EntreLeadership - Dave Ramsey Takes Live Questions From EntreLeadership Summit

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

Today, we’ll hear about: •      How to retain big talent without big money •      How A.I. can screw up your company •      Dave Ramsey’s method for screening potential hires •      A business owner who is scared of releasing control of her business Links mentioned in this episode: •      The EntreLeadership Podcast: https://bit.ly/TheEntreLeadershipPodcast •      Get your tickets for EntreLeadership Summit 2024: https://bit.ly/3LRiZJH •      Learn more about EntreLeadership’s Stages of Business: http://bit.ly/3yvdavv •      Have a question for The EntreLeadership Podcast? Leave a voicemail at 844.944.1070 or submit your question for a chance to be on the show with Dave Ramsey: https://www.entreleadership.com/ask Start growing in business and leadership with the EntreLeadership Newsletter. Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://bit.ly/3IRWnsL Support our sponsors: •      NetSuite: https://bit.ly/NetSuiteEntre •      BELAY: https://bit.ly/351P9AE •      Payority: https://bit.ly/3IaA5SK •      Staples: https://staplesbusinessadvantage.com/ramsey Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: •      EntreLeadership Summit: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipSummit •      EntreLeadership Master Series: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipMasterSeries   Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: •      Elite: https://bit.ly/3tI2fN8 •      Advisory Groups: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipAdvisoryGroups •      Executive Coaching: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipExecutiveCoaching •      Workshops: https://bit.ly/EntreLeadershipWorkshops Listen to all the Ramsey Network podcasts anytime, anywhere in our Ramsey Network app: https://apple.co/3eN8jNq Learn more about your ad choices: https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy: https://www.ramseysolutions.com/company/policies/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the Gaylord Opry Land, the Summit, Entree Leadership Summit. We are doing an unusual version of the Entree Leadership podcast. I'm your host Dave Ramsey, and I'm here with our Platinum members of Summit. You guys make some noise. We've got a great week with incredible speakers and thought leaders and authors from all over the world. And absolutely stellar work has been done on this stage all week, and so we're getting ready to lower the bar for the next few minutes. and we're going to take questions from the audience instead of calls like we usually do on this podcast.

If you do want to participate in this podcast in the future, you can call in and leave a voicemail at 844-944-1070 or go to entreeleadership.com slash ask. If you didn't know, I'm your host and I've been doing this for 30 years, this being business. If you want to talk to someone about theory or a think tank or some academic about business, well, you got the wrong podcast. should move on. No, what we do here is I actually did this stuff today. I'm the CEO of Ramsey Solutions, about 1,100 team members, and I still, with a great leadership team, lead our organization. I have the difficult conversations. I still make payroll on Friday. We still do the stuff in the trenches every day, and I have for 30 years. So that's who's talking to you, who's helping you with your Q&A, your questions, and again, we're going to have live audience questions

from this Entree Leadership Summit audience today rather than calls coming in. And so we're going to start with Martine. Martine's from Tallahassee, Florida. Hey, Martine, how are you? I'm great. How are you? Doing great. Doing great. How can I help?

Okay, my question is I am the CEO of a chiropractic practice in Tallahassee. And how do you motivate staff when your budget or your finances don't allow for more benefits or more money. How do you do that? Well, more money comes from more revenue. So everybody getting to share in the revenue increases in some way or another would be a great thing to put on the table as a possibility if you can pull that off. In other words, we're at this point today, a certain point today. If we can get revenues up, we can change some of these things. So that's a carrot to lay out there. But I don't recommend small businesses try to compete with corporate America on benefits packages.

We don't at Ramsey. I mean, we have some basic stuff with 1,000 employees that we didn't have when we had 10 employees. You know, we've got a lot more room, a lot more room in the budget to do the, quote, benefits package. But the difference, your brand differentiator for hiring and for motivating and for keeping people is not the quality of the benefits package. You're never going to compete with huge corporations on that. And you don't want to because you want to let them have those people that are worried about benefits. I want to bring people on in a chiropractic practice that care about healing, that care about people, that have a huge heart that love the work and want to be involved in the work.

And that's motivating. They're tied to the mission. So we're tying back into the mission rather than money just won't motivate the unmotivated. That's a lie that people have out there. And benefits packages won't motivate the unmotivated. So what we've got to do is plug the folks into a role where they can, sense that they are moving the needle in someone's life, that they're moving that mission along. And chiropractic's huge on mission. I mean, the whole thing is, the whole movement of chiropractic

is a mission. And so plugging into that, into the healing aspects of that, I think, I'd just constantly be putting that in front of them rather than, oh, raises, or, oh, we're going to have this benefits package, or whatever. The second thing I would do, a third thing, First thing is don't try to compete head-to-head with corporate America on benefits package. Second thing is we're talking about being on mission. The third thing that comes to mind is we need to be constantly talking through where we're all going together. And we can get people tied in on the same mission and the same desired future, we call it, around Ramsey. We stole that from Henry Cloud.

And this idea that we can plug into this desired future and we're all unified, we're all heading this way. See, I can treat you like family in a small business situation. I can really love you well. I can know your spouse's name. I can know you know what's going on in your life. You don't have that luxury in corporate America. They're too scared of their own shadow to start with. But number two, there's too many of them.

And so I can't at Ramsey anymore with 1,100 people. I can't know that about everybody, but I can make sure my leaders all do. And you're in a small enough situation. you can know everything is going on with those folks and have this really deep, rich, wonderful personal relationship and I highly recommend that. That's a brand differentiator.

You don't get that in corporate America. Corporate America just treats people like a unit of production. They treat them like crap. And so you've got that opportunity to create a relationship difference as well. So how long you've been doing this? About 14 years now. Wow, good for you. Good for you.

Well done. How many team members? Six to ten. Okay, perfect size, yeah. That's what I was guessing. That's typical practice. So good stuff, very cool. Well, thank you for what you're doing and thank you for your question. Very, very good stuff. Very well done. So guys, you got to remember, you know, I don't want to compete head to head with large business. My brand differentiator is that we're not corporate America. Thank God. A bunch of us started our businesses because corporate America peed on us at some point, you know. We don't want to be like that. I don't want to be back in that again. I got to wait. from that. And so you don't want to go that direction. Hey, this is the Entree Leadership Podcast, a special edition from the Opry Land Gaylord Hotel, where we are doing the Entree Leadership Summit this year, back in a moment. Welcome back to the Entree Leadership podcast, a special edition from the Entree Leadership Summit, live in the ballroom here. At a

lunch break, we're hanging out with some of our closest friends, taking questions actually from the audience here, the studio audience, we'll call it for today, rather than actual call-ins. But if you want to call in and be a part of the show in the future, this is a new call-in format on this podcast where I answer your questions, and it's completely free, and some say it's worth exactly what you pay for it. So give it a shot. The phone number's 844-944-1070, or you can leave a message at ontraryleadership.com slash ask. Our team will get back to you and set you up to be a caller here in the future. Now, we don't talk a ton about legacy builders, but Entree Leadership Summit is actually a great example.

of how Ramsey Solutions transitioned into this final stage of business. Back in 2015, Entree Leadership had a bunch of different events going on, and there were several one-day events. We had a performance series. We did a Master Series twice a year, and back then I taught every single lesson at Master Series. And we reached a point where I said, I'm not doing that anymore. And if something doesn't change, the company's going to be left high and dry when I retire, because if I'm the only talent that's doing it, hey, how does that make the, we've got to make our events less dependent on me. That doesn't work. And that opened up a whole world of possibilities. Ultimately, we landed on the idea to create an event so good that if I wasn't hosting it,

I would want to attend it anyway. The quality of speakers, the high level of thought leaders, the people that I listen to, a lot of them are now friends, and the people that have helped me bring my business along, hey, I wanted to bring them to you. We called it Summit, and that's where Ontario Leadership Summit came from. And we bring you the top minds and business and leadership because that's the type of conference I would pay to attend. And next year's summit is our 10-year anniversary. It's going to be April 21 through 24 in Dallas, and it's going to be a party, y'all. You don't want to miss this. You won't believe this lineup. I mean, people like Mike Rowe are going to be there, man. It's going to be incredible. James Clear from Atomic Habits. It's going to be

quite a lineup. You don't want to miss it. Check it all out. You can learn about it at Entreeleadership.com slash summit and get your tickets there. So on the microphone up next is going to be Kathy. Hi, Kathy. How are you? Hi, Dave. I'm great. Great.

Where do you live? I'm in Sundusky, Michigan. Cool. What kind of business? A title agency, community first title agency. Ah, very cool. Very cool. How can we help?

So I'd like to know what your take is on incorporating AI into customer interactions and how you can balance that with human connection. You better balance it with human connection. And when you're not, when you are using AI, you need to be sure from an ethics standpoint that the people on the other side of it realize they're not dealing with the human, that they're dealing with AI. And so I think AI has an opportunity to pour fuel on a lot of things we're doing, doing them faster, doing easier, doing more efficiently.

But the idea that we're going to replace a human connection or a human connection. touch is a really dumb idea. I think the companies that do that, it's going to screw them up. And so I'll give you an example. A thousand years ago, people used to actually call businesses on the telephone and stuff. Y'all remember that? And we have a receptionist. Her title is the director of first impressions. Because when they call in, the person that answers the phone, that's their first impression of our organization. So how good she is, how happy she is, how wonderful she is, as a human being. And we went through the first person. And we went through, a period of time in business, y'all may remember this 10 or 15, 20 years ago, when everyone did away

with the front desk. They did away with receptionist. You had this phone tree, this answering thing, and you'd call in push four to get this department, push three, and it was all automated. Well, it lost the human touch. And we made the decision to, instead of going to that direction, we're going to double down, and we gave the director of first impressions a raise. And we said, we're going to actually demand even more of you now. And so you've got a, you got a, you got a you've got to create a world-class experience now. And so instead of using technology to replace a human, we used a human then to keep the human touch

and use technology to enhance the experience. And so that's the way we're going to go at AI from a Ramsey perspective in that we're going to avoid the ethical problems of, you know, no one wants to be stuck on hold with a customer service agent that can't even speak English. And we all have had that experience. You know, no one wants to interact with a bot unless they want to interact with a bot.

And so you can give them that option, but it needs to be clearly stated what it is. It needs to be clearly stated that you're choosing to have this type of interaction versus a human connection. And then we're always going to have humans overseeing the AI, not the other way around, where humans are watching the quality control, watching the actual content, because it's a great technology. and it's really going to do some fun stuff, but it's fraught with danger when you pull the human element out of it.

And again, we lose, from a small business perspective, we lose what is one of our advantages, if we're not careful, which is the personal touch, is the human touch. And so that's how I would go at it. And in your world, I mean, most of your interaction is not consumer, most of your interactions with real estate agents, right? And so, yeah, and so from an efficiency standpoint, they may choose a technology just to get something executed, you know, get a document executed,

get it back, that kind of stuff, you know, just a docu-sign thing or whatever, and throw it out there. They may want to choose that from an efficiency expert or efficiency standpoint, speed standpoint, that kind of thing, which is fine as long as they know that's what they're doing. And I always want to give them a human option as well. And maybe where you choose to blatantly not use AI do what we did with our director of first impressions and double down and go, not only are we not going to have the phone tree welcome you to Ramsey, the recording, welcome you to Ramsey. We're going to go beyond that, and we're going to really create a superhuman experience over here with her. And then if you need to be in a phone tree, we can drop you

into one. And you can hit four to go to that department or seven to go to that department or five to hit the, you know, to go to somebody's desk or what, you know, all that kind of stuff. So again, What you want to be careful of of these technologies is where they create a fake, insincere response or connection to the customer because our advantage in small business is always relationships with our team, with our customer. It's a real human-to-human connection. But we're going to be using AI a bunch, I promise you it, because in the broadcast world, as much content as we produce, we'll be able to do a lot of stuff with it,

but we will not be doing it unless it's managed by humans. And any time that a customer is having an interaction, they're going to know it. So thank you. Very, very cool. Good stuff. This AI thing, yeah, good question. Good question. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, this AI stuff is, man, it's quite a topic. I mean, it's all fresh for all of us. And any of you that have experimented with it, it kind of blows your mind what it'll do. Our guys the other day said, let's have Dave Ramsey do a rant about something that I would never do a rant about. I forget what it was. And it was the silliest, funniest thing, but it was really sounded like me. It was a little bit scary. Yeah.

Just to show the power of this technology, it's a lot of fun. Yeah. And it's going to mess with trademarks and copyrights, too, if we're not real careful. This is the Entry Leadership Podcast. Welcome back to the Entree Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Ramsey. Hey, guys, you are our marketing plan. have one otherwise. You're satisfied customers is what we call it. They tell other people. And in the

digital world, that means we need to ask you to actually tell other people. There's three things you can do to help this podcast. If you're watching us on YouTube or listening as a podcast, that's all great, listening on YouTube, however you're doing it, maybe your own Apple or your own Google Play or your own Spotify. I don't care wherever you are with this thing. Thank you. Would you do me a favor and help us by subscribing or following or whatever the appropriate thing is with the technology you're using. If you subscribe, you follow. Not only are we going to be able to deliver this to you each week when we do it, but it helps with the old algorithm over there on the internet. Yeah, pushes our show forward and helps us keep in the top 10 leadership and business podcasts out there, which we pretty well stay there all the time,

but it's because you folks help us by subscribing and following. Oh, and share. A lot of those technologies have a share function. click the share button send it out send it out send it out if not just clip clip the link and send the link out that's cool too and of course you can leave a five-star review one-stars aren't helpful mama said if you ain't got nothing nice to say don't say nothing at all if you hate the show what the flip are you doing listening to it just troll somewhere else okay so leave us a five-star review that's helpful thank you for that we appreciate it this is the entree leadership podcast a special edition from the ballroom here at the gay lord upri land hotel where we are today uh wrapping up a week of of Entree Leadership Summit, and I'm in the room with the platinum attendees doing this special edition.

Up next to the microphone, it's Mark. Hey, Mark, how are you? Great, Dave. How about you? Better than I deserve. Where you live? We live in Thomasville, Georgia. Oh, yeah, fun, fun. How can we help? My wife and I own real estate and personal property auction company, primarily doing auctions on our online platform, and we're in the process of building our team out. And we've got our core values down and our mission statement down, but when we're interviewing hires, how do we ensure that they're going to be a good cultural fit for a Christian-based company with strong conservative values?

What you can do legally, and it's part of our interview process at Ramsey, is we just state real clearly who we are. And then we ask the question, how's that feel? And so it's stuff like Dave Ramsey closes the show and has for 30 years that there's ultimately only one way to feel. financial peace, and that's to walk daily with the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus. He's a stated

evangelical Christian leader in America today. How do you feel about that? He's the CEO and the owner of the company. How do you feel about that? But you can't say, we require you to be, that's completely illegal by federal law. And you don't want to violate federal law. We would never recommend you do, and we don't. What we found with all of our legal counsel and all the crap we've been through over the years of this stuff is we're allowed to make statements about us, and it's perfectly legal to say, how do you feel? How do you feel about that? And they'll give you some response, but at least they know what they're getting into. And 99% of the people that don't align somehow with the statement you have made, they don't want to be there. They're

going to opt out. And so just, it's cool to make statements. It's perfectly legal to make statements about who we are. This is what we are. This is Dave. Okay. So, again, again, the folks that think that that's nutty and flaky and weird, that's okay. It probably is, but you may not want to be here then because you're probably going to be freaked out. So that's exactly, that'll work perfectly. But again, just don't be real careful. Don't violate federal law. You don't want to do that. You don't want to get in that lawsuit. You don't want to do things illegal. We don't ever want to suggest you do things illegal, but it's perfectly legal to make statements about who you are and then ask someone about how they feel about that.

And that'll get you there. So good question. Thank you for joining us. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Special edition of the Entry Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Ramsey. We're broadcasting from the ballroom at the Opryland, Galoard Hotel where we've had about 3,000 folks all week at Entree Leadership Summit.

The Platinum attendees, the folks sitting up front, have come back from lunch a little early and are hanging out. We're taking questions from them from the floor rather than from the phones today. and thank you for joining us. If you want to be a part of the show in the future, leave us a voicemail at 844-944-1070. We'd love to have you be a part of the program that way. Up next is Tanya.

Hi, Tanya. How are you? I'm great, Dave. How are you? Better than I deserve. Where do you live? I'm actually off the coast of North Carolina. Oh, fun.

Yeah. Cool. Cool. What kind of business you got? Real estate development, portable housing. I love it. Good. Good.

How can I help? So we are starting in to legacy stage of business. stage five and starting the succession planning. And I've got a couple of challenges or more fears that I'm hoping you can give me some advice on, so as the fact that I'm facing reality that I'm now old and need to start thinking about retirement. But really, how do you take your hands off the control and allow your successor to come in and maybe make decisions a little different than you would have made, even though those decisions may actually take the company a direction that's even more

than you could even imagine. And comes with that, too, is as you go through that succession planning and the transition, because it's not a one-day event type thing, is how do you get the rest of the staff and your external influences to accept that transition while you're still active in the business? So if you've started that with Ramsey and... Yeah, we've been working on this for about 15, 16 years at Ramsey. And so it is a gradual process, and there's a lot of questions built into your question. there. So let me see if I can kind of comb through some of them. The first one is the fear

issue. There's two things happening there. I assume you're the founder, the start, you started it. Okay. Yeah, the first generation turning over to the second generation, that's, that gen 1 to gen 2 is the most emotional of all successions because we founders are hardheads. We're stubborn, we're gritty, we're control freaks. That's how we freaking got here because we would not not be denied. And now you're asking to pry my fingers off of this thing that I've held really, really tightly for a long time. It's an unnatural act. It really is. And as soon as I started doing it, I knew intellectually what I had to do. But what I didn't see coming was how emotional it was going to be. And so it was like, I started planning to be replaced and then it started working.

Oh, crap. You know, like I'm planning to be less important. And then suddenly I'll was less important. That's kind of disconcerting, you know, like the, like your grounds moving under your feet. And I kind of had to just say out loud, like, this is, I don't, the little Davey part of this is, doesn't like this. Now, the more noble CEO and leader and head of the family is, succession is proper and it's what I should be doing. That, you know, the higher calling part of me is like, yeah, this is what we've got to do. It makes sense. It's a smart thing to do. But then crap, I'm suddenly not as important as I once in. They don't need me.

They don't need me. They can pull this off. I mean, these guys put the stuff together, and I didn't plug one thing in. You know, it's crazy, you know? So the second part of that fear, so that fear is normal, but you've got to work through it. But it is a, and it's particularly bad for the founder because we started, you know, I was here when by God, nobody was here. Shut up, you know.

You really can lean into that if you're not real careful. And I've had to catch myself a time or two going, I've got socks older than you. Come on. You know, but I managed to keep my mouth shut and just try to be a little bit more mature and deal with that fear. The second part of that fear is justified, and it's a standard fear. Succession is the ultimate delegation and the final delegation, because it is final when you do it. You can't undo it. It's done, you know?

and we guess it could, but I mean, it's very, very difficult. And delegation, there's always a fear for any of us in leadership when we're delegating. And there should be a fear. Because if we do this stuff and, you know, I put somebody on this stage and they screw up our brand, you know, I've delegated part of my brand to them. And so you cannot delegate and you should not delegate and you should be afraid to delegate to someone who you can't trust their competency. and you can't trust their integrity.

And that's a basic delegation lesson in entre leadership, both competency and their integrity. And so they're going to take the company somewhere that I might not have taken it and it might even be a better place. Only if they do that while abiding to the principles that brought us here. We don't worship processes at Ramsey.

Processes change every day. AI, we were talking about that in the last time, you know, another question a few minutes ago. AI is going to be a different process. There's going to be a new process. But the principles of relationships matter. The principles of people matter. That's still going to be regardless.

That principle can't change. Now, how we go about it, what media we use, what medium we used. I mean, when I started Ramsey, I mean, Al Gore hadn't invented the Internet yet. So, I mean, we've had lots of new processes and lots of new medias and mediums come about. So processes need to change, but not principles. And so you've got to trust the person. that you're bringing on to take the thing, that they're going to stick with the principles

while they take the business to a whole new level with different processes. And that's the integrity and the character you're delegating out to. So you've got to build that, and that requires some time. You walk alongside someone before you let them walk ahead of you. And they may walk behind you for a while and then beside you for a while

and then walk on ahead of you, but they have to prove out that they're going to stick to the principles that got us here while changing the processes and taking the company to even better places than maybe I could understand because, you know, the iPhone is not native in my hand, but this next generation it's native. They have never known a world without it. And so they're going to know things naturally that I didn't know. And that's wonderful, but we've got to stick with the principles while we change the processes. So I can turn loose to them and I can make that fear go away, the more I trust.

in their integrity and in their competency to stick to those principles and how we treat people at Ramsey, how we hire, how we fire, because people are involved. This is how we deal with a customer that's upset. All those kinds of things are still very, very much a part of our DNA, very much of what got us here. And so you've got to have that down, or I'm not going to turn loose. So you're not a control freak to not turn something over to someone, whether it's succession or simple delegation. You're not a control freak. You're wise. Don't turn it over to them until they've proven that they're competent because they're going to screw up all your work,

whether it's succession or whether it's just a simple task that they're doing wrong because they're not competent. It's called training. It's not control freak. It's called training and mentoring and discipling. So all of that to say that'll come and talk up. The last part is how do I bring the customers and the team along with this? They're already wondering what's going to happen when the old man, the old lady dies. And so we just need to talk about it out loud to everybody.

So we've shared our succession plan with our customers for years. We've shared our process out there. We're very open about it. And we share it with our team until the team's sick of hearing it. But they at least know that we have a meeting. once a year. The, if Dave dies this year meeting. What are we going to do if Dave dies this year? Here's what going to happen. This, this, this, and this. If Dave dies this year. And I call it the Monty Python meeting. I'm feeling much better. It's just a flesh wound.

But yeah, yeah. So, because it's weird to sit in a meeting and talk about dying this year. And I do it once a year. It's weird, you know, but we talk about the leaders know, the Ramsey Ayers know, my wife knows, you know, everybody knows what's going to happen if something happens and that prepares everybody for the ultimate that when we do step aside due to death, health, or just choosing to retire, then everybody's fine with that. So this year we moved Daniel R.MZ. into the president's role in January just the other day. And that's been an 11-year process. He's worked all over the company. And we didn't move him into the role because I wanted to move him in the role or because he wanted to move in the role. We knew we were ready

when the key leaders, the top leaders in the organization, the operating board said, we need to do this now. And so when I talked to my friend Dan Kathy, his son Andrew just took over a chick-fil-a. Andrews in his 40s. And I was asking him how Andrew was doing. He said, he's doing great, doing great, you know. And Dan said, so Daniel moved into the president. I said, yeah, he said, so was he elected on the elevator or in the board room? And I said, oh, on the elevator, the team was ready for him to be in that role. And the leadership team was ready for him to be in that role. The only one that really wasn't was me, you know.

And so, I know I actually was, but I mean, it's still, it's because it's another sign that I'm getting old. It's another sign of my mortality, you know, and again, I get to deal with those emotions. The good emotions is I get to walk with him now for the next season, the next five years, 10 years, whatever. And I'm the CEO, and he's the president, and we get to do this together just for fun. And it's just a father and son thing. we're just having a blast since January. It's the first time he's ever worked with me directly. He's always worked for someone else in the company.

So all of that to say, we've broadcasted to the customers so much and so gradually over time that they thought, well, of course he was going to do that. It was kind of obvious, not because he's my kid, but because they could see the track. They could see him moving along the way. The team could see him moving along the way.

They could see him being ready, that he was getting more and more ready every year. And it had nothing to do with his age. It had nothing to do with his Ramsey, person, Ramsey family affiliation had to do with his competency, his integrity, and it was an obvious good play for everyone involved. And so that's what you're looking for. Gradual, talk about it a lot, lots of overcommunication. It's natural to be afraid and for it to be a weird moment emotionally for you like it is for me. But the other part of the fear is a warning to not

turn it over too quickly and abruptly. Way too many of you guys in business. your succession plan is as you're dying, you clutch your heart, and as you fall back in the grave, you toss the keys out. And that's your succession plan. That almost never works. You have doomed the place because no one was ready. The person you tossed the keys to wasn't ready. The team wasn't ready to accept that person.

The customer base wasn't ready to accept that person. And you just created stress and anxiety for everybody involved. So the more gradual, everyone in here needs to start thinking about their succession plan now. If you just opened your business last year, start talking about it now. And the succession plan can be you just sell it. That's end game. I'm going to sell the business. It doesn't have to be to your family, whatever.

You can do whatever you want to do. But you need to start thinking about it now because your customers are thinking about it. The old man is getting old. The old lady's getting old. What are we going to do when they die? What happens to me as a customer? I depend on this service to run my business. What's going to happen?

That thing going to fold up like a tent over there because it seemed like the only one's competent over there is that one that's getting old. And, you know, the customers are having these conversations in their head. They're thinking it. And you think, la, la, la, la, nobody cares. Know everybody that's dealing with you cares. So start talking about it, start laying it out there,

making a gradual layer upon layer upon layer. It's a great question. Thank you so much for joining us. We appreciate it. Hey, guys, remember better a weary warrior than a quivering critic. Leaders serve. Leaders are active, not passive.

Leaders act on principle, not appearances. This world needs more high-quality leaders. So choose to lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for listening to the Entree Leadership Podcast.