EntreLeadership - Can My Business Survive Without a Partnership?

Episode Date: March 24, 2025

Today, we’ll hear about:  A son deciding how to move forward with his business after his father’s death  A business owner dealing with the aftermath of a walkout  How Seth Dillon and The Babylon Bee are fighting for free speech   How insurance fraud is impacting a small business    Next Steps:  📞 Have a question for the show? Call 844-944-1070 or send us a message: https://ter.li/ask-us  📚 Learn about the EntreLeadership System: https://ter.li/system-p  💻 Get EntreLeadership Elite for your business: https://ter.li/elite-p  ✉️ Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://ter.li/enl  🏢 Attend EntreLeadership Summit: https://ter.li/summit   🎤 Attend EntreLeadership Master Series: https://ter.li/masterseries   📖 Preorder Dave’s new book, Build A Business You Love: https://ter.li/4zfr52    Connect With Our Sponsors:  💼 Go to Belay Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource!  💻 Visit NetSuite today to learn more.  🧾 Visit Payority for a free consultation!  📈 Grab ⁠Sales Gravy's⁠ free resource to help you hire and lead better. 📝 Use code ENTRE15 to get 15% off your first year of Trainual.    Listen to More From Ramsey Network:  🪑 Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman  🎙️ The Ramsey Show  💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights  🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show  🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour  💡 The Rachel Cruze Show  💰 George Kamel    Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is the Entree Leadership podcast, where I take calls from leaders like you about what it takes to win at any stage of business and leadership. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience, leading in the trenches right alongside you. If you want to submit a question, go to Entreeleadership.com slash ask, or leave us a voicemail at 844-4-944-1070. Thank you for. for joining us, America. We're glad you're here. All right, Rudy is going to start us off in Ohio. Hi, Rudy. How are you? I'm good. Thanks. How about you? Better than I deserve. What's up in your world? So I am the owner of a small business that manufactures tax economy supplies, and we're currently doing

4.3 million a year in revenue with 26 employees. And my question is, in order to expand the business, and grow, should we acquire other sculptors in our industry in the form of a merger? So you've got someone that knows how to do taxonomy that's a one-man show. Why would you have to acquire them? Why don't you just hire them? In our industry, if you excel at taxonomy, eventually you get into making the products that tax immerse will use and consume. And eventually, that leads to where, Everybody's kind of like me, and we start our own business manufacturing, that kind of stuff. Mm-hmm.

And so it's difficult because there's multiple people out there that, you know, are doing kind of the same thing as us. And it's hard to talk them out of kind of their dream of doing the same type of thing and come work for us. Well, what do you think a merger is? It's the same thing. We're just giving it a different name. I just, it's one of those things where they felt like they still had a part of it, where one end was on the wheel. I didn't know if it was. Oh, you're going to give them a ownership position.

Yeah. And I know you say the only ship that doesn't fail is a partnership, but in our industry, because it's such a unique skill, I didn't know if there was ever exceptions to the rule because how difficult it is to, you know, find other people like us. Listen, if they want to work for themselves that bad, you're going to end up with three or four heads on this monster. Right. Something with three heads is a monster. And it's not going to function well. And especially if you've got people that are a little bit artistic, let's just throw in a little drama, right? No, that's fair.

No, I personally would not do that because I think it's going to, you know, you're giving up so many things here in order to just get some talent on board. I would rather just pay them more than give up ownership position and control and create drama. And, you know, there's different ones out there get tired of. So here's the thing. A lot of practitioners in any kind of technical or artistic field, for instance, let's just say graphic artist, okay. They love doing the graphic arts,

but they don't like running the business. to get to do the graphic arts. They don't like going and getting new customers. They don't like the billing. They don't like the, you know, dealing with the customer. They just want to do the actual graphic art production. And I suspect you probably got some solopreneurs out there in your world that are tired of dealing with the customer.

They're tired of the billing. They're tired of trying to source the, you know, the materials to do the thing. They just want to actually do the sculpt. and they wish somebody else would take the rest of it. Am I wrong? No, that's true. And honestly, I'm probably reaching deeper than I ever thought I would because recently my father passed away

and he was our main sculptor while I ran the business. And so I'm in a position where as much as I would have liked to, I didn't get the opportunity to learn what I needed to from him. And so I can work my way around things, but I would never call myself a sculptor. I was more like apprenticing. So we've built a successful business, but now we kind of don't have a way of growing it until I can get more time to... Well, until you get somebody hired to replace what he was doing. Yeah.

I'm sorry, man. How old was he? He was 62. He was 17. time world champion sculpture. Wow. So he was legendary in your world. Yeah, in our industry, he was the best that there was.

And that's, I mean, it sounds biased because it's coming. No, I mean, it sounds like that's true. So, yeah, so you not only lost a dad, you lost a legend. Yeah. Wow. I'm sorry. That hurts. Yeah, that's going to make, if you're not careful, your broken heart is going to

cause you to do something to gather somebody in that you don't want to do. I think, honestly, any idea, whatever you were paying him was probably not enough. You know, based on what you're telling me, he probably wasn't taking enough out of the business. You and he owned it together, I assume. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I think you're going to give up a chunk of your profits to get a world-class person to come

into his seat. But listen to me. Think about it from the, put the shoes on the other side. You got a young guy out there that's really, really good, and he gets the opportunity to step into a legend's shoes. That's the position you're hiring for. I think that's pretty attractive. You get to work in the shop with the tools that the legend used to work with.

No, that is true. That's a big deal. Would you have any advice on the guys that are burning? out, you know, still trying to do it on their own. I think they're going to want this job. I think they want this job. Yeah, no. Your dad did not like doing the stuff that you do.

You run the business. You were a godsend to your dad because it allowed him to do what he loved, which was sculpting. He hated the other part of this business you do. Yeah, anything that was paper, he didn't touch it like it was. You got it. You see what? I know who he is.

I know this guy. And what a wonderful guy. And let me just tell you, there's lots of him out there that are not as good as him, and there'll never be another him. But there are people that think like him, and they're sick of doing the touch, they don't want touch paper, and they're having to. They're having to do the billing. They're having to answer emails, and customers are almost a bother to them.

Do we still maybe look at doing, just acquiring these people? No, I would just hire them. I would just hire them. or buy them out. I mean, if you want to give them some money and buy them out, too, if it's a buyout package, I'm going to buy your business and you're going to work for me. And you're not going to have to do any of the crap anymore, and you get to be in the shop where the legend was using the legend's tools.

This is pretty appealing. And if you want to give them a percentage of profits, that's fine, but you don't give them ownership. And you don't have to come to them to make decisions. You own it. They don't want to own it, man. I'm telling you. They want them to do the sculpting.

if you get the right one. If you get somebody that wants to do it, that's not your guy. But it's not a merger. It's a purchase. And it's not an ownership position. I'll give you a percentage of the net profit on the work that you do. And I'll give you a great salary. And I'll give you some money up front to buy you out if you've got some money.

You have some cash to do that with? Yeah. Yeah. No, we've been very blessed over the years. Okay. Yeah. So I think you're, because of your loss and the part of your heart that's broken, which just makes you a good man, it's keeping you from realizing how much of an attractive situation you have for someone out there. It's very attractive.

And that's what I would tell you to go do, man, as soon as you can. You're a good guy and you run a great business. I mean, you're doing $4.3 million in tax attorney. I mean, who does that? You. Who wants to be involved in that? In a legend's seat, everyone. That's what I'm telling you. This is the Entree Leadership podcast. If you want to grow your business in 2025, then you've got to grow as a leader first. I realized many years ago the problem with my business is the guy in my mirror. If he doesn't grow, the business doesn't grow. And that's why over 2,300 small business leaders have already RSVP for the Entry Leadership Summit.

It's May 18 to 21 at the fabulous Gaylord Resort in Denver, Colorado. You do not want to miss this. Platinum tickets are already sold out. Preferred seats are almost gone. The standard section is filling up fast. If you're ready to scale your business with us at Summit, you need to get your tickets today. To join us, go to Entreeleadership.com slash Summit right now, or click the link in the show notes if you're listening on the YouTube or podcast.

Kim is with us in Pensacola, Florida. Hi, Kim. Hey, thank you for taking my call. Sure. My daughter and I, we own an electrical supply business that my dad started in 1973. She's the president, and I'm the CEO. We have six locations. We're about 95 employees right now.

And our gross annual revenue last year was $55 million. Wow, good for you. I know. We have an amazing team that we, owe it all too for sure. My problem is about four months ago we had a mass exodus. We lost

12 employees, nine of them in one single day from the same branch that we work at. I mean, we're here every single day with these people and see them. And the ringleader of this exit, he text us that evening after hours and told us that he was

leaving immediately and these other people were going with him. after they got their Christmas bonus, they made sure to wait for that. We're a family business, and it kind of caught us really by surprise. And we've realized as the months have passed, that they did us a favor, but my customers are still feeling kind of hurt and a little bit betrayed by them and our employees still that way as well. And I just didn't know if you had any words of wisdom to kind of help get us through

this just betrayal that we feel. And I beat myself up because it's like, I've worked with these people every single day. How did I not see this fixing happen? Yeah, when I look back on stuff like that, I do the same thing. I'm like, you know how stupid that guy is, how crooked that guy is? And you know what's worse? I hired him. How stupid does that make me?

Oh, worse than that. I kept him. I didn't see all of this. What is wrong with me? Is that what you're thinking? That's what I think. Pretty much, yeah. Exactly. Like, how did I not notice this?

Yeah, how did I miss out that this guy's an absolute crook? I mean, what kind of jerkwad walks out cold and takes a whole bunch of people with them without ever raising a concern? Right. I mean, and how dumb am I that I allow someone to be in my midst and I don't even realize that? I must be the most naive person on the planet. Exactly. He was one of our managers, you know.

He was one of the head roles. He's a bad dude, though. He's a bad person. This is a person that's a horrible character. Yeah. Horrible character. So, first thing I have to do, and sometimes I have to do it every morning, I'm just being a little real with you,

is I have to forgive myself for not being a good enough leader to catch that I had a crook in my midst. You got to forgive yourself. you're not God, you're not clairvoyant, you can't tell everything about everybody. Some people are pathological liars, they're so good at it, they have such a talent at being an absolute crook that even the best of us can't catch them. Right. You've got to forgive yourself. I know.

And I've got to do that. I got to tell you, I have faces coming in front of my face right now, as we're talking. talking about this. I don't like this. I don't like this conversation. It makes me mad at me. Right. But part of doing business is, you know, sometimes when you dance, you look foolish, but dance anyway. Right. You know, sometimes, you know, it hurts when you love, but love anyway. Sometimes people screw you when you're good to them, but be good to them anyway, right? Right. It's the mother Teresa mantra. And really, it's the only way to operate. It's the way your dad operated, it's the way you've operated, and you're not going to change the way you operate

because somebody was a crook or because somebody was a misbehavior, a person of low character, of low moral fiber, got into our midst, and it pisses me off and it hurts me, but it's part of having $95 million in revenue. It's part of having, or what was, $55 million in revenue, 95 employees. I wish 95. That would be great. Yeah, it'd be great if that happened. Yeah, wouldn't make me mad at all. Fifty-five with 95 employees, right? Yeah. Right. It's price of admission to get to be you. And you've got a good life.

And you've got a good business and you're good people and you're good to your people. And honestly, there's only about three or four people on the planet that care that this happened and you're one of them. Right. And a year from now, no one will be thinking about this unless it's you. Because I guarantee you, Mr. No Character isn't thinking about it. He's a twirl. He's a twirp. He moved on.

A person of class would have come in and said, I have these problems, and if we can't solve them, I don't want to stay. A person of class would have come in and said, I've got a much better offer at the competitor. You guys have been good to me. I want to give you a proper notice, and I'm going to leave and go to the competitor. A person of class wouldn't poach employees from a former place they used to work when they were a leader at that other place.

Right. But some people don't have class. I've had people leave here and come back and try to steal our people. And when they steal them, I always say, head out. Good for you. Remember, Ramsey has a rule. We don't rehire. Oh, yes, definitely not.

So when you're gone, make sure the door hits you good and hardened a butt as you leave. Right. Because that'd be the last time. And I'm not mad about it, but it's just a fact. And then, you know, then Mr. Low character goes broke and they come crawling back over here. You want to be rehired. Doesn't happen. Don't rehire them.

because the same reason you left is the same reason I'm not hiring you again. Exactly. I would never take them back. Yeah. So they're gone. They're just gone. They're in the rearview mirror. The rearview mirror is small.

The windshield's bright and it's in front of you. So I might just call an all hands meeting and just say all this out loud. Right. And we kind of did. You know, we really kind of got everybody together. And I think people are starting to, the first, about the first month was really hard because, I mean, our employees really felt it. Yeah, yeah.

It hurt them like, well, why did, you know, why did, you know, they do this to us? Exactly. They feel kind of like you feel. Yeah, yeah. I've had people here the same exact situation here over the years, and, you know, I can't believe they would do that and dishonor this place. Right. Dishonor all the hard work that we did together. I thought this was my friend.

Exactly. I feel like if that's the integrity that they had, we didn't need them anyway. Absolutely. Absolutely. Good riddins. I'm really glad they're gone. But all I'm saying out loud is it does hurt, it does make you mad, and it does make you lose a little chunk of your confidence in yourself. That just makes you human. It just makes you human. And I don't have a quick answer that makes all that hurt go away fast. Right. Other than to go, okay, rule number one, we're glad they're gone. Rule number two, we're going to move on. We're not quitting because they did. That's for sure. You know, rule number three, we're going to communicate with the team. And then we're just going to say out loud and admit, yes, this hurts. And yes, it causes me to lose a little bit of my confidence.

But none of that's enough to make me quit. I'm just a little tougher. I'm just a little more wise than I was before. I might be a little bit even, you know, more negative. But I'm going to be careful. You know, it's not going to, this emotion's not going to own me. It's not going to redefine me. It's their problem, not mine.

and, you know, you just got to lay it where it goes and then keep moving. But I think it's fair to say for those of us that run small businesses, this type of stuff, this type of betrayal is one of the most hurtful things that happens to us emotionally. Losing a little bit of money is not nearly this hard, is it? I'm definitely not. Making a stupid mistake in accounting and looking up, oh, we're $10,000 short because we screwed something up. that doesn't hurt near as bad. Pisses you off, but not near as bad as this does.

Exactly. Yeah. Well, I appreciate it very much. And that's, is, do I sound like what your dad would have said? Yeah, pretty much. He probably would have, threw some other words in there, but yeah. Yeah. He would have been, and I think that's what bothers me.

Some of these people worked for him way back when. I mean, these are long people that have been here a while, some of them. So it's kind of like they did it to him, which was he, they do it to disrespect me or whatever, I'm fine, but to do it, it felt like they did it to him, which is like even more personal, yeah. Exactly. But they got to look at themselves in the mirror, and it's an ugly picture. Right. You're right. Yeah. You're right. I would just let them go as best you can. Sometimes, again, sometimes you got to do it every morning. Right. Some mornings you wake up and their faces are in your dadgum mind floating around,

and you've got to clear them out for you, go do something positive. But time does heal this stuff, too. The further distance get away. Yeah. And when you get them replaced with people that are better than they were. Oh, yeah, that's where we're headed now. Yeah, that's also the ultimate revenge. Right. You know, God gives you a replacement that's an upgrade. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. And that's where it takes you. I'm sorry, Kim. I wish you hadn't gone through that. But I got bad news. You're probably going to go through it again. I wish I could say it's only once around here in 30 years.

It wasn't. It's more than once. Now, I never had 12 at one time under one person being that. I've not had that. but I have that individuals completely betray us and let us down and steal from us and everything else. And it just is heartbreaking and maddening and all of those things. It's just real. And after you were good to them, right?

And you, you know, after all I've done for you, that's kind of what runs through your head. But that's just part of it. And that's also very true. Oh, so mean. So mean. Wow. Some people's children. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast.

Welcome back to the Entree Leadership Podcast, Dateline, Anaheim, California. Financial Guru Dave Ramsey sprang out of a shopping mall fountain today to scold a woman who had frivolously wasted an entire quarter on a wish. Young people these days have no idea how important it is to save every cent. A drenched Ramsey told the embarrassed quarter thrower, you carelessly threw away an entire 25 cents into water for a so-called wish. What kind of an investment is a wish? You should wish for your quarterback, sweetheart. This is pure financial carelessness. I do applaud you for using cash, though.

According to sources, Ramsey had used to snorkel to stay underwater for hours until the unsuspecting woman rashly tossed her coin in. Obviously, this never happened, but it's hilarious, and it's from our friends at the Babylon Bee. If you don't know who the Babylon Bee is, what cave are you living in? You should definitely be checking out the bee.

is hilarious satire, sometimes more brutal than others. I've been blessed that the ones picking on me are not that brutal. They're just cute and funny. But some of my friends, they don't come away so unscathed. These guys do a great job. One of the speakers at our Entree Leadership Summit this year is the CEO of the Bee, the Babylon Bee, and his name is Seth Dillon. Seth and I have become friends over the last several years.

He runs a great organization, has had some fabulous fight. in the public eye. And I just wanted to get a minute to spend some time with him. Hey, Seth, how are you, my man? I'm good, I'm good. And I don't know how obviously false that story was. It does sound like something you might say. Yeah, say, possibly, yeah, known for hanging out in fountains with snorkels. Yeah, no question about it. There's been some great ones over time, man. You guys, and the hilarious thing is our, my friend group in business, ministry, other things all around the nation, they will send me like, I'll get like 14 or 15 hits immediately by email. They're going, have you seen yourself on the bee today?

They're so proud that I made the bee. That means I've made it, right? So if the bee is picking on you, in one sense or another, you've made it. So it's good stuff. The Babylon B is a satire site that's popular among Christians, conservatives, anybody who loves good humor, good sarcasm. And like I said, Seth will be one of our speakers and teachers at the Entree Leadership Summit. May 18th through the 21st in Denver.

Now, I remember the B before you, and you came in. It was a couple of years old, right? That's right, yeah. Yeah, it was started in 2016, and I took it over in, it was started spring of 2016, I took it over in spring of 2018, so it was exactly two years old. Was it Adam? Was that the guy's name? Adam Ford.

Yeah, I remember meeting him one time, a long, long time ago. And, I mean, it was a baby little sight. There was not much going on. He was just kind of poking out there, having fun, and you came in and took it over and actually made it profitable. Yeah, well, I mean, he did have an audience. So it was a WordPress blog format site. You know, he'd bought some template that allowed him to make this news-looking website

for very low cost without a graphic designer or web developer or anything like that. And he and a couple of other people that he had invited into kind of this pitching group, this work group where ideas would be kind of tossed around. He called it the think tank. He had invited some people in to pitch ideas and contribute. And so it was kind of a volunteer-driven, collaborative thing that was the hope was that it would get off the ground and that it would spread like wildfire and that it would grow. And it did.

I mean, back at the time, you're talking early 2016, Facebook didn't have a lot of the restrictions that they later came to have. have. And so the content, you know, you put good content out there, even if it's a link to another website, it still had plenty of opportunity to go viral. And so the B was going viral right out the gate. It caught my attention very early on. I was seeing headlines like, you know, Holy Spirit, unable to move through congregation as fog machine breaks. And it shows this, you know, cloudy sanctuary where you can barely make out the stage. And, and stuff like that was going around. And I was seeing it. I was like, man, this is really, really funny stuff. It's not cheesy. It's

insightful. Often it's directed at the church in a very introspective and self-deprecating way, which I thought was healthy. A lot of skinny jeans. A lot of skinny jeans on the worship pastor jokes. Yes, yeah. Worship pastor jokes, bass player. Yeah, all that stuff. And as a kid who grew up in the church myself, you know, I was a pastor's kid, so I'm not a kid anymore, unfortunately, but grew up as a pastor's kid in the church with behind the scenes, you know, knowledge of how the church works. humor really spoke to me, and I just wanted to get involved. Honestly, my first thought was, I wish I had started this thing myself. But when I ended up talking with Adam about it, you know, he was looking to exit,

and I was wanting a way in. And so we worked a deal out in early 2018. That's when I took it over and decided, you know, this had plenty of opportunity to become a business. I didn't know the first thing about running a satire site. Who does? Or how to monetize the traffic? Yeah, how'd you monetize it? What was the first thing you did to get some?

money coming in the door. Well, one of the first things that we did, so we already, we had, we had Google ads on the site. And this was one of Adam's concerns initially was that we had all of our eggs in the big tech basket where you, you drive traffic through Facebook. That was 90 plus percent of our traffic was Facebook. And then 90 percent of our revenue, or more, 100 percent of a revenue at the start was Google ads just placed on the site. They show this programmatic, you know, random display ads on your, on your site. You get paid when they get enough in and people click on them. And so, you know, that was how it was initially monetized,

and that would pull in some money, you know, from the traffic that was hitting the site. We were actually doing well with traffic. So it was generating enough revenue to cover the small cost that it had early on. But in order to grow it into a business, we needed more than that. So one of the first things that we did was launch. Essentially, it was like a Patreon model, you know, a subscription model where people could pay to support the B

in a small amount. and then we tried to find ways to layer on some benefits to that so that you weren't just donating money to us. We were actually giving you something in response. And so we launched a subscription platform pretty early on and offered some things like a headline pitching forum where you can actually collaborate with our team and get your headlines published on the Babylon B.

That's one of the things that you can do is engage with them and see the behind the scenes, the inner workings of how we do this creative process and contribute to it. And a lot of people thought it was kind of funny, actually. people were paying us to do our job for us was the joke. But it was a cool opportunity, actually, to get involved in the creative process and pitch ideas. Plus, we had, you know, forums and the ability to do comments

and turn off the ads and all of that stuff that we layered in there, too. So subscriptions was a big piece of the monetization puzzle initially. So I think I picked it up on Twitter in the early days of Twitter. So you're saying it was almost exclusively on Facebook initially. We had a presence on Twitter. we didn't have as big of a following and we weren't going as viral there. Back then, I mean, on Facebook, the virality was insane. We could post an article.

We did one about how a motorcyclist identified as a bicyclist and set a world record. And that got shared, I don't know how many tens of thousands of times, maybe over 100,000 times on Facebook, and it drove millions and millions of visits to the site. Like the kind of traffic that would crash the server and the site would stop working. like we were generating from Facebook.

So Twitter, we still did well there, but Twitter is not, it's still, even in its present day form as X, our content does very well there in terms of getting reposts and likes, but it doesn't drive traffic to the site at the same rate that Facebook used to in the glory days. Right, right.

Now, in the old days before Twitter became X, before Musk bought it, they and Facebook went through a, well, I mean, since 2020, really, up until just the recent memory, went through the cancel culture process where anything Christian, anything conservative, anything gun related,

anything funny, had to be banned. You guys got tossed from all those sites, right? I mean, it started with fact-checking, you know, jokes that were getting rated false because they were misinformative, and these platforms were trying to crack down on the spread of misinformation.

You had the first one that really hit us on Facebook was a joke that we did about CNN. The headline was CNN purchases industrial-sized washing machine to spin the news before publishing it. And it's a silly joke. Like it's not even like, you didn't even laugh. Thank you. But it's like, it's kind of a dumb joke. Obviously, there's no way someone could use a washing machine to spin the news before, like, that doesn't even make sense. It's just a CNN biased joke.

Facebook was working with Snopes as a third. party fact checker to make sure that misinformation didn't spread on the platform. And Snopes raided that joke false. And then Facebook threatened to demonetize and de-platform us if we kept spreading fake false news on their platform. We're like, but that's what satire is. You idiots. I mean, really?

God of course. It was a little bit, it was touch and go there for a while because we kept getting these threats on various platforms for spreading misinformation. And then, of course, the media picked up on it and was like, you know, these guys are trafficking in misinformation under the guys of the guys of. satire. Those are the exact words of the New York Times. And so that's how they were trying to characterize us because they didn't like the jokes that we were telling. They didn't like the targets of our jokes. And so this was speech that they wanted to try to restrict. And one of the ways to

go after it without just censoring us for no reason because they didn't like us was to say, well, you're contributing to false beliefs with your misinformation. And so that was really one of the first things that we bumped up against. And then it shifted and morphed into this conversation about policies aimed at preventing hate speech or hateful conduct. And so, you know, if you make fun of a protected group or individual, you know, that falls into a protected class, you are, in their view, punching down. You're bullying someone who's marginalized and oppressed from a position of power, and you shouldn't be allowed to do that. And so all of these things became off limits for comedy, even when you had a situation where you might be joking about

someone who's like a high-ranking government official, but they happen to be transgender. Well, that's considered punching down because they're in a marginalized class. We're like, well, wait a minute, these are the institutions, the cultural and institutional power is pushing these ideas on the culture. We're pushing back on them by joking about them, and you're saying that we're punching down at the marginalized and the oppressed. Like, we're actually punching back, if anything, punching up at the cultural and institutional power.

So there was that whole debate that played out, but that's how we ended up in Twitter, jail. We got suspended on Twitter in 2022 and caught the attention of Elon Musk with that. Yeah, that was one of the things. I mean, a lot of us got thrown off of different platforms for saying anything serious about not necessarily the rainbow world, but COVID. If you went anywhere on COVID other than the prescribed Fauci narrative, then you were evil and you weren't following the science and you were in ignorant redneck or whatever, and you had to be tossed. harmful misinformation. That was the justification for tossing you off.

And I actually testified before Congress on this topic, and I mentioned COVID because COVID was one of these examples where they were saying, they were trying to justify their censorship after the fact by saying, well, we censored based on what we knew at the time. And when I hear that, I'm like, wait a minute. So you're acknowledging that knowledge changes over time, okay? If knowledge changes over time, then that means whatever you're censored. censoring right now, you might learn it's true tomorrow. You think it's misinformation today. It might come out to be true tomorrow. You shouldn't censor it because then it's going to come out that

you actually censored the truth. And so if it's true that knowledge changes over time, then we should never arbitrarily decide at any given moment, especially when dealing with scientific, you know, topics, these health issues, that what's currently the prevailing narrative is the only thing that's sayable. Otherwise, we'll never be able to get to the truth because we can't debate it, which is the fastest and best way to get to the truth. And we can't laugh up the absurdity of some of your positions. Right, exactly. But COVID was a great illustration of how it's really a knockdown argument against censorship.

The fact that knowledge changes over time means you should let people debate the issues and not decide preemptively what's true and what's sayable. Yeah, because one thing we learned was the medical community didn't learn math while they were in school. Yeah. so for sure. So speaking of punching up, a lawsuit in California. They banned political satire and parody. I guess they passed a law and then you sued them? Yeah, it was crazy. You're not allowed to laugh in California anymore. Is that what we're saying? Well, it was like they tried to make it somewhat narrowly tailored so they weren't just banning comedy altogether, but it was, it was Newsom's response, Gavin Newsom's response to a parody video that was done about Kamala Harris, you know, in the lead-up the election. It was stuffing

words in her mouth. It was like AI generated and it was labeled parody and it was pretty funny. But Gavin responded to it saying, this needs to be illegal. And so he kind of streamlined and fast-tracked this bill that would make it unlawful

to satirize these politicians was that your video? It was not our video. It was someone else's video, but we do content like that ourselves. And so what was being applied, the law was being drafted and passed to apply to content like that, which of course would have applied to our content as well. And what it would have done is it would have insulated these figures from

criticism when, you know, the public has every right under the First Amendment to criticize public figures and politicians. And it also would have, you know, censored and suppressed our speech. We would have had to worry about whether or not a joke that we were going to tell was going to run to follow the law and result in fines and whatever. And so maybe we would start censoring ourselves. It chills speech. And so, yeah, we fought again. Every opportunity that we've had when something like that happens, we have immediately filed a lawsuit to try to prevent it. And in this case, you know, we had a great success there where the law got blocked. Yeah. And man, your legal bills must be unbelievable. No, they're not actually because generally speaking, when these issues come up,

there are pro bono law firms that are happy to take the case. In this case, we had Alliance defending freedom representing us. And they do that for free. They are happy to help in cases where speech is being abridged, where you have freedom of religion issues and rights are being infringed upon. They will represent clients like us at no cost using donations from people that support their non-profits. They're itching for that fight always. Yeah, yeah, they are. So they're great. They're great allies in this. It means that we're able to fight back without having to bankrupt ourselves. When you took this over, you thought, hey, we're going to poke some fun at people.

We're going to laugh, and we're going to make people giggle, and we're going to make a little money and have some fun. And it turns into this culture war thing, doesn't it? Yes. You didn't see that coming, did you? No, I mean, you don't expect, like, when you're setting out to just do comedy and make people laugh, there are two points to it. We're trying to make people laugh. We're also trying to make them think. And so a lot of the headlines that we produced,

the jokes that we were producing, were convicting, challenging, you know, ridiculing things that needed to be ridiculed. And so that can be very controversial. And so there's always going to be controversy that comes with that to some extent. But the broader culture war and the, not just the war on, there's the war on reality and reason

and then in truth. and then the war on speech and the ability to speak the truth. Those things we got caught up in simply because we're trying to speak truth to a post-truth culture using humor, which I think is one of the most effective ways to do that. And so, you know, we were engaged in those fights to ridicule the bad ideas that we thought needed the ridicule.

And then the infringement of our own ability to do that by these platforms that were trying to say that you can't tell those jokes result in us being on the front lines of a battle for free speech in the public square. And so, you know, comedy was really kind of like this intersection of the tyrannical effort to stamp out dissent and the people having the most effective voice in that dissent, hitting each other head on. And so that was not expected.

No, it was not expected. But it's a fight that I am perfectly willing to engage in because I think that we can win it. I think that we must win it. And I think that when you go after the comedians, you go after the humorists and you try to take yourself so seriously as to not tolerate their humor. You look like a humorless scold. You look like a tyrant.

And you only hurt your cause. And so I think we're blessed to be in a position. We're one of the most effective ones to do it. Yeah, definitely. So what size is the team at the Babylon be these days? We're up to about 40 people total involved in the business. That doesn't mean 40 writers. You know, the B is more than just a writing team.

We have, you know, we do e-commerce stuff, so we have people involved in that. We have marketing people and customer support and video editing and graphic design and all of that. So we have a whole team, a varied team split between our two offices here in Florida, where I am and in California. But around 40 involved at this point, either full or part-time. Okay, good. Very cool. Good stuff. Hey, man, thanks for your time. We appreciate the stories. This is great stuff. We've been involved in a bunch of those similar fights. They weren't nearly as fun or funny, or for good reason.

But a whole bunch of people that decided they were going to not believe the narrative for one reason or another and not function based on that belief. You know, we took some hits. New York Times headline, Dave Ramsey's trying to kill his employees. Wow. Because we came back to work, which is kind of counterproductive, you know, to kill your own employees. Right. But, yeah, apparently I did. Good news is we didn't lose a one.

That's great. That's great. Very good stuff. You say it's not as fun and funny. I mean, just imagine that when we file a lawsuit, we're including all of these jokes in the law. Like, our lawsuits are hysterical because if you go through, we cite all of these examples of these headlines and, you know, the things that the law would apply to. And so even the lawsuits themselves are entertaining. I can't imagine. I can imagine a judge reading through this chuckling with his morning coffee. Yeah, exactly. This is great. These guys are out of

their minds. This is so fabulous. So fun. Hey, I appreciate you joining us in May. I think you've got a lot to say to small business leaders. You've grown a wonderful business there. You fought some good fights. All of us that are in small business have to fight the fights. We also have to hire and we have to fire and we have to go through the whole process of creative anything, whether it's a heating and air company or a media company. It doesn't matter. And so I think you've got a lot to say to our folks when you come out to Denver in May. Looking forward to spending more time with you, my friend. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. Thank you. Thanks for coming on. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Entree Leadership podcast. Thanks for joining us, America. We're so glad you're here.

You're going to really enjoy Seth Dillon if you come to Entree Leadership. The guys are blast. He is fun and funny, and he's tough and a good business guy. So all of that goes together. Isaac is with us in Minnesota. Hi, Isaac. How are you? Thank you for having me today. Sure. What's up? Right. So I am a 50-50 partner in a moving company here in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He's on payroll, depending on the week. We have some part-time guys. Last year's revenue was just about 550K. at the middle operator stage. And my question for you today is how we should best proceed moving forward after our previous insurance provider has been providing fraudulent COIs to us. And it turns out we did not have general liability insurance.

COIs? Certificates of insurance to the clients that we work with. Okay. Has something been, have you got a claim again? against you now? Yes, on January 6th this year, we had one of our crews moving complex. Thankfully, it was on the first floor, but they did bump a water sprinkler that was attached to a main water line, $1,000 of damage to the... Okay. And so the insurance company had given you a certificate of insurance that was fraudulent.

Not for this particular apartment complex. They didn't require one, but We have been giving them to all of our business. So how does that affect this particular situation if you did not have a COI on this situation? Incident damage. And it turns out we have been uninsured since 2023, despite paying for premiums for general liability and having COIs verifying that we have. But you did not have insurance. Okay. So the general liability should have covered this.

Is that what you're saying? Yes, sir. Okay. And so the insurance company says what? What are they saying when you say, you did not cover us when we gave you money to cover us? What's the deal? What did they say?

Yeah, our insurance broker basically told us a few weeks after the incident when we did decide to go, well, he first tried to convince us that it was a bad idea to file a claim and we might not get renewed and we just wouldn't be able to operate. And it turns out once we did decide we want to file the claim, that he said he, quote, made a big mistake, and we haven't had general liability since 2023. So this is the broker that did this?

Correct. It's not the insurance company. It's the broker. Yeah, we... Is he a singular? Is he a solopreneur by himself? I believe he is attached to a company, but he's the only point of contact that we've had.

But he's attached to a general agency? Correct. Yeah, who is liable for his behavior then. Have you talked to an attorney, Isaac? I have a family friend, you know, kind of giving us some, but yeah, we have had a little talk with an attorney. Yeah, I think you go to your insurance broker's agency and say one of your brokers is misbehaved and you're about to write a $32,000 check. Or we're going to file charges on all of you with the insurance commission. and we're going to sue you. And they're going to write a $32,000 check so fast. It's unbelievable.

They don't want the insurance commissioner up there. They don't want the insurance commissioner up there, but they really don't on this, where they have fraudulently, you've got the pieces of paper showing that you had coverage that he never wrote. He completely fraudulently lied to you and stole money from you. The insurance commissioner is going to own them if you involve them. if you involve them here. The state of Minnesota

insurance commissioner is not going to go be okay with this, Isaac. You follow me? It's a big deal. It's a big deal, yeah. So they're going to eat somebody's lunch. And so, you know, I'm going to hire an attorney and pay some money

and they're going to pay my attorney's fees and they're going to pay $32,000. Or I'm going to sue them for millions, and I'm going to turn the insurance commissioner loose on them. For fraud. Yeah. I mean, this is fairly open and shut. If I'm grasping the concepts, I may be missing something here,

but if I'm grasping the concepts, you got them, dude. And he reports to somebody. I don't, you're, what I'm making sure is that somebody in this loop has some money and it's probably not the crook. But the crook probably works for somebody. It probably reports into a general agency. who's liable for his behavior is my guess. That's what I'm betting on in this conversation.

So, and you probably need something other than a family, a family friend is a good guidance to give you some advice, but you need to get above this guy into his, whoever he reports to, whoever is reliable for his actions and let them know that they're on the hook for my attorney's fees, which are now 10 grand, because that was the retainer I had to put up,

and the $32,000. And if you don't do that, we're going to sue you like you've never been sued. We're going to make a hobby out of you people. Yeah. Yeah, because, I mean, he screwed you, dude. This is criminal, possibly. Yeah.

I feel like we've been getting price-coached. We talk with other companies that are in our industry as well. Yeah, you got price couch because you gave them money and got nothing. You definitely got price-caouched. Yeah. You didn't have, you gave him money, he put the money in his pocket, did not write the coverage. Right? Yeah, that's the ultimate price count.

It's called fraud, man. So, yeah, you need to check some people up over there. And, you know, I'm going to get very, very, very aggressive. And I forgot I made a mistake, does not cover it. You don't, it wasn't accidental that he issued a certificate of insurance knowing there's not coverage. That's not accidental. that's not I messed up. That's, I'm a crook.

There is, yeah, that's what I'm saying. You know, the underlying policy was not there all along that the COIs would have come out of. Yeah. Yeah, you're, you're, you're, yeah, oops.

Oh, yeah, oops, right, a $32,000 check real fast, or you're going to be writing plus attorney's fees, or you're going to get a visit from the insurance commission. So I got your ups. Yeah. Because I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I don't think it was a mistake.

Do you? It gets weirder and weirder the more we go down the rabbit hole. Yeah. Yeah. And usually where you find confusion, you find evil. They hang out together. They are best buddies. I'm sorry you're going through this, man.

That's tough when you've got a $550,000 business, have a $32,000 hit. But it's not your hit. Go after them. And, you know, you have a $32,000. dollar bill you need to collect. And we're going to give you aggressive about collecting that bill from the people that defrauded you.

That's what it amounts to. Wow, man, what a mess. I'm so sorry. You're a good guy. Don't let this stop you. Keep fighting. Keep fighting. Keep fighting.

Keep fighting. I love it. Remember, better a weary warrior than a quivering critic. This world needs more high-quality leaders. So take courage and lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for listening for the Entree Leadership Podcast. Thank you.