EntreLeadership - It's Just For a Season—Looking Back on 24 Years of Seasons at Ramsey Solutions

Episode Date: April 12, 2020

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Hey, this is Alex Judd, and this is a bonus episode that our team recorded specifically to bring you hope and practical action items that you can use as a small business owner to tackle this whole coronavirus situation. So here's Daniel Tarty with our chief production officer here at Ramsey Solutions, Blake Thompson. Hey, hey guys, Daniel Tarty and the Entree Leadership team here at Ramsey Solutions. I'm joined by our very own Blake Thompson. Hey, Blake, what's up, man? Thanks for having you. Jumping in here. Blake's our chief production officer.

And, man, almost 25 years here at Ramsey Solutions. I mean, you've seen it all. Like, you basically started this thing with Dave in the early days. It was just a radio show back then. And now we're a thousand-person company and 200 million top line and 18 million listeners out there and a nationally known brand. I mean, you've seen the whole journey. And, man, the stories you can tell. And I've heard you tell some stories that are gut-busting funny.

I'd love for you to just tell our audience, you know, what? Take us back to early on. I mean, we're going to jump into, like, where we're at today and leading in times of chaos, blah, blah, blah. But I think people really want to know, like, what was Dave like back then? What was it like getting this thing off the ground? It wasn't all just rainbows and sunshine back in the day. Yeah, tell you the truth, when I started with Dave, I knew of his show, but I didn't listen. It was called The Money Game during that period.

It was 1996. And I was in a job. I couldn't stand at the time. I'd come out of college a couple years before that newly married. I wanted to get into broadcasting, but it's not what worked out after I walked the stage. I thought I'd just get the dream job and it didn't happen. So I had to get into something just provide for my family and grind. And he reached out.

He wanted to take his show syndicated out of just Nashville. He's doing great in Nashville. He was beating Rush Limbaugh in Nashville. And during that time, that was huge. So he knew this message would be good for the entire nation, not just Nashville. So he wanted to take the show National. So he reached out to this little Christian school that I went to Treveka Nazarene College at the time, now university, bigger than it was then.

And he was so pleased with a sales guy he had hired that he thought he'd go check there first before the trades are in the media area. And I had stayed in contact intentionally with a professor there. If you ever get that thing you think I'd be good at or perfect for me. And we prayed for it for years. And she reached out to me on my little pager one day. Worst day of my job. Pager. Worst day of my job. Look down.

Why is Treveka calling me? Finally got a break. Had two guys not show up. I'm running like crazy in this business. And called him and they said, have you ever heard of Dave Ramsey? I was like, no. Well, he's a local radio show guy, money, da-da-da. If you heard of the money game.

And I go, yes, there's this sports bar I love to go to. And there's an advertisement in the men's bathroom with this guy with a chain around his neck. And it goes, are you bound by debt? Listen to the money game. I go, I know exactly who you're talking about. And my professor, long story short, said he's looking for a producer to help his show go national. And me and my husband listened to him all the time, Blake, this is the job.

This is what you've been praying for. It's been what you've been wanting, something where you love what you're doing and you're helping people. Because you knew that was my heart. And I got to meet Dave. And back then, the interview was me and him. Because there was seven people in the office over in Brentwood. And I sat across from them. And Dave had three-piece suit, you know, kind of look like the professional banker kind of guy, which now he's like anti that.

And we had a great conversation, and he sold me on the mission. And tell you the truth, it was a major pay cut for what I was making in the 90s, newly married 25 years old. But he's like, hey, this is what we make. We do everything by cash. But this thing's going to be big. and I'm called to do this, and he sold me again on that mission. And I was like, hey, the money's not a problem. I will take the cut if I can get on this train with this guy.

And I did another interview than a spousal, like you guys talk about, entree leadership. The spousal was with my wife and Dave and Sharon, and his kids, Daniel Ramsey now running FPU. You got Rachel, who's a personality here. They were in the booth behind us at the age of like nine and maybe six, and Denise, the oldest. So it's cool to look back.

on those days, but as far as the early days, we would drive a round-trip 40 miles every single day from our office to a little old closet studio to do the show. Because that's all we had. And Dave wasn't going to build a studio without cash. This is what year? In 1996. Again, he was already established in Nashville. So I came on, started running the board with him, being the phone screener.

The reason he hired me is because he had a local board operator by the station. That was like, okay, I work my four hours or my three hours and I'd go home. It wasn't like someone working in the business with him on content and how do we get the right calls and how do we grow this thing and how do we get syndication. So that was the early days and it was tough. I remember being in a meeting. I've told the story in Antre years ago. I was in a meeting with my suit too because Dave had his suit on with head of WSM radio. I mean, one of the biggest radio affiliates in the nation, vice president's in the room, engineer that's been with them 40-something.

years. It's kind of like this staunch, just kind of like, you're scared to talk to him when you have a problem with the little radio show you're doing. And Dave was asked by them when he said, the meeting was set up to go, I'm taking the show national. You guys can be the mother station, but I'm taking it national. And that engineer looked across the table and said, well, how are you going to pull that off technically? Because we got our hands full. And Dave pointed to me. I'm a 25-year-old kid in my studio, he goes, he's going to do it. All these big wigs in there. And I, Daniel, I literally was just like, yeah. I'll do it. I went home that night and told my wife, I think Dave thinks I'm way smarter than I am. I have no clue what I'm doing. But what it did is Dave smart. Dave threw me in the fire. He's going to, he taught me scrappy then. We're going to bust down a wall. I'm going to work with you on this. We're going to do this together. But it made me have to go figure out how to do the thing. And the first thing was just get a little device that we dialed up our first local radio station. Our first affiliate was Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

a small little station, and we started there. And we thought this thing would just spread like wall fire in weeks. It didn't do that. We had to put the leg work out and grind and make that happen. It's so funny. I love that. That's inspiring to just hear, like, what you and Dave saw early on and how you've built it to where this thing is today is just, I mean, it's such a testimony to your tenacity, your vision. Use the word scrappy. I want to want to dive into this a little bit more because, you know, 1996, that means you guys went through all the panic around Y2K, and then all of the issues with 9-11, and then everything that happened in 2008, and now here we are again, 2020 in the midst of, you know, another big market disruption

because of the coronavirus. And so this isn't your first rodeo. You've seen this before. You talked about being scrappy. I think a lot of times in peacetime and things are going good. We get sophisticated, but when it gets hard, we got to get scrappy. Say more about, like, what is it about being scrappy? What does that look like? And what did you guys do back then that was scrappy? Someone asked me the other day, this is new for us in the production world, this going home and working and this virus. Have we ever seen anything like this before?

And we really haven't. We haven't ever had where, in our company, it was like work from home. The closest thing, and you mentioned this, I can come. compare it to is in the media world was 9-11. And what we did there was we had to do a shift in the way we did things. It couldn't be business as usual. We didn't have to go home per se, but we had to listen to the market. And they didn't want just business as usual baby steps. They were scared. They were like, what's going on? Dave became and the show became that outlet or that megaphone for the nation. People are like, do I pull out of, you know, the stock market? What do I, I mean,

the big fear, like we've never seen before, before that hit. And so just like today, we have to change what were maybe the messages. We have to, we're called our production team and our megaphones to be available for people to give them education, to give them hope. And so, if anything, this has made this time where we have to get a little more scrappy, because it's not business as usual. We're not just going in all our studios with all our production teams. We're like, how do we keep being that for America, that platform and that voice, but continue not only our normal episode rhythms, but like with what we're doing here, we need to be doing more of it. We need to be stepping up more of why everyone else is silent.

And that's what the beautiful thing is what you're doing with bringing the people in. And so what's that look like now? It's tough. We're in a studio, yeah, but we got to a skeleton crew that's working at home and then coming over here, being safe about it, knocking it out, I got people doing production in their houses, personalities, with little rigs we had to make with an iPhone camera or a lov mic that hooks to it. You've got to think out of the box instead of we're going to just go dormant, we're going to go silent, we're going to hope this just goes away in a week. Now we're going to plan on this going to be around for a while, so what can we do versus

living in fear or, oh, we can't do business as usable, so we're going to just wait and see what happens. A lot of scrappiness with my production team in the last two weeks. I've been inspired by you and your team. I mean, literally, maybe not quite duct tape and bailing wire, but I mean, just whatever it takes to get gear together and continue pushing out hope. You mentioned hope. You mentioned us being called to deliver hope into the marketplace. It seems like anytime there's a crisis that all the media outlets go to the fear of fear-mongering and the drama and sensationalizing everything that's going on. And what I've always loved about Dave, and you know this, is like he runs the opposite direction,

right? He goes so far extreme to the other direction of like, no, it's going to be fine, the voice of reason, the voice of hope in the midst of all the fear. How do you experience that? You know, when everyone else is going that direction and we're going upstream. You know, Dave has become like my second father. You think about a guy starting at 25 who's almost 50 and been mentored by him that many years. And so when that stuff happens, I become a mini Dave kind of.

It's so instilled in me on how we do business here that when Dave what he uses or someone uses in the building of the Buffalo running into the storm when the cows are freaking out and going the other way, I naturally have that a little bit. bit, but after working here so long and watch my leader stand in that and lead that way, that's how it's just naturally how I do it now. So when I talk to my team, the way we separate the fear in a time like this and job loss might be coming versus opportunity, you can be scared. We can have some fear here. But if you're going to just live in that world of fear, and listen to the news every day and in your mind just tell yourself, it's coming, I'm losing my job, and it's probably going to happen because that's how you're taking this.

It's like you're projecting that into it. Yeah, you're projecting it. So you have no control over that. So why would you live in that of, I cannot control this? What can I control myself today? So what are new things we can be thinking of out of the box? What are new opportunities, business owners listening to this or watching this can go, hey, how can we change our business of how we do it in a shop or an office, but at home?

What are things we could do today that our competition's not doing? Because they're living over in the fear and waiting for this thing to end. I think that's what I get the most from Dave and how we try to get our team rolling. Talk to these business owners who are hearing this right now thinking, yeah, I want to lead forward with courage. I want to bring hope to my team. I want to bring hope to our customers, let them know, hey, we're going to get through this together. And then there's kind of that voice in your head that's like, is this false hope? You know, like, I don't want to act like I'm kind of in denial or I'm out of touch of what's going on.

You know, false hope would be like if you're going, hey, guys, there is no coronavirus. Well, everyone's like, you're not credible because you're out of touch. How do you kind of find that sweet spot? Because, Blake, you and your team, you look at all the words and messages going out of this place. And I think we're doing a great job right now of bringing hope, but also not being naive. People are really hurting right now. How do you kind of, there's attention there maybe, that you balance? There is.

Again, we're not in total denial of that this thing is real. It's a real thing. And we've been told to stay at home. I mean, it's changed. The marketplace, the economy is gradually changing, of course, with this. So we're not going to live in this fantasy land of that's not happening. But we're also called to be a different voice of encouragement and hope like we just talked about. And if you turn on your TV now, everything is about the death toll or the economy.

And again, those things are real. But we're called to be a lighthouse. We're called to be there for the business owner, for someone in debt that might have just lost their job. So we're not going to stop doing that. We're going to be reporting what we believe and what we're seeing and not ignore the virus and what's going on. But there's nothing that's going to stop Ramsey Solutions if we have any control over it and doing what we've been called to do for 30 years of giving the hope and being there for the listener and the viewer. So that's the best way I can describe it. It's new to us.

I'm not going to say we had a plan for all this. But I think the point is that even though we didn't have a plan, we have something so instilled in us that we're going to run into it and we're going to keep doing or even doing more. It's a time and a season to do that. It sounds like even though you didn't have a specific tactical plan, there's still timeless principles you're falling back on. Definitely. When you're talking to your team, clearly they've rallied. Clearly, all systems go. but there's also a risk that something like this can fragment a team or cause a team to blow up.

What do you think have been the keys to keeping your team aligned? Not just the communication, but I mean, even coming into this, like, what did your team have going for? They're like, man, this is the foundation this thing is built on. And this is why our team's able to pivot so quick. When you say that, I think of two things. I think of in their world of production, they're so instilled of knowing that next episode has to come out. So they have a structure in, here's what has to happen each day in order to hit that goal. Some of them are daily. Some of them are every other week. Some of them are

further out. So naturally, that rhythm and that ownership of that is going to be there as the foundation. So when we talk about, all right, that blows up a little bit. You got to be at home. Well, we get together and think out of the box. Well, we still got to do the thing. And so, So how are we doing it different? How does it look different? How do we make sure we still hit that goal? It might be A, B, and C changes to, you know, something totally different, which has happened to us. The other thing I think of is that even when you're first hired here, one key thing we say, Daniel, to a new hire is, hey, our goal is for you to work roughly 40 hours here.

And in that 40, you bust your butt. We work hard in this building. But we're also, and Dave has instilled this for years. We're also about you going home and being with your family. So we tell them early, they're seasons. There's seasons where everything's going great. That kind of production flow I just described is rocking. You've got everyone doing the thing.

And then there's other times where there's a new initiative or a new thing or something we could take advantage of at that time. And someone might have to work later. Someone might have to come in on a weekend. But it's a season. It's rare. So I think knowing that and these guys and gals being used to that in production, This feels like a season.

It's a weird season, but it's still a season. And it's, okay, I'm going to maybe wear a different hat because I'm at home editing different than when I'm at the office because I don't have as much and they need me. I'm coming in and it looks a little different with a skeleton crew, whatever the case. But I think the reason the team's still going is because they're used to that flow of production and it's a season. It seems like you've also done a really good job of getting your team to, see how they're a part of the solution. And we got a big problem, lots of pivot, lots of disruption, new ways of doing things. Like, you're not grabbing all that and having to figure it out on your own. It's like you invited them in and said, guys, I need you to help figure this out with me.

And you guys are kind of in the boat together, right? Yeah. And for business leaders, listen, my hope is you already have or going forward in your hires, you always instill that sense of ownership. And I think our team has that with their megaphone, their personality, their show, their production thing. They have a sense of ownership already instilled in them that when I communicate with them during a season like this, I communicate in a way or of that sense of ownership and a team mentality. And if you don't have, if they live in that fear or they're staying at home and they freeze up, they need to know that you, in order to win a game, the basketball game, you have to have X amount of players, and they're one of those players.

And so them freezing up or the fear setting in or not being able to be a part of that team or take on the ownership, this is real life. You've got to feel the pains that we're feeling when it's down and the gains when it's up. And so we need everyone. So it's more of like a coach or a quarterback on the ownership side and the team side. And a good thing is we have been taught by Entree leadership and still that early. And our heart, hires in day one that they have that naturally. So when you get a freak time like this, some of that stuff's already in there. Like, you're a extremely seasoned leader, and you've been doing this a long time, and you've got all of this wisdom, and you can do stuff from a leadership

standpoint in your sleep that people just getting started are still trying to figure out. And I know that so much of your credentials as a leader come through battles that you fought and you've emerged as a better person on the other side. It's the storms that we face that make us stronger and more capable as leaders. What would you tell leaders going through this about who they hopefully are becoming as a result of the battle personally? It's good. I first would like to encourage them that they wouldn't be doing what they do today or they wouldn't in their position if they wouldn't someone that naturally has a drive and a leader mentality or a heart for others. And so the fear can still be there.

So my encouragement to them, and I can only speak for myself, is that this is a curveball. And it's your job as the leader to step up and not freeze and to shift and lead well and communicate with your team. I can't say that enough during this time. That's one of the biggest things I've learned is that communication is so key. I need it, not just to make sure they're okay and doing it. I need to know what's going on.

And I hate the gap in that that we lose when we're not in the building together. I can't walk down the hall and just check on someone. But I just encourage them in a time like this, it's a time to step up. Hopefully this just makes them sharper. We look back at this and go,

man, we talk about all the time, these kind of things in life make us better. And you got to look at it that way. But again, it's not going to just naturally happen if you don't step up and lead and try to be the communication, the messenger in this, the owner. Yeah. Yeah. So good. So good. Blake, I've really enjoyed this. I think, you know, I've been having conversations with our leaders here at Ramsey, but this one's special to me because, you know, when you're going through a battle, you just want to have hope. And one of the best ways to get that hope is to hear stories from warriors who have gone through battles before and can tell about how they made it through and how they were better as a result.

And you've got almost 25 years of those stories here. And so I'm encouraged, I'm inspired by your story. And I'm so grateful for what you and Dave have built. And to get to be a leader here with you and be a part of this is just, it's a true privilege. And I know our audience is encouraged today as a result of kind of fear and everything you've shared. So thank you. Well, thank you. And I tell you, it's great to have guys like you and the guys in that booth over there that feel like a team.

And when you got a rough patch like this and it's like this is wild, it's good to have each other's backs and know all of us are going through this together. So I appreciate you too. No doubt. Well, I just want to remind everybody out there that we are part of your team. If there's anything at Entree leadership that we can do to encourage you, to equip you. you don't hesitate to call us. Call our coaching team. We're doing free calls right now. We're just trying to be a resource that's available in the time of all this chaos that you guys are dealing with. Keep fighting. Keep going. Keep pushing through. When you persevere, you're going to

come out stronger on the other side of the storm. And together, we're going to make it through. We'll talk to you again really soon.