EntreLeadership - #266: Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin, Donald Miller—Live From Summit

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

We’re coming to you again from EntreLeadership Summit, this time with an outstanding panel discussion featuring Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin and Donald Miller. The powerhouse trio tackles questions from our attendees and addresses tough issues such as managing rapid growth, developing leaders instead of managers, and defining success within your own organization. Their answers are insightful, candid, and straightforward—and a game-changer for sure. Oak Run Associates’ Priya Ghumman, who also owns Development and Construction Corporation of America, will also be joining us. An EntreLeadership raving fan if we’ve ever met one, Priya has attended three Summits (and is already registered for next year!) and says the lessons she’s learned there have helped her transform her 40-year-old family business. entreleadership.com/podcast EntreLeadership Summit 2019 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

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, four leaders. Thank you so much for joining the conversation. My, oh my, Summit Day 3 is in the books. It's hard to believe. It feels like Monday morning was an hour ago.

So here's what we're bringing you today. Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin, Donald Miller all spoke, but then we put them together on a panel. And the only thing better than hearing each of those gentlemen speak is putting them together. The brain power almost shut down the power grid in Texas. It was absolutely phenomenal. We're going to bring you that entire conversation. And then we have another summit attendee who's going to share with you. That's going to be great.

And a special offer for Summit 2019, those tickets are going like crazy. we're already approaching a near sellout. So we've got a special offer for you podcast people because you know how much I love you and take care of you. So you're going to stay tuned for that after you hear the panel. Let's get right to it. Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin, Donald Miller, taking our attendees questions.

So fun. I get to sit up there with them and read the questions and watch the magic happen. Here it is for your ears. Right here. Excellent. All right. Okay, guys, as we told the audience, these are questions from our audience that were submitted via the app, and we're going to dive right in out of the gate.

How do you replace current leaders with more qualified leaders but not destroy team unity? Not everyone at once. I'll start, even though these guys know a lot more than I do about this, but brutal honesty and vulnerability. This is why we didn't get along. This is why it hurts. If I've got a little character flaw, it doesn't let me do this, it was going to affect us all. It was going to cost us money. It was going to cost you money.

If it costs us money. Brutal honesty. That's the only thing I would have to add to that. I'm not sure I like the word brutal in architecture or in leadership. The Peter principle is a great axiom, which is that in almost any bureaucracy, if you do a good job, you get promoted. And sooner or later, you'll get promoted to a job. where you are incompetent. And at most bureaucracies, you will then stay there forever.

Which means that sooner or later, every bureaucracy is filled from the top to the bottom with incompetent people. And if you want to build a vibrant, growing institution, you can't let that happen. But we have to distinguish between managers and leaders. If you are asking a manager to lead, that's your fault. And that maybe what you ought to be doing is saying to that person, you're a manager, please manage. These are your KPI.

or you need to say to that person, I need you to become a leader. I believe in human potential. Go get trained to be a leader. And become one. And then you can lead. But if neither of those things can happen, then you need to be able to say to this person,

we went on this journey together. What is needed here, you had the chance to do. And I'm sorry it's not making you happy or me happy. Let me go find you, either something in this institution or another institution together, which will help you thrive, because they gave at the office the way you gave at the office. But the message I think you want to send to your team is, if you're ready to lead, we have a place here for you.

Because this is an organization where leaders are going to be given room to lead. Read it again. How do you replace current leaders with more qualified leaders, but not destroy team unity? Team unity is not destroyed by people leaving if they know why they left. If somebody's incompetent and everybody's been talking not in a mean way or something, but we're discussing, like Allen was saying yesterday, here's what excellence looks like. We're driving excellence for the project and you can't carry water for the project. And everybody knows it in the room.

And you're sanctioning incompetence is what John Maxwell would say and calling that for the sake of unity. That's not for the sake of unity. It's because you're a wuss. You have to step into it and deal with it up front. To be unclear is to be unkind. You've got to be really clear with folk and say this is the steps

that are going along. And if everybody knows that it's not, that moving somebody out is not a random act of violence, but instead is the result of simply not being able to drive towards excellence, then there's no fear involved. So I'm not going to randomly

get taken out, so I'm still unified as long as I can drive towards excellence. But if I'm a wide receiver and I drop six passes in the playoffs, I can pretty much expect that during the Super Bowl, I'm going to be riding the bench. Yep. Next question. How do we manage rapid growth without being crushed by the weight of the growth? The weight? You've grown.

Every time I talk to you, there's a couple hundred more people. Oh, you? Well, it's percentage-wise not been that rapid. In our minds, it's not rapid. So I think the thing you've got to do is you have to make sure that the financial resources, the technological resources and infrastructure, and the human resources are all keeping pace with each other. If you get one of those weak, then you are building a house of cards.

If you don't have your technology and your infrastructure in place, processes in place, the thing will cave in on itself. If you, you know, hire the wrong people, you don't have your human resources in place with the growth. It'll cave in on itself. And if you run out of money, it'll cave in on itself. And so it's a three-legged stool. If you keep those three legs growing at the same pace, the stool's not going to break. For some looking in from the outside, it may look like it's growing fast. It might be just that the root system is really good. And so what's above ground has taken off. You know, that may be all it is what sets, tree a while ago. I was watching that. That's very insightful, the dandelion, the whole thing.

But if you can keep those three things running together, you can survive a growth curve. Where people get out of whack is, they grow without one of those. They run out of money. They get the wrong people in the seats because they're getting too big a hurry, hiring the people, or their technology and basic, their servers, your technology, infrastructure, whatever you're utilizing there is not kept up and kept up in pace. And what we've ended up doing is we've kind of been, you know, we're doing this all the time, except for the money one. The money one is, I'm so dead-blame, conservative, there's always going to be plenty of money. But you've also been really smart about technology. You know, when Facebook bought WhatsApp

for billions of dollars, they had fewer than 20 employees. And your leverage of FCC spectrum or an app is terrific. Adding one more person to it is different than a restaurant seating one more diner. So we need to think really hard about why are we growing? Do you win by having the most employees? Do you win by giving your investor the biggest possible return in the short run? Or do you win by making more of the change you seek to make? And so I'm really pleased that my team is a studio. We're not trying to get bigger. We're trying to spin something up that can scale without people being the thing that makes it scale. And that's... more and more true for more people here, especially if you're a freelancer. If you're a freelancer, don't

trick yourself into thinking you're an entrepreneur. That the way a freelancer grows is not by hiring other freelancers. The way you grow is by getting better clients, because better clients get you better work, which means you can charge more for it. You don't need more hours. You just need better work, and that's not solved by having more people sort of like you, but who work a little cheaper and a little harder. We'll do a follow-up question there. What are the temptations or maybe some warning signs when you begin to experience some rapid growth and you've got great momentum and times are really, really great. It's really exciting. And that's where more opportunities come

your way. What would be some of the warning signs or temptations or basically what to say yes to, what to say no to? I have a friend back in Nashville named John Ingram. You know John. I think. Brilliant guy owns Ingram Book Distrators, Ingram Barges. Well, Before I ever wrote a book in my early 20s, I accidentally became president of a publishing company, and we became the fastest growing company in our segment. I signed a contract. John, I've never told John this with his company. We'll keep it a secret.

And it was 90-day terms, and they could ship books back and not pay for them within that 90 days. This is me being a naive idiot. It's a racket. What happens with that, and everybody here knows it is you end up with a major cash flow problem. exploding as a company, but you're exploding on orders, not actual cash. And so this company would order a thousand books for me, take 90 days, ship 600 of them back, then I'd have to ship those 600 back to them so they could have them in their warehouse. And I was paying shipping both ways. So you just do the math on that. So one thing that I learned from that and from a couple other

experience is always pay attention to the cash. This may be a million dollar order, but what's it going to do to my cash? Rapid growth finances is a very fast way to grow bankrupt. And you just have to be, don't count the end dollars along, you also count the dollars that's going to cost me to make those dollars. And I'm convinced, I just look for opportunities to make greater profit and I look for opportunities to not have terms. And I want to balance those as the company is growing. Where can we get money fast and where can we knock it into terms? I don't like any of that kind of stuff. And if you can build a financial foundation on safe, money, money, fast money, and high profit dollars, then you can start to play a little bit with some of

the other stuff, but I would be very careful about rapid growth financing. And back to this growth thing, something I learned watching Dave, that next person you'll hire, are you lowering the average or raising the average? Because if you're lowering the average of your team, because you're in a hurry, when are you going to stop lowering the average of your team? How low does the average of your team go before it's over? On the other hand, any time you can raise the average of your team, it's probably a smart move. Good. You've had a lot of great opportunities coming your way as the show grew,

and we know from the history of our company, you've been very disciplined about what you say yes to and what you say no to, even though on the surface it looked like a great opportunity as we were growing. Yeah, a great opportunity can cause you go broke. Just what you're talking about. You can get one foot on the boat, one on the dock, and the boat leaves and your butts in the lake. Yeah.

You know, receivables and payables don't line up, you know, and that's what you're talking about. We ran those same stupid Ingram terms as a publisher ourselves, and we get paid from them in 90 days, but all the printers that print the books want their money now, well, there's a problem. If you sell a million books in a short period of time, it'll cause you to go bankrupt, you know, even if you don't borrow money. It's just ridiculous. And they'll ship the goddamn books back on the 89th day and reorder them. Well, that's exactly what they'll start the whole process over. It's a scam.

To be fair, I think it was John's dad at that time who was doing it. still a scam. I don't know whose dad it was. I've given them the heart. And they've got a freaking monopoly on distribution. I mean, they're just, we still do business with them, but it's a pain in the butt. So what we're always looking for with customers is, and with the advent of technology, the advent of the web, it's much easier than it used to be to create a situation where there aren't terms. You just pay. Even on a business-to-business application, you just pay. Well, you send me a bill. No, you just pay. You can just throw it right here on my square.

You know, you just swipe it right here on my phone. You can just pay right here. But you know what that requires. It requires the fact you made something that was important enough that there isn't an easy substitute. Because if there is an easy substitute that gives terms, they'll go for the terms. And if you are the one and only, the irreplaceable one,

the one I need right now, then I'll pay. Yeah. And, you know, you've got to have a purple cow. You really do. I mean, it's got to be remarkable so that people are making remarks about it. But, I mean, there's only one way, only one place you can buy ads on the Dave Ramsey show. There you go. You know, and so if you want that, then I set the terms.

And the terms are if you have dot com in your name, you prepay. So, you know, because your credit sucks. So some of the old-timers we bill, but most of them, they just pay. Oh, there's pay cash. They just pay. And it's just, you know, really, you think about the number of places and different ways now that you can collect money instantly. even in a B-to-B setting, and we just got to stop and think about that is the proper way to do it. Our endorsed local providers years ago, we used to have them, you know, they would send us checks every month.

And, you know, then we'd spend half our time, you know, with 10, 15 percent of them trying to chase them down. And how can I endorse you for financial advice when you don't pay your bill? That's kind of oxymoronic times four, you know? And so we had to change all that. We just put that whole system on an ACH, meaning that it just drafts their checks. checking account. We hit enter on the computer. All our money is in the account unless their account is dry, in which case they have a problem now, not me. I'm not doing collections. And so we just change the terms where it's cash, this cash on the 15th of the month. Hit enter. It's all batched.

You know, and you can do that with something like that. You can do it a lot of different ways, but that way you don't get caught in this crossfire because, you know, there's two reasons people fail, debt and too much success. They'll kill you. They'll kill you. All right. Next question. How do you identify market disruptions and then capitalize on them? Oh, you guys. Well, I just heard you give a great talk on this. I did give a good talk on this morning, but I want to hear what Seth's got to say on that. You're the king of this, man. I'm going to sit at the feet of the master.

There's no such thing as markets. There's people and their networks. People tell themselves a story, and that story resonates or doesn't resonate with what's in the world around them. When it doesn't resonate, they're under stress. They're feeling tension. If you can show up for that person in the right moment, they will eagerly enroll in where you're going. Networks are disrupted by technology so that if there's a bunch of lawyers and they're used to going to the law library to look up cases and someone manages to move the cases onto the computer, they have disrupted the way it is to be a lawyer. You don't have to go to the new technology,

but if you don't go, your status goes down because now you're slower, now you're left behind. Now you're not part of the cool kids. So what we look for is those we seek to serve. What are they afraid of? What's causing them attention? What do they seek? And the networks that align them,

that make our culture, how are the networks shifting, because technology, and technology doesn't have to involve computers, technology could involve the invention of the shovel, right? That technology then changes the way people like us do things. So your job as a leader is to instigate, to be the agent of change who causes the disruption to happen. And a really simple, super trivial example,

on my in-law side, grandparents and great-grandparents living in some little senior citizen enclave. All the restaurants are the same. One restaurant has a salad bar, opens a salad bar. That is a technology shift that changes the way the network talks to itself about dinner. And that breaks the discussion about dinner, because now there's nine restaurants without a salad bar

and one with. Now we have to talk about that. Do we want the salad bar to know? and by ratcheting it up, it causes all of these shifts to happen. So if as a restaurateur, all you're saying is I call Cisco, I get raw ingredients, and I sell them, you're managing. But if you're saying, how do I disrupt this community and the way they see food, you're leading? I got nothing. You're very kind.

More blue cheese in the salad bar. I love listening to Seth because he gets me above the problem in a philosophical kind of mindset. Like watching that slide deck go through a while ago, it changes your philosophy. And I'm like, I'm not even sure what he just said, and I love it. But, I mean, it wakes the philosophy up in you because I'm so entrepreneurial and tactical that the way I see marketplace disruption is, for me, I immediately get at the business model. I start to go how we're doing business in the nuts and bolts. Can we just, you know, instead of buying food at the grocery store, can we blow up and deliver it?

You know, instead of delivering financial peace university with VHS to DVDs, is there another way to package that and spool it together and bind it up in a different way? Is there another way that you'll consume this process that we use that was so glorious this week, five years from now that would be more glorious? What's the different methodologies? I mean, is there a connectivity way? Right. And you need both.

So if you think about the Netflix example, he bet the company when he walked away from DVD mail. why would someone download a video high bandwidth when they could get a pristine, easy-to-handle, and organize one on DVD? Well, the answer was, if you could get a show before anybody else, you would talk about it. Because you would go to work the next day and say, did you see the new house of cards? That turned to ratchet. Because if one person in the office was talking about it, their status went up and everyone else had to get it. That wasn't happening with the DVD thing.

But he needed a partner who could look at business models in the economics way you're talking about, and the two of them have to come together. But it begins with human desire to be part of something. But I remember our friend Bill this here, you were breaking on him all ago, was working on our team. Bill, you remember this story. He was working at the office, and there was probably 15 or 20 of us working there. And we just got an email. And, you know, we were just on the Internet, barely, right?

and he buys tires for his car on the internet and had him deliver to the office. We made fun of him for days. Who buys tires for your freaking car on the internet? And then he did this other weird thing. He sent an email to me and his office was right next to mine. I'm like, Bill, I'm just right here, you freak, you know? And we made so much fun of him. And now my secretary sits as close as me, my personal assistant from Ken, and I send her 40 emails a day now.

You know? But it was just, he was an early adopter. He was an early adopter on that stuff. If you think about the things that the way we do business now as consumers, the things we consume, that we would never, I mean, you pull this thing out of your pocket and you can have stuff at your house in just a few minutes. It's nuts. And who would have ever thought that?

just a little while back. And so that's the business disruption stuff that I get into. Do you know what's really cool? You know how they ship the tires? Like, what could you put a tire in that would protect it more than being a tire? So all they do is put a sticker on it. That's the packaging. It's a tire.

I've had it. It just shows up. There it is. There's a purple cow. So true. All right, I love this question because it allows each of you to kind of give us your definition in your world. It's like the drum solo part of the concert.

Yeah. How do you define, how do each of you define success for your companies? For our companies? For your company. Somebody else go first. You went, the first person who talks has to take it. That's disruption.

There's a lesson to learn there. He framed the argument in such a way that I can either agree or disagree. I choose to disagree. All right, I'll go first. I apologize. No, no. a bunch of years ago, I had a fork in the road between more and enough. And after I left Yahoo, someone offered me a job running marketing for a company that was going to go at the peak of the internet boom, and they offered me a billion dollars in stock options.

And I turned it down, and I'm super glad I did. It has nothing to do with the fact that the company burned before the, after the bubble, has to do with the fact that once you turn down a billion dollars, worth of stock options, you shouldn't really compromise to make a profit because you could have compromised they made a billion dollars. So for me, it was this chance to say enough. And many of the successful people I know, successful in quotes, aren't happy because somehow they got hooked on more, an endless parade of more, as opposed to one day saying enough. So I want more, but I don't want more profit, I want more change. I want change and trust in equal measure because one fuels the other. That's what I keep track of. And I have no idea if my business is profitable on any given day. It's not important to me. I have this running narrative in my brain or kind of running algorithm

that I don't know that you could ever measure it. But I constantly am asking myself, God, why am I on the planet? What do you want from me? And I'm constantly measuring the opportunity cost of story brand against that purpose. And when story brand begins to cost me opportunity to do what God wants me to do, I don't care about the success of the company. And so I'm constantly having to measure that. You're kind of figuring out, okay, part of story brands help small businesses, clarify their message, help people employ.

I worry about our country and the economy. I loved that Art Laffer was here. And I want to be part of that, but at some point where somebody else can do this, and Donald Miller needs to go put his brain over here, I want to affect more and more and more people at all times. And when Storybrand, the opportunity costs on that outweighs what I think God wants me to do, which I don't exactly know, but when I start feeling that, I feel a weight, and the company is going to go down either way.

And so I think I'm almost like your answer, I'm constantly saying, hey, I got 25 years before people start being really polite to me. And we need to move now. You know, that's not a lot of times. It's a very short period of times. Two Labrador Retrievers. Ooh. Wow.

You start measuring your life in your chocolate lab, and you're going to get moving. Don't look at me. How many labs you got left? Seth is reeling from the Labrador Retriever. Are you okay? Well, can't we just say it's two Lithuanian dictators or something like that? I'm an 11-year-old lab that my wife calls my first wife,

and we're dealing with that right now. So that's why it's soft. My gosh. We're pretty primitive. The way we measure success is a number of people helped. It's that simple. And we have figured out if you help enough people, you don't have to worry about money.

And so we do, we keep up with it. We count it. We look at the metrics. Profit per person helped is the technical metrics. that you would use because you have to stay open and feed the people that are working there to help those people. If you're not responsible with the money, they don't get fed, payroll doesn't work. So I have to be concerned about profit to make sure that happens.

But it's not the driver. It's the byproduct. It's the result. Profit is the result. Ken Blanchard says profit is the applause your customers give you. And Rabbi Lapin says, when you serve someone, they give you certificates of appreciation with president's faces on them. So just serve.

Just serve. If you can help people change their lives, they'll line up. Our next question is, what advice would you give us about taking a new product or service to the market? So I touched on this a little bit. The smallest viable audience has to be at the heart of anything that you launch.

Can you tell me the name and address of the 20 people you made this for? And if I bring this to those 20 people, will they fall all over themselves? If not, then what you've really done is said, I needed to make more money. What can I sell people? Not there is someone who needs this. I will bring it to them. And if you can't find 20, I'm okay even if you find 10.

But this idea that you have to find, they have to build the next blank, where blank is Slack or Facebook or whatever. That's not going to happen. The odds are too much against you. Don't even try that. Try to be meaningful to the smallest viable market. The problem with that is you will find out really fast if you're wrong. And that's why it's a good thing.

Because better to know now than 15 years to know, well, that was a wasted Lithuanian dictator. Well played. Clarify your message. That would be my. almost before you bring a product to market, know what problem you solve, know how you're going to talk about that problem, get it down into sound bites, and let those sound bites do the work for you.

You know, I think the, someone was asking me the other day about success, and I, in one of these interviews, I was doing one of these stupid interviews, and they, um, journalism questions, you know, and it's like, what was it was success? And success, success, it's really, all the people I know that are successful, and I I guess it would go to product launches as well. Really, you're standing on a pile of failures. And so really, a product launch should probably look something like that if you want it to be a success. And for me, that means I'm going to try some stuff on a lower scale, like you're talking about the miniature market or the lowest possible market.

I'm going to try some stuff to where if it doesn't work, I'm not financially devastating. and marketplace embarrassed. I want to test it in a sense and get it out there with some people and, you know, get in the sandbox with people and stir the gumbo and try to figure out what it is they really or what are they really want. They tell you what they want. Sometimes they're lying. Almost always. And so I just have to sit there and I have to stir it with them. And so it's like failing forward. It's experimenting. It's the old seventh grade, you know, with the Bunsen burner. Why did they give us gas burners in the seventh grade? Attached to natural gas and fire.

There was just something wrong with that when I think about it. They kept you from a stupid class. Anyway, they taught us the scientific method, you know, and you have a hypothesis. You test against it. And if it doesn't work, you write it down and you figure out what you learn from the failure and you're experimenting, you adjust. It's not, I failed, I quit. I threw one interception as a quarterback.

And so I'm done. You're going to throw interceptions. And so you figure out you don't throw across the middle because that guy good, you know, and you go, I'm not going over there with that ball. And so I think that's what we do with product launches. I try, unless I'm in a space where we've proven our competence. Like, we launch a book, launch Chris Hogan's Everyday Millionaire book in January, it'll be a number one bestseller. That's a space. We freaking own that process. There's no variables there that we don't account for. We know that. That's not a new thing. That's another product in a

successful product launch model. But where it's a brand new thing that we don't know what the flip we're doing, I don't want to stub my toe that big. I'd rather just, you know, have a little bump into something and turn, bump and turn, bump and turn. You don't want your test. Do you want the audience in a test to know it's a test? So here's the anecdote. A consumer electronics company came out with a new clock radio,

and they did one of those focus groups with a dozen people, and they looked at, showed them all the features, what do you think of this, what do you think of this, what do you think of this? And at the end of the focus group, they said, all right, we really appreciate your time. This is going to cost 100 bucks. Do you think that's fair? And everyone goes, that's a great price. Great.

Thank you so much for being part of this. Now you have a choice. We'll give you $20 in cash, or you can have the clock radio. And every person took the cash. Which means the whole test was completely bull. Exactly. And so. When they got to put their money up, they quit lying.

The real test is not, doesn't, feel like a test, it feels like a sales call. Yeah. Yeah, we, you know, I tell people all the time, our sales guys, when they're new, we used to have a tradition a long time ago, the guys come in, we made a sale, we made a sale, and where's the money? Well, they took, they gave us a contract. They got their order. When you get the money, we count it. And so the first sale, when we actually got their check, we made them put tape on it, put it on their forehead and wear it for a couple hours around the office, because now they got money. When you got money, you made a sale until you got money. I mean, you're in the real estate business? You sold a house? Yeah, when it closes.

That's when the house is sold. Until then, it is not even close. So the lying stops when the money starts. I want to follow something up, throw it to all three of you here, but Seth, you and I, we did an interview many years ago, and you brought up a wonderful statement by Kevin Kelly, who's one of the most respected futurist in the country. And I'm going to paraphrase it and just give it to you, but he basically said 1,000 true fans is really all you need to succeed. I mean, Dave started out out of the back of his car, local radio, Don, you've built this thing up. Just teach a bit on that, and then you guys can weigh in on that, but it really does kind of play off of what you just shared, this idea of 20 people, and then over time you get to that

thousand. Why is that statement so true and so powerful? So the internet, it's not hard to get 600,000 people to follow you somewhere. I mean, you can just buy followers or whatever you want. 600,000 people are entertaining themselves by watching you type. That's not a true fan. It's not even a fan. A true fan buys the limited edition signed vinyl CD. A true fan drives three hours to get front row seats in your concert. You are true fans.

A true fan is worth by Kevin's math, if you're a soloist, between $100 and $200 a year in many fields. So you've got 1,000 people paying your $200 a year, year and it's just you, that's a living. It's a great living. One thousand true fans per employee. Everybody else, they're trying it out. Be generous with them. Here, it's free, it's free. But the true fans, they want to be at the front of the line. And it's been misunderstood and misused because people skip the true part. Yes. They just go straight to the fan part. And what we're discovering in our culture is if your status can go up and the story you tell yourself gets richer

when you see yourself as a patron, as a true fan, as an insider, then you and the artist are in a mutually beneficial relationship. Any thoughts on that? No. Dave? Seth's socks don't match. My socks haven't matched one day in 12 years. That's right.

It's been a long time. Not one day. The reason they don't match is because I wrote a book called Purple Cow. And in the book, I wrote about a one year. a company called Little Mismatch. They make socks for 12-year-old girls. Not all 12-year-old girls, just weird 12-year-old girls.

Not all weird 12-year-old girls, is 12-year-old girls with a fashion problem. And their fashion problem is they can't wear a new dress to school every day because their mom won't put up with that. But if they wore little mismatched socks to school, they could say to their friends, hey, want to see my socks, which was the company's slogan. And then their friends would go home and say to their mom,

Mom, I need new socks. This is a ridiculous idea. The first year that they were, when I wrote about them, you didn't get two, you got three for $10. And they sold half a million dollars with the socks. The last time I checked, they were doing $40 million a year in revenue selling socks that don't match.

So that's why I wear. These are not little mismatch. My kids made fun of me for wearing socks for 12-year-old girls. And I realized that I could mix my own. Sox. Like it didn't occur to me for a year that I could actually make my own mismatch socks. There you go. More bonus content. All right. Yeah. Another question here. How do you get your teams to think and care the way you do?

I've got some thoughts. Well, you go talk first again. You fell right into that trap. This is a, we have a small company. I've got 15 people who show up every day and another 15 or so who essentially live off us, contractors. So I'm speaking out of school here, but we bought the house next door and turned it into our office. It is like a family. I love these people. Not all of them have made it.

They've come in. We've realized they're not a fit, and they need to go. And the team kind of senses that. But, you know, the owner, loving. their people is, there's a whole other level. I'm not, you know, Bill Belichick gets great performance out of guys. I don't think he calls him at night and says, how was your day? I don't think that's happening.

There's ways to get performance out of people, but when you really open up your heart and say, these people are trusting me with their lives, with their income, with their family, with their insurance, with their houses, when you realize that, you say, they deserve my heart in some way back. and it is not only helped us in terms of productivity. There's all sorts of financial models. My people don't work for money. They work for respect and money's part of it.

It's one of the, but if I treat them like garbage or don't care, money's not going to mean anything to them. They're not going to last another week or whatever. So, you know, I just think love is a word we don't use in business enough, but I think it's a secret weapon. I think most people want to do it and they feel like they have to reserve it in order to run and operate a business. and there are definitely things that you don't need to cross boundaries.

These are not my children. I remind myself that all the time. That is not my child. They're making stupid decisions that I don't need to chime in about. But really opening your heart and having an affection for your people, it's not only great for productivity. It's great because it invites them into a much more meaningful job. Even if all you're doing is fixing toilets,

it's sometimes hard to find a why there. Why does this matter? Well, it matters because together this group of 15. people are fixing toilets. And we do it for a living and we do it to protect each other. We do it to care about each other. We do it to provide a great place to work because the world can chew you up and spit you out. It's one of the reasons that we show up at this place every day. So to me, that's part of that equation. Well, here's the truth of it. People don't believe what you believe. People don't want what you want. People don't know what you know. And you can hope that there

is complete alignment, but your narrative is different than their narrative. You have the narrative of somebody who probably went through a lot of sacrifice to be in charge. And the people who have chosen to come to work for you have a different narrative. And there are people who have worked for folks who aren't as good as you. And that has informed their narrative about who they trust and what they believe and what they want. So what we need to be able to find as leaders is the humility to accept the fact that people are different than us. and they have not failed when they act in a way different than we would have acted. And then we have to have the empathy to realize that someone who doesn't know what we know,

want what we want, or believe what we believe is not wrong. They are right. That if we had grown up the way they grew up and seen what they have seen and been treated the way they were treated, we would probably be just like them. And so it's super easy. My dad was a lifelong entrepreneur. I've been a lifelong entrepreneur to say, but can't you see? and I am treating this place like my family and this and this, why don't you get it?

Well, they don't get it for the same reason your customers or your non-customers don't get it, because they're not you. And so it's a special sort of humility to say to people, I will see you deeply enough to guess the best I can what you want and open doors to help you get what you want. And I will hold you to your promises. and that's a big part of what I've learned from Dave, is that we make big promises and keep them.

But when it comes right down to it, I think the question is flawed. You're not going to hire people who want your story to be their story. You're together on a journey, but you're not the same person. People aren't loyal to corporate America because corporate America is not loyal to them. Yep. If you want people to care,

about your narrative, you've got to care about theirs. I mean, that's what these two guys are both saying in different ways. And their story. They've all got a story. I've got a guy right now who's got a 19-year-old son that's not doing well at all. Doesn't look good. And it's been fighting all kinds of diseases in the hospital. And, you know, our whole teams are just welcoming with them and praying with them and crying with them.

and, you know, but that family hadn't had to worry about anything while this is going on because our team loving him well, their family. And that doesn't mean that every time that guy, five years from now, after all this is behind us, is not going to turn around and say something nasty about Dave Ramsey. There's no guarantee he won't. Matter of fact, that's happened to me before. I actually have a guy that writes a negative blog about me pretty regularly, and I gave him a car. I appreciate that. It was a nice car.

Yeah, but you bragged on me in the book, in print, so I don't care what you're writing in the blog, okay? If I'm in your book in print, the blog doesn't count. I mean, you know, see, there's no guarantee. There's no guarantee that if you care about them, that they're going to care about you. But for the moment, all you can do is all you can do, and all you can do is the right thing for people. and remember that they're people, and if you'll treat them and love them well as people when they're down and when they're up, and treat them like you'd want to be treated in those situations and pay them, what you said you were going to pay them, keep your dad-gum promises, don't screw around with them, then the other people that are watching you take care of that guy while his 19-year-old kid is sick, I'm not doing it for that reason. We're doing it because that's the right thing to do.

But, you know, there's 700 other people watching this happen. and so then they know what's going to happen if they have a problem. And so that's the only shot you've got at building a culture where they actually care like you care. Then if you've got that culture built and they don't care, fire their butt because you can't make some people do stuff. I mean, I'm not going to manage people. You were talking about that earlier. I'm going to lead people. and they have, that means that, Christy said it earlier, we don't, you know, how do you motivate people?

We don't motivate people. We hire motivated people. I'm burned out. That's impossible. You were never on fire. Hoohoo. You know. So, I mean, you know, you can't, you know, there's some people no matter what you throw at them. And it sometimes has to do with their upbringing. No, I mean, you know, their narrative, their story is so nasty and so abusive and so toxic that they came out of that they can't. receive love. And they're not going to care. And I can't fix that by, you know, we're not running a counseling organization in that sense. I'm going to do all I can do and put you in that setting. And then if you can't drive to excellence and you can accept the love and reciprocate the love by caring about the outcomes as if you own the organization and being all in, we're all in for the Super Bowl. We're all in. If you can't be all in, we will help you work somewhere else

and set you free in Jesus' name. I mean, we're going to do that. That's where we're going. And we're going to talk about it a lot, but this thing of, you know, you come in and you're, you know, unless there's a personal problem and there's something that's causing you to drag, you need to be bringing it. It's game on. And so there's either two speeds wide open or I got a personal problem. These are the two issues. And, other than that, it's just something I'm not going to try to fix your stuff. And I've gotten, because I tried for years. I did that. I would just overdo it. And I was in more pain about them getting fired than they were getting fired.

And I just came to realize they don't care at all. And it's not that I'm going to become callous or something. I've just done enough of it that it sets the organization free when I remove the splinter. And the healing begins. It's like, Wow, who knew we were hurting that bad until that guy's gone. And we're all like, thank God he's gone. You know, we don't have to put up with that anymore. And it's just, but you reach a point that that we're going to pull together. And the other thing is this, if you create that environment, they self-select out because they don't fit in. There's nobody to whine to because nobody else is whining, you know, nobody to gossip to because nobody else is gossiping. And you just don't fit in

if you're a negative nanny, you know, and you're not going to care because everybody else cares. And the rest of the team's looking at them going, we don't do that here, man. That's one of those other places. When you set that environment up, it takes a while. I mean, we had a lady walking through the office the other day from New York City. She was visiting from one of these companies we were working with, and she's like, all the people here like each other, and they're all smiling, and they're all working really hard, and they're nice people.

And I said, yes, ma'am, we fire the other ones. And he dropped the mic and walked away. Hey, this is good stuff. Thank you for submitting your questions. We love getting the feedback from the app, good stuff. And I want you to show your appreciation to Seth, Donald, and Dave for hanging out and answering your questions. Thank you guys very much. Our guest, Seth, and Donald Miller.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did sitting there listening to it and watching our audience soak up the wisdom. Well, I told you to stay tuned. so I'm not going to make you wait any longer. 2018 is already done and we're thinking about 2019. Today, we told our audience who we've got lined up already. I'll run through it for you and then I've got a special offer for you because we're already 70% sold out from the people who've been sitting here with us the last three days. Of course, Dave Ramsey, Chris Hogan and Chrissy Wright will be there from our team. Pat Lynchione coming back.

Marcus Buckingham joining us for the first time. Dr. Henry Cloud coming back and Simon Senate coming back. And we just announced today two other great additions. Peyton Manning, the All-World Hall of Fame, soon to be. First Ballot, Hall of Fame quarterback. Peyton Manning is going to be joining us. And then Carrie Lawrence, she's the first female F-14 fighter pilot. So I've already got top gun music in my head bouncing around.

And that's going to be in Sunny, San Diego, California. Now, here's the deal. We're 70% sold out. It's getting bigger and bigger and hotter and hotter. And folks are still head to the airport or checking out of their hotel as we speak, and they're going to buy tickets. So it's going to move quick. This isn't hype. So here's the deal. We want to give you an opportunity. If you register before Tuesday, May 29th at 3 p.m. So whenever you're listening to this, look at your calendar where you're at, Tuesday, May 29th, 3 p.m. is the deadline. If you register before that deadline, you're going to save $300. So that's a really good deal. And here's how you register, entreleadership.com slash summit 2019.

So entreeleadership.com slash summit 2019. Entreleadership.com slash summit 2019. Or we have the link for you in this episode show notes. So you want to move quick. It's going to be unbelievable out in sunny San Diego. All right. I always love it when we hear from. You folks, people who are just like you, winning in business, and you're part of the Entree

Leadership Tribe, excited to introduce you to Priya Guman. She is the president of Oak Run Associates and Development and Construction Corporation of America. She's been engaged in our tribe for close to a decade. We were thrilled to be able to get a little bit of time with her and capture her story about how she's growing. Listen in as you hear another Entree leadership story. So my name is Priya Gouman. My company is a construction development and property management company.

We are almost 40 years old. My dad founded the company when we immigrated from India. Gosh, well, almost 40 years ago because my dad started the company pretty quickly thereafter. Who were we before all this? Well, this isn't my first event. I've been to three summits. I'm going to go to next year's summit. So I'm already registered for that.

And I went to a master class seven years ago. Seven years ago, I would say we were strong and we were a good company. We had 10, 15 leaders at the time, wonderful people. But their hearts really didn't beat hard for each other. Their hearts beat for their own efforts at the company. So at that time, I think we're about 150 employees. Right now, we currently take care of a 3,500 home active adult community. And we span, like, all these industries.

So we have a cable company where we provide, like, high-deaf digital phone and then visual content. And then we also have, like, a security company. We've got 30-something security guards. So we do, like, basically everything. We have a golf course. We have a restaurant. What else do we do? We have a real estate company.

So, like, we do all these different things. And so we have leaders from each division. And I went to that master class. It was five days. Like, it was expensive. But I thought, well, I'm going to go. And I prayed about it. And I said, God, do I need to go to this thing?

I was like, yes. So I went. I came back and we started these weekly meetings. We call them leadership team meeting. So now we just call it leadership. We have leadership on Wednesdays. I mean, for seven years, it's been every Wednesday morning from 9.30 to noon. So it's like several hours.

And when I first started, they were like, God, we have to go to another meeting. And I was like, you go to one meeting a week. Nobody had meetings at my company because I don't like meetings. But when I went to that master class, and Dave taught the whole time, there were just a few people that also taught. Well, here's an interesting story. I'm going to just sort of divert, because I do that a little bit. At the end of that whole thing, you got a one-on-one session with whomever you wanted in Dave's executive leadership team. So I chose the chief operating officer at the time. I don't remember who was. And I had this huge, I was losing, we provide lawn service. We have a lawn service division, like a complete suite of services to 800.

92 homes of those 3,500. We have a contract with almost 900. And I was like losing our shirts. We were losing a quarter of a million bucks a year. And you could go, the one-on-one at the end was, you went and you told what your mom. So it had to do with irrigation. We didn't toggle off that when we sold. We had a wastewater treatment company also that we sold to the county. Anyway, we're losing all this money. Do you know that within four years, I sat with that guy? I don't even remember his name. I wish I could because I would just thank you. him every day. He had some sort of a horrible stomach bug, so I couldn't even meet him. So I got on the phone with him the next week. And we talked on the phone for like almost an hour. And I was like, well,

here are all my options. And he goes, well, let me tell you what I'd do. So we ended up digging 60 wells on our project. It just so happened that we had a use permit that was like rotating. You have to know all about like land development code to really understand that. But anyway, The bottom line is we saved $250,000 within four years, four years, just off that one idea. I was like, I'm sold. So I've done a bunch of the different things that you guys do. And I love these summits. They're awesome.

So now we're like, we're super profitable. We're really, really solid. I don't believe in like mad, crazy growth. We do it quietly and steadily. We've got an interesting, like, we've got a ton of compression on the way we make money because we have 3,500 homes, everyone pays me amenity fees. They're on different tiers, and we've constrained ourselves. We can never increase their fees more than the cost of living. So that's in the deed restriction. So I have a contract with each and every home, not each and every homeowner. That's kind of

the cool thing about what we do. It's with the home. It's forever. But we're very solid. The thing that I'm struggling with now is I made some poor choices with some leadership positions. I'm looking for a controller right now. I chose somebody who had a great spirit and a great heart. She didn't have the skill. So I had to kind of help her make the decision to go. As Dave said, I actually didn't have to liberate her. She was wise enough to come in and offer me her resignation.

She made a bunch of mistakes. This is three months ago. So right now, the challenge that I have is everybody really cares about each other and they care about the company. We're implementing the advantage right now, which is what I heard Pat Lentioni last year, talk on at the summit. We've got all these goals. We're working on clarity right now. And clarity is hard to do. It's hard to do when you cross a bunch of industries. Everybody talks different language.

You know, we have wonderful people. But we have a thematic goal. You know, if you've read the advantage, you know, there's a thematic goal. 12, 31 of this year, we want 98% humble, hungry, and people smart teams. So 98%. What I come here is for, and I've tried a couple of others in a to what I do with you guys, nothing comes close in terms of content. Nothing comes even close in terms of just like drilling down into really what matters to a small business. So when I leave, I go through like, you know, the three days worth of stuff and then I extract the stuff that really matters to my company. What really mattered was that in my mind, we've never really all, all our leadership is on one page. But how much of that has sort of filter.

downwards, not enough. So now I realize, oh, God, I'm the one who has to do this. I've got to put into place with my team, like a plan for clarity, and that's what the advantage is. And they're all, like, you know, waiting to hear what I have to say when I come back this time. Years ago, I learned about it here, one of these events. So we actually just built a crew space. It's a huge warehouse with a bunch of offices. We have a learning center inside that. We have a huge group of custodial technicians, there's janitorial positions, and then landscape techs,

and there's almost 50 of them. We're going to be teaching them every single week on something that has to do with teamwork and being cohesive. We have a sign-up in that cruise space, which is awesome deluxe space, that says no energy vampires because that's part of the vernacular.

So when I leave here, we extract certain things. And one of them is, you know, Alan Malali just said, you know, you have to have zero tolerance for anything that falls, short of those expectations that you have, but you have to clearly communicate those expectations. Well, that ties right in with the advantage and where we are right now. That's what I'm going to go,

I'm going to go back and do. I do a ton of self-evaluation. When you come out of something like this, it prompts this sort of thoughtfulness about, am I that person? Am I somebody that everybody looks at and understands what my boundaries are? Yes, check. Do I have enough mercy? Maybe. I got to check that one. You know, sometimes I don't, I don't, what's the balance between having zero tolerance for anything that falls short and sort of like working with someone through, you know, a crisis? Have I become a much better leader? Oh my gosh. The person who I was seven years ago isn't anywhere close to the person I am today.

And I'm actually, I'm pretty happy with it. And we spend, it's my family's business. You know, I worked my way from the very bottom. I ran blueprints for seven months. like without stopping. That's how I learned about blueprints. That's before I was a general contractor. But, you know, today, I would say that my company,

they love each other, they've knit each other into their lives. And that, you know what our thing is? We have, you know, we just answer the question, why do we exist? And this is what my team came up with. We exist to make life more beautiful for our constituency. And equally as importantly, to grow, people into the fullness of who God created them to be. It's a sacred obligation on both parts.

That wouldn't have happened without me coming here. You know, seven years ago in Orlando, you know, it's just unbelievable the James that God has made, both in my heart and my group's hearts. Well, I hope you're inspired and we'd love to share your story. So, hey, if you're winning big, great way to do that is to give us a heads up. You can email us podcast at ontraeleyship.com. Well, it's been an unbelievable week. And even though we are wrapping up here in San Antonio, we got so much content. We want to share with you. And we're going to bring you more and more through a parting gift of a recap episode coming out this Friday.

So make sure you're subscribed so that just automatically shows up in your feed. On behalf of Will the producer, Eric Cheslovich and Chris Wright and the entire Entree leadership team. Thank you so much for listening. We'll talk with you again. very soon.