EntreLeadership - Dave Ramsey Reveals How He Built His $300,000,000 Business

Episode Date: June 3, 2026

Building a business takes more than vision—it takes grit. In this episode, Dave Ramsey shares the setbacks, financial pressure, and practical decisions that helped turn a small idea into a $300 million company.    Next Steps: 🎯 Figure out your business's next steps in a free consult call with an EntreLeadership team member: https://ter.li/cjk4u0 📞 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-Leadership 🎤 Attend EntreLeadership Master Series: https://ter.li/masterseries-conference 📖 Order Dave’s book, Build a Business You Love: https://ter.li/b4kru2   Connect With Our Sponsors: Go to Belay Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource!  Go to Christian Healthcare Ministries and use code ENTRE for a 50% credit toward your first month of membership. Visit NetSuite today to learn more.   Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💰 George Kamel   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dave, thanks for coming by today. You know, people across the country know you as the guy on the radio, 20 million people listening. We got 1,000 team members that work here. It's a $300 million a year business. But what a lot of people don't know is how the business actually got started. And I would love it if you'd tell that story today. Well, when we were going broke, I was studying biblical finance, studying what the Bible says about money. And I was praying, okay, God, is this just like something I'm supposed to teach at church?

or am I supposed to do something with this in the marketplace because I lost my career. I wasn't able to buy and sell real estate and so how am I going to make a living and so forth? So, you know, I'm spending time in prayer and I felt like God's saying, okay, you're going to help a whole lot of people with this pain.

I went, okay, all right. And so I put a little ad in the newspaper that said, we stopped foreclosures, and people would call up, and I would go, and I went and rent a little office, and I would go meet with them and sit down and stop their foreclosure and do their budget,

and work with their creditors and all that stuff. And I charged them like $750, you know, a lot for broke people. I mean, you know, how do you get paid by broke people up front? You know, so, yeah, it was not easy. It was hard. And but I didn't, it was just fresh out of the bankruptcy. And I looked up about four months later and I wasn't doing enough clients to even cover the overhead.

So I ended up having to close that. Did you just like stop real estate one day and start that full time? As soon as I started getting some clients, I went and went and rented to office and decided I'm going to do this. And, you know, I'm a financial coach now. I'm going to help people stop foreclosures. And that was the main crux of it was we would do, you know, we would talk to the mortgage companies and work out a forbearance plan, a payment plan to catch people up. And it worked pretty good for the people I was able to help, but just wasn't enough of them. And so we lost like 5,000 bucks and we were dying.

That was like a lot of money. How long? What period of time was? Four, five months, six months. and then I just had to load the furniture up into a truck and take it home and close the thing. What was that like? I felt like I'd failed twice in a short period of time. It wasn't fun.

I was scared, mad. And I'm like, well, God, you told me to do this. And then it didn't work. So maybe it wasn't you. Maybe it was last night's pizza instead of the Holy Spirit. You know, I don't know what was I was listening to. But so I went home and cartel in my living room and started doing real estate deals again because I could make money doing that.

And I got back up to, you know, six figures in those days, which was a lot of money back then. And I was making $100,000, $120,000 a year. In the real estate? In real estate, again. And so, you know, a year of that later, and I was still doing coaching, counseling, but just very little of it. Where did most of that come from?

I know you said you put the ad in a paper. Was that that was driving it? That was back when the newspapers, people read the newspapers and there was classified ads in the newspaper. It was before the Internet, you know. So there's a whole different world. But it'd be the equivalent of putting it on Facebook Marketplace today or something like that.

Just placing a lad, and people would come in. So I was doing some coaching. I'm doing ministry at the church, coaching and counseling. So I had this hodgepodge of stuff going on, and I went on this radio station and started getting a whole lot more business after that people wanting help and wrote a little book, and had it in the trunk of the car, but I'm still doing real estate deals. And then Sharon and I sat down, and I said, okay, this is 18 months later after closing,

but sort of closing, you know. and just fiddling around, just trying to make a living and keep this dream alive and keep it pushing out there. I said, I think we can now go full time again. And I'm going to teach a class, and I've got some speaking by then that was starting to come up. I'm making a little bit of money speaking. I can sell a few of these little books, and I mapped it all out, did a little pro forma. And I said, I think we can make $63,000 next year. About half of what I was making.

I was making about 130, 120, and I said, and we can live on that if I just stopped doing real estate and just, and we'll go, I'm going to go rental a little office again. And this was 800 square feet, and I did it month to month, so I could close it and not have a lease hanging over my head if it didn't work, right? What was Sharon's reaction to that? She's like, well, let's just take some time and pray about it and feel, is this really God? Because it won't go away. The thing's just bothering me. It's not, it didn't just, it didn't die. It stayed alive, but it just went underground and had to germinate a bit, you know, kind of thing.

So anyway, she came back and said, yeah, let's try it. And, you know, we can always go back again to real estate if it doesn't work. Just don't, you know, we're not going to take on a bunch of bills. We're not taking on a long lease. We're not taking on a bunch of employees or something like that. We can't afford it. And so we opened in an 800-square-foot office that was month-to-month in the basement of an office complex because there was office space they couldn't rent because it was so crummy.

no windows, but they rented it to us month to month. And it was $800 a month for $800 square feet, which was just like just right here. I mean, it was just barely. And started teaching a little class. And at the end of the first year, we thought we'd make $65,000. We made $64,400. So we hit it pretty close.

And she's like, well. She cuts you some slack? No, no. I mean, she's like, okay, now we make half what we used to make. That was successful. Now what are we going to do? But, of course, we've never made less. than that ever. It's always been every year a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.

But we've had to manage every dime and every purchase decision as if it would kill us, because it would have in the old days. And so we got rid of buyer-fair first. I mean, I got like telephones that you just bought at Best Buy and just plugged them into the wall. We didn't have a telephone system. And finally, I remember we bought our first telephone system, back when people had telephones. and it was like $7,000. And it was this huge decision. By then we had 10 team members and we're like, well, we've got to have telephones that aren't all just these random little thing. You know, we've got to have something that works together.

Yeah. So you can transfer a call from the front desk. Has to be a system, actually. Yeah, and so we bought this used one from a bankruptcy thing for $7,500. But I remember that precisely because there's such a big decision. Now, I remember you telling a story about sitting there with your Bible open and the word light. and Lampo. Where does that moment interject in this timeline?

At the very beginning. Before open the first thing. Before you opened the first thing. The first thing had little lighthouses everywhere, sitting around all over the tables and everything because it was Lampo. It was the light. And, you know, God, what are you going to want to name your company?

And he named it. And then he closed it, which is really disturbing from a faith walk perspective. I mean... What do you think was the lesson there? I got out over my skis, is what I did. and don't get out over your skis again. Like I hadn't just gone bankrupt.

You know, how dumb is this? But yeah, get over your skis again. But it just made me super careful to never again be on the edge. You know, always stay back from the edge. I'm not making any decisions that if this doesn't work, breaks us. So the second go-around, card table in the living room, up to about 10 team members. How long is that?

24 months. Okay, so a couple years. Yeah. Financial Peace University started growing, and so we started staffing that. And then we moved to this other building. And again, though, we rented very short-term space because we weren't sure it was going to work.

And then took on a little bit more, and then took a little bit more. And that place was like a country house, like we just kept adding rooms. It was the worst designed office space ever because we would just knock a wall out of the neighbor when they moved off and rent that. And so you'd walk from place to play,

and the colors would change as you walk down the hall. You know, because it was everybody's old stuff. We weren't painting nothing. We're just keep going, we're making money. We want to make a profit. we want to make a profit. And all the desks were bought at bankruptcy auctions and stuff. And then we were over at the Financial Peace Plaza, the building before this,

which was the next move, before we ever bought flat screens. Everything was the big old chunky, huge, look like a car sitting on your desk thing. But it was like, and I'm like, well, that one works. Why do we need a flat screen? And they're like, well, everybody. And I'm like, what do you mean everybody? This is not, if you get your work jollies out of the screen you've got, You're in the wrong room.

It's not who we are. But everything was like so cheap, so utilitarian. And finally, you know, flat screens were small enough purchase as a percentage of our world that they didn't matter. I'm like, well, okay, whatever. So we ended up moving to flat screens. That was a big deal. And then we started buying actual new furniture when we bought furniture and stuff, so, which was very weird because all of our furniture was used. I am hearing like little faint hints of your lesson on financial peace for business.

in this story. You know, we don't buy new. We're saving everywhere we go. We rent till we can buy. We rent till we can buy. Yeah, we didn't, we didn't build a studio. So that's really, studios were, studios were super expensive. Yeah. And, uh, to build a radio studio. So we used the, the one at the, we drove across town and used the radio station studio to do, to launch. I mean, the Ramsey show was on a hundred and something stations before we had our own studio. Okay. I mean, we were, we were, we drove across town, 45 minutes each way. How often? Every day, every day.

And then 45 minutes back and traffic, because it went off there at 4 and we get to ride traffic on the way home. And so it's just like, God, it was awful. And then we put in the first studio, we didn't even soundproof it hardly. It was like a closet. And so when people would walk down the hall talking while I was on the air, it would go over the air. And so we had to put up like yellow construction tape during the show.

You couldn't walk down there and talk in because nothing was soundproofed. And now you got me sitting out in the middle of this. Yeah, we know soundproofing at all. Who put you back in a crowd? Let's just sit back out here in the middle of cubes. That's just great, yeah. For a lot of entrepreneurs, healthcare is one of the most unpredictable line items in the budget.

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And right now, CHM is offering new members a 50% credit towards their first month of membership. Go to CH ministries.org slash entre and use promo code entree. That's CH ministries.org slash entre and use the promo code entree. Now let's get back to our episode. It is an interesting point. We're sitting in the middle of the entree leadership team area, right? When in the life of the business, does the story start to come about?

regarding business leadership and succeeding at business and people wanting to know what you knew about that? You know, I had this knowledge set about marketing that I was working from and then somebody would come in with a different knowledge set and they weren't aligned and so they, it was just all this chaos. And so I'm like, okay, I have to teach everybody how I run a business inside the building

and so that I can know that they're gonna do the thing the way I would do it, training, basically. So I could trust their competence, doing something the Ramsey way, and I could trust their integrity, obviously. That's how we delegate, that's what we teach. And if you want to be in leadership here, you will have to go through that class. The class is not mandatory, but you won't be in leadership

unless you've gone through the class. Because I can't know that you're going to lead the way I would want you to leave. And again, it's still in the days of an overhead projector. And so I would sit down and type out the lesson, and we would run them off. type it out in the morning and we'd run them off. And every Tuesday afternoon, we in those days had very strict hours.

We were 8.30 to 5.30. And I would start teaching at 5 and finish at 6. So I would give you 30 minutes on the clock to come to class free. And you would stay 30 minutes over to be in class. To invest in yourself. To invest in yourself. And be able to understand how we're running a business. Why is this successful?

Why is this marketing successful? How do we view contracts? How do we view money decisions? How do we do? How do you run a business? business. And so every little thing. When was that in the, overlaying the growth of Lampo, Ramsey, with the birth of entree? It's five or six, seven years in,

something like that. And so I just started teaching it and, you know, we had to make a little overheads with the answers and little examples and stuff. And I'm up there flipping the overheads and teaching for an hour. And writing the lesson in the morning and we would just run them off on the copier because there was 25 people or something. than coming to the thing. But then one of the guy goes, hey, my wife's in a real estate business, and she'd like to come to watch this. I told her about it. Another guy said, hey, I told my pastor, this would be a good way to learn to run our church. And could he come? And I'm like,

sure. And then somebody else said the same thing. And I looked up and there were more people sitting there that didn't work for us than did. And I'm letting them come for free, just for fun of it. But I'm like, I might could sell this because people want to know this. I never have charged our own team to go through it, obviously. But, you know, those lessons, then were refined and refined and refined. And there was a guy working here named Daniel Tarty that a lot of our audience knows. He worked here for many, many years.

And he's like, if we ever do anything with this, I want to help. Move me to that area. If you ever do anything with this. And I named the class from day one, Entree Leadership, because I didn't want leaders like corporate leadership bull crap.

And I didn't want people that were just entrepreneurial because that's like trying to, nail jello to a tree trying to herd cats. I didn't need it. I had enough chaos without adding chaos to it. So I wanted to encourage an entrepreneurism mindset in leadership, an entrepreneurial leader. And so I kind of, we made this word up, the two. And so you have to be an entree leader to lead at Ramsey. And it became our playbook of how we run the business, how we grew the business, how we are growing the business. And then we launched a little seminar with it that was like,

I think 150 people came, something like that to the first one. It was at the Hyatt in downtown Nashville. You know, I've got a huge passion for business, for small business people, because I've been on my whole life. And I see them, we all do stupid stuff, and I get tired of watching us all do stupid stuff. Why, I wish somebody had been around and teach me not to do some of the stuff I did.

God, man, it's painful. Where did you get the lessons that you taught in all of that? So much of what we've learned, we learned at the School of Hard Knocks, and it seemed like everything we did, we had to do it two or three times to figure out how to do it. and it left a mark, it bruises you. You know, a lot of these people have theories

about how business works, but we actually did it. That's different. And so we're practitioners. That's very different about this brand. A lot of leadership brands are what someone thinks it ought to be. It's very theoretical, very think tank, but never made a payroll. And I made payroll for 30-something years now, and never missed a payroll, even in the weird times.

And not going to be in that position. But I mean, when we lose money, it's deeply embedded. The numbers are seared into my brain. I remember several things we've done that didn't work. And I remember those numbers. They're red. It's not good numbers. No.

If you had to kind of sum up, what has been the thing that has propelled you to take this to the marketplace and keep doing it for so long? It's obviously serving the small business people. And I really do understand that economically, small businesses are 43.5,000. percent of gross domestic product, it is the backbone of America. And it is the best people. Small business people, there's a few crooks and people, a few nasty people around, but by and large, they're family people, and they love their team, and they take care of their team. Corporate America pisses on their team. And we don't, you know, people we work with are good

people. They love their people, and they cry when somebody doesn't make it, and they have to let somebody go. It tears their stomach up. They don't use payroll as a way to increase profit by chopping people's heads off. It's not, they're good people. And so helping good people get better and get bigger is helping America, is helping those individuals. So when we help an individual in the money space, we help that guy, his wife, or her, you know, her husband, their kids and their grandkids. We help a small business owner. We impact 40, 50, 60 families simultaneously. And so there's scale to this in terms of the impact that it can have in serving and in lifting people as we go through. And so it's been a great joy to watch the light bulbs come on over the top

of small business people's heads for all these years teaching this stuff. If you think of just one of them out there this morning getting up and getting after it for the day, put a bow on this whole thing for us. What would you want them to know from you? Oh, it's hard. And I wish I can tell you it's going to get easier. Because as soon as you solve that set of problems, God's going to give you a whole new set to solve. I mean, it's, it's, it's hard. It's not for everybody. And it's not for the faint of heart. Small business, not for wussies. You got to, you got to be strong. You got to get up. You got to get up every time you get knocked down. But there's nothing quite like the thrill of, of it, the win and the push through and the victories. And, you know, watching your team members

grow and, you know, start out at one level and become a leader, become a massive executive leader over the period of years. And, you know, but the pain that goes with it is real. And so it's doable. It's worth it. It's fun. But if you're looking for a smooth ride and you want to mail it in, small business is not for you. You've got to get it, you got to step it and fetch it every day.

Thank you, Dave. Thank you. If you're serious about growing your business and avoiding the mistakes that cost Dave years, you don't have to figure this out the hard way. Talk with one of our Entree leadership coaches. help you get clear on where you are, what's holding you back, and the next right steps to move forward. Check out the link in the description to schedule a call. Thanks for watching, and be sure to subscribe for more great leadership content.

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