EntreLeadership - Should I Sacrifice a High Salary for Business Growth?
Episode Date: September 23, 2024Today we’ll hear about: How to determine your salary as a business owner Why delegation is the key to running a successful business How raising prices is essential for all businesses A b...usiness owner struggling with how to prioritize clients 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 Offers From Today's Sponsors NetSuite: https://netsuite.com/ramsey BELAY: https://www.belaysolutions.com/entreleadership Payority: https://www.payority.com/entreleadership Trainual: https://trainual.com/entre Found: https://found.com/entre Listen to More From Ramsey Network 🎙️ The Ramsey Show 💸 The Ramsey Show Highlights 🧠 The Dr. John Delony Show 🍸 Smart Money Happy Hour 💡 The Rachel Cruze Show 💰 George Kamel 💼 The Ken Coleman Show Learn More About Your Ad Choices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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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 leadership
and business.
I'm Dave Ramsey, your host with over 30 years of experience in the trenches.
I'm in here as the CEO of Ramsey making these decisions every day.
This is not a think tank.
This is not theory.
I'm not a college professor who's never made payroll.
Made payroll last week, make it again next week.
This is how we do it around here.
So if you want to talk to a practitioner, you got the job.
the right place. I'll help you with your business. We help businesses, tens of thousands of them across
America do better and move up through the stages of business. Give me a call at 844-944-1070. Or you can go to the
website at Entreeleadership.com slash ask. Leave your question there. We'll get back to you and make you a
caller on the show. Alex is in Nashville. Hi, Alex.
How are you?
Hey, Dave.
I'm doing good.
How are you?
Better than I deserve.
How can I help?
Well, I'm the owner of a pool service business in Nashville.
Did about a million in revenue last year on track to do about the same this year.
I'm just struggling to figure out what I should be paying myself.
I make about one 18 a year right now, and we don't have a ton of profit left over.
We've got a couple of trucks we're trying to pay off.
Just trying to figure out how much cash I should have in the business.
I have a personal emergency fund, but I sort of haven't transferred my financial values over to my business.
Been in business about eight years, so just kind of...
Trucks you need to pay off.
So you have debt on trucks?
A little bit, yeah.
How much?
I think it's 90,000 on eight trucks.
Okay.
All right.
Well, the first thing I would do is to put your household on the minimum that it can operate on.
What would it take to operate your home?
About 70,000.
Okay.
So I'm going to start taking home 70 grand.
I'm going to leave the rest of it in the business to reduce the debt and build retained earnings.
Any profits past your basic living expense salary, you need to clear the debt up.
Because if you get 90,000 worth of debt off the books on a million-dollar business,
your profits are going to, your margins are going to go up.
Yep.
And so you've got a cash drain on you here.
You're trying to drive the boat with an anchor out the back.
and so what we teach is different than the debt snowball and the stuff we teach on personal finance.
We teach small businesses to take your net profit after you pay yourself a living wage.
Your case is 70 grand.
Whatever your net profit is each month then, I would put either 20 or 30 percent of it aside
as a retained earnings buildup to grow the business and fund any shortfalls or any bad months or stuff like that.
and then the rest of it, the other 80 or 70%,
I would throw at the debt until the debt is gone.
So it sounds like that that's 50,000 a year,
so probably 40,000 going towards the debt,
you'd be debt-free in a couple years on those trucks.
Yeah, I mean, that sounds about right.
I guess once I would be debt-free,
is there an ethical number or percentage?
No.
No.
The amount is not an ethical issue.
The only thing that drives your amount is you need to leave enough in the business to grow the business and for the business to be healthy.
Our businesses have never had debt, so I simply apply this formula.
I take a percentage of our net profits out before I get paid and set aside for retained earnings and the rest of it's mine.
I don't leave anything else down here except retained earnings.
Okay.
But I continually grow my retained earnings, and it has never grown as fast as the business has grown.
So I never really get there.
But at this stage, with $300 million top line, my retained earnings are tens of millions of dollars, obviously.
But it's still not as much as I would like for it to be in a business size.
But I still grow it a little bit every month.
A percentage of our net profits go to retained earnings automatically.
Everything else is mine.
And I take it home.
And then once it's home, I do change.
charity work with it, philanthropy work through our family foundation.
We grow our personal investments.
We enjoy it.
But our generosity, our enjoyment, and our investments all happen at home once we pull
it out of the business.
And no, there's not an unethical amount.
One thing I like to teach people is that once you take money home, that you always are
living on less than you're taking home.
and that leaves an overflow, an excess to be used for generosity and the helping of others.
And as long as you're, as long as you are allowing some margin for generosity, substantial
generosity, then that, that's your only ethical measure.
And so if you're taking 10 million home and you give away a half million,
or you take 10 million home, you give away a million, you know, you're, you've got a great life
and you've got an unbelievable generosity.
Yeah, outrageous generosity.
So if you take a zero off of that and take 100,000 home
and you put 10,000 in generosity, you live on 90, that's still,
you're still, you keep the, the only ethical thing is keep your lifestyle at home
smaller than your income so that you have room for generosity.
And then that'll drive your ethics.
And that's a Jewish principle called the Havdala service.
And Rabbi Daniel Lappen taught it to me in person and in his book,
Thou shall prosper. Both. That's exactly how we do it. So good stuff, Alex. Good question.
Sounds like you got a good business. I'm proud of you. Keep it up, man. Let's get those trucks paid off
and then go to the moon with this baby. This is the Entree Leadership podcast.
If I ask you what your profits and losses were this week, would you know?
The hard truth is if you don't stay on top of your numbers, your business will fail. The Bible says,
be diligent to know the state of your flocks and herds. It's a proverb that was written
in an agrarian culture.
You have to know what's going on with your inventory.
You have to know what's going on with your money.
You have to stay on top of it.
You cannot out-earn disorganization
and lack of systems and processes.
But you can use simple practices
and wise decision-making
to have a successful growing business.
You don't even have to be a money expert to do this.
And the Entree Leaders' Guide to Business Finances,
you'll learn the profit principles
and the key practices that we use here at Ramsey.
over the last 30 years. It's free. This free guide, did I mention it's free, will simplify
the foundational components of managing your revenue, managing your expenses so you can build
your business on a solid ground. Go to ontareeladership.com slash finances to download the
free Entree Leaders Guide on finances to business finances. You're going to enjoy reading this.
It sounds boring as crud, but it's actually worth reading. And because I got to tell you,
handling your money well makes you have some money and that's never boring that that that you know
there's not a boring moment when you're talking about stacking cash payton is in san antonio hi peyton
welcome to the entree leadership podcast um i am a survey project manager out of san antonio work for a
company we do my office does around four million a year with about 15 team members um my question for you
the day is we in in our role in our job we're typically working with limited staff options and
training staff so i find that my job i have three main priorities it's my team members and their
health um and their work environment their culture then it's production key seen product and then i have
client acquisition and client relations.
And I find it very difficult to balance those three.
And I'm trying to figure out if there is a correct order to prioritize those three categories
as opposed to just seeing which one slips up at different times.
The problem with prioritizing them as your process for deciding how to allocate your time
is it could end up that you spend all of your time on the number one priority
and none on the other two,
which is not going to keep your business open.
Right.
So you can't really force, rank, prioritize,
and say, I really can't get to number two until I get number one done.
That's not going to work, but you can just say,
okay, I need X number of hours a week in client acquisition,
or we don't keep more clients coming in than we lose to atrophy.
Okay.
I mean, you're going to lose a certain number of clients and you need to put more in than that so you have some growth net.
Net, you follow me?
So how many hours a week in client acquisition have you got to do to do that?
And I just say I need to allocate that many hours to that.
Culture and team training and so forth, the same thing.
I would just say how many, I would experiment with some hours.
Have you ever run a time study on yourself and say this is what I spend now?
No, it just, I mean, right now it feels like it all just slips through.
I would say that a lot of my job is production in training people and getting stuff out the door is a lot of my time, probably 80%.
We do have a pretty high client demand, so we have the luxury of a lot of clients coming to us,
but we still have daily reports trying to keep them updated.
And that usually those weekly updates tends to fall through the cracks with what I'm doing.
Instead, it's like I get the job.
The 15 people on your team, what do they all do?
Well, we have field crews, so that's half of them.
And then the rest is other office cad techs that are doing the drafting.
But we kind of have a bottleneck on the top side.
So I'm a licensed surveyor.
We have one other license surveyor in-house.
Yeah, but do you have any admin?
We have one admin.
Are you understaffed on admin?
Because weekly reports should be done by admins.
The lead surveyor that's in charge of the whole stinking place
doesn't need to be doing weekly reports.
That needs to be delegated.
I guess we typically, the tradition is whoever's the project manager
is also the only client point of contact for that project.
That's fine, but the admin can just send it out in their name.
Yeah, that's a good point.
I've not thought about doing that.
Yeah, because doing those weekly reports is great
because it keeps the communication lines open with the client.
Client knows the project's rolling down the hill like it's supposed to be going down the hill.
Everybody's happy with that communication,
because communications moves out a whole lot of rough edges and everything in life.
and so that communication is vital,
but it's not necessary that I have to push the button on that.
My assistant can push the button on that.
That's a great point.
Yeah, so let's find some things like that to get off of you,
and then the things that you have to do,
you have to sign off on stuff as one of the two surveyors.
You don't have a choice.
That's a law.
Right.
And so you've got to review that because your neck is on the line.
You've got to look at that.
That's the time you've got to do.
You've got to train the people.
Now, do you have senior people in the field that could do some of the training?
We do.
We do.
And they are training a lot in the field side of things, and they only have to come to me for, you know, the rare occasion.
So why is it taking up all your time?
Well, it's mostly on the CAD side and the office drafting and putting together design surveys
and all the different types of deliverables that we put together.
But a cat is not.
require you to do a cat. A cat operator is a cat operator. That's a technician, man.
They can't do their work without you doing it.
Well, a lot of the people we hire are green, and so we have to train them in-house, pretty much.
And with our company, you know, specified our company specs on all their formatting and drafting
and textiles and all that training, I guess we're thin on senior staff.
It's me and one other.
So we're doing all the training on that.
And yes, they start.
But there ought to be an end to the training.
It shouldn't be odd infinitum.
It shouldn't go on forever.
You ought to be able to train somebody and then walk away.
Yes.
Otherwise, your training didn't take.
Yeah, I think the difficulty in the training is we do,
because of the high variety of work that our particular firm does,
a lot of firms will stick with one thing.
So they're going to do a lot and block surveys.
and then it's like a mill turning them out, right?
We do quite a variety of work,
so sometimes we don't see another type of those jobs
for another two or three months,
and then by the time it comes back around,
it's hard for them to keep up with that pace.
But I think we're thin on.
Listen, you're putting time on, okay,
you call me up because you're time stressed,
and the answer to solving your time stress
is create delegatable systems and processes and people.
You're either putting people in that you can't trust
or you haven't got the emotional maturity to turn loose
once they've proven their competence.
There's a whole lot of everything comes back to me
and my whole conversation with you.
It's up to me, it's up to me, it's up to me.
And you're feeling, I can hear the pressure, the stress in your voice.
I hear it in your vocal cord.
You're carrying the weight of this whole stinking place.
and you're not shoveling it downhill at all.
You've got to get some people in place like delegating those admins to push a button.
You've got to get these CAD guys up where they can freaking deliver.
Their job is production.
If they can't produce, then you hired the wrong people.
They've got to be able to do it.
If I hire technicians that can't do the work after a little bit of basic stuff,
then I hired the wrong people.
And even if they are green, I've got to get them moving.
And so you've got to get, and you've got to,
to get your senior people in the field that can do the field training more and more and more.
So that all your time, because everything I'm bringing up, it's like you feel like you've got to do it.
And I got to get that all for you for you to be able to move to the next level because you're stuck on a treadmill.
Everything's dependent on you.
The production, everything.
And so you're operating what ought to be a pathfinder or a trailblazer business at a treadmill level
because you haven't put delegatable people and delegatable systems in play.
that you trust enough to hand it off.
And so one of the great joys of my life, Peyton,
was when I reached a point that I could trust the competence
and the integrity of different team members,
which meant I could walk away and work was getting done at a level
that I was proud of without me touching it.
And that gave me scale immediately.
It's the only way you get scale in business.
If you've got to touch everything, the ability to scale is horrible, and if you've got to touch everything,
it's very stressful because you really do have this 300 pound weight on your shoulders.
And you're walking around with stooped over going, God, this is killing me.
You're going home at night.
I can hear it.
You're exhausted.
So we've got to get some people and some processes in place in the next three months.
I'm going to give you three months to do it.
I just made that up, okay?
But still, that's the most time you got, three months.
You've got to be delegating more.
And the only way you can delegate is if you can trust their competence
and you can trust their integrity.
And so you lean in and you watch for patterns of the workflow.
You check stuff.
So I get like 200 emails a day,
and 180 of those are just for me to not be surprised
by something that's going on around here.
They don't require me to do anything.
It's just keeping me in the loop,
and it's me getting my fingers on the pulse of this place
knowing what's going on.
So I'm checking accounting numbers.
I'm checking key performance indexes,
and I've got communication emails coming at me,
and I can tell what's going on with 1,100 team members.
And most of who I don't even know their name today
because a normal course of turnover in a business
and the normal growth curve that we've been on,
I haven't been able to keep up with their names.
I used to know everybody's name and their dog's name and their kids' name,
and I just don't anymore.
But I'm still getting the vibe off of what's going on around here, and you can too.
I'm going to send you a copy of the little quick read we did called Delegation,
and then you can jump in on Elite at our website and join and get in there,
and you can learn a whole lot about making these moves.
You've got the right frustration, but the solution is not how we prioritize your time.
the solution is you need to offload some crap you can quit doing everything superman um my wife used to when
i would come home sounding like you patin my wife would say you're not jesus that's his job one messiah
only one allowed we don't have two and so you you can't carry it all you're not omnipotent you don't
know all the answers if you're the only one that knows all the answers this business is screwed
and so that's the thing you got it you got to start growing you got to start growing delegatable system
processes and people, where you trust the competence, trust the customers care in someone else's
hands other than just your own. And so I appreciate how responsible you are for all this and how
diligent you are, but it's killing you. I can hear it in your voice. Hey man, thank you for calling in.
You're a good man. You're going to do great. You're a young leader. You're going to get this fixed.
You're going to get it straightened out and we're going to help you. Thank you for calling in, Peyton.
This is the Entree Leadership podcast.
I'm Dave Ramsey, your host.
This is the Ontario Leadership Podcast, one of the top leadership podcasts in America today because of you people.
Thank you for spreading the word for us.
Thank you for subscribing and following and sharing the link and telling people to listen to this crazy man on the microphone.
That's been doing us a long time.
Question of the day from Toronto.
Darcy says, we're at the point where we would like to raise our rates in our digital marketing and advertising agency.
We can easily do that for new clients.
We'd like to raise them for existing clients as well.
How do we communicate the change without losing too many clients?
And how much should we raise them by?
A lot going on there.
I think the first thing you've got to do, yes, everybody gets raised.
No one gets a pass.
And I learned this in the rental real estate business.
And I still do it to the real estate business.
and I still do it to this day.
We raise rents every single year on every property.
You're kidding.
No, sometimes $25, but we're going to do.
We never leave it the same because leaving it the same over and over and over again,
the longer it stays the same, the more entitled the customer feels to that rate.
And then when you do move it 10 years later, after you've been keeping it low for the good customers,
they have an absolute duck fit because they feel an ownership in your rates.
Advertising on this podcast or on the Ramsey Show, we take in tens of millions of dollars a year in advertising revenue.
Churchill Mortgage has been with me for 30 years on the air.
Zander Insurance has been with me 25 years on the air.
I go up on them every year.
And they're excellent customers.
As a matter of fact, both those guys are personal friends now.
But I go up on them every year.
Sometimes not much.
Sometimes we make other concessions in the deal.
Maybe give them a few more spots here or there.
We may bonus them some stuff.
But the actual card, the rate card, goes up every year.
Because we don't want to get this mentality that this is a fixed price.
and it's good forever.
And, well, I'm a good customer.
I deserve the, why would you go up on me?
I'm a good customer.
Because we go up every year.
That's what we do.
And because you get, there's an entitlement thing
that happens in a service business
if you don't do that.
So, yeah, you've got to go up on everybody,
certainly the new ones and then the others.
Now, then the question becomes how to communicate it
and how much to go up based on your email coming in.
It's a good question.
Darcy, I like it.
I don't know how much.
much, you've got to look at the rate, and you've got to look at what other, what some of the
competitors are doing, how do you flesh out? I mean, are you cheaper than everybody else in the
market? Then you've got a lot of room to go up. If you're the most expensive in the market
everywhere, then you're not going to go up much. It's more symbolic if you go up. But I would
just, you know, the way I would communicate it then is the truth. And the truth is, hey, we're a small
business and collecting the right amount in a high inflation environment is the only way we get to
stay open. And so we have to raise some rates to remain profitable because our costs have gone up
in this high inflation environment. And I'll guarantee you your costs have gone up. I'll tell you
the one that went up the most is your payroll because mine is. And it's not necessarily because
we hired more people. It's because we're paying people more than we ever have before because
the marketplace demands that and that payroll costs is higher. So I'm going to pass that on to my
advertisers. I'm going to pass that on to you people that buy a book from me. I'm going to pass it on
because I've got to make a profit to keep paying the people that work here. Otherwise,
I have an unstable, unsustainable situation here called an unprofitable business. We don't run a
not-for-profit, at least not on purpose. That's not our goal. And so, and it's not, that's not a greed statement.
it's just the way, it's the philosophy of life.
So I would just tell them the truth.
Hey, we're a small business.
We haven't gone up on our rates in a long time,
but this inflation is kicking our butt.
Our payroll's kicking our butt.
The cost of labor is caught kicking our butt.
The technology cost in a digital world's kicking our butt.
And so I'm sorry, but we've got to go up on our rate X.
And if they get mad and leave, that's going to be part of life.
You're going to always have attrition of customers in business.
You never have any, no businesses have a,
100% customer retention for 25 years.
There's no such thing.
If you do, something's wrong.
Okay?
In the apartment renting business,
if you've got an apartment complex with 300 units,
you need some vacancy.
If you don't have any vacancy,
it means your rates aren't high enough.
If you're 100% full year after year after year
on your 400 unit apartment complex,
your rent's too cheap.
Your rent should be gone.
going up, going up, and it should be pushing the edge of the market that pushes some people
out all the time. And sometimes the people that pushes out are sad. You didn't want to lose them,
but it's just how the math worked out. And so you're going to lose a customer and you're going to
lose some you don't want to lose. You're going to lose some you do want to lose. And by the way,
if you have a high-maintenance customer that takes up all your time because they're a but,
this would be a real good time to deal with them by jacking their rate. You need to get paid for
that maintenance or let them hit the road one of the two or both and you're okay with it either way
so that that's you know it's a maintenance fee because you're high maintenance you're a princess
you're a problem child and you know you that's you don't have to say that but i mean that's how you
structure the rate on the thing and i'm perfectly fine doing that there's nothing unethical about that at all
and so i prefer not to deal with them at all so when we've got high maintenance customers we just we just send
them on their way. We let them go bother somebody else because they take up 80% of our time and they
make us 4% of our money and they're not worth it. So hit the road check. Now that's the thing.
And that's what you're doing. So you communicate it by telling the truth. My costs have gone up.
I'm a small business. I can't absorb all this. I'm sorry, but our rate's going to go up.
We've studied the market. We're going to try to not go up as much as some people are,
but we're only going up this much and this is what our new rate is. And just send out a note,
some of your key clients you may want to call them and talk it through with them that's fine
and then every year do it again don't let it go another 12 months every 12 months you need to go up
on your rate so you never get back here again with this feeling of oh i don't know about my old
customers how are they going to react they're going to react because every year it happens it's
just how that's part of the deal every year they go up on me but every year they provide me
better service and i make money off of the service that their digital marketing makes me more than it
cost me. And so as long as I do that, then they're services free ultimately. And that's what
you're going for. It's a really good question, Darcy. Really good question. Thanks for joining
us on the Entree Leadership podcast. Thanks for hanging out with us, America. This is a podcast by
small business for small business. You small business people are heroes. You are the backbone
of the U.S. economy. Most people in America work for small businesses.
they don't work for large corporate America.
And they're really happy about that too
because corporate America will piss on you.
They'll step on you like you're a roach
and they'll just leave your carcass in the street.
They don't think anything about it.
Small business people are family people.
They love their people.
They take care of their people.
Not all of them, but you've got a much higher probability
being treated right working for a small business
than you do working for goobers in corporate America.
So I'm happy to serve you.
I'm happy to be one of you.
I'm honored.
I'm proud.
You deserve to win.
You deserve to be successful.
I want you to make so much money.
All your dreams come true.
You work your butts off out there.
I know who you are.
I've worked with you for 25 years, and I am one of you.
So thanks for hanging out with us.
Ashley's in Fort Worth, Texas.
Hey, Ashley, how can we help?
Hi.
So I own a wedding planning business in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
I'm 29 years old. I've been in business for nine years now. I have a team of five and we do about
350,000 in revenue each year. Right now we serve pretty much any type of wedding. We do the low-level
services like month of coordination, but also high-end services like wedding weekend planning that
obviously are a lot more involved, but are higher ticket items for our company. We're very successful
at both of them. But I worry that by offering the whole spectrum and not just
a certain niche is hurting our chances at getting those higher-end clients.
And so my question is, should we put more effort into marketing to high-income clients
knowing that it would make less time for or even potentially eliminate our lower service
clients altogether?
There's not a moral or ethical reason to do this.
It's just a choice.
There's not even a business acumen reason.
I mean, it's not like one's right, one's wrong.
It's just what do you want to do with you?
your life kind of a thing. So let's run it down two possible tracks for just a second. One track is you
do away with the lower end line and you accentuate the higher end line. You raise your prices a little
more. You get into the real concierge business, if you will, and you're just really catering to
the wealthier bride and groom that are going to spend some serious money on a weekend, right? And you're
part of that money they're going to spend. And if that's what gives you great joy and you see yourself,
having a staff double the size you have now, doing twice as many of those as you do now,
three times of many as you do now, 10 years from today.
If you see that picture in your mind 10 years from the day and you love that picture,
then that's the route to go.
I'm fine with that.
And that's not a bad plan at all.
The other thing you could do is staff to divide the product lines by branding and by staffing.
and rebrand your lower end stuff to where it's not confusing to the customer.
They know they're getting the Chevrolet, and we've also got the Bentley's over here, right?
But I've got this team that does the Chevrolet delivery method, delivery items,
and then I've got the team over here that handles the Bentley's.
I'm making up cars here, but you know what I'm talking about, right?
Sure.
So, Cadillac Chevrolet, whatever metaphor we want to use here.
I'm saying, you know, and it might be that you have a handful of people delegated to that other, that cheaper brand and give it a different name, maybe even different color scheme, a different graphic look, where it's broken apart.
It's close enough that they know it's you, but they also know it's different.
You know what I'm saying?
So then you can run two separate P&Ls.
You can run the P&L on that cheaper product line.
and make sure it maintains its margins based on volume.
You're probably running a smaller margin, higher volume on that line.
And then on the other one, you're going to run a smaller volume,
much higher margin on the high end line.
And you can split it off and run it that way.
Since you've got that built,
I probably would try that move first.
And if it's still stealing your joy, can it?
close it and move those people, move those people back into the high-end, high-margin
side that used to work the Chevrolet side, okay?
Sure, yeah.
What you're saying is actually very confirming.
I had a very similar idea, and the main reason for it is one of my team members,
specifically, all of us have very different goals and just needs of, like, what the business
provides for them.
And one of them, who's been with me the longest, actually, she has a full-time job
and does this on the side.
and she pretty much exclusively does serve those low-level packages.
So it feels as if removing it would be basically cutting her out of the business altogether,
which doesn't feel right or fair either.
So what you're suggesting is very confirming for sure.
Yeah, but I mean, you need somebody more than just one part-timeer doing it, don't you?
Correct, yes.
Okay, all right, but that's just that legacy employee you want to take care of is what you're saying.
Correct.
Okay, that's good.
I like that.
I like the spirit of that.
The other thing that comes to mind as we're sitting here talking about this is the person, their personality, their training, the way they carry themselves, it's different at a Motel 6 than it is a Ritz-Carlton.
Correct.
And it's okay that you're hiring people that have the Ritz-Carlton-l-look-tone feel over on the high side, and it's okay that the people on the other side are,
you know, they're wearing their blue jeans, right?
Mm-hmm.
And so that's why I want you to allocate your labor exclusively to one or the other
because I think these are not the same people.
Agreed.
I'm thinking.
I don't know your business, but I think I can envision that that motel, hotel idea,
that metaphor is probably plays pretty close.
Yes, yes, sir.
Yeah, it's because, I mean, you know, I mean people in the Ritz that would never work in the other situation.
I mean, people in the Motel 6 that could never, they wouldn't let them in the Ritz.
You know, and so, and not because they're bad people, it's just a different type of a human being.
Different dress, different walk, different training, different feel, the way they think about the customer is different and all of that.
And none of that is neither good nor bad in the situation.
So sounds like you're a great executive.
Sounds like you're a great owner, actually.
I'm excited for where this is going for you, and you're thinking very good.
What you're doing is good strategic thought.
And a lot of people on a business your size haven't ever had a strategic thought.
So you're really ahead of the game by doing that.
I'm really proud of you.
Good work.
Keep it up there.
Very, very well played.
Good stuff.
Remember better or weary 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 listening to the Entree Leadership Podcast.
