'm going to know in five years where I want to be. And then we start backtracking and saying, okay, so what do I need to do? How do I need to change to be able to get there? Big thanks to Christian. And as a reminder, Christian is just one of the 2299 other businessmen and women at Summit making it and breaking it in their industry.

If they can do it, so can you. You don't magically show up one day. and have a concrete plan already put together. You have to start that conversation. We want you to start thinking about it right now. All right, it's time to listen and learn. Dave gave a great talk on how to disrupt markets. Really great stuff. Here's Dave. The rate of change in business today is faster than at any time it's been in history. Today, we don't have the luxury of a six-year or a 12-year market swing in most spaces that we're in. We've gone from the printing press to the telephone. 400 years to do that. We've gone from the telephone to the television. It took 90 years to do that.

We've gone from the television to the computer. It took 30 more years to do that. The computer to the internet was 20 more years. The internet now to the smartphone, 15 years and the smartphone overtaking everything with mobile PC, nine years. Amazon's only 23 years old. The iPhone is only 10 years old. Market disruption in a rate of change like that is a way of life. You better embrace it. It's coming. I don't care what space you're in. Change is coming and it's coming at a breakneck speed and you've got to get ready. You're either creating the wave of market disruption, you're riding the wave of market disruption or you're getting crushed by the wave of market disruption. No one is on the sidelines. You will be an ice house that's out of business

or you'll be a two and a half billion dollar industry because you caught the front edge of the wave or you created the wave that you're writing. Standing on the sidelines is no longer an option. We struggle with this inside of our organization because once something's working, you kind of let I want to let it just work. You want to get comfortable. That thing's profitable. Don't screw with it. I've been working 15 years to get to that. Finally, it gets there.

And everybody wants to mess with it. Leave it alone. It's working. I like my comfort zone. Don't bother me. You don't have an option. You should be very uncomfortable in your comfort zone. As we studied this inside of our own selves in our organization,

and we've watched other companies that are moving and shaking and other ones that are being overtaken and pounded by this market disruption. And we figured out there's basically about three things that will cause you to get crushed by market disruption. Number one, hubris. Once I learned to read, I loved reading. I discovered reading could take me anywhere I wanted to go. One of the first things I got plugged into, these little yellow books, and they were at the sixth grade level, and I read them all in the fourth grade. There was a whole series of them on Greek mythology. all the interaction with the Greek gods and the humans.

And in almost every one of them, the interaction with a hero that brings the hero down is excessive pride. The Greek word is hubris. My friend Jim Collins wrote the book Good to Great, after he wrote the book Built to Last. And while he was working on his follow-up book, his third book, the marketplace shifted. was a big downturn in the economy, and he had all this research in front of him. Jim writes from research. He's a wonderful academic, and he really did not intend to put out another book until Thriving on Chaos came out, but he dropped this little book out in the middle of that, How the Mighty Fall. And he started studying great companies that had fallen,

and the number one habit was hubris, hubris, excessive arrogance or overconfidence kills companies. Noquio owned the cell phone business. Their market share was an 800-pound gorilla. They owned the business. They had touchscreen technology in their R&D labs and decided in their brilliance that it wasn't marketable and it didn't need to come to the market, that the flip phone was going to be just fine. No key is gone. They're gone.

Huberous will cause market disruption to crush you. The second one is keeping your head down, not looking up. You can't survive in business if you don't set aside in time for strategic thought. Now this is a revelation for people like me because I'm a guy who makes payroll by Friday. I'm the guy who gets up, leaves the cave, kill something, and drag it home. I do tactical stuff by nature. When in doubt, push something. When in doubt, move something.

When in doubt, work. When in doubt, move, move, move. Activity, activity, activity. Do something tactical. Move something. I'm that guy. But as our business has grown, I've had to learn to get above the problem and look at the whole problem. That's called strategic thought if you didn't know.

Instead of just being down in the problem trying to fight your way through it. Because if you're above the problem, you go, if you just turn left right there, you could go around. You don't have to go through that wall. For me, I'm just running into the wall half my life. So I've got all these MBAs that work on our team now. How many of you have an MBA? I love MBAs. I've learned so much from y'all.

Master's in Business. I've got several of them on our team. I didn't hire them because they had MBAs. We hired them because they were smart, and they happened to have an MBA. But 100% of the MBAs that I've ever interfaced with in depth, all of them learn at least this one thing in every MBA program, and that is strategic thought. They teach you if they don't teach you anything else when you're getting your MBA to get above the problem and work the problem from up here. And so those MBAs have really helped a guy like me, a dirt-scratching entrepreneur, learned to get out of the tactical and up into the strategic and watch where I'm going and how to get there. The benefit, those MBAs have taught me that and I've taught some of them how to work.

But you've got to have both, don't you? You can work stupid. Where there is no vision that people perish. We know this in our organization. It's happened to us a time or two. The third thing is protecting sacred cows. Man, don't we love the stuff we love? This thing's making money.

Back in the day, this was how it all started. When my grandpa started, this is what we sold. Well, you'd be out of business, son. I don't care what your grandpa did. Our rule around our place is we look for sacred cows and we shoot them and eat them for lunch. If you try to protect your market share, artificially, instead of serving the customer so much better than anybody that's disrupting the market,

then you're going to get taken down. That's a sacred cow. I've always done it this way. I like it this way. It's always worked. Why would we change it? Because things are changing. That's why you would change it. If you're not constantly changing, you're screwed. It's just a matter of time. I don't know if you know this or not, but Kodak actually invented the digital camera. eight years before the digital camera got any market share and anybody knew there was such a thing. But they took the technology and put it on a shelf because their executive team said, oh, if we put this out there, film sales will go down. And Kodak is currently in Chapter 11.

Again, the digital camera. And by the way, if you're in the digital camera business, are you in trouble right now? Yeah. How many times you see somebody pull out a real camera? It's like, well, they got a camera. How do you do that? I've seen a camera in forever. It's always your phone.

And some of your phones are much better cameras than any camera we ever owned growing up. Or even if you really bought a nice one with a lens and everything, you've got to really be a big time photographer to have actually a real camera. The Kodak. No, we can't. We've got to protect the film business. We can't put out something that takes our film business. Marketplace changes.

When I started teaching Financial Peace University, I taught it with a bad suit and an overhead projector, and there was five people, and then there was 50 people, and then there was 300 people in a ballroom, and we did that every day, five days a week. That's how Financial Peace University got its start. But we reached a point that logistically we simply couldn't get there. We went to this little studio and put these people in these little funeral chairs, uncomfortable little folding chair thingies, you know, for five and six hours for two Saturdays in a row and put all the financial peace university lessons on video.

We paid $7246 for the production. And then they printed them out on VHS tapes. Look that up, young people. I didn't want to put it on VHS. Because I'm a speaker and a teacher. And I know when I'm relating to my audience that if I can keep them laughing and nodding, if I can make them think, if I can make them cry,

I know I can connect to them if I tell you to raise your hand, you all raise your hand, you get animated in the process, learning occurs. I know how to do that stuff. You can't do that with a VHS tape. You're just watching a TV and you can be distracted and not care about anything else. And I said, we put this on VHS, the humor won't work, the emotional connectivity won't work, the inspiration piece won't work, the information will work. I can transfer information, but if I don't get the human connectivity with them, the behavior won't change, and financial peace university is going to fail. And I fought our guys. I said, we can't put it on VHS, and finally relented and did it because we couldn't get any bigger.

We were stuck. We had to try something new. My intent was to continue to run the live classes and watch this video idea fail. And I'll never forget, I walked in the back of the room at a church that was teaching it on video. There were 40 people watching the video. They didn't know I was back there. And I cracked a joke, and they all laughed. and I went, oh crap, I was wrong.

And then, and this still amazes me to this day, I said, everybody in the room has done this, raise your hand. And these people raised their hands. I can't see you out of the TV. It's not logical. So not was I just wrong. I was really wrong. And guess what?

VHS exploded. We couldn't keep them duplicated fast enough. And then people started. calling us and go, have you heard of these new things called DVDs? And I went, no, no, VHS is working. I don't care about DVD. I can't spell it. Y'all ever done this? I was resistant to put it on DVD. We put the audio on cassettes and you could get the cassettes. I was resistant to put it to CDs. By the time we got to MP3s, no cost of goods sold, I went do it, starting to figure this thing out that you better change with the times, you're either going to get crushed by these waves,

or you're going to create these waves, or you're going to ride these waves. Shoot your sacred cows. We don't have a choice. We've always done it that way. There's never a reason to keep doing something. As a matter of fact, if that's your only reason for doing it, and you don't have another reason for doing it, that by definition is a sacred cow.

Shoot it. Systematically avoid protecting your sacred cows. So there's three ways companies get crushed by not changing. So how do we actually think ahead? How do we look ahead and see what's coming? Well, the first way I've discovered is we had to avoid the paralysis of perfection. My friend Seth Godin will be with you this afternoon, arguably one of the best marketing minds. I told you this in the opener yesterday on the planet.

And Seth has a saying, ship it. Nothing happens until you ship it. Too many people with their products and their services and their product adjustments and their product launches say, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, fire! Ship it! I missed. Draw and shoot again. Ship it. It's not going to be perfect. The first time I did a book that wasn't self-published with a real publisher and a real editor, I kept going, well, this deal isn't right. And as soon as I got it done and we printed it, there was people that, misspelled things in there like me. And we got these letters. Don't you know the English language? No. It's not a book about the English language.

It's a book about money. I know that. Shut up and do it. The book's not right. There's misspellings in every single book I have out today. At some point, you ship it. The editing stops. You'll never get there.

Get it to a point where you're just not embarrassed completely and ship it. Get it out there. And when you're doing it, doing digital stuff, you're going to iterate by Friday anyway. You're going to split, test, change, move stuff, ship it. If you wait until a product or service is perfect, you'll never launch it. There's no such thing as perfect. By the time it's perfect, it's over. It's not going to be perfect. Get it out there. By the time you get it perfect, it's not perfect anymore because the market already moved on you. Change something. Change something just to say you did. Number two,

Maintain a healthy, emotional desperation. A kid I grew up with, I can't really grow up with him. I knew him growing up, and I got to know him in my 20s. He was, well, he grew up rich. Daddy was a multimillionaire. And he wasn't like a trust fund baby where he was afraid of work. He was a hard worker, good salesman, one of the best salesman I ever met, a bit of a con artist, a little slimy.

But this kid, he and I would work on something. together in sales. And his approach sitting at the people's table making the sale versus mine was completely different. Because I was a kid from the other side of the tracks, I needed to make the sale. There was a level of desperation

in my body language, in my voice. And he didn't have any money either, but he'd grown up with money and he just figured you could get money. It was kind of cocky, a little bit arrogant. But it was just this confidence. You know, he didn't think he was going to fail. Might fail tonight, but overall, I'm not going to fail. So rejection or not making a sale didn't bother him.

He did not have a healthy level of desperation. One of the reasons where we are is I run scared part of my day every day, don't you? It's good for you. Somebody is not just a little bit concerned, a little bit desperate. Now, I said a healthy level. I don't want toxic stress. That's not what I'm talking about. But, you know, you ought to go towards something as if something's chasing you.

You're going to get run over if you don't take risks. Number three, keep a childlike curiosity about the future. What if you had nothing to lose and everything was a whiteboard? And you just went, let's just play. If we didn't have a $10 million business over here that we were worried about the sacred cow, what would we do? Have some wow meetings. Blows my mind stuff, right?

Look for clues. out there on what's coming. Keep your childlike curiosity up. Learn to see clues in the present that foreshadow the future, my friend Rabbi Daniel Lapin says in his book, when new problems pop up, the entree leader looks for a new solution. It's what Netflix did.

And Blockbuster went to them and tried to buy them when they were just a little DVD distribution company that mailed them in the little sleeves to your house. Did you ever get those from Netflix? And I've got to tell you, Netflix right now is printing money. Unbelievable market disruption. $150 million spent on the production of season one of the Crown. Most of you watch television substantially different than you did two and a half years ago.

Almost everything you're watching that isn't sports or news is on demand. How much of your business have you been demanding when they come? consumed it, and now they're going to consume it when they want to. And you're already late to the party. That's how we feel around our place. They're going to watch it when and how they want. Let me give you an example of something we're dealing with right now. We're in two different industries that don't know the other ones there, and the consumers treating them the same. The book business, you ever hear the rumor, the books are going, the bookstores are going out of business, and the publishers are all going out of business because everything's going

digital, the e-book is going to put the paperbook out of business. Have you heard that one? Let me tell you what the numbers are. E-books five years ago were one percent of the market, one percent of sales. Today, in the self-improvement space, e-books are one and a half percent of the market. They're cool, but they're irrelevant. But here's what happened. Audio books, when I started in the business, were on cassette and they were abridged because you didn't want to buy a whole set of cassettes. And then we went to CDs, and they didn't want more than two CDs in the audiobooks, so still abridged.

Went to MP3s with audiobooks, digital delivery. Everybody is a full book now, unabridged. Audio books, five years ago, same time span, were 2% of the market. Today they're 14% of the market. And that was kind of a dusty little category. It was cassette tapes. and now we're just going to put the whole book on digital. But here's what's happening.

It's sitting in the same place in the consumer's mind, and we discovered this because we're one of the few people that are in both spaces. We're also in the radio world. During that same period of time, my podcast on the Dave Ramsey show, it's 604 radio stations, okay, on mainstream regular radio. We launched a podcast for an hour for free, and it worked so well, we thought, well, we'll just put all three hours out there for free.

First year we launched the podcast, it was like 100,000 people. Five years ago, it was 200,000 people listening to the podcast. This year, we went from 7 million listeners on mainstream radio, real radio, to we're at about 9.6 million, just under 10 million on real radio right now on my listenership. During that same time, my podcast listenership went from 100,000 to 500,000, and it will break 6 million this year on demand while I'm traveling. while I'm at the gym, while I'm on a walk on the beach. By the way, it's the same way I listen to, exactly the same way.

Digitally, technology, hardware, everything is the same, except the particular app. Same place that I listen to audiobooks. I listen to podcasts. And the consumers doing both of these things and these two stupid industries don't even know the other one exists. We do. We're going to be there, baby. See what you're looking for? You're looking for clues in the present.

with these trend lines that foreshadow the future. You're looking for stuff like that. Doesn't matter what business you're in. You can be in an ancient business and deliver it a new way. Radio is an old business. Teaching from stage is an old business. Publishing is an old business. We've got to find new ways to do our old business

and be market disruptors or at a minimum ride, the wave of the market disruption, to keep us from being crushed. by the market disruption. I think that's exciting news. I think it's great news. I'm an entrepreneur. All that spells for me is opportunity.

And it gives me a little bit of a healthy desperation to run so I don't get killed. I'm going to be right there in the middle of all of that. And you should too. You've got to do something to stay engaged in the rhythm. Momentum doesn't happen quickly. It happens with a rhythm. It happens with staying on it. It's game on, game on.

Application of information that causes transomomom. Transformation doesn't happen quickly. You've got to stay on it, stay on it, stay on it, stay on it. And we ask ourselves around our place all the time, where do we want to be in five years? And who do we have to become to be there in five years? Because we would be there now if we were already the person that we needed to be to be there. If the organization had the skill set and the abilities and the aptitudes, we would already be there. So we must need something that we don't have today to get to where we're not today.

Does that make sense? You keep doing what you've been doing. You're going to keep getting what you've been getting. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. What's your dream? Let's reach out there 20 years and say that. Let's reach out there five years and say that. You need to be on a path.

Even if you take a step back, it's okay if it takes me on the path. Even if I take a step sideways, it's okay. Even if I change the whole color scheme, it's okay if it takes me on the path. But don't just be doing something to be doing something different. That'll get you kill. where do you want to be when you're 46? Where do you want to be when you're 66? What do you want your organization to look like?

It's a transformational process inside of our organization, inside your organization, inside your personal life. It's a transformational. And I've studied transformation for a long time because it's what I do for a living. How are lives transformed? The Bible says, be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. my friend Andy Andrews came in and did a talk at our office a while back and it was devastating because I love the idea of finding someone who's doing something well and then studying it and replicating it, copying it, stealing it. Best practices. Have you heard that say yes?

He said if they're doing best practices, if there's an industry set of best practices and you do the industry set of best practices and you are the best in the best. the world at those best practices, expect no more than about a 3% win rate over what they're doing. You might beat them by 3 to 5% doing what they're doing better than they're doing it, the industry best practices. And I like the idea of studying winning and following it. He said if you want 50x, not 3 tenths of a point X, if you want to have 50 fold the industry, The industry is X and I want 50X, I want 100 X. Then you have to do something as perpendicular to the industry.

You have to be a market disruptor. Well, as always, the Entree Leadership team bringing you a great tool on this episode. It's the Entree Leadership Success Formula Challenge. Now, you just heard Dave say, we ask ourselves all the time, where do we want to be in five years, and who do we have to become to get there? So our team realized the perfect tool to offer you is our success formula challenge. It's a seven-day challenge containing a three-part video series taught by the man himself, Dave Ramsey. This three-part video series will break down the process of taking your dreams, turning them into a vision, and then making them a reality.

It's about knowing where you are, where you want to be, and then asking the right questions and following the right plan to get you there. The question is, are you up for it? Here's how you get it. Text the phrase, success formula. No space. Success formula. Text that phrase to 33-444. One of the things I love about what we do from our podcast from Summit is Will and Eric and Chris are out scouring the lobby for all-star attendees. And we've got another one, a guy by the name of Andrew Olson coming up right now. He's the owner of PDG plus creative. He's an all-access member and been to many of our events. And we got Andrew to come into the booth and record a conversation that left me out of all the fun. But it is a great story. And I want Andrew to be able to share it. Here is his story.

So my name is Andrew Wilson. I own PDG Plus Creative. We're a full-service marketing and interactive agency in Oklahoma and Kansas City. The team that I have in both offices is about 12 to 14 people. It varies. We have a couple of contractors that are basically full-time. But most of the team is in-house. So, 2014 was when I took in my first summit, and I went to the master series in the march of owning my business, which I'd already owned a business turning point productions prior to 2014.

And I'd already cultivated a team of people who knew my leadership style, who liked me, who trusted me, and it was reciprocal. But when I purchased PDG, I'd come into a team where, to be real honest, the leadership just was terrible. The guy wore his emotions on his sleeve. If he was having a bad day, everybody was having a bad day. And they didn't know me. They didn't know what I was going to do. and I had this trust with my team that I didn't have with them. And as I said, January was the purchase.

March was when I came to Entree Leadership. And I remember getting back from Ontario Leadership, and I pulled the whole team together. And the first thing that I said was, I'm sorry. I've been doing this wrong. I didn't know what I was doing, and I've been doing it wrong. And so from that day forward, we really started to cultivate this idea of culture

and what it meant to have a culture inside of business. And I first sent by sending my interactive director to Entree Performance Series in December, and then again with my creative director the next year, I think it was the following March. And it was amazing watching them come back because we were like vibrating on the same wavelength. And once we had a leadership team that had already been through this process and had heard all of these ideas and concepts, we were really able to get not only in the same page, but we were able to kind of disseminate this culture idea down through our entire organization. It was amazing.

I mean, it started with as a team we sat down and we wrote out our core values, our operating principles, and all of these things. And once we've finally had those figured out, everything poured over there. We were developing. Our policies were changing. They're becoming more people-centric. Our processes were changing.

Even this year, 2018, we've made some substantial changes to products and services based on these ideas. And it's funny because we're making really, really simple decisions now that are changing the way we're doing business on a massive landscape. And I'll have strategy walks with my interactive director and my creative director sometimes. We'll laugh because we'll say, say, how did we not make this change two years ago? And it's always a remembrance that we simply

weren't equipped then to make the decisions we have now because we had so many other problems on our plate to fix. And every year, it's been a culture of change. This year, we've introduced a couple of new platforms for how we're offering services that have almost doubled our business. It's blowing my mind. If I was to describe myself as a leader four years ago, it was with purpose, but listless, maybe not with such a focused vision. I know. how to do business and I knew how to get things done. I've always been a person who likes on-board decision-making. I like people to be on board and to move my direction. Of course, there are those that don't. That's okay. I learned how to deal with those since. But I've always preferred that

type of a leadership style. But ever since doing the Entree Leadership Summit and Entree Leadership Master Series, I've learned how and why I am that way, and I'm able to speak and communicate with my team members on a level that I never dream possible. The culture building, inside of our organization has become a super passion of mine. And I even work with other business owners that are in my area just to help them understand what we have and why we're different. I'm constantly getting questions about it. How do you get your people to stay late? I don't ask. How do you get such loyalty? I'm loyal back. It's all of these things. And it's amazing to me how foreign some of these concepts are to some of my even close friends. And now that we've brought

on team members that are, as you would say, on the shoulders of giants, We constantly walk through this stuff. On Wednesday, this is our team day, and we constantly walk through our operating principles. We have sort of a checklist of things that we go over. It's funny because if we were sitting in team meeting right now, they'd all roll their eyes. And what's Dave called that when they mimic you, but it in a playful way. You know they're listening. We always say our profits matter because without profits, we don't have paychecks,

but it's not the most important thing. Our clients matter, but it's not clients that are the most important thing, even though without clients, we don't have profits without profits who don't have paychecks. At PDG, the most important thing is the people. And when we understand that, when we were finally able to make that connection that we, the people at PDG are the most important thing for the business, in the business, because we are the business. Everything else trickles down from there. And even our clients notice.

So back to your original question, has the other team members noticed? I think they started noticing within about the first year we started making these changes. And the people that come on board now, if they're coming from a different corporation where we're going through our 90 to 120, hiring process. These are a couple of those responses I've legitimately gotten. They'll be like, you guys are weird. And sometimes it works. And sometimes they're like, I like this weird and I want to be a part of it. But I've definitely had some, some corporate people say, this is really uncomfortable and I don't like this. I'd say since 2014, our team has doubled. And so of our, our profits have not been linear like that. They've gone through the roof. This year, we've seen some significant

changes in the way that we're offering our services. We opened up a Kansas City office in August of 2017, and ever since then, I've been working on not only penetrating that market, but bringing some of these product ideas that we've had for our services into that market as well. It's been received incredibly, and we've been growing exponentially profit-wise. Two years ago at the summit in Dallas, I came with my entire leadership team, so it was me and two other people. And it was funny because on the car ride down there, we had all these missions and objectives. And I say this in the most sincere way. We had really made some more. cultural strides inside of our business.

And so we were feeling pretty good, not arrogant or cocky, but just really good. And so it was funny because all of our objectives were these high level, like, okay, we're already killing it in these areas. How can we maximize? How can we do better? And it was really funny because we sat down in the first lesson with Dave, I was there pen and paper with notebook, and he comes out with his first line. And it was funny because we all

leaned forward and looked at each other and just shook our heads because we were like, we still suck at this. How is this possible? And we all had to laugh at ourselves because we thought, okay, obviously we're doing well. We're not doing it where we'd like to be. We can always improve. But I think that's what it is. It's a constant reminder. This is in a place where I can sit down with other entree leadership people that really get it that are trying to move the direction that we're moving.

And it's just like I said on the app this morning, iron sharpen iron. And we're making a couple of shavings this week. It's just all about becoming better, becoming better. You can listen to the podcast and you can become energized. But there is a momentum that. is carried when you're actually physically engulfed. All of your senses are engulfed. You're with people that are getting it and they're all driving forward. Whereas Entry leadership is really physically demanding and you get kind of exhausted, emotionally charging. It's very emotionally

charging. And I think you make connections with other people that it's just like they said with brainstorming. It's you're able to sit down and bounce some ideas of somebody. But you're not just bouncing ideas off a sounding board. You're bouncing ideas off of somebody who's in the trenches with you and who gets it. I can think of, so in 2014, when I was at my master series, I'm still deeply really incredible friends with a guy that I met there. And ever since the master series, him and I have continued to work back and forth. And he's actually making a transition out of the business he's in now to another one. And it's not a small one. He's a CFO of a very large company into another one. And he called me a couple of months ago. And he was like, I'm

getting ready to make this transition. What do you think about this? And we just were able to hit the ball back and forth, and he knows that inherently him and I are going to be on the same page, the things that matter. So everything else is just bouncing ideas back and forth. We probably talk about every other week or so. There are absolutely been times that he's helped me, especially because since he's got so many more years in the industry that I do, in his particular industry, that he just has amassed some wisdom that I haven't had the ability to get yet, simply because I haven't spent as much time on the earth that he has. You know, there have been times when I've called him, and it's funny because, you know, in a really polite way, and I say this just because I have a sense of

humor. I've said this a lot, but he chuckles at me, and he's like, Andrew, let's just think about this for a minute. And it's really that I've dug myself into two positions, and I'm being stubborn. Both of the options suck, and he just reminds me, you need to go do some more homework. Or you're being stubborn. You need to forget about this other ego involved, and you need to think about it these ways. So he's able to kind of wrestle with me and hash some of those things out. But all of them stem from principles we've learned to Entry leadership. I think probably I would, just because of my nature, I would probably find other people, but he's just somebody that I've really connected with.

I don't have a good relationship with the gentleman that owns the building that I'm renting out of. And while things need to jive and move forward, it seems like even if he makes a really simple request or a really practical request, I butt heads with him, just because automatically I go out, he's being unreasonable, right? And so I called him up and I was mad and I was angry about this stupid thing. and he was just like, okay, so he lets me, he listens to me, and he says, hey, have you really thought about this? Or are you just calling to vent with me?

And whereas 95% of the conversation was just about me venting, we were able to conquer the 5% problem, the elephant that became a mouse. I would say one of the problems that we're facing right now is growth both in Oklahoma but then in Kansas City as well and how do we get the most effective path forward in our growth, where do we put our resources and where do we put our manpower? So I have two objectives, going home from my...

monetary leadership. Number one, to test the values and objectives and processes that we have in place now. Culturally, are we driving forward the way we need to drive? So we do this once a quarter, but then again, after every summit that any one of us attends, we do a cultural health checkup. I don't know if you remember that from Patrick Lucione's lesson a couple of years ago. It's supposed to be anonymous, but we all put our names on it because nobody cares. It's a list of a 30-year-so questions where it kind of allows the team to measure the cultural effectiveness of the organization. And as leadership, we take those, figure out the scores, and then we report back on the areas that we're weak, how we plan to fix them, get

team buy-in, any suggestions that they have for fixing problems, and then, of course, continue the things that we're doing really well. So that's the first priority, simply because culture is one of those things where everybody knows if you don't have it, but it's hard to know when you do. So that's the first priority. The second priority is just to figure out how to manage the growth that we have right now, which is a fantastic place to be considering that 14 years ago we were hemorrhaging money out of every corner of the office.

So, you know, now we've got substantial cash flow built up. We've got some retained earnings for down periods. And again, on our billing months, we've just been absolutely murdering at these last six months. Big thanks to Andrew for sharing his story. Well, that's going to do it for day two from Summit, 2018 and San Antonio, Texas. Good news. Tomorrow is our final day. We're going to bring you another podcast as well.

So on behalf of Will the producer Eric and Chris and the entire Entree leadership team, thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again very soon.