EntreLeadership - The Best 65 Minutes You Could Spend for Your Business in 2026

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Dave Ramsey talks about the goals that challenged him and built the foundation for what exists today. Get the blueprint for creating unstoppable momentum in your own business.    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   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

Merry Christmas from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions. This is Entree Leadership, the show where leaders like you learn 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. And since it's Christmas, we've got a special gift for you. An exclusive talk straight from our 2023 Entree Leadership Master Series. You'll learn why intentional planning is the engine that drives your business business. forward. Plus five things, every goal needs to get real results. Because if you want to grow your business, you need to know what you're aiming at. This is the playbook I've used to grow my

business over all these years. And it's helped thousands of others grow theirs. So, settle in. Let's talk about how to make next year your best one yet. Planning started at a really, really young age for me. I think I was just a little business nerd to start with. I mean, I used to buy these leftover or the seconds little pieces of leather from tandy leather company. Does anybody remember Tandy leather company? And I got these little leather tools, and I could put someone's name with these little leather tools on these little pieces of strip of leather and snap on each end, and then paint in their name. And so I'm selling them out of my locker in mass. I mean, I had a booming business in middle school.

eighth grade and I got called to the principal's office because I saw this activity around my locker and thought I was selling something else. Yeah, so I've always been a little business nerd and kept a P&L and I don't know why I knew to keep a P&L. I guess my parents were entrepreneurial and maybe taught me that. Dad had me cutting grass when I turned 12 years old by the time I was 13. I had 27 yards to cut and he made me keep a profit and loss statement on that to pay him back for his lawnmowers that I were tearing up. So, yeah, we've always been a business nerd.

And mom and dad, as I said, were entrepreneurial. They were in the real estate business. So they took us to sales conferences and motivational events and things like that. And so I'm 12 and 13 and 14 years old, sitting on the front row listening to the Zig Ziglers of the world, and the Earl Nightingales and the Cavett Roberts and the Charlie Tremendous Jones, the motivators of the 60s and the 70s and even up into the 80s, a lot of these men. I got to know later as friends before they passed. Some of them passed before I was actually even into adulthood,

but they were the people. Radio in the 1940s and 1950s was broadcast. Television did not have brand penetration into the American household. The average American did not have a television until the late 1950s. And so in the 40s, and certainly in the most of the 50s, radio was king. And in those days, of course, the president would come on, and Roosevelt was famous for coming on and doing fireside chats with the people to encourage them through the Great Depression.

And then with World War II, he announced the bombing of Pearl Harbor on radio. And so radio was the thing. And also on radio in those days, because it was the only medium that people had any access to and mass. There were radio shows, dramas on the radio, and they would read scripts and play characters and the Lone Ranger and Tonto, hi-ho, silver! And the horses would come running through with the coconuts, right, to make the sound of the horses' hooves.

And so the sound effects and all of that stuff was born. In Chicago on WGN Radio, which is still a mammoth AM radio station, it's iconic, partly because it is a clear channel station, meaning it carries and reaches all over the place and carries the, of course, the baseball games today is why a lot of people would tune into WGN. But anyway, on WGN, in those days, there was a radio show called Sky King. And it's hard for us to imagine today, but airplanes were also fairly rare. Air travel was very rare in the 40s, 50s. And so anything having to do with a lot of an airplane would be like having to do with a flying car today or something like that.

And so this hero, Sky King himself, would fly in on an airplane and they would make the airplane noises over the air, of course, to save the day and be the hero of whatever problem or villain there was out there. The voice of Sky King was a wonderful, very radio baritone, booming voice named Earl Nightingale. And Earl had incredible, incredible pipes to start with. But he discovered as a young man in radio doing that show, which was very famous in its day, still even though that was going on, there wasn't much money in radio. Still fairly true.

We make money on radio today mainly by monetizing it, by using it as a lead magnet. It's not a hugely profitable. And if you're a talent on the air with one of these companies even today, you don't make serious money except for a handful of people. So Earl figured out he's moving on from the radio business, and he bought a general agency in the insurance business. Now, general agency in the insurance business in those days would have sold life insurance door to door. And had men in black suits, looking like men in black, and white shirts and ties, and they would walk door to door, knock on the door, and try to convince the average homeowner to buy life insurance. Of course, this was a day in time when it wasn't unusual to have someone knock on your door and not get shot.

It would be weird today to be knocking on people's door. They would be a little bit freaked out, but we had peddlers and other people coming door to door even in those days. And so these men would go out every Monday morning and walk the neighborhoods, walk the suburbs of Chicago, and knock doors. And Earl became a great sales manager, a great motivator. And he would pump them up and give the rocky speech and give the attack speech. and whatever speech, and they would get all jacked up because they faced amazing rejection. I mean, it was like a thousand nose to get one yes.

And they just knock doors until their knuckles are raw, but they make a living. They do well, and they sell, selling life insurance door to door. So Earl's second favorite love, other than running this new general agency very successfully, was he loved the fish. I confirmed this whole story, by the way, with his widow. I never got to speak to Earl personally about it, but I've followed Earl for most of my life in one way or another. And so that's why I've dug up all this history on him in detail. So Earl's widow confirmed that one weekend in the late 1950s that Earl comes into his general

manager and says, hey, you got it for two weeks. I'm going fishing in Canada. They're in Chicago. He's going to pop across the line and go fishing for a couple weeks. And he loved to do that, especially in the right times of the year, of course. And so the general manager goes, you can't do that if you leave and you're not here to pump these guys up every morning, every Monday morning, the sales are going to go while, while you're going, all the way down. So for two weeks, you're going to see a decline while you're gone. If you leave, you can't leave. And Earl goes, well, I'm going fishing. So I've got to come up with something. So he remembered his old radio days and he went back over to his friend's radio station and went into the booth and recorded

a 33-minute talk on an acetone record. Now, in those days, we didn't use tape. We used acetone. It's like a flimsy little record for a temporary recording. It was a flimsy. It looked, resembled like an LP, but very flimsy. Any of you, old enough to even remember, we would put stuff on the back of a bad Archie's record on the back of a cereal box or something like that. It would be like that.

It would be that kind of a thing. It didn't have much shelf life to it, but it wasn't meant to be. It was a temporary recording. So he recorded the 33-minute talk. Brought it back, handed it to the general manager went fishing. General Manager played it on Monday morning. The following week, sales went up with Earl being gone. The following week, he played it again.

Sales went up again following this. Well, by now in Chicago, Earl is going viral before anybody knew what that meant. Back then, they would have thought it was the flu. And so his word is out, and the guy that has the clothing store wants all of his salespeople to listen to it, the guy that has the auto dealership wants all of his sales people listen to it. Anyone who had a sales team anywhere in Chicago that heard about this increased sales with this magical Monday morning talk on an acetone record wanted a copy of it. They wanted to hear it.

They wanted to play it for their guys. Earl gets back from fishing and his general manager goes, we got all these requests for this, this acetone record. I can't hand it out. And he goes, well, so he goes back to the radio station, presses a master on it, and publishes it in an LP4. Now, LPs are typically with the music business, they're typically 33's, and something like that, you would do a 78 RPM. If you're old, you remember things like this.

I remember this. And so he publishes the talk in an LP and starts to sell it. And this is one of them. I actually collect them. They're antiques. And the reason I collect them is this talk is called the Strangest Secret. You can listen to it on YouTube today. It's laying out there in public domain.

one of these days I'm going to pick it up and do something with it just because what happened was they started selling these LP records and this became the first recording of a talk, non-music, in human history to sell a million copies. This was the first million seller, this talk. And it is that good. And it launched an entire career in the motivational speaking business, the sales training business. He later teamed up with a guy named Conant and Nightingale. Conant was born.

And in the 70s, they sold more motivational on sales training and management training tapes and training series than anyone in America. They were there long before Covey was in the space, long before Dave Ramsey was anything except broke. And so they were out there moving stuff around in massive volume. The talk is legendary. You ought to listen to it. Those of us that study talks will study something like a Churchill speech,

or the famous I Have a Dream speech and look at the cadence of it, the story arc of it, how he's handling his words, because there's a reason that those talks become iconic in terms of the delivery, if you're an orator, if you speak for a living. And so those of us in that world, we study people like that, and look at that. This is one of those. It's that incredible the way it's laid out. The premise is this. He says in there, Ralph Waldo Emerson says that a man is what he thinks about,

all day long. Proverbs in the Bible says, as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he. And Earl's contention and the strangest secret that the strangest secret is you become what you think about. You become what you think about. So control your thoughts and be intentional about your aim because you're going to hit something when you pull the trigger. You become what you think about. He also famously said in another talk, what you can conceive, grasp, and believe that you can do it. What you can conceive and believe you can achieve.

Thus was born the positive thinking movement. And Earl had been a student of Napoleon Hill, think and grow rich. Napoleon Hill probably was the great-grandfather of the motivational speaking movement. Earl was definitely the grandfather of the movement, without a doubt, and a Zig Zigler would have been born out of that, and a Tony Robbins and a Dave Ramsey out of that. And so that's kind of how this world that I'm in has evolved in that sense. Owning a business can be a heavy load. You want to serve your customers well, make a healthy profit, and grow.

And your team, family, and customers are all counting on you. And now everybody's talking about AI like it's magic. And you're wondering how to keep up. You're carrying a lot, but you don't have to do it alone. That's where NetSuite comes in. Over 43,000 businesses, including Ramsey Solutions, use NetSuite to lighten the load by bringing all their numbers into one system. Accounting, inventory, CRM, payroll, the works. And now NetSuite's AI takes it further, automating, busy work, fly,

flagging inventory issues, spotting cash flow problems in real time, and catching risks before they hit. So you're not just closing the books faster, you're making decisions confidently. And when your numbers are right, that takes a lot of pressure off your shoulders. And yeah, switching systems is a big move. But NetSuite's sweet success process gets you up and running fast. Go to NetSuite.com slash Ramsey for a free product tour and to schedule a time with a NetSuite rep. That's netsuite.com slash Ramsey. What you can conceive and believe you can achieve. Now, we all know from a common sense

perspective that you could be delusional and then that wouldn't be true, right? I conceive that I'm going to play in the NBA as a guy that's this tall with this limited athletic ability at 63 years old. That's not, I can conceive it, I can believe it, but that's delusional. All right, that's not going to occur or the NFL or any other professional sport short of pickleball. I mean, seriously, right? So this is what we're dealing with. So, so, but if you, within reason, within comp, if you're not delusional, if you're self-aware, if you can actually grasp an idea, start to believe it, it's doable. And you become what you think about. So I grew up cutting my teeth on this stuff right here. And of course, in all of those sales trainings, they always taught us to set goals.

So I would always set goals. Even when I was 12 or 14 years old, I would set monetary goals for myself for my little cutting, grass cutting business. And one of the things I love to do was minimum wage in 1973, when I would have been cutting grass at 13, was $1.65. And so I had a whole bunch of yards that were $3. And so my goal was to make sure that I cut every one of those yards and trim them and swept them and everything from the time I walk up to the time I walk off less than an hour,

so I was making double minimum wage. And so I'm such a freaking nerd, I'm watching my watch while I'm, you know, it was a game, it was a game, I had to beat my buddies who were wopper floppers by double. And I controlled my destiny because I was self-employed. That's how big a freaking nerd I was as a kid. So, yeah, but that's because we're setting goals. We're setting goals. We're setting goals.

We're setting goals. Now, we all know, we've all heard, it's almost cliche, that you will aim at, you will hit what you aim at, so you better aim at something. And you better not just say, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, pull the trigger, right? Don't get paralysis of the analysis. And, you know, you'll hit what you aim at, so be careful what you're aiming at all the time. We had a small group of folks, a business of you guys over, we called it the Eagles gathering, and talked all morning about business and succession.

And one of the things we did in the afternoon was do some tactical gun training stuff and shot some of our pistols and stuff out at my shooting range behind my barn out here. And, you know, our security director, Jason, is really hardcore about, like unbelievably hardcore about safety because, you know, that's how people get hurt is being an idiot with a dead gun gun. And, you know, one of the things you immediately learn is muzzle control. But you never flag, which means wave your muzzle. Even if the gun's empty and open and the chamber's completely, you never flag. Anyway, you don't point a weapon ever under any circumstances at something unless you intend to destroy it.

Because it's the only possible outcome. So you never flag. Ready, aim, fire. You will hit what you aim at. So aim carefully. Don't flag. don't wave the muzzle around. Make a decision clearly, very concise. Goals at work are five things. The first thing is they must be specific. The second thing is they must be measurable.

I want to lose weight. That's not a goal. That is a wish. Or it's your spouse's wish, in my case. because she walks eight miles every morning, works out like a fiend, has zero body fat, which is seriously wonderful since she's my wife, but it's simultaneously shaming. So I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight. It's not a goal. That's a wish. It is something that is measurable because you could measure weight loss, but you weren't specific.

What do you want to lose? I want to lose 30 pounds. Okay? I want to lose 30 pounds. Now we've got the two basic things covered. We've got a measurable goal because weight is measurable. I want to make $100,000. That's measurable.

And it's specific. I want to make more money. I want to increase revenue. It's not worth anything. I want to increase sales. It's not worth anything. How freaking much? Put a number on it.

Tell me what you're going to do. because that's going to lead us into the rest of a natural exercise that comes out of goal setting. Must be specific, must be measurable. Here's the third one, and this one's where the magic comes. What's the time limit? I want to lose 30 pounds. Good. That's specific, and it's measurable, but I want to lose 30 pounds.

How long you want to take? 10 years. How many times do you want to lose 30 pounds? Oh, you too. Yeah. So I want to lose 30 pounds when. Now, as soon, I want to make $100,000. When?

Over 10 years? 10 months, 10 minutes. When? By Christmas. When? What are we going to? When? As soon as you have something this specific and it's measurable and you put a time limit on it,

instantaneously, even the non-math people start doing long division and breaking that apart. You can't keep yourself from doing it. I want to lose 30 pounds. When? Over three months? Great. How many is that a month? 10 pounds a month?

What is that? Two and a half pounds a week. Now I immediately start going to the things I need to do that I'm not doing now, which is reduce caloric intake, increase water, drop the sugar and the bread, and increase the aerobic activity. Bing! Two and a half pounds a week starts going off. That's an average of 10 a month, and that's 30 pounds magically in 90 days. I want to make $100,000 when a year. Okay, that's $833 a month. What's your sales rate? What's your average? order value. What's your rejection rate? Okay, based on our rejection rate with the number of calls, you're going to make 67 calls a week in order to pull that off. Because at your commission rate, you've got to close this much to get this many dollars in to have $2,100 a week coming in to your pocket, which is $8,300. So I had a guy, you know, these salespeople, some of them, the only sale

they make is us when we hire them, right? And so we talked about that. So I had one of these guys I'm sitting in the lunchroom with him talking just randomly one day, and he's blowing off. He said, I'm going to make $100,000 this year. And I said, no, you're not. And he said, well, what do you mean? And I said, you don't think I read the sales reports? I said, you're going to make about $50,000 this year. And he said, oh, no, Dave, I got it.

I'm not, right, right, right. No, really, really. You're averaging about 30 calls a week, and you've got to do about 67 a week at your order value and average close ratio in that room. And you're not the exception. That's the other rule. Well, you think you are, the freaking Peyton Manning of sales? Come on, buddy.

Seriously, going there and dialing for dollars, man, make the contacts, build the relationships, close the deal. But you take 67 hits, man. You're doing about 30. And if you want 100, I think you could make 100. But it's your current rate of activity you want because your activities are creating your results and your results are not going to be there. You need about $2,100 a week in income.

That's $8333 a month. month to make $100,000 a year. So he didn't sit by me at lunch anymore. But oddly enough, I did watch the sales reports, and his call volume did go way up. And then we figured out he needed to work on actually making, having a real conversation, not just call volume, actually talking to a human and discussing ideas with them, not just dialing. And so it's a process to teach folk. But yeah, and so anyway, we got him there. and he did really well for a while, but he was bull-crapping me and he was bull-crapping himself. Because if you've got a, you know, I want to pay off, you hear me do it on the radio all the time.

They go, you know, I got $75,000 in debt. It's going to take me eight years to pay that off. I'm like, you can't pay off $10,000 a year? I mean, that's big math real quick. I mean, 75 divided by 8 is not even 10, right? You all got that? You know, Dave's a math whiz. I mean, no, we learned that in the sixth grade, seriously.

It's long division, you know, so short division in that case. So, I mean, but I immediately just look at two things. I look at their income and say, okay, how much disposable income could I throw at the debt and divide it into the debt? And I go, you ought to be out of debt in 14, 18 months, you know. But it's just all I'm doing is backing into a time limit, a specific amount that's measurable, and it's helping them set a goal and then jacking them up to make the sacrifices to cause the thing to happen.

sell the car, amputate the Tahoe. Sell so much stuff the kids think they're next. Quit going out to eat every freaking night and then wondering why you're broke. You know, I'm just walking people through. What have you have to do to hit this measurable result in this period of time? The fourth thing about goal setting is it has to be, that goals have to be yours. I want to lose weight is way different than my wife wants me to lose weight. I want to make more money is way different than my boss wants me to make more money.

I didn't tell that guy, I want you to increase your sales. I want you to increase, I didn't set a quota for him, make 67 calls or you're out of here. I just helped him with his reality that he was not embracing the activity. He wanted to get where he said he wanted to go. When you set goals for someone else, that's corporate America. That's called a quota. Now, you have to set performance standards, which are your floors, that's different. Performance standards are, this is permission to play, this is table stakes, this is what you've got

to do to stay in the building. That's a performance standard. But a goal is what they're going to do up into the sweet stuff, right, beyond just getting to stay. The difference in being a barely hanging on sales rep and a sales rep who's ringing the bell, right? There's a lot of, anything in between there is a goal. Difference than performance standards. Now, performance standards are not quotas. That's reality. You have to bring in this much,

or we don't get an ROI on you, and this relationship ends because it is based on a two-way street here. I give you money. You bring me more. That's how employees work. That's how team members work, right? This mathematical thing, we can't get away. Otherwise, it's not sustainable. We're not running a not-for-profit intentionally anyway. So, have to be my goals. I have to own the goals. If I don't believe it, if I can't conceive it, Someone else believing it for me doesn't work. Has to be your goals. Why are you a dentist? My mom always want to be and be a dentist.

I'm not coming to you. That will hurt. You don't want to be there, so I don't want to be there. No, thank you. How are you a pastor? Tell me your story about becoming a pastor. Well, my dad was a pastor, my grandpa was a pastor,

and my dad always wanted me to be a pastor. My grandpa always wanted me a pastor. I'm not coming to your church. That's sweet, but I want to go to a church where the pastor is called by God, not his daddy. I want to go to church where the pastor wants to be a pastor. He's not living out someone else's dream that's long dead. My mama always wanted my daddy. No.

That's why you don't invite your kids into your business unless you tell them, unless God calls them into your business, unless they want to be there. They don't need to come into your business because they're there to please you. That is never going to work. You're always going to get a reduced level of creativity, productivity, effort. You always are. It's someone else setting your goals. You have to set your goals.

You have to train other people to set goals and motivate them to set goals. I can require you set goals. That's different than telling you what your goal is. I can require everyone have a goal setting session in a sales meeting, and I would do that often. but that's different than me coming in and going. You know, we talked about it at the operating board level, and we think all of your people should be X. That's a quota.

There's no buy-in. That's to be your goals. And the last one, and this one's just magical. And I do not quite understand it. There is a spiritual element to it, and it absolutely happens, and it doesn't happen if you don't do it. It has to be in writing.

I've sort of kind of got my budget in my head, you don't have a budget. A budget is a detailed plan laid out for your goals, for your money this month, this week, this quarter, this year. That's a budget. In writing, on paper, on purpose, and aligned with your spouse if it's a personal budget at home and you're married. You don't have a budget until you did that. I sort of kind of got it in my head. I know where my numbers are. No, you don't. You're full of crap. You just don't. It has to be in writing. So as soon as you write down, I want to make $100,000 in one year. I want to, that's $8333 a month.

Go ahead and do the long division, $2,100 a month. And here are the things I must do to cause that to happen. Here's my activity level that must cause that to happen. Here's the six things that must occur to get that result for that thing to happen. And I've got to tell you, I grew up on this stuff. A lot of you've heard this stuff right here a thousand times. You've been in all kinds of things in leadership trainings over the years. Some of you, this is your very first time to hear it.

with your team, but this stuff is in my DNA since I was a kid. 50 years I've been chewing on this. This is how I think, it's how my function. This is as close as I typically get to strategic planning until I learned as an act of my will to do strategic planning. But this right here I did from day one automatically. This is my prayer journal, which also has in all my goal sheets from 1997, July 93, I wrote down my personal mission statement, how does God want to do this mission through me? Question mark.

And I have three Roman numerals in the outline. Number one is products, financial peace book, video, audio, newsletter, crisis book, secular and biblical workbook, specialty items like T-shirts and software, which was a brand new thing then. By the way, when I wrote all of that down, None of those things were in existence except the financial peace book.

There was no audio, there was no video, there was no anything. In July of 93. July of 93, Roman numeral number two. High touch. Support group concept seminar mixed with counseling. Because I had figured out personal finances, 80% behavior, 20% head knowledge. And so I had to help people with their money by changing their behaviors. and I had studied behavior transformation, behavior modification through several different lenses,

a biblical lens, through a psychological lens. I've got several grad-level psych classes. I kind of was my hobby in college to take a bunch of grad-level psych because I was always interested in what makes people tick. And so I had studied, and by far without question, the highest success rate on major behavior transformation would be an addict who breaks an addiction. and doesn't have a recidivism rate. Rehab centers, they help to varying degrees.

But by far, the small group for accountability, known as 12-step, has the highest success rate of anything in that space. Nothing else touches it in behavior modification area. And small group, accountability, and other things. I got the studying in other different areas other than just 12-step. And there is actually a debtor's anonymous for people who can't stop doing debt. That's a 12-step program and you're not allowed to go to a 12-step group unless you're invited by a sponsor and sit in, but there was a local one and I talked the guy and let me sit in one night.

He got permission of all the people because they heard I was studying it and what they were doing. And I went in and sat with them and took notes and asked them questions and then got up and left and they had their meeting because they don't do their meetings in front of outsiders. And so I've studied this stuff. This is where this was born. I want a support group concept with a seminar, a speaker giving out information and then counseling one-on-one and groups. and group concept to be able to cause the behavior modification to help people get on a budget, get out of debt, live on less than they make, and become wealthy. Roman numeral number two, high touch.

That's all I wrote down. July, here's the seven things I want to do, including build the group concept. By then I named it, life after debt. By August, I wanted a one-day retreat book for life after debt. By September, by October, the fall. Following April was the first time I set up an overhead projector after I put it down here in July and wrote down the details and took off with what became Financial Peace University. Then I went to a thing that a buddy of mine was doing that was a strategic planning, goal-setting

exercise. He was a want-to-be motivational speaker, and I went really to emotionally support my buddy, and honestly it was pitiful. It was horribly done. It's one of those things like root canal for a day. I sat there and listened to this guy and drone on. But he handed out this sheet, which said three-year strategic plan, and I did the exercise because I was sitting there, and might as well do something while I'm sitting there. And I said, by the end of 1995, what are your goals you want to hit?

Well, at that point, I was on the radio, and I had one radio station. I want 25 cities with a radio station. I started syndicating it. I want to add 25 cities to the network. The network consisted of one station. I had sold at that point 10,000 financial peace books, and I wrote down, I want to sell 50,000 financial peace books. And I want Financial Peace University to be taught in five different cities by the end of 1995.

I missed every one of those goals. By the end of 1995, I was in two radio stations, not 25. I didn't sell 50,000 financial peace books. I sold 30,000. And I didn't have financial peace books. Peace University in five cities. I had it in three cities. I wrote down by the end of 1996, I want to have the radio show in 75 cities.

I want to sell 200,000 financial peace books and I want to have financial peace university in 25 cities in 25 cities in 25 cities with the radio station. We were in 31. We failed. We had not sold 200,000 financial peace books. We'd only sold 147,000. We failed. We were not in 25 cities with Financial Peace University.

We were in five cities. We had failed. I missed every one of my goals. But when you write it down and you can conceive it and believe it, you start taking the actions automatically to cause it to become true. And even though I didn't hit the exact number, the end of the story is 680 radio stations, second largest talk radio show in America,

second only to Sean Hannity. I was number three until Rush died permanently, and me and Sean moved up. notch. That's not the way you want to move up, but we did. I didn't sell 200,000 financial peace books. It's currently a 3.2 million. And of course, financial peace university has been taught in 50,000 churches to 10 million people, not 25 cities. So I failed to hit those numbers. But the success was taking the actions to move towards those numbers with as much enthusiasm and brain power and sophistication as I had at the moment. I can do it a lot faster now.

Right? I know more. I got more scars. You could too. And digital didn't exist. It was not a thing. Everything's easier with digital or harder. So there we go. Set it out there. When I read this stuff from 1993 and I stand on this stage, it tells me the power of that right there. And someone that is motivated to take the action to cause those things to occur. Obviously, there's a lot of pain, a lot of manure shoveled, obviously there's a lot of issues, a lot of different things happening, and a lot of positive things and a lot of wonderful blessings that came from left field that I never saw coming and that put me, that I, you know, I often say I'm better than I deserve because I don't feel like I have done enough to get to be here. And other times I feel like I've done way more than I needed to get to be here. Y'all know what I'm talking about?

It's this weird dichotomy of feeling undeserving, and yet I have worked my butt off, and so some moron says you're so lucky. I just want to throat punch them. Yeah. Writing those goals down makes them real. It helps you ask what must be true to get there. What is not true today that must be true to get there? Launching a product, there's a whole bunch of things that must be true.

I've got to design the product, I've got to create the product. If we want to launch a book with George Camel on January the 16th, we started asking ourselves 18, 24 months ago, what must be true for that to occur? Because obviously we have to write the book, edit the book, print the book, create a marketing campaign and a marketing plan. We have to create cover designs and test them. We have to work through a whole lot of ups and downs and backs and force because the edits are painful on these things. They're hard.

When it's on paper, you can figure out the actions and the milestones, the steps. automatically starts, you ask yourself, what must be true that's not true today? What must be true if I want to lose 30 pounds in 90 days? I know what must be true. I'm not necessarily willing to do it, but I know what must be true. Y'all know what I'm saying. I know I've got to make 67 calls in that call center if I want to make $100,000 a year. That we know what must be true.

And it's not true today, so we have to change some behaviors to get the hit that goal. What must be true that is not true today for me to be the kind of leader that I need to be 10 years from now to lead an organization, 10x the size of the goal? the one I'm leading right now because right now I'm leading precisely what I'm able to lead. So I got to be more able if I want to lead something bigger and scale it. That's me. I have to read, read, read, read, read, read, come to stuff like this every year and relearn and relearn and relearn and relearn and go back and apply and have a coach.

And I've got to do everything I can for me to get out of the freaking way because what must be true is I got to be a lot better for this place to move on. And everybody in leadership has to say the same amen inside this place and all of you sitting here. So when you actually do the things and you achieve it, it's weird. It's anticlimactic. So we just went through all this with Dr. John Deloney's book. Wouldn't he great yesterday? Yeah, wow. We have a detailed process to launch a book. So almost every one of our books launches at number one. Highly unusual. We don't do a lot of books like publishers, but we do you know, five, six, seven, max a year. But when we do one, almost 100% of them have been number

once. And it's not because we have some trick. It's just we know I sell books in a world that doesn't know I sell books and where bookstores have disappeared, right? And so we're great marketers. So we lay that plan out on Dr. John's book and we're getting after it. We're doing every little thing. There's like that marketing plan is like seven pages single spaced. I mean, the number of things, the number of podcasts he was on, the number of shows we got him on, the number places for him to talk to push the book, the number of hours on the Ramsey show, which we can show a direct correlation to that to book sales. The pre-sale distance, don't want to start the pre-sell too far out, but you don't want to start it too close because all the pre-sales count in the first

week's sales towards it. By the time we did all that, we sold close to 50,000 books week one. Number two book in the nation that week was 21,000. So we beat number two by two X. Boom! I mean, we weren't fooling around, right? It's like jam the Super Bowl for you. 59 to nothing, you know, shut up, right? But all that is is exactly what we're talking about here. We laid that all out and said, what must be true, what must be true, what must be true, what must be true. And by the time we execute it, you know it's going to happen. You know, it's like by the third quarter when you're up 50 to nothing, you got it, you know? And you're like, oh, yeah, this is, it almost become, the win almost becomes anticlimactic. All the end.

energy comes in the striving. And by the time you get there, it's just like the biscuits and the waffles and the jiggins really good. This is just a syrup. You know, this is just the extra topping. The win is just the topping. It's weird. You would think that, who-hoo, no, it's all the stuff we got to do, the fighting and the grinding and the hustling and the sweat and the smiles and the horrible jokes and all this stuff that we went through together and the process. And who spoke that into this, into existence and cause that, and then you stand there and you go, dad, gun, boom. All right.

Next. Immediately you walk on the next. That's what we all do. We can't keep ourselves from doing it. If you bask too long in that, you're the quarterback from high school who still throws the football in the backyard, Uncle Rico, right? You know, you need to move on. You move on.

Goal setting and getting things done is tactical. There comes a time when you've got to take the goal setting ideas and the benefit of goal setting and start moving it to strategic. And we've laughed about me in that regard. I resisted. It's like a bunch of corporate mumbo-jumbo. The other thing that's helped me move towards strategic other than actually doing the stratops and doing the offsides with our team, even though I'm not, I enter it willingly

now, even though it's not my gifting, it's not naturally fun for me, but what I do know is we have a proven set of results from having started to do it. years ago. The result, doing off-sites, doing strategic thought, has advanced our business further than I could advance it with simple goal setting. And so for that reason, I understand that intellectually. One of the groups that's helped me with that is I end up over the years, we've hired a lot of folks that have an MBA, a master's in business. I mean, you all got a master's in business, by the way. Cool. Good. Love MBAs. We got a bunch of them on the team. I don't have an MBA. I've got a PhD and D-U-M-B. But hard enough.

right. So, but I love the MBAs and I've learned a lot from one thing I am 100% sure of. I have never met someone that went through a master's in business and MBA program in any school, anywhere that did not come out really appreciating, understanding, and actually excellent at strategic thought. They teach strategic thought in that in that line of thinking more than any other thing. Now some MBAs get more stuff on finance, some of a get more on accounting. Some are good at marketing, but I never meet an MBA that doesn't have really good mind because they've been formally academically trained to do so on strategic thought. And so having all these MBAs on my team, they've helped me, because they've taught me

the benefits of strategic thought and how to frame your mind that way, because my mind is not framed that way. It's framed tactically like we've been laughing about, but it's also true. And so it's been great. I mean, I've got these young MBAs on the team, and it's been a good partnership because, you know, they taught me how to do strategic thought, and I taught them how to work. The best gift you can give a small business owner is a proven plan to grow a business that doesn't consume their whole life. That's why my book, Build a Business You Love is the perfect stocking stuffer for any business leader. In it, we share the five-stage system that helped me push through the challenges every owner faces and ultimately build a $250 million company.

Get it today at entreleadership.com slash grow or click the link in the show notes because giving this book could be the turning point in someone's business and their life. So we had a business unit. It was a good size business unit. This was about 10 years ago, roughly, maybe 8, somewhere in there, that was not losing. It was growing and it was winning. But we all had the sense that it had the flu. You know, it was running at 70% or 60% speed and winning. We all had the sense there was some low-hanging fruit.

There was some additional wins that we could get a hold of. We just felt it, but we could never put words to it and couldn't figure it out. And so I'm coming down on the leader. I'm getting with that leadership team. I'm talking to the creatives, talking to the marketers. And I'm like, what is it? Because I know this marketplace is bigger than this. We don't have a marketplace problem.

And I know we've got the narrative right. Where are we missing the connection with the customer with the tribe to multiply this? Because this thing's running on addition and it needs to be running on multiplication. It's got the ability to go. I could feel it. Y'all know what I'm talking about it just in my gut. And we started talking about it. And finally, I got so frustrated.

We argued and fussed and fumed about it for about a year. And finally I said, okay, we're going to go and do an offsite. And they went, you just called for an offsite? I'm like, yeah, we're going to, we're going to, this patient has the flu, we're going to diagnose the flu, and we're going to freaking fix this. We're going to come up with a health care plan for this patient, and we're going to get this thing moving because there's too much opportunity. I'm going to put, let's put the best marketing people, the best finance people, the best

leadership team, everybody, we're going to put a bunch of us in the room and we'll put the key leaders off this team that's got the flu in the room. And so we got about 10, 11 of us sitting there. And the more I sat and thought about that, I thought, well, that's the same exact people been working on it for a year and we ain't moved the needle. I got to do something different. So one of my best friends in the world is Dr. Henry Cloud. Y'all got his book Boundaries this morning. And Henry and I do all kinds of stuff together. We love each other and have sick sense of humor together and that kind of stuff. And we enjoy a lot of the same things. And so anyway,

I call Henry. And Henry does a lot of boundaries that sold about 10 million copies or 12 or whatever. and he does a lot of corporate speaking and that kind of stuff, but he also, little-known fact, does a lot of one-on-one consulting with super high-end multi-billionaire type folk and goes in and sits in their boardroom and just helps them analyze from their boardroom, what's going on, and has the moment like some of the executive coaches have had with you all, I was talking to one of you all yesterday and said the executive coach says,

how long are you going to put up with that? How long are you going to put up with that? And about the third time you ask how long you can put up with, you got to go fix it, right? You're going to not put up with anymore. And Henry has those conversations with people that no one else has a backbone to do that with. And so I called Henry and I'm like, Henry, I know you're like $10,000 a minute or whatever to come do consulting. But I need you to come to Nashville and consult us for a day on this. And what you're going to get paid is nothing.

I'll help you sell some boundaries books on the radio. And he's like, ah, that's cool. I'm coming. All right. So he did it. Came as a favor, in other words, and sat in that room and pissed me off. Shamed me to no end. There's the first thing he sits down and says, he says, he says, okay. He always does this thing.

Okay. What is your desired future for this? And I went, sell more of it, Henry, sell more of it. And he goes, that's not what you teach. Detail. And I'm going, you've been here three minutes, and you've figured out where we're screwing up. And I've been working on this for a year. I'm going to kill you.

I was so mad because he immediately, we had no detailed, desired future. We had nothing to work towards so no one knew if we were getting there or not. And so everybody's just flailing around out there in the street hoping they don't get hit by car. What's your desired future? He goes, you can't decide if you have the right staff to execute the desired future until you know what the freaking desired future is, Dave. You can't decide if you have the right cash flow to execute the desired future until you know what the desired future is, Dave. I said, shut up, Henry. I was so mad at myself because I freaking teach this.

stuff. And I had him fly in from La La Land and California to tell me what I already knew in three minutes, but I didn't seem to know it. God, I was aggravating. Probably never happens to you. I know that. So we immediately started laying out a desired future and started going, we don't have the right people in the right seats to accomplish that future. That's why this has got the flu. We don't have the product design dialed in and touching the tribe in this way so that it accomplishes that desired future. And it's by the end of the day, the business model started changing and shifting. By the end of the day, everyone's energy level was triple. All we did was lay out a freaking desired future. He has a five step framework that he uses with desired

future being the end thing. That's where you're going to get to. But what are the five things you've got to do to get there and you back into it once you've laid out your desired future? Just like with the goal. It's measurable, it's specific, and shut up. up. God. Then we're doing another offsite, and I called another friend of mine who does them for a living. He does a lot of them. Pat Linsioni. Pat, if you have never heard Pat speak, you need to come to summit, he'll be speaking, is as ADD as they get. I mean, he's just like, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. He's called me up with a new idea every 20 minutes. He's got more energy. He's a lot of fun at dinner, too.

He's a spectator sport. But so he comes to our offsite and I know where we were, we're at this little house. We'd rented this little Airbnb and we're down in the basement of this thing. And his model is you need to have a thematic goal. You need to have a thematic goal for the year. A goal that has a theme. And that's his same way of saying what Henry's saying with desired future. And his thing is, he says, if you have a, if you have a thematic goal,

then you need to have the things that are going to cause that goal to occur, four, five, six of the maximum of seven of them, that when you execute those things, 100% of the time, if you got all six of them, the goal will have happened as a natural byproduct of accomplishing these other things. They're called defining objectives. And that's his framework that he works with. And then he gets in an argument with me and starts telling me about how we have too many core values.

And I'm like, Pat, we didn't call you here for that. He goes, by definition, if there's 14, it's not core. It's not core. You can't have core 14, Dave. And I said, you know, he goes, it's just an an anon. And I said, what's asinine is, is the size of my company compared to the size of your company. And here, here cussing me about my core values. Shut up, Pat.

We got a big argument. It was hilarious. And we're going at it, man. And our teams are like, then we go ready. We jumped in the car together and we're all going to dinner with the whole team. And the team figured by the time we got the dinner, Pat was fired. and was going back home. No, we love each other, man. That's how we process love. We fight. And so, it's just asinine, Dave. It's just asinine. I said, what's asinine is you come in here

with this attitude, but your tiny little buck company compared to the size of ours. Shut up, buddy. And so, you know, anyway, we had a good fun. It's fun. And, um, but we got out of him, the defining objectives. The thematic goal thing, we tried to use it for a while. So what I ended up doing, the reason I tell you these two stories is, A, they're true stories. B, both of them will be with us in Summit. And C, uh, it calls. It calls you. It calls you We stole from both of them and developed our combination hybrid of the two, and that's what we work with here, and that's what we're going to show you guys how to do. And by the way, they both have given us their blessing to steal their stuff and create a hybrid

between the two. Obviously, they're friends, and they probably don't think we're a threat. So it's okay. A desired future is simply where you want your company to be in the next 12 to 18 months. For your business to be effective, you have to have clearly defined vision and goals. Look at where you are now, determine where you want to be, and then ask yourself what must be true to make that happen. This starts with a 12 to 18-month desired future statement. The desired future statement formula has to have specific and measurable things in it, and so it says this.

By this date, in our case, we do them in the third and fourth quarter of the year before to hit December 31 of the year following. So we're finishing up the polish on hours right now that will end at the end of 24. So that when we touch 24, we hit the ground running. We don't wait till 24 January to develop the statement for end of 24. We already have it done before 24 starts. The 12 months of 2024, here's what we're going to be doing. We're finishing the polish on that this moment right now. Okay?

So we will, by this date, create this or do this resulting in this. a measurable thing, a series of activities that are going to create a measurable mathematical result. I'm going to lose 30 pounds in 90 days. So here's an example. By December of, this is one we just made up, 2023, we'll launch our second location in Mexico resulting in $1.5 million increase in annual revenue. That's a desired future that you could have. That's not us.

We're not doing that. Your defining objectives are how you're going to get there. What must be true that's not true today in order to get there. Select three to five of those, a maximum of seven. Beat it and beat it down. Usually you know what it takes. It's not two, by the way. If it's only two things, you probably haven't got a big enough thing you're working on.

But we need to up our game in these areas or create a game that we don't have yet, in these areas, if we do that, we will hit this desired future. If we don't do that, we won't. And then you assign an owner to each of those defining objectives. So, for instance, with us, we're sitting on the operating board. If one of the things last year was to increase our, one of our defining objectives last year was to increase our listenership to all of our broadcast properties into, total by 15% in the year 2023. That actually happened last year. Then you assign an owner to that.

Now, the owner is not by themselves, but they're the tip of the spear. They're the one running it. They're the single ringable neck. That's the person we're looking for. We're going to ring your neck if you don't get this done. Now, we'll help you run blockers. We'll help you fund it. You can put your team around it. You're not running this completely as the Long Ranger, but you are the same, you are the owner, the stakeholder of this. I'm a stakeholder. You're the actual owner, the Ringable Neck. So you're going to come in and report back to the rest of us how this is going once a week. In this case, that 15% increase in our listenership to our broadcast properties was Blake Thompson,

who is on our operating board and runs all of Ramsey Networks. He's been with me 23 years. And so that's YouTube, all the different video things. We've got a show on TBN now. We've got all of talk radio and certainly podcast in all of its various forms and locations. And as we went through the year, we learned some things that were part of the measure and we changed how we were measuring it because YouTube shorts blew up. But YouTube shorts, little short clips are lead magnets.

They're not actual broadcast of content. And so we couldn't count those in his numbers because they blew up. And he was up 40% counting those. But that was giving him a false positive on whether he was going to be. going to accomplish our other stuff off his defining objectives. So we made him pull those out, and then he's still at 23%. So you come in then as a single ringable neck and you report, okay, here's what's happening with Spotify. Here's what's happening with YouTube. Here's what's happening with the short version or the long version on TikTok now. Here's what's looking at the long

version on Twitter now with Tucker Carlson stepping into that space. We put our stuff on there, see how it runs. We're going to check every one of these things. Here's the numbers. Here's the numbers. Here's our baseline where we started, and here's where we are today. Thus, we have a growth rate. And the goal, the defining objective is one of the five things that we have to hit 15% on that, and he's today sitting at 23. If you're off by 15% of your goal, whatever your goal is, and you're off by 15%, you're not green. If your own goal, you're green, or above goal, you're green. If you're off by 15% you're yellow, and if you're off by more than 15%, you are, by definition, red. Something's on fire.

We're in trouble. It's not working. Okay? So all of this tool, the tool to build one of these desired future dashboards with the defining objectives laid out and helping you put in the template the single ringable neck and hold a group thing. and then everyone comes in and reports to the whole group. So Lynchione's five dysfunctions of a team. The team is all helping each other, but we're also holding each other accountable

within the executive leadership team to do the whole Ramsey dashboard. Guess what? Every department has a dashboard. We have a dashboard committee that collects all the dashboards from the whole company and the defining objectives and make sure they fit this template

because I never again want to sit in a room with Henry Cloud and him say, where are you going? And I'd say, I don't know. And now I know what's wrong with my business because I'm so stupid. I'm not doing the stuff I teach. Never again do I want to have that happen. So it's now operationalized that everyone does a freaking dashboard. Never again will we be without one.

And the defining objectives and the single ringable necks that are going to cause that dashboard to occur. Now later today, Daniel is going to talk about strategic off-sites and Falcons are going to come in and hang out with us on other things that we can do. to help lay these things in place. But the dashboard, there's a dashboard tool, and it's tied into your meeting tool in Elite that'll help you lay all this out, and then you can just tie it back in. And you can handle it with one-on-ones if you want. In our case, with the operating board, we're doing it in a group. And so Jen is holding one of the defining objectives, so Jen's going to report on it and is going to say, look, here's what's going on, and I'm off here and I'm off here, so I'm calling this yellow. And I'm off here and I'm calling this yellow.

This one's in the tank. I'm calling this one red. And one of the, One of them that's in the red this year is we had some very defined detailed goals on real estate leads coming into Ramsey Trusted. And we can't control the outside market, outside variables, and real estate's freaking slow. And so our lead volume and our cost per lead on paid is way up and our lead volume is way down, our conversion rates way down, our revenues way down on Ramsey Trusted over any other year because of real estate, residential real estate market is slow. We can't control that. But at least we're getting a red report on that.

We're getting a red report on it. Single ringable neck's coming in there going, don't kill me, I didn't do it. Kill Biden, I didn't do it. No, don't kill Biden. But it's like he's the single ringable neck. Don't, you know, but yeah. Fire of the president.

Yeah, but the, you know, all this stuff, right? So we're looking at the outside market and we're going, okay, this is what's going on? So is Herb Jenkins that runs trusted doing the best he can do with what he has? He's bringing his exec team in. We're all looking at that. We're going, is there anything else we can do? Is there anything else we can do?

No, it just sucks. It's red. And if we don't make our goal at the end of the year, this is going to be one of the reasons. Because this thing, you know, it's an anchor dragging along behind the boat right now. See how that works? And you're all talking to each other. You're all lifting each other up. You're all holding each other accountable.

And you've got that single person that's driving the lane, drive in the lane, put the ball in the hoop. Drive the lane. Knock the bodies out. Boom. Drop that ball on the hoop, right? Get up in the air. Drop it in there. And if you're not doing that, how can we need a trampoline?

Let's get your butt up there. Let's do it. What we got to do. We start talking it through, talking it through, talking it through. And we do this every week and we wear this stuff out. Red yellow green, red yellow green, red yellow green. And if all your defining objectives are green, by definition, the math would occur that causes the desired future dashboard to occur. So if you put in there, we want to increase revenue by $2 million. How are we going to do that? We're going to increase sales, and the sales manager's got a single ring on a mulek. and recruiters got a single ringable net because we've got to get more salespeople on the team. And you've got defining objectives to increase sales by the end of the year by that much.

It could be a very simple one, right? And you've still got them all there, but these are the components that cause that to occur. We can't do it with the existing sales team at the existing sales rate. So what must be true that's not true today that will cause this to happen? Those are your defining objectives. And go back and do those things over and over and over and over again. This is strategic thought, which is the only reason. I love it because it's really glorified goal setting.

Right? This is when it works. It really gets there because I can really, I can push and pull and I can run my business and I'm looking at these dashboards. I can pull up dashboards on our stuff, on our software from anywhere in the company at any time and see what's red, yellow, green. And just like I can pull up red, yellow, green on the employees in the weekly report and see what their attitudes are, the stress level, the morale level, right?

And all this stuff, I can pull, I got lots of little smiley faces that are red or yellow or green around me. But they're all indicators in the world. real quickly, the primitive mind can pick that up and I can process lots of information in short periods of time and manage a fairly sophisticated large business without me being in every detail, just doing these drive-bys. And you definitely can do it, you know, when you run a $10 million, $20 million operation that way. It will change everything. It'll just be like somebody turning on the lights in a dark room. That's what happened when Henry Cloud said that that day.

That's why it's so emotional for me. Well, where do you want to be in five years and how are you going to get there. What's your desired future? I want to make more money. I never want to be there again. So being a business owner is hard. You got to do this stuff over and over and over and over and over again. My friends Zig Ziglar used to say that people often say that motivation doesn't last and neither does bathing. That's why we do both often. We got to do it over and over and over again. And your leadership team does it with you. That's why there's important to do events like this, events like Summit. It's why it's important to have a rhythm with a coach. It's why it's important to be an elite. It's why it's

important. We do the same stuff we're asking you to do. It's how we got here. These things, none of these things we're doing are something we teach and don't do. These are things, this is our playbook that took it from a card table in my living room to a $300 million company with a thousand team members and a major national brand. That did not occur as an accident. I was not lucky. I am inordinately blessed by my father in heaven. I am not confused that we would not have done this without his touch on this. I'm not questioning that.

But we also know that we've gotten better every year. And even as late as eight years ago, I can sit in a room and relearn something I know and polish it and take two good friends who are brilliant in the space and steal both their stuff and mix it together and act like I created it and move on, right? So there's no better way to do that kind of stuff than events like this. That's how it works. That's how you win, folks. As we wrap up the year and start planning for the next one,

take a minute to think about where you're headed. What's your desired future? What must be true to get there. It's time to get clear, get focused, and get after it. Ready, aim, fire. And remember, better or weary warrior than a quivering critic. This world needs more high leaders. Take courage and lead. Thanks for joining us on Entree Leadership and Merry Christmas.