EntreLeadership - My Toxic Husband Is Hurting Our Business (and Our Marriage)

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Today, we’ll hear about: How a business owner faces her husband’s toxic leadership Dave’s advice for keeping legacy clean and fair for a father with two sons The right way to mentor emerging leaders through hands-on coaching instead of reckless delegation  A business owner struggling after bankruptcy and Dave’s personal experience with bankruptcy Next Steps: 📞 Have a question for the show? Call 844-944-1070 or send us a message: https://ter.li/ask-us 📚 Learn about the EntreLeadership System™: https://ter.li/system-p 💻 Get EntreLeadership Elite™ for your business: https://ter.li/elite-p ✉️ Sign up to receive tactical tools, advice and resources in your inbox every week: https://ter.li/enl 🏢 Attend EntreLeadership Summit: https://ter.li/summit  🎤 Attend EntreLeadership Master Series: https://ter.li/masterseries 📖 Order Dave’s new book, Build a Business You Love: https://ter.li/b4kru2 📄 Get the Strategic Planning Template today: https://ter.li/7z7qu6   Connect With Our Sponsors: 💼 Go to Belay Solutions or text ENTRE to 55123 for their free resource! 💻 Visit NetSuite today to learn more. 🧾 Visit Payority for a free consultation! 📈 Grab Sales Gravy's free resource to help you hire and lead better. Listen to More From Ramsey Network: 🪑 Front Row Seat with Ken Coleman 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💡 The Rachel Cruze Show 💰 George Kamel   Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, this is Entree Leadership, where I take calls from leaders like you about what it takes to win at any stage of business and leadership. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience leading in the trenches right alongside you. If you've got a question you want to ask on the show, fill out the form on Entreeleadership.com slash ask or call and leave a voicemail at 844-944-1070. That's 844-944-1070. Jennifer is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Hi, Jennifer. How are you? I'm good, Dave.

Thank you for taking my question today. Sure. What's up? So my husband, Anthony, and I own a veterinary practice. We have five veterinarians and around 40 people on our support team. Our gross revenue last year was $4.8 million, and we're on track to have gross revs of around $5.2 million this year. Wow.

My question for you is, what do you do when your spouse and business partner is the donkey on the team? So Anthony thinks that he's a good leader. He tends to lead by pushing from a place of emotion and negativity rather than leading towards our shared mission and values. When something upsets him or doesn't go his way, he can get very loud and he tends to say whatever comes to his mind to whoever is around. and it's typically not very pleasant. It sets the entire team on edge, and it can make for a very unpleasant work environment. My practice manager and I have tried to talk to him several times

about watching his tone, about choosing his words more carefully, and only complaining up to the rest of the leaders instead of venting to the entire team. His response to us is always something along the lines of, well, that's just the way I am. I shouldn't have to watch what I say. If they don't like it, they should just quit. I am the boss.

Better yet, I'll just quit. Sell this whole place to corporate and start a new practice so I can do things the way I want. Dave, how can I address his toxic attitude and behavior in a way that he will understand? How old is this little boy? He's 49. God, he's emotionally 14. Yes, he is. How long have you all been married, huh?

16 years. Yeah, I'm guessing this isn't the only place we see him acting this way, huh? No, it's not. So, yeah, I mean, you don't really have a business problem or a leadership problem or a donkey problem or anything like that. You've got a guy who's desperately needs to sit down with a counselor and with his pastor and start some personal growth. And I guess it starts with your marriage. So maybe you guys start with some marriage counseling, and he probably won't go because he doesn't do anything wrong. You're not wrong.

But I think you need to go anyway, and I think you need to start talking to a marriage counselor about how you talk to this guy. and because I my experience with coaching people with money stuff and and with coaching people with business as well is that when a wife starts speaking this way about her husband it's not long that they're that they're that they're separated and it doesn't work out because that lack of I mean you you truly don't like this guy I mean it's pretty crazy and there are days at a At a minimum, you don't respect him. Mm-hmm. And, I mean, you just called him a donkey on a major national podcast.

I mean, so it's pretty sad. So, you know, the way you've described him, everyone would agree with you. But I don't think that's the issue. I think when you fix how he treats himself and how he treats you, the natural byproduct will be he'll change how he leads. Okay. And so I think I start with the marital breakdown. And that's, you know, I would sit down with a good marriage counselor and go, this is what's going on, helping navigate getting this guy in here so I can save our marriage because I don't think we'll be married five years from now. I don't think you will.

If this continues the way it is, because here's the thing. One thing is for sure. Everything's growing or dying. And this has been deteriorating for a while. probably five years ago it wasn't quite this bad but there's something breaking down inside of old anthony here that's getting worse and by the day and so's the separation between you and him and the distance between you and him and the respect towards him and those kinds of things is getting worse not better and so yeah you're going to have to do something to throw a wrench in this and help

it turn the other direction to save it um otherwise we're not going to have to have to worry about whether we sell to corporate and go do our own thing because it'll be split up in the divorce. And it's a great practice. I'm going to $5 million practice. Wow. It's pretty incredible. Yeah. But anytime someone says it's just the way I am, then my answer is always, okay, change. Because the way you are kind of sucks. So it's time to change. And you get to choose these things. Everybody does as an individual. There's times I've done stuff like that too. And I just have the opportunity to grow up. I have the opportunity to change. And that's a very sad situation you're in, Jennifer. I'm very sorry for you. My goodness. I wish I had better news.

But yeah, it's a marriage counseling. That's where I started. It was me. If you've ever looked at your calendar and wondered when you actually get to lead, you're not alone. Most business owners aren't out of ideas. They're out of time. Somewhere along the way, growth turned to grind. You hired more people, added more meat, and somehow ended up with less focus than before. That's the growth trap, when success starts slowing you down. So here's the truth. Leadership isn't about doing everything yourself.

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That's E-N-T-R-E to 55-123. Well, you wouldn't build a house without a blueprint, so why would you try to scale your business without one? Here's the truth. Without a plan, you're just reacting and not leading. And if you're always reacting, you can't build the momentum your business needs to. grow. That's why we're giving you Entree Leadership Elite's Strategic Planning template

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practical steps that take you from putting out fires to actually growing. Get the strategic planning template today at Entreeleadership.com slash strategy or click the link in the show notes. Wayne is in Amarillo, Texas. Hi, Wayne. How are you?

Hello, Dave. I'm doing great. Good. How can we help today? Well, I want to say thank you so much for helping us small businesses. Sure. My honor. So I built a small IT services business in Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle.

We cover a little. little bit of the eastern New Mexico part as well. Last year, my stepson and I, we brought in just under a million dollars. We focused on the one-to-one personal touch. I don't do the managed service provided stuff. But right now, my stepson works for me full time, and I'm still on treadmill myself. He's been helping me for almost two years now, and he's interested in moving into the ownership here in Texas. At the same time, my son, who lives in Wisconsin, he served in the Navy, and he's now finished with that, he ran the nuclear reactor computers on the USS Ronald Reagan.

Wow. Well, he wants to move towards ownership and possibly build another branch up there. So my question is, should I keep everything under one umbrella or should I have a separate company up in Wisconsin? You're going to stay in Amarillo? Yes. You're just going to teach the Wisconsin Sun how to do what you and the Step Center doing? Basically, yeah, I'd probably travel up there and participate up there, hold his hand, make sure that everything is going well and do the same thing. up there.

Are you writing checks up there to get it started? Yes. Okay. How old are you? 61. I would just build two separate little companies because what I'm going to get left to the stepson and what I'm going to get left to the sun in your will. Okay.

And it's much easier and cleaner. And that way they eat what they kill. So if the stepson grows it here, huge and the son doesn't, then he got what he got, right? Or vice versa. They got what they got instead of having to go, well, I got to give up half of this dadgum wonderful thing I built because the one down there didn't do any good and they split it between us. So no, I think I'd keep them separate. I'd just open a new different LLC and see if you can run that one up there to four million. And meanwhile, teach the stepson to get that one to four million. And then you've,

you've created a nice legacy handoff for the two of them. And in the meantime, giving you something to do for the next decade while you continue to work on this stuff. But then I would just will it to them and, you know, make sure they know that, you know, when I die, you get, you're going to become the owner, if not before. Okay. Yeah, that makes it real clean. You see what I'm saying? Yes, I do. Yeah, I think that, I think that plan will work. Interesting, interesting situation. You've got yourself in there. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah, very well done. Good job, man. Keep it up. And, you know, just head up to Wisconsin for a while and see if we can get that one up and running. Caitlin in Kentucky says, Dave, I see leadership potential in some of my younger team members,

but they're not quite ready yet. How do you give them real responsibility without setting them up to fail? I put them over projects instead of people first and see if they can get some projects done, give them some tasks, some responsibilities, and where it's a measurable result, and we can see success with that. and then I would, you know, even, and sometimes then you could run them temporarily over a team, a small team to run a project or a person or two to knock that project out. And then you walk alongside them while they're doing that and mentor them in the relational

interaction with the team. So that, but you walk with them before you run with them. You crawl for you walk, you walk, you walk, before you run, right? And the same thing with them, and you're going to walk right beside them, hold them up, show them what to do. You don't just throw them up against something and hope it works. Now, we're going to say, here we go. And in the moment, you walk out of that meeting, you go, okay, okay, you did that pretty well,

but if you'd have done this or this or said this or that, you'd have been better off moving that project along. Instead, you know, that guy kind of pushed him back there. So anyway, you got ways to talk through this with people, but you have to be in the moment with them. And so they're sitting beside you. You're sitting beside them in the, in the, first time they drive the car. We don't just toss on the keys and go, I hope you don't wreck, you know, hope you don't fail. Good luck with that. You know, brakes on the right, you know,

don't step down on that thing on the far right. It's going to make it go. I mean, you don't want do that. You don't do that. You get in there and go, this is how this works. That accelerator is going to be a lot more sensitive than you thought it was in your mind. So just touch it barely and see how that feels. Yeah, here we go. And you just walk them through it and you're there real time while they're actually doing it. And then the more competence they show, the more you lengthen the rope of control. And so by the time they are excellent at it, that rope is really, really, really long. But we don't just toss them a 75-foot rope. I mean, we're seven inches to start with, right? We're right here with them. And so that's mentoring, that's discipling, that's training.

and you set up some real world scenarios where they really see the result of their actions, positive and negative, and you can walk with them and show them every step of the way. And it's worth the investment, by the way. Those leaders that you train like that are much better than a leader coming from another organization that you have to get to do it your way. When you say, look, you start this with the motive of what's good for that person. leadership is service leadership is influence so we're going this is what leadership means and we're

trying to be a leader here not a boss and so we want to lead we want to pull we don't want to push we want to pull we don't want to push we want to push we want to ask questions not make some many statements pull pull pull pull not push push push and that will definitely get you there kately excellent excellent question there kiddo proud of you keep it up keep growing those young leaders that's a big deal if you're working 60 to 7 hours a week just to keep your business running, you're headed for burnout. The only way to grow without running on empty is to stop working in your business and start working on your business. And that takes advice and accountability from people who actually make payroll. That's why you need

to join an advisory group. You'll get a coach and a circle of business owners like you who will help you stay focused and grow without sacrificing your nights and weekends. Find out if advisory group are right for you at Entreeleadership.com slash advisory groups or click the link in the show notes if you're listening on YouTube or podcast. Thanks for hanging out with us, America. If you want to help us out, we would really, really appreciate it. What you do is simply this. You click the subscribe button, the follow button.

Makes a lot of difference. And so, yeah, and the, you know, the share button, those kinds of things. Tell people about the show, tell them that we're here to help you, especially if you're running small business. We love small businesses. 54% of the gross domestic product in America today, all goods and services are created by small business people with 200 and fewer team members. Small business literally mathematically is the backbone of the American economy.

So when you and I can serve small business, help them to be better, help you to be better, we're helping America be better. We're helping the free enterprise system blossom and prosper, and we all get to be a part of it. So help us with that. It's what we're down here for, man. And how can we walk through that whole thing? Paul is with us in Canada. Hey, Paul, how are you? I'm well, Dave, and you? Better than I deserve. What's up? Well, I'll give you some background. My wife and I own a small AV and rental company here in Alberta at P. We have around five employees, and if everything goes well, by the end of this year, we'll be on track to hit just below a million in revenue. I'll give you a brief history.

During the peak of COVID, my bank called me up one day and said we are limiting our relationship and gave me 10 days to pay our commercial mortgage on our building we had. that was in 2020. Long story short, this past January, the building sold with a shortfall. In February, I sold my personal residence. April, they came to me and said we still owed 220,000. So this past July, it was able to get a small loan of 90,000, and we were able to make a deal to pay this off. But when I did that, and we got all the paint,

We're the bankruptcy papers and court papers back. I felt I was going to have a weight lifted off my shoulders, and it didn't happen. So I guess my question is to you, when you went through bankruptcy and you had everything paid off and you're back on your feet, did you feel immediate release or did it take time to get back and, you know, that emotional, recovery emotionally? I might still be recovering emotionally. Yeah, that's a little too much truth. Well, I can remember a couple of things that enter into this. The whole thing is there's a lot of manure in the story, and the only good thing about that much manure is it's really fertile.

You can really grow stuff, you know? And so with this much poop, there's got to be a pony in there somewhere, you know? It's just like, oh, my gosh. Um, I, I had fought, and you have two, it sounds like in your story, I had fought, um, probably 40 creditors and been through foreclosures and lawsuits. And, and I was 28 years old. And I had a brand new baby and our marriage was hanging on by a thread. And, uh, I had fought it for two and a half years. So the stress level and the weight of it was so stinking heavy that, and I didn't, I didn't, I wasn't smart enough or sophisticated enough to understand the weight I was carrying.

I just knew, I just knew it was like I was holding my breath the whole time, kind of, like under, trying to do a, you know, squat thrust of 500 pounds or something. I'm walking around with this bar across my shoulders, and I didn't even realize it was there. So when I filed actually signed the paperwork to file bankruptcy, I was driving away from the lawyer's office and two stoplights later, I did feel like I had sat down 500 pounds. I could just, it was like somebody had been standing on my chest and they got off. And because the fight was over, it was like the surrender was real.

And there was nothing else I could do. I was done. And it was over. and there was this tremendous release, tremendous peace there. Now, you know, that was that moment, and I can actually take you to that stoplight and said, I can go right there. I know right where it is. I know exactly where it is.

Still a stoplight there, 35 years later. Probably a few more between there in the lawyer's office now, but anyway, it's still there. And so that's a very clear moment. and then I went through, and it sounds like you're getting some of this too, so I'm, I may be not reading this properly, but I went through this thing where, um, that I was a failure and I lost all my confidence and that I... Yeah, confidence is definitely shaken. Yeah, and I didn't feel, uh, I didn't, I didn't want to walk into a room and knock stuff down anymore, you know? I didn't want to push a deal over. I didn't want to, and, um, I had to get back in the saddle to create some income to feed that little family, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't because I suddenly had an S on my chest because I had filed bankruptcy and gotten a weight off of me. It was the opposite. It's like, okay, who am I to be doing this? Who am I to be doing this? And I went through this period of time where I lashed myself over and over and over again with the lash, metaphorically. I didn't physically do that, but I'm saying I, you know, I, um, beat myself up. And that probably went on for some number of months, not years or decades. And then I had another moment where I went, hey, I did all I knew how to do.

I didn't leave anything on the field. I didn't bankrupt as a shortcut. I fought it two and a half years. They were coming the next morning to take the furniture out of our house, including the baby bed for the brand new baby. You know, I did all I knew how to do. Now, today when I look back, I could, there's stuff I would have, now I know to do that I wouldn't have known that. But with what I had, I used every tool in my belt. I left it all on the field.

I've got to give my, I've got to give that 28-year-old guy some grace. He did the best he could do with what he had to work with. and so I kind of went through this short process spiritually of just forgiving myself and going, okay, you're not as bad as this part of the story says you are. You're not as good as you used to think you were, but you're not as bad as this part of the story says you were. Now, what can I do to never be here again? And that started the whole thing of, I don't borrow money.

That started the whole thing of I'm 100% always generous. The next time a bank calls me, it will be to try to get me to buy them, not to call one of the notes because there are any notes on Dave. I'm never going to be there again. And because you can't predict when the savings and loan industry completely crashes because the president puts out an edict and shuts down an entire segment of the industry, which started the crash of me. You can't predict COVID.

and what do I do? I saw audio visual equipment for events. Guess what? In Canada, there's no events. You people shut the whole thing down tighter than California. It was unbelievable. You had nothing you could have done. There's nothing you could have done to get prepared for that,

except not owe the bank money. Yep. And you won't ever do that again, I hope. So, you know, I kind of went through this release, forgiveness, manure everywhere. What am I going to, I got this many lemons, how am I going to make some lemonade? And let's learn a few lessons from this so we're never back here again. And I'm going to do an autopsy on the dead patient and figure out what happened, so I never die this way again. And, you know, one of the things I came up with is I don't want to,

I don't want to have any relationship with any banker ever again. never the only relationship is I'm going to put some money down there in their bank and they're going to beg me to do anything that I'll because you know that that you know some see what I'm saying so um the reality is there's part of this is your fault the reality is part of it's COVID's fault the reality is part of it's a banker's fault and that's the reality and we can assign percentages of blame if we wanted to but it doesn't really matter we're still sitting where we're sitting and so I'm not going to expose myself

to a government that's out of control again. I'm not going to expose myself to a bank that's out of control and has no soul whatsoever again. And then I can't blame me next time. And so when COVID hit us, I didn't have any banks calling me. And I'm not putting that in your face. I'm just saying because I went through the same thing you went through 30 years ago, right? So it's forgiveness. It's forgiveness.

It's perspective. it's an autopsy. And then we start looking out the windshields to the rearview mirror. Yeah. Yeah, Arbite kind of just decided that they were getting rid of 25% of their customers during COVID. So it hit us. Yeah. We were the lucky quarter.

And, you know, you may be different, but I'm from Tennessee and I'm a hillbilly. I'll never forget that guy. I don't care where he is. I know him and he's still in Nashville. and wherever he is, I'm going to stay completely away from. They will get no revenue off of this thing called Ramsey. There will never be any intersection with that guy ever again, because he's got no soul, and I want nothing to do with that guy.

You know, and that bank was run by people that's that guy. And so if you don't want to be permanently angry with that guy, that's okay, but be permanently angry about the situation and not put yourself in a position where they can ever do it again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they screwed y'all. I mean, there's no question.

I mean, I don't doubt that a bit. And it's the same thing happened in our situation, but a little different. But I mean, it's the same concept of we really don't care if we can, if we kill 10% of our customers because we'll make so much money on the other 90%. And that's just corporate freaking bankers, you know. And so anyway, that's, but what did you do wrong? Well, I mean, you signed a piece of paper that let them do that, called a mortgage. Yeah.

So, and at the time you did it, you thought you were really smart. And me too, dude, me too. You know, it's like I've done some stupid butt stuff at the time. I thought I was really brilliant. And it's like, God, but you know, here's the great news. The great news is you didn't fail at business. You failed at real estate. Yeah.

So the business that you're running is still incredibly viable, and you're still incredibly good at it. Nothing you did was a business mistake. It was a real estate mistake, a debt mistake. Yeah, correct. Yeah. So, I mean, that's the way I crunch through this in my own mind. What part in this was mine?

I didn't try to be a victim of them, but I also didn't take 100% of the responsibility because the reality is it wasn't 100% on me. I wasn't late. Me either. Yeah. Yeah, they just pull up and go, oh, well, we just don't like, and, you know, you're in the events business, and we don't like you now because nobody can do events because we declared COVID.

So once we declare COVID, you're all dead, you know, so it's like, oh, my God, it's horrible. Yeah, I'm sorry, man. I'm sorry you went through this. But the great news is it's done. And you can use the windshield, which is way bigger than the rearview mirror. and that's called forgiveness and grace of yourself. And you just move on and go to the next thing. And let's go make a whole stinking bunch of money and pile it up in somebody else's bank.

Oh, yeah. That's already been done. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And if that guy that works over there that did this moves to your bank, your bank's going to lose a customer. You know, because this guy can't be trusted. He's a freaking shyster, which is a banker. I mean, there you go.

I mean, it's just, oh, God. It's unbelievable. Man, I just, I feel for you. I know what you've been through and what you're going through. But it is a spiritual exercise to take this many lemons and turn them into lemonade. And that's turning the windshield into the way we're viewing things instead of the rearview mirror is the way we're viewing things. We're going to get what we get from the event. We're going to leave it back there and move to the next thing.

And this is an event. And it's a pain in the butt. and I'm sorry you went through that. You're a good man, though. I can hear it in your voice. I can hear the way you carry yourself. You're a good leader, your good business guy. Move on with that.

And this is just something that happened to a good guy. And let's go on. Cool, man. Thanks for calling, Paul. You're a good man. Did I mention that already? Yeah, you are. Hey, folks, remember better a wary warrior than a quivering critic.

This world needs more high-quality leaders. So take courage and lead. I'm Dave Ramsey, your host. Thanks for joining us on Entree Leadership.