EntreLeadership - How to Move On From (and Avoid) Business Failures

Episode Date: October 23, 2023

Today we’ll hear about: •       How visionary leadership fails when middle management is not aligned with the vision •       When it’s actually beneficial to buy real estate for your business •       What to do when you have employees who are horrible with their finances and continue to ask for cash advances •       Why you can’t dwell on business failures if you want a successful business Links mentioned in this episode: •       The EntreLeadership Podcast •       Stages of Business Assessment •       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 •       BELAY •       Payority •       Trainual Learn more about EntreLeadership Events: •       EntreLeadership Summit •       EntreLeadership Master Series Learn more about EntreLeadership Coaching: •       Elite •       Advisory Groups •       Executive Coaching •       Workshops •       Stages of Business Assessment 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 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. I'm your host, and I've been doing this fighting and scratching and clawing in the trenches thing for 30 freaking years, right alongside you. So this is a podcast for small business. If you're running some big, hairy thing and whatever, 10,000 employees, I don't know how to. do that and I really can't help you. I've probably got some ideas about leadership, but it might help you, but in general I've never done that. This I've done. This I've done. And we walk through the stages of business and particularly the stages of small business. There are

clearly identifiable five stages. The first stage is the treadmill operator. That's how most people start. And that, as the name implies, makes you feel like you're on a treadmill. The main problem that treadmill operators face is too much of the business, particularly the revenue, of the business is dependent on you. You've done no delegating. You've done no time management. You're just stepping and fetching. You're just getting it.

Just run, run, run, run. But if you take a vacation, you're unemployed. You're a treadmill operator. And so we teach you to time audit. We teach you to get above it to start hiring and delegating out some of the revenue producing activities and hiring and delegating out some of the activities that cause the basic business to operate. So the whole freaking thing is not sitting on your back, your shoulders, and your head.

Once you do that, you level up and move to the next stage, which we call the Pathfinder stage. Now, the Pathfinder, this is where you want your team engaged in a shared direction. The primary problem you lack is there's not much strategic alignment through the whole place. The team doesn't know where we're all going. And what percentage of your team could tell you why the business is. exists and what they do to cause that existing thing to happen. And so that stage is what I want to park on for just a minute, the Pathfinder stage.

There's an article that's running around LinkedIn from 2019 from Harvard Business, Harvard Business Review. And basically the conclusions of the article are like this. Visionary leadership is widely seen as the key to strategic change. That's because visionary leadership does not just set the strategic direction. It tells a story about why the change is worth pursuing and inspires people to embrace the change. As my friend Simon Sinek says in his famous book, start with why. We often say when you're getting out of debt, you need a why that'll make you cry. You need something that motivates you.

Your why is the aspirational motivation of why we're doing this. Why are we scratching and clawing? Why are we fighting this battle? Why are we killing this dragon? Why? Why? And visionary leadership tells you this. And the research this article says finds that the positive impact of visionary leadership breaks down, you lose the positive impact of it when middle managers aren't aligned with top management's strategic vision.

Now, this is classic Harvard business review language. So we've got visionary leadership, but then we have middle managers. See, these should be another layer of leadership, not managers. Managers count stuff. Leaders push things around and make them happen. So you need middle leaders, not middle managers. And then they need to be aligned with and understand the why, and they'll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol right alongside you,

meaning you've got strategic alignment. The article continues, visionary leadership is not just important for senior managers, leaders. It is also matters for middle and upper low and lower level managers who play a key role in carrying out strategic change. Now, it's worse than that. The whole freaking place has to be aligned on not only where we're going, but why we're going there. and that requires so much communication that every level of leadership is sick of talking about it. Because all we do is freaking talk about it. We talk about it so much that at least everybody knows.

That creates alignment. But when the guys and gals on the front lines that are actually executing with the customer don't know why or what, all they were told was just go do this. You know, they told how to do it, but nobody, they don't know what they're doing, what the part of the, part of the machine that they are. They have no motivation. They're not aligned. They roll their eyes and they half but do their job.

Back to the article. When middle managers were aligned with top management strategic visions, things played out as the widespread view of the visionary leadership would suggest. The more of these managers, engaged in visionary leadership by communicating, there it is, their vision for the future and articulating where they wanted their team to be in five years, the greater the shared understanding of strategy in their team, the more the team was committed to strategy execution. Get that. That's important. In other words, once the idea is communicated, once we have alignment,

commitment goes up. But commitment does not go up from lack of communication. And two many companies use mushroom communication. Keep everybody in the dark and feed them manure. And that doesn't work. All you get is lack of commitment, the equivalent of an eye roll, and contempt for their job and their leaders. And you will not keep thoroughbreds in your stable if you treat them like mushrooms. They require clarity. They require clear strategic and tactical communication. This is what we're doing. It's why we're doing it. And even the opportunity to opt out. Maybe you don't want to go on this journey, but this train is going on this journey. We are going to do this? Are you a we? The last element in the article says,

our experience working with companies around strategic alignment suggests it starts with creating strategic alignment among middle managers before strategy execution efforts began. Again, well, duh. This should not be one-time communication, but a dialogue. People will only take ownership and strategic communication if they're consistently persuaded of its value. Okay, so this is our strategic idea. This is where we're going to take the company. It's why we're going to take the company.

We're going to the beach, and here's what it's going to be like when we get to the beach. It's going to be warm and sunny, and you're going to love the beach. You're going to play in the waves. We're going to read a book. We're going to the beach. Describe what the beach. beach is. This is the beach is the destination. Let's go to the beach, boys and girls. Here we go. And everybody get aligned about how we get our butt into the car, get the clothing packed,

and get to the beach. And so we're aligning every layer of the company with extreme levels of communication, storytelling, aspirational lift. You don't have to be a motivational speaker to tell people that you're excited about where you're going. You don't have to be a professional communicator to say something over and over again until people finally hear it. You'll learn different ways of saying things, different story methodologies, different humor levels to get people on board and get them plugged in, but only if everyone is aligned or you're going to get it. But let me tell you what, visionary leadership that does not require and cause extreme amounts of communication to get alignment all the way through the company from top to bottom,

visionaries leaders who run around and don't do that second part of it and then start executing on the strategy that no one else knows what it is or is aligned to it all you do is aggravate the piss out of everybody you just make everybody mad and that's basically the hillbilly version of what this article is saying but that's what's really going on so quit running around flapping your arms acting like you're doing something spreading the good love spreading the good word when the front lines and the middle lines have no freaking idea why you're doing it or what you're doing. It aggravates everybody. So talk about it a lot.

This is who we are. This is why we do this. And this is how we do this. Everybody line your ducks up. Here we go, boys and girls. You've got to have that alignment. And that's what this Harvard Business Review article in essence is saying, especially for you pathfinders.

that will cause you to level up and you'll move on to the next level of trailblazer. Yeah, five levels of business. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. I'm Dave Ramsey. Welcome back to the Entree Leadership Podcast. If you'd like to participate and be a caller on this show, you can call to leave a voicemail. Our team align you up as a caller. The number is 844-944-1070.

or you can leave a message at the website, and they'll get back to you, entreeleadership.com slash ask. Andy is in Crown Point, Indiana. Hi, Andy. Welcome to the Entree Leadership podcast. Hey, Dave, how you doing? Better than I deserve, man. How can I help?

Well, thanks for having me on the show. I'm an owner of a landscape company. Our annual sales is $2 to $3 million a year, and we're completely debt-free and have saved about a business. million dollars into a building fund over the last five to seven years. Wow. Yeah. It's been a fun a couple of years.

Congratulations. Well played, Stud. Thank you. So we're currently run the business out of our home, and I've greatly outgrown the space and looking to use that building fund for something, and I'm trying to figure out how much of it is the right amount to spend. and to continue to grow debt-free, of course, and not stretch ourselves too thin. Okay.

You got too – a good way to clear this in your head is this is not really a – when you go buy a building, in this case, you're not doing that for the business. You're doing that because you want to buy real estate. Yes. Because you could go just rent a building for the business. Okay. So you're buying a piece of real estate to invest in, and you happen to know the tenant. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, so you separate that out because you've saved up a million dollars of profits that you can put into a building that you guys can use.

But you do want the building to be a good real estate investment as well. So we built these buildings on our campus. They're office buildings, a little different than what you're doing. But still, we built them in such a way that if Ramsey's solution, goes away, the Ramsey family has some mighty fine office space. Sure. And so that's kind of what I want you thinking here. I'm guessing you probably want something like office warehouse arrangement, right?

Yeah, with a big yard space and possibly enough space for a tenant while we're even operating out of there. It's just a lot of money. I've worked really hard to get this amount of money saved, and now I'm scared to, I'm just, it's just a lot of money. Yeah. Well, you just, you know, you pay cash for a person. piece of real estate, but you need enough left back to operate the business. You're not going to put the entire, you're going to drain down a zero cash. No, well, on top of that, we have about 150,000 and retained earnings inside the business. Okay, so you're fine with that then. So this is your

real estate fund. You got a million bucks to buy. You don't have a million to? You got a million. I mean, that's what? We're going to do that. So, yeah, buy something at that. But again, don't buy something that is so freaking specialized it can be used for nothing else. But I don't see a need for you to do that anyway. And by the way, a good office, I don't know about Crown Point, Indiana, but good office warehouse space is one of the best categories of real estate investments right now. I mean, I've got about 10 of those, and I would buy 10 more if I can find them at a deal this year. I mean, it's just a great, it's kind of a working man's office space, so to speak, and I've got some wonderful tenants in some of the properties we own

in that space. So it's a good real estate investment, and it happens to be that it's going to help your business run more smoothly and more profitably too because you'll have everybody in one site and everybody has a home base to bring the equipment back to and you know do maintenance all that kind of stuff get reset for the next day a place to keep the trucks all that it's a whole different world than the way you've been living so you're probably going to gain some productivity and efficiency when you move in would you think a hundred percent and i'm frankly sick looking at it at home yeah yeah that's not to mention your wife right exactly she was sick of it two years ago Yeah, so I mean, that's fine.

You guys are doing what you're supposed to do. You're gutting it out and you saved up the money. You're going to pay cash for a building. I think you're incredible, man. Congratulations. Big time, big time successful. You've got to love that guy. Hey, let's just open a landscape company and do $3 million a year and save up a million dollars cash for a building.

Just shut up. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Hey, I'm Dave Ramsey. Thanks for listening. If you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you've probably heard me or some of the other callers mentioned the stages of business that I was talking about at the beginning. How do you find out what stage you're in? Well, the Entree leadership team just released our new and improved stage of business assessment, completely free. It'll help you easily and accurately identify exactly where your business is today and what you need to do to get better at business, they cause you to level up and go to the next stage.

So you'll know what to work on to get better. The natural tendencies you have at your stage that are negative, the natural tendencies you have that are positive, and how to accentuate those and what skills you add to your tool belt to move up. It's completely free. Click the link in the show notes or go to entreleadership.com to find out which stage of business you're in. Again, it is a completely free assessment. Mark is in Sacramento. Hey, Mark. Welcome to the Entree Leadership Podcast. Hello, Dave. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it. Certainly. How can I

help? So my question is, well, first of all, I have a small office rental company in Sacramento, California. Our total revenue is $3.5 million. And we have a team of four, including myself, I mean, that group of four. We have an issue. We had an issue with the employee of ours who was done a wonderful job for years, then asked us for a cash advance. And right when this happened, they were voluntarily offering a lot of, I would say, very, very poor financial decision-making. And we gave them the cash advance. They went on to ask for another one and a third, which that was the last. But as an employer and employee relationship, I found myself going, oh gosh, they've done a great job. They're not asking for something. And I want to help them. But they're also volunteering information

about terrible financial decisions they're making. So I was hoping that there would be, if you could give me some advice or wisdom as to, what help can I offer? What should I say? How do I navigate through that situation? Well, full disclosure, I get criticism from my haters on being too parental with our team

because I love my team and I see it as a responsibility to help them. and when you're giving this guy money, you're not helping him. Your funding is stupidity. That's not an act of love. It's an act of cowardice because you refuse to talk to him about it. So I'm picking on you, but you've got to talk to him about it, right? And it's scary to talk to him because it's awkward,

because it feels like you're going over the line, right? Well, the third time that it happened before we issued it, we said it would be the final one, and we asked what was going on. surprisingly the situation was, oh, I was able to pay my rent. This is the employee, he was able to pay my rent for installments, but now my landlord says I need to pay on the first, like normal rent. And I'm totally fine, but just because of the situation, I need the money up front.

That's when we said, we can't do it anymore. But it was such of a fundamental misunderstanding of how kind of your budget works and how finance is working your life. I was, this guy's driving a car and doesn't know how to put gas in it. he's trying to live a life and doesn't even know how he's not got basic life skills and that's okay it's not a bad thing he's not an evil person but i'm just saying if you're asking me so i'll tell you what i do what we do here okay if this happened at ramsie here's exactly what would happen now we're a little bit weird because we're in the financial world hello so but we would

immediately say um yes we'll help you we'll help you get the ship righted uh It might be in advance. It might be we just give you some bonus money just to get you help and think. But we're not going to help you with stupidity. We're going to help you fix the whole thing, which means we're going to sit down and we're all going to do your budget together and we're going to show you how you can never have to be here again. A, quit making stupid but decisions that we wouldn't be quite that blunt.

But, I mean, that's the essence of the messaging, right? Quit, you know, quit doing these. You said you observed. Okay, these irresponsible things, they've got to stop. because they're not good for you. It don't affect me. But, you know, if you're, you can't go to Florida on vacation when you're behind on your house payment. That's dumb.

Okay. So no more Florida vacations unless your house is current. You save up the money to pay for Florida vacation. That's dumb. You can't do that. So that actually happened one time. That's why I remember it. So I'm looking at somebody going, what is, how dumb are you?

But that's what I'm thinking, but I'm trying to be nice. And I'm going, you just can't do that. You come in here asking for a dad-gum house payment. after you got back from a Florida vacation. Why'd you go on freaking vacation? That's just dumb, right? And so, anyway, so we help them with the house payment, but we refuse, we love you so much that our job as leaders is to serve you. This is me talking to a team member that we love you so much that we're not going to participate or fund your misbehavior. That's called enabling. Instead, we're going to participate in your healing, which is a whole, approach, meaning I'm going to get in your budget. I'm going to show you how to do this.

And if you don't want to do all that or you get mad because I'm overstepping my rights as an employer, well, then I don't have to give you an advance. I understand. Yeah. That's a wonderful starting point. Outside of reviewing the budget with the employee, is there any of the resources just to quickly maybe give to them, have them read, have them watch? I think just getting down to the brass tax of what they're actually spending their money on face-to-face is. best. But is there maybe something else? Yeah, yeah, you're going to, and you're going to have to address the things that you observed.

What did he, what was the irresponsible thing he did? Well, an irresponsible thing was, hey, I was able to get a dog for $500 discounted from $800. That was one of them. The other one was... You got, it's able to do what? Now, say that again. Buy a dog, and they were telling me... He bought a dog? They were so excited to tell me they got it for $500 instead of $800. I got it on discount.

And they're behind on their rent. Correct. yeah okay so i mean that's that's that's that's that's about as dumb as the florida vacation right mm-hmm that's the same thing you're behind on your house because you went to florida is i bought a dog i love dogs i just bought a dog the other day but you don't do that that's cray-cray yeah you're exactly right so you just go do you're making you know so what you're doing seriously between you and me and me and the eight million listeners or whatever right is you're you're reparenting this guy because apparently his,

he was raised by wolves, right? I mean, or dogs, maybe, I don't know, but, but, but I mean,

he, you know, who, where was his dad, his mom to teach him common sense, right? So you get the honor of teaching him common sense for the first time, which you don't buy an $800 dog for $500 and grin act like you did something

intelligent while you're behind on your rent. That's dumber than a rock. Right? I agree with that. Yep. And so, yeah, you just got to, I'm going to address those things. Now, I'm not going to be as bombastic as I'm being right now. I'm going to be kind.

But I'm going to say it very clearly or bluntly, like you might hear me on the Ramsey show. If he called in and told me this, I'm going to go, dude, you can't do that and call that winning. That's not a cute dog. It's not that cute. You're a grown-up. You've got to pay your rent. Right? So, you mean, you know, this is, so you kindly, firmly, and then we'll put, I'll give you a financial

Peace University, and I'll do the upgrade with the every dollar app, and we'll plug them into our whole financial thing. And this is why a lot of employers out there buy our smart dollar thing and put all their employees through the curriculum so that employees have less financial problems, and then they're not a distraction while they're at work, and they're not a distraction to themselves. So all of that. But we'll give you that. Hang on. We'll have the team pick up and get you, get him signed up for they. Give them a total money makeover book too. Because the guy just needs to learn basic financial sixth grade math. I mean, rent before dog. That's the process. You know, it's a jeez, I don't drive you nuts. But it be a part of the thing, and I was reading, yeah, part of the thing is

that we do, you're going to be, if you care about your time, you're going to be, if you care about your team, and you lead with truth and clarity into people's lives as an act of love, then you're going to be accused by your haters of being too parental and overstepping your bounds as an employer. Your other option is be soulless and plastic virtue signal. bull crap corporate America. It's afraid of their own shadow and won't love their team enough to say,

don't do that, son, you're hurting yourself. Don't do that, girl. And sometimes we've had to sit down with a young man in our organization over the years and say stuff like, apparently no one taught you that you just don't do that around ladies.

You need to learn how to be a gentleman instead of just a male jerk. Because right now you're a male jerk and you're highly offensive to everything female you come in contact with. And you may not know that just because you're, but I'm just going to be your uncle or your dad or whatever for a minute here and go,

son, you just can't talk like that. We don't do that here. You can't do that around ladies. You're not going to get a good response anywhere in your life and you're certainly not going to get a good response inside this building acting that way. And if you can't, keep doing it, you're going to have the opportunity to do it somewhere else because that's not how we do it here.

And you just kind of, you know, but what, but it's basic life skills stuff. It's not like how to do your job. It's not a technical skill breakdown. It's soft skills. It's manners. It's, uh, uh, did you realize that that's like sexual harassment? It's violating federal law. I mean, but you're, you know, you were raised by wolves so you don't know this. and you have to, you know, your entire value system comes from social media. So we have to actually teach you how to be a normal human. And so, yeah, we do that stuff every day here, every day. Not that much, not as much as we used to because we do a better job of hiring. But you kind of do have to decide business folk out there, leaders, if you're going to love your people well enough to be invested into their lives and into their futures and into their character to create the environment and the environment and the,

culture you want inside your building, or you're going to be fake, virtue signaling, plastic, spineless corporate America. And HR makes all the decisions because leadership has no backbone. And, you know, don't you just love a company where HR is feared or HR does the, I run to HR if I have a problem. That means leadership is not present. Our HR team is not your pastor, your leader is your pastor your leader is who you come to with problems not HR because our leaders actually have spines and care and actually lead and you know mark is the right kind of leader because he's he cares he's asking about how to do this properly so he's a he's a good young leader there with a small crew and just getting this started so mark your why this podcast is here thank you for

calling. I'm honored to be, to be here and to get to talk to you about this. Hang on and we'll get FPU for that guy and hopefully we can get dog behind the rent instead of dog in front of the rent. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Our producer is Austin Selby. Our associate producer and board office Will Will Rutter. Sometimes it's been Hill, but today it's Will Rutter. Andrew Holmes and Nathan Keeler or on the camera and Emily is usually on the phone. Skyler is today. So did I get that right? I got everybody right. Good. Look at that. That's amazing. Thank you for joining us, guys. If you want to be part of the program, Dial 844-9-4-1070. By the way, we could use your help.

You are our only marketing budget. We don't spend any money on this show, as you can tell, other than payroll, which is substantial on this show. Looking at the booth guys right now, Paral substantial on this show. But the, but if you want to help us, we'd love it. Click share and share, clip the link out, send a link to somebody,

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promote the show on the internet and all the algorithms and all that stuff. So help us a bunch. So share, subscribe, follow, like, five-star review, click the link, send it out, talk about it, tell people, thank you, thank you, thank you for that. Alex is in Dallas. Hi, Alex. How are you? Hey, Dave, thanks for having me on. I really appreciate you taking your time to do the show. I'm honored. I love doing it. How can I help? I own a volume photography business. And last year, we gross 275. Right now, the business is me and my wife. And last week, I hired my first employee. Wow. This July, we started our fourth year, first or our fourth year in business. And every year, I set business goals in terms of revenue and accounts, like new accounts.

And every year, we've been exceeding them. So my question is, I feel like, I feel like this question makes me sound like ungrateful or like I'm humble bragging, but how can I feel more content with my success on hitting those goals? And so I always feel like I could have done better or I should have done more and it's kind of causing some frustration when I get to the end of those goals. Well, it took me a while to understand that for most of us that do this entrepreneur thing, contentment and ambition are not on the same spectrum. They're not like contentment at one end ambition at the other.

That's the way I kind of thought about it for a while, and that's not right. So contentment is I am comfortable with where I am. Ambition is I'm going to leave anyway. You know? And it's because here's the thing. I, you know, but it's, It's a natural thing to say, okay, if I hit the goal, I wonder, gosh, how much more could we have done if I'd have stretched the goal, you know? But if I don't hit the goal, I go, ah, angry and frustrated and push.

But that's just a matter of being competitive. And with yourself and with the marketplace and going, I just, it's not good enough. It's not good enough. I want to be better. I want to be better. I want to win. I want to win. I want to win.

Everyone needs, it's human nature to need to see traction and progress. someone who doesn't need to see progression in their life is lazy. Yeah. So that's not lack of contentment, though. I'm very content. I like what we're doing. I like who we are. I like all those things, but I want to do more of all of it.

And so that's not driven by discomfort with where we are. It's driven by a need to serve more people. driven by a need to just an achievement need, but the achievement need is not psychotic. It is not, it's not due to psychological problems. It's just due to healthy ambition for progression. And so, yeah, I think you need to set goals and I think you need to occasionally miss them. And I think you need to be frustrated when you miss them. Now, what you don't want to do is sit in that and sit in the frustration and sit in the failure. Like we've had, in the, in the, in the, the failure. Like we've had in the last 36 months, we've shut down a, at the top of my head, four projects that I can think of that all cost me a lot of money.

And I mean, we didn't just fail. We failed gloriously on all four of them. And so I have to kind of be the Ted Lasso, Goldfish thing, you know, I have a very short memory. What animal has the shortest memory of goldfish? I got to move on. I got to move on. It's like your golf game. concentrate on the last shot, you don't get to concentrate on this shot. So even if you hit well,

or even if you didn't hit well, you've got to hit the next one. And so you've got to be the goldfish with a short or no memory. And that's, you know, in a spiritual sense, that's grace. I give myself a lot of grace for those colossal failures, even give the team grace for the colossal failures. I don't give myself or the team grace if we repeat the stupid but thing that caused the failure. I don't want to do the same stupid thing over again. And if we come up, short on a goal. I want to be frustrated, but I'm not going to live in frustration for two weeks about it. I'm going to be frustrated for 10 minutes.

Reset. Go on. You know, if every time a quarterback through an interception, they quit, football games would be real short. So you can't stop on every failure. Or if every time they threw a touchdown, they quit. Football games would be real short. And so you get to go to the next play, whether you through an interception or whether you through a touchdown pass.

You go to the next play. you go the next play. And that's that goldfish, that's grace to yourself. But you still keep playing to win. You still want to run the score up. You still want to throw more touchdown passes. And so that's not because I'm discontented. It's because we're winning.

They're different. They're on a different plane. I don't know if I'm making any sense. I feel like I'm babbling. But that's how I'm doing it around here. And that's how I've worked it through emotionally and spiritually in my head. Yeah. I just was, I wonder sometimes if I'm setting,

the wrong goals in terms of the business, because the financial things, like you've said before, it's a nice scorecard, but I wonder if, like, I'm looking at that too much. So I have to, I've got a business, a small business group of guys that I meet with once in a while, and I asked them this question in there, like, well, you should just be happy. You're doing good. And after talking to them, they were like, well, maybe it's because you came from other jobs where you didn't like your management, you didn't like your leadership, and you wanted to lead a team, and you should be more aiming towards that as your checkmark.

Yeah, I mean, you know, what is it you're trying to accomplish at making money is only one of the things? Yeah. You know, but maybe building a quality team with a high quality culture is one of the things. That's one of my goals. I mean, we fight for culture here. We fight for, you know, having a quality environment. We spend a lot of time, money and energy on culture that does not have a short-term ROI.

It probably has a very good long-term financial ROI because you retain the good people, you run off the donkeys and so on, because they don't fit in. And so, you know, but, but anyway, I, and you can add to the list, I certainly do here, the mission of what you're doing. Our goal is help a whole bunch of people. And we figured out if we help, the more people we help, the less we have to worry about money. So, you know, let's serve in volume. And, you know, same thing. You know, think about the joy that photographs give that you take to the families that you're dealing with. And so, you know, if you did 10 times as much, that'd be 10 times of many families with joy due to those photographs.

And so because I know our family treasures photographs, we're photographed nothing. I mean, my wife just got another family. She's classic grandma. Gets everybody together for a dadgum picture. And here comes another one over the mantle, you know. And so, but it goes, those things give people joy. Yeah. They do.

And so it's, because we can remember the time that, you know, remember when, you know, Johnny was four and what, you know, all the stuff. It's, so I don't know what types of photos you're taking, but, you know, you're serving someone with that. And so, you know, maybe you, you. some of your goals is we want to serve more people and we want to make more money and we want to build a culture. Those are three things that we do. By the way, we help people get out of debt, change their life, become millionaires. We help small businesses run better, become very profitable

and get more joy out of their business because they get the donkeys out and the crazy out and all that. We do that all the time around here and we take great joy in talking to people like you and 10,000 more Alexes wouldn't make me mad, you know. So that's a, uh, uh, uh, that's an opportunity to serve, and that brings joy. And that's another type of goal we can set is almost the McDonald's sign. Billions served, right? And so, you know, that's where we're going. But, hey, you're a good man for asking these questions and for wrestling with the issues.

You're always right when you say money's not enough. But money's not bad either. It's just don't stop there. That's not the only place you'd set goals. So let's set a goal of, you know, having 10 team members and they're all happy and like each other and productive. And that'd be a great, nice little business to have 10 people that actually got along in one room. That'd be stuff that Washington, D.C. can't pull off. So you'd be way ahead of the game, you know, that whole thing.

So very cool, very well done. Congratulations, sir. You're the right kind of people. Hey, folks, remember better a wary warrior than a quivering critic. Leaders serve. Leaders are active, not passive. If 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.