The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Blue-Collar Cash Love Your Work, Secure Your Future, and Find Happiness for Life By Ken Rusk

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

Blue-Collar Cash Love Your Work, Secure Your Future, and Find Happiness for Life By Ken Rusk Kenrusk.com Ken Rusk is the author of BLUE-COLLAR CASH: Love Your Work, Secure Your Future, and Find Happiness for Life (out now from Dey Street Books/HarperCollins). He is also a blue-collar construction engineer and founder of Rusk Industries, Inc. who has launched multiple successful endeavors over the last 30 plus years. He believes that anyone can realize their dreams and live a comfortable life regardless of their educational background or past.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, we're coming here with another podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys being here. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats,

go to the CBPN or Chris Voss podcast network.com. You can see all the nine podcasts that we have over there and listen to all the greatest stuff, right? A lot of our podcasts are featured on this, some of the different places. So you may see this elsewhere. We've been interviewing a ton of great book writers, authors,

et cetera, et cetera. Some people are launching their books. And today, this is a book that's coming out today, so it's pretty exciting. You want to run down to Amazon or your local book dealer to take and get a hold of it. And this gentleman's pretty darn cool, so let's get into it. What we have today is we have Ken Rusk on. He's the author of Blue Collar Cash, Love Your Work, Secure Your Future,

and Find Happiness for Life. Boy, that sounds like a good deal to me. I'm glad he's on. It's with HarperCollins. He is a blue collar construction engineer and founder of Rusk Industries Incorporated. He's launched multiple successful endeavors over the last 30 plus years. He believes that anyone can realize their dreams and live a comfortable life regardless of their educational background or past. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Ken? Great, Chris.

Thanks so much for having me. Awesome sauce. This is kind of something I needed today, finding happiness in my life. So I expect that we'll have happiness after this. No, I'm just kidding. That's great. You've got to read the book first, right? Oh, for sure for sure okay but we'll get part of it in the podcast there you go you'll end up happy after the end of the show people um so uh ken give us the dot coms if people

look you up on the interwebs yeah you can look us up at bluecollarcash.com or kenrusk.com you can also follow us on ken rusk Official on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Awesome sauce. Now, so people can pick up the book up. They can pick it up at Amazon or any of the local dealers. It is out today. It's brand spanking new, so you can run out and read something and probably beat everybody else to the punch.

You can say, hey, I read the latest, newest book, and I'm smarter than you because you haven't yet. You know, you can beat people to the whole thing. You've got an interesting story. The interesting research I've done on this book and everything out in your past, your employees are going to be talking about a lot of cool things and probably helping a lot of people that right now with this recession may be looking for some different new career moves, or this is a great opportunity like I've gone through in life where you've taken and made lemons out of, or lemonade out of lemons and used something like this to jump her to a new career. Give us a background origin story on you. What were you doing before Rusk Industries and you got into all this stuff?

Well, you know, when I was 15, I went to my high school like everybody did. I remember I was in 10th grade and we used to have to cut through this fence to get to the local carryout after school where we would hang out and have our pop and do whatever we were doing. And, you know, there was a couple of businesses that I had to pass by on the way to this carryout. And I'll never forget, there was always a lot of hustle and bustle going on around this one particular company. And I found out that it was a foundation waterproofing company. So, you know, I needed a summer job and I thought, you know, I'm going to go in there. I knew some people that work there. And I went in and I got a job digging ditches in the summertime and then working

in the office in the wintertime. And I got to tell you, it was really important for me because it really taught me the value of hard work. You know, I spent a long time on the business end of a digging shovel and a jackhammer and a mixing trowel. And to me, it was a means to a bigger end. It was a way to make some money to, you know, gas up my car, maybe take my girlfriend out for a pizza, you know, do all this stuff that kids do back then. But it quickly turned into something where I knew the value of, for yourself and controlling your own output and then making a good life for yourself. Awesome sauce. So you started working for these other folks.

When did you get the bite for becoming an entrepreneur and starting your own business? Well, you know, it's a situation where our company began to grow just exponentially. And at one point, we had to decide to expand. And the path we chose to expand was to create franchises in other cities and states. And so they had myself and some other people, we got involved in creating this franchise. And then we would go out and go to another town, another city, another state, and just open a franchise. And I did that for probably, I don't know, three or four years. You know, you live out of a suitcase and you kiss your wife goodbye on Sunday and you see her again on Friday.

And, you know, that only lasted so long before I thought I wanted to kind of do my own thing. You know, I had been opening up companies for other people. And, you know, they say that's a good thing because, you know, you're making mistakes with their money and their time. And that's okay. But eventually it got to the point where I wanted to kind of do my own thing and be in control of my own destiny. So we decided to open our own company here in Toledo, Ohio. And I've been doing it ever since. Toledo, Ohio. Yeah. All the astronauts come from Ohio, don't they? Well, I know of at least one that comes from Ohio.

Yeah, there's a whole lot of them. There's like a bunch of them. It's like really kind of weird. But that's cool, though, because we love astronauts. So this is really interesting. So you, you decided to start your own business. Well, yeah. You know, if I looked at it this way, if I, if I could control my own output, meaning if I could control my own efforts with, like I said, whether I was landscaping or whether I was digging ditches or, you know, mulching flower beds or whatever I could, whether I was landscaping or whether I was digging ditches or mulching flower beds or whatever I could do, I thought to myself, if I could get help in doing that, I could grow my own workforce and I could multiply that effort and then multiply the finances that come along with

it. So it just seemed to me to be a no brainer. I needed help. I had friends that needed to work. We just got together. We just kept going and kept going and kept going. Pretty soon, we turned a six-employee company into a company that now employs over 200. Nice. Nice. That's a lot of fun when it gets 100 bucks. Yeah, it is.

Does Rusk Industries focus on just one industry? I think you have multiple corporations, don't you? Yeah, we're into construction chemicals now around the country, specifically fire retardants for new construction. We also do, we have a couple of different offices that do foundation work. And we're into some developing of houses and residential neighborhoods as well as office buildings. So pretty much anything that involves construction is stuff that we're involved in at this point.

Wow, that's awesome sauce. That's awesome sauce. And you're nationwide. You know, we talked about before the show about how there's kind of this stigma, or I suppose you'd call it a stigma, between blue-collar and white-collar work, and where people sometimes blue-collar work is like, well, you didn't go to college and you didn't do any learning. I didn't go to college. My first business, very similar to what you went into, was stucco work.

As a kid, I'd gone in the summers to help my father do stucco work, and we plastered foundations, that kind of stucco work as a kid uh i'd gone in the summers uh to help my father do stucco work and we plastered foundations that kind of stucco work yeah great so you're probably familiar with that oh yeah um and so i learned to kind of do that and help him during the summer so i knew i knew how to do the job and i was just helping out my old man and uh in my teens i got fired from mcdonald's because i had long rocker hair and I wouldn't cut it. And there was a strict religious guy who was my manager. And, you know, I wear these rocker T-shirts that, you know, look really, you know, that's the seat music, you know, that sort of thing. But it wasn't, you know, Van Halen.

I don't know. Really. So, you know, evil rock music. And so I got fired and, uh, and so I, you know, I went home to my dad and he goes, he goes, what are you doing? I don't know. I, you know, and I was supposed to go to college. Uh, I had a Pell grant to go to the university of Utah. And, um, he said, why don't you just go take all my tools that he didn't use anymore. He, he'd since closed up and gone, whatever. And he goes, you know how to do it. So I was like, Oh, screw it.

So I just started going out and selling to contractors, which was hard, you know, skinny young 18 year old and, uh, and, uh, started the business and that was my first company. But yeah, a lot of people, a lot of people look at the stigma of it. And I think one of the things you talk about in your book is this. Well, yeah. One of the things I found was interesting is that somewhere along the line, someone got the great idea to get rid of shop class in our high schools and replace those shop classes with a desk full of computers. Now,, obviously we needed to have our kids learn computers for sure,

but it almost eliminated the opportunity for someone who wanted to discover maybe carpentry or welding or plumbing or auto mechanics or home economics, whatever it might've been, it eliminated that opportunity. And they kind of just funneled everyone towards it's college or else. So if I'm a guy who wanted to be a carpenter and I'm not following the path of everybody else that goes to college, I'm automatically going to feel somewhat stigmatized. And then if you put that on top of this huge push for, you know, you got to get an education, you got to get an education, no matter what that education is, you just got to get an education, you got to get an education. No matter what that education is, you just got to go through that experience. It was almost like if you didn't go down that

same road, that there was something maybe not as successful for you. And nothing could be further from the truth. If you think about this, Chris, there's 165 million people that are working in the United States at any one time. About 60 million of those people do something with these, their hands. So that just kind of proves the point that college, while I'm not an anti-college guy, college just couldn't be for everyone or who would do the things that we need to do to keep our society moving. Exactly. And, you know, my mom talked about this for a lot of years, uh, cause she was a school teacher, but a lot of kids, uh, Oh, I guess over in Europe, what they do or England, what they do, great Britain is, is early on. They, they kind of start figuring out what you're into. And there's some people that are into a very tactile experience with working. There's some, like I I've seen people like sometimes i'm bored and i'll go on youtube and i'll see guys that tie like you know crazy rope ties you know that's part of their

job with boating or something like that um there's you know i've seen some of the the work that they can do that's just so amazing they're like wow i mean and and it's and it's complex and they do it so well but they have a real passion for it. Like, you know, I was forced to go through wood shop, metal shop, and leather shop, and I'm still waiting for that leather shop to pay off. But, you know, I hated every moment of it. You know, I would go to metal shop, and the guy would be there with the missing fingers, the leather shop boss, and he's like, let me show you how to work the thing. And I'm like, I don't want to be in metal shop and the guy would be there with the missing fingers the leather shop boss and he's like let me show you how to work the thing and i'm like i don't want to be in metal shop business i

don't think so but there's some people that do and there's something wrong with that there's some people that are really they're really just better at those tactile things you know and and what's really sad about our education system is it's very soul crushing when you're, you know, when they're trying to force these different concepts down on you, like math and algebra and, you know, biology and kind of what they're supposed to be doing is flushing out what you're interested in. But a lot of the schools have just gotten to this point where they're just trying to ram classes to you. And when it comes to college education, it's like education it's just coming up with a reason to charge you more money and keep you in school longer and stuff um because 99 of the stuff you

just won't use like for me high school the only thing i learned in high school that was of any value was typing class so i could type my own letters and invoices and and marketing pitches that was it the whole thing was a waste of time. So yeah, there, there's people that are like that. And it's sad that our schools don't do a better job of kind of figuring out who everyone is and everything else. And, and we depend upon, you know, blue collar people. I mean, everybody, everybody's a contributor in our society when it comes down to it. Well, you know, it's, it's,

it's really easy for someone to stigmatize a worker or someone in that position. And then 10 minutes later, the refrigerator breaks and they need to call that person or they want their outdoor kitchen built so they can have their parties and they have to call a stonemason, okay, which are becoming more rare and more rare. I look at it this way. You know, if you're going to operate on my knees so I can get back on the golf course, or, you know, I'm going to want you to know what the heck it is you're doing. If you're going to teach our kids, if you're going to engineer a building, if you're going to manage people's money, you definitely need to know what

you're doing in that regard. And maybe secondary education is extremely important for that. But if you're just going to go just so you can walk out with, you know, having drank 4,000 beers in four years and, you know, ate 77 pizzas and then now you're coming out with this bland business degree that you don't know what to do with, you know, I look at it this way. If you have a college year that costs you, let's say, $40,000 or $50,000, and you multiply that by four, that's $200,000, okay? You better know exactly why you're going to college to invest that kind of money because what the other guy's doing is he's going to get a job that he doesn't have to pay for. He's actually making $40,000 or $50,000 a year. So in that four-year period of

time, there's a four-year $400,000 swing between person A and person B. So if you're going to take the time to invest in college, you better have an absolute reason, especially since, Chris, 37% of the people that go to college today that graduate never get a job in the degree that they studied for. I mean, if you think about that number alone, okay, you know, that right there should tell you that not everybody's meant to be there. Yeah. We used to see that. We had a mortgage company for almost 20 years. So we got to look at people's lives like a P&L. And a lot of times they were doing debt service to their college stuff. You know, we'd have to factor that in.

And sometimes it was extraordinary the amount of debt service they would have. And you're like, you ran up, you know, $200,000 or $300,000 in school debt, and you're a social worker. Did you check on what social workers make? And they're really great people, and we need them. Great job. But sadly, they don't get paid very well. And the debt service, I mean, there were some doctors I saw

that had so much debt service to what they paid to go through medical school. They were almost living on the street when it came to after taxes and everything else. But that being said, you know, like you say, so your book goes through and helps people with a lot of different things. Let's get into the book and some of the meat of it, if you would. Okay.

The first thing that I try to do in the book is I try to get people to think differently. And I don't care whether you're 17 or 50. If you can position yourself to think of your life as something that you want to visualize, something that you want to draw out. You know, one of the things that I do in our company is I actually have new people that come in that are hired in. I actually ask the question, why are you here? Okay. Well, I need a job. Okay. A job for what? So I can make some money. Okay. I'm game money for what? Pay my bills. Okay. Now tell me more about that.

Well, I got to fix this car and I got to do that. Well, beyond that point of time, then what are you looking for? Well, then I would like to do this. And I say, okay, good. Now we're getting somewhere. Here's a piece of paper. Here's a poster board. Here's some Crayola crayons.

Okay. I want you to draw out what your life would be if you could have it just the way you want it. OK, what's your your nirvana? OK, what's your comfort, peace and freedom? What would it look like? Because if I can get people to think properly about what it is they want their life to eventually be, then all I have to do is show them how to break that down into small pieces and obtain those things one piece at a time. You know, when you set up a vacation, Chris, you always know where you're going. You set up the plane, you set up the car, you set up the restaurants, or you set up the hotel, or your bathing suit, your beach towel, you know, your suntan lotion, whatever it is, you know, crystal clearly what you're going to do when you when you get on that vacation. And yet in life, our kids or even people in their middle

ages, they just wait for life to happen to them instead of them happening to life. So the first part of the book is spent just trying to kind of undo the thinking that they currently have, which is, I'm going to start here and just chop my way through the woods and see what happens to a place where we create a spot that they know they want to go to and then follow the path to that. I think that's pretty brilliant. That probably gives you a lower turnover rate. Well, for sure. If someone says to me, hey, Ken, within your organization, I think I can create the life that I want. Now I've got what they call an entrepreneurial thinking employee, like Tom Golisano says in his book. So I have that person who can say, hey, Ken, thanks for the training.

Thanks for the visualization. I now know where I'm headed. So kind of get out of my way and let me do it. And, you know, if I can surround myself with as many of those people as possible, Chris, my company can't help but just launch forward. That's awesome. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of that making people more entrepreneurs and giving them that big vision. For a long time with our companies, one of our challenges we had is we would take guys who were making a lot of money. We'd start them out at $2,500 a month, and they thought they'd finally hit the big time.

And they'd literally rocket ship within about three or four months to $10, grand a month. And, um, and, and one of the problems we used to have is their heads a blow up, um, because they weren't used to making that kind of money and they have issues. And we talked at one point about bringing in financial advisors to, you know, try and make a plan for them for the future so they could see the big, the big picture. Um, and so it's, to me, it's always been really hard to get that motivation going to see what the future is and stuff and to really make people feel like they have something going on that they want to stick with long-term. Because that was the big issue is getting them to see the long-term vision of it instead of the short-term vision of it. Well, you know, here's

another one of those little known facts, one of those well-kept secrets it. Well, you know, here's another one of those little-known facts, one of those well-kept secrets, and I don't know why it's kept as a secret. You know, we talk a lot about retirement, okay? And I say to myself, okay, so I've got someone here that I'm going to have a conversation with about their retirement, a conversation that they normally wait till they're 28, 33, 39, 42, and then they're panicked to start having, right? So if you, something as simple as you take $60 a week of your paycheck, okay, from the day you start, and again, Chris, you won't miss something that you never had, right? So you take that $60 from the day that you start, you save that for 10 years into some type of 401k or other instrument like that.

By the time you retire, okay, if you've started young, 21, 24, 25, you're going to have over a million bucks in that account. So from day one, you can forget about your retirement and go on to living the other things that you want to have in your envisioned puzzle, if you will. And again, that's something that is such a simple concept. I mean, Dave Ramsey talks about this all the time, and yet he doesn't actually put out there to our kids. So that's another part of the book is teaching people how to say, okay, here's your money. What are you doing with it? So put your, put your, secure your future,

love your work, secure your future and find happiness in life. Blue collar cash. So do you largely teach people how to be entrepreneurs or is the, is the key to happiness and success in blue collar work becoming an entrepreneur? Or do you talk about both sides of the coin, if you will? I think two things. Number one, if you're a person who can run a group of people, eventually, if you can start, you know, maybe you're, you're working on a framing crew. And then at some point you become the foreman of that framing crew. And then at some point you have two crews that are offsite, one, on-site, one off-site, and then you decide you want to start building your own houses, that's fine.

But if you're also someone who says, I don't know that that's for me, there is still so much money in doing the job. I mean, carpenters, especially Finnish carpenters in Toledo, can make as much as a doctor because of the rarity of these people. Note to Swell, quit job and move to Toledo. For every electrician, for every five electricians that retire, there's only one coming in to backfill that position. Well, it doesn't take a marketing genius to figure out that supply and demand is really upside down there. And if everyone's going towards the right, maybe you

should go towards the left because that's where the demand is high, the supply is low, and that's where the money goes. So it's kind of a simple process. And that's why when I see these people, I can tell you a quick story about a guy. I was renting a car a couple of years ago because my car had had some issues and it was going to be down for a couple of weeks. And I never forget, I'm talking to this guy behind the counter and he's probably 23 or four and he's got the suit on and he's trying to do his thing and be professional. But the more I talked to him, the more I could tell he wasn't really happy with what he was doing. And I got into it with him because I had to wait there a

little while. And he said, you know, I think this whole college thing was a bill of goods for me. And I said, why? He said, because I was told I had to go by my teachers and my parents and everybody else. But I really wanted to be a carpenter. And now here I am 80,000 in debt, working at this car rental place, making 30 grand. How am I ever going to get out of this hole? And, you know, my advice was find a way to be a carpenter because if you're that passionate about it, you're going to, you're going to take care of your whole world that way. Yeah. Yeah. Probably make more money than just working a retail shop and getting a wage or something like that.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's too bad in our education system it doesn't do that. And then a lot of parents have a hard time with, you know, what I do in life, and they're just like, go to college. What do I do in life now? Get a job. What do I do now? Get married.

You know, there's just standard answers. And we were talking pre-show about how a lot of people you feel, you know, they have this job, I need a good job psychology. And a lot of it just comes from that. Their parents teach it to them. Like if I had kids, I imagine you would do the same. If I had kids, they'd have their own business by five or I kick them out. I'd be like, Hey Johnny,

did you start a company yet? Well, you know, I want to see incorporations and board of directors, uh, from you, you know, it's,

uh, stuff like that. I, you know, I'd be, I'd be reading them, uh, uh,

uh, declarations and, incorporation, uh, filings, uh,ings uh 10ks and stuff you know when they're like two years old to bed and today microsoft uh found its quarter gdp was up by anywhere um my employees you actually just joke about that but i would i would never tell my kid to go to a job in fact i would i don't, I'd probably be that jerk dad that would be like, you're going to get a job.

No, I shouldn't be that way. But, you know, that's the problem. A lot of people, they just get taught this. What do you do? Get a job. And so they don't really put a lot of thought into it, and they make these choices and accept these choices that people give them when really they can think about a lot of stuff.

And when I was in the construction business, there were a lot of people that were technically entrepreneurs because they were their own contractors or they were their own people that worked in some of the different subcontracting things. I mean, I was my own boss. I mean, I needed a contractor to give me a job technically, but I still was my own boss. I could decide whether I want to work for them or pay and kind of decide my hours just a little bit. And once I got the bug, too, oh, my gosh, I couldn't get rid of the entrepreneur bug once I got it. So what are some things that you talk about finding happiness for life in your book?

What are some of the aspects you talk about in there? Well, again, I think everyone needs to be really honest with themselves, and that's why I kept coming back to the words comfort, peace, and freedom, because I think if you have those three words, they're kind of like a triangle. They're almost interdependent upon each other. And, you know, these words kept coming back because you can easily define them. Okay. What does comfort look like to you? Okay. What does peace look like to you? And what does, what, what, what would happen if you had those two, how would your life be a little more free, you know, free to do, you know, free to give back, free to spend time doing things that

are charitable, free to recreate, you know, and have hobbies and sports and all that kind of stuff. So what we really try to do is get people to think realistically about, you know, again, that's my neat life. I'd like to have that. Are you a house person or are you a condo person or an apartment in the city person? Are you a pickup truck? Are you a sedan, a minivan, motorcycle, or an electric car or a bus person? Okay. Are you a car or a bus person, okay? Are you a cat or a dog person? And if it's a dog, what would you name it? Okay, what kind of dog?

And we really get specific about what they would make for themselves, what their envisioned life, their perfect life would look like. And then we try to get them to go after that because once they start down the path of reaching a goal or two, they become these almost self-managing, goal-oriented, you know, super machines that can really propel your company forward. We have this huge board in our hallway, in our office, and it's made of like that black glass that you would see in front of a bar where they write the margarita specials on it, you know? And so what we do is we invite anyone who's putting a goal up to write it up

on the board, the date they started, the date they expect it to end, exactly how they're going to get there in finite detail. Okay. And then everybody else in that office kind of cheers them on. And I got to tell you, we only have to do that once, okay? Because once they see the power of that, they just put their own goals up on the board, they continue to hit them. And then, you know, sometimes they want to give me or my company credit for it. And I say, you know, come on, guys, all I did was lead you to this place and give you some visions, okay? Give you some ideas on how to think. You did all the work.

So, to me, comfort, peace, and freedom is the true happiness, if you will. And everybody has the ability to control this. It's not like, you know, you have to be a visionary or an entrepreneur. I don't even know what some of those words mean when it comes to this, because once you get someone down the path to working for themselves, they become that and they're all the more happy for it. I can see that. I mean, I wish I had your book 20 or 30 years ago, Ken, why weren't you there for me? Because, you know, that was one of the problems I always had with employees. A lot of them, you know, for me, you know, they would be like, well, you just show up every day because you're in the business. I'm like, no, because

they have massive bills. Like people be like, what's your motivation? People say to me, Chris, what's your motivation in life? Why do you work so hard? And I'm like, because I have bills and they come every month and they keep coming every month. And, But it was interesting. I would have employees, and it was much harder from a sales aspect to keep them motivated because, you know, you're on a commission sort of scale as opposed to a wage. And you go through periods where you make a lot of money, and your brain goes, ah, take the vacation, slough off a little bit, and then you're behind the gun,

and then you got to catch up. Right. But one of the problems I have with employees is getting them to see the big vision of their jobs. And I think it's, for me, it was always hard to get them to see that because, you know, I never had discussions you had that I love

that you put forth in the book about what they want to achieve. I just figured they manage that kind of stuff in their head. You know, me, I, you know, my head, I'm like, okay, I want a new BMW and, you know, I want this and that. And I just figured they all wanted the same thing. And I tried to inspire them where I could, but I remember there was one time I had an employee who came in. He'd come to me six months behind on his child support, and he had like five kids, so this wasn't any small sum of money. And he was living on his friend's couch, you know, totally broke, rock bottom, beater car, and all that good stuff.

Came to work for me. Within about six months months he paid off everything got his child support got caught up got a nice car got a new computer got his own place everything else walked into me one day and he goes i'm not motivated to do anything i got everything and i was trying to get him to plan for the future i'm like well there's so much stuff you got to do you got a retirement program program, you know, you still got those kids, you're going to need to pay for them for the next, you know, until they're 18. And, you know, I mean, what do you want to do next? What's the thing? And sometimes it was really a hard challenge to get people out of their thermostat, you know, where they're happy and sometimes they sabotage.

But I like what you do. I love the brilliance of that goal board because it kind of makes it not only, you don't feel alone in your goal. You kind of feel like you're, you do. I love the brilliance of that goal board because it kind of makes it not only – you don't feel alone in your goal. You kind of feel like you're working at the company you're at. You're kind of helping, and you've got kind of some cheerleading going on from your coworkers. Well, you know, the important thing is that in order to get someone to think differently, they have to go through this metamorphosis.

It's like five different things that they go through. The first one is they have to congratulate themselves that now that they're this different person. It's almost like they say to themselves, OK, you know, if I'm a smoker, OK, I'm not a smoker anymore. I don't identify with it. I'm not that person. And then they are successfully quit. So the first thing they have to do is identify with the fact that they're new. They're thinking differently. So they should congratulate themselves on that. The second thing they do, and this is where the board comes in, is they have to identify the goal very, very clearly. And I mean, very clearly, down to the dollars and cents, okay, or in the timeframe. That's very important so that they can visualize

it. And then they go on to the next step where they actually take action on it. And what I mean by that is they literally, they do the math, okay? I need to do this. It's going to take me 48 months to do it. I'm going to have to save $18.42 a week to get there. And it's not anymore an if goal, it's only a when goal. Okay. And then they further down the line, they go to the payroll clerk and they say, okay, now I want you to take that physical money out of my paycheck and put it into an account that I can't touch. So now this goal is in action. You know, they set it and then they don't have to sweat about it anymore. Right. And then finally they put it up on the board so that everyone can see it. And now they've shared that with others. And, you know, once you make that commitment, you know, I don't know if

you remember your city pool when you were younger, but when you first get up on that diving board, and it's 10 feet in the air, and you're walking towards the end of it, you know, the only thing getting you off that board is your little five-year-old buddy saying, hey man, you better jump. You made it this far, you better jump. And I think that there's a lot of power in that. So it's like I said, it's kind of this metamorphosis that these people go through, but when they're done, they come out the other side going, holy cow, this life of anticipation is the only way to live. I love this idea, man. I love this board. You should put a picture of it on your, well, it's probably personal with people's personal goals. Well, I do have a picture on it. You can kind of see the back. Oh, awesome. I love this. I'm going to have to get a hold of your book because

someday I'm going to have a business that has a bunch of employees. I don't know, though. I've really been enjoying this for the past. Since 2004, I've been really enjoying doing my own thing. You know, if I have VA assistance if I need them or hiring for, you know, projects or gigs or events, I do. But after having a lot of employees, it was, I don't know, I seem to have more peace. I was using your peace, comfort, freedom triad there. But no, I love that you nailed this down because a lot of people, they don't have a vision when they go to work.

And they wake up and they go, I'm going to go to my job. What are you going to do? I'm going to work for my stupid boss. And then, you know, they don't realize they're working for themselves. The money is for themselves. You know, they're always just trying to get to Friday. I always had the employees that were always, you know, phoning it in and at a quarter to five, they were in the marathon racing starting position to get to the punch clock, you know, and I had some really great employees too, that, you know,

they, they worked two hours after and I knew who they were. Um, but, uh, I always knew the people were that were running out the door. You're like, Hey, can you just do this one thing? I'm out of here, man. I already punched out. And, uh, but, and there's something wrong with that, but a lot of people, they lose the vision and it hurts them on motivation. It hurts them on jobs and as, as employers and CEOs and stuff, you know, we want people that are motivated. We want people to care about what they do. Um, you know, I don't want to be a slave driver. I, I, I called, uh, I called, um um i called the labor departments and asked if we chain people to death they said no i said okay i get it i get it i get it okay take the chains off no i'm just

kidding um but i mean people people in so many jobs today are like that you know they're just like they feel dead end and they're not focused on the big picture. So I love how you talk about applying that as a CEO or a boss or an employer, or just taking that into your own sort of context of what you want to take and do, because then you, you see the big picture, whether you're working for someone else or yourself. Well, you know, I think what's really important, and this is where as, as an employer, you have to take a step back for a second because the people that you're

getting in your organizations now, they've grown up with the ability to look at any bit of information they want in the palm of their hand in a millisecond. And that includes shopping the opportunities for work, okay? Where they're going to work here, where they're going to work there. And a lot of times, if I have someone that comes into me with the attitude, hey, what's in it for me to work here? You know, you can be put off by that if you were a boss of 10, 20 years ago. But now I kind of embrace that because I want to answer that question and I want them to answer that question, okay. I've, I've said this a thousand times in my company in front of the entire staff. I can't get what I want, nor can my company get what it wants

until all of you get what you want first. That's the way this works. There's input. There's, you know, there's making something and then there's output. And so I'm at the end of the line there. So it makes really good sense for me to make sure all of you can reach the goals that you want so that you'll stay, you'll be motivated. And as soon as you hit that first goal, I'm going to ask you what your second one is. And at some point, Chris, we're going to start working on two or three goals at the same time, be it six months, two years, five years, 10 years, because for me the reality is making every one of their goals a when goal, as I said before, not an if goal, because then you turn hopes and dreams and wishes and wonders into reality that way.

Have you ever heard somebody say, well, I want your job? Yeah, absolutely. I think I've heard people say that. I'm like, what do you want to do? I want your job. Yeah, absolutely. I think I've had people say, I'm like, what do you want to do? I'm like, I want your job. And I'm like, well, maybe I'll just go be the chairman then. Yeah. So I love the idea. As we talk pre-show about culture, company culture, business culture,

having a healthy environment, let's talk a little bit about that and what you feel about it. Well, I can tell you right now that there is such a shortage of workers, as we've discussed already, Chris, and you're competing for a smaller and smaller pool of people. So in order to attract them into your company, you have to do a lot of creative things. I call it like making it a culture of cool.

And you can describe what cool is, okay? There's energy in the building. There's music in the building. There's celebrations going on with birthdays and whatnot. There's cookouts every single week. There's acknowledgments of jobs done well. There's bonuses and there's contests going on. And the people feel like when they get into this place, they're in a real big bowl of energy.

And they really, really get addicted to that. They want to come back again and again to kind of stay there. And you got to remember, this is so important. I mean, I even have someone that's only, their only job is to create cool. That's it. Wow. And the reason that's so important is because, again, if I'm, if someone comes to my office, by the time they get there, they've passed 24 help wanted signs on their way to my office.

And you know, there's competition there. So I have to make myself stand out in a way that people are going to go, man, I really want to work at this place. It's, it's, it's a great place to be.

Yeah. Is that person James Brown? I feel good. Yeah. No, just the, no environment's really important. I think it's cool how you run your environment.

I, like I said, I wish I would have some of this data. I think it's cool how you run your environment. Like I said, I always point out some of this data. I really struggled with this back in the day with keeping employees motivated, keeping them their eye on the big goals and everything else. You know, I mean, we guys have made a lot of money with me. And, you know, sometimes one of the hardest things we had was, you know, getting their brains to blow up. Maybe we should have put them in financial programs where they were putting that money away. Because once their brains blow up and their thermostats kind of reconfigure them. I also like on your goal charts how you get really nitty-gritty on the specification of the results of what they want, albeit financial or, or whatever. I remember Anthony Robbins in 89, I went to one of his first seminars.

Uh, and he asked the lady in the front row, he goes, uh, so what do you want to do this? Uh, what do you want to do? You know, this year I want to make more money. And he goes, okay. He flips her quarter and he goes, congratulations. You just made your goal. It's pretty powerful to me at the time it's stuck with me all these years because i was like oh wow and he's like you know he talked about if

you don't specify your goal then you know your goal is ambiguous and and not really even worth going for in your in your mind's eye and uh so he's like you know you gotta you gotta set a goal because just more money could mean you know you get five cents but more at the end of the year. So I love that it goes into that. Culture is important to me. One of the things that we try to do with our companies was always lay down a good culture as best I could at the time. I didn't have your book. But one of the things I always had was the unasked question.

The only dumb question is the unasked question. And there's not one person in this company who has all the ideas everyone can contribute ideas i don't care who they are what they are contribute them um but the the unasked question uh um uh the only dumb question is the honest question got people to answer a lot of questions in fact when i was one of those bosses where when people come to me and go, hey, Chris, can we do this? I'd say no, you know, usually whatever it was. And I'd explain to them why. Or sometimes I'd say yes, and I'd explain to them why we did things that way.

So they understood the why behind the answers. And it just helped educate them better with the companies. And they, of course, go share it with their other employees. But having a learning sort of environment or healthy environment, like what you're talking about, it's really important because when you have people turned on brain-wise and motivation-wise, where they're like, hey, I give a crap and I want to do a good job and I see a future for me. I'm not just showing up to a job and phoning it in and going home and saying, screw all that stuff. I think that makes a huge amount of difference. You're less living for the weekend. I see so many people, they'll post on LinkedIn or something. They're like,

oh God, is it just Wednesday? I'm like, hell, I didn't even know it was Wednesday. I'm just working, man. It never ends. The bills never end, and I'm just plugging along, chewing my elephant. But, you know, I can't imagine going through that grind. I think when I was younger, I used to go through the grind where you'd sit and you'd work for somebody else, and you'd look at the clock, and you'd be like, holy crap, it's been four hours, and the clock's only been 15 minutes.

Yeah, you know, it's funny about that because again, if you have someone that's anticipating something, and this is a key thing about the way I try to teach people to live is, you know, imagine being able to anticipate something six months from now, a year from now, two years or three or five years from now. And, and it's not as hard as you think, because, you know, I had a gal that said, you know, someday, I would really love to go visit my family in Europe. And I said, Okay, how about we put that path together today? Okay, not someday. And she said, Well, what do you mean? And I said, Well, tell me what you want to do. And so she told

me and I said, Okay, so what's that going to cost you? And I think she said something like $3,000 or whatever it was. And I said, okay, can you afford to save 20 bucks a week? And she said, well, yeah, I can afford to save 20 bucks a week. I said, okay, three years from today, you're going to Scotland. And she looked at me like I just invented penicillin. Okay. And again, these are not really complicated concepts. It's just no one has told them how clearly these paths can be cut and followed. And you know, what was great about that is you and I both know that time goes by in a flash. Okay. Weeks and months go by like days. And for her, she got to anticipate every detail of

that trip for the next, you know, 35 months. But what was great about it was the money that she put away started to build. And she would come to me and say, I'm a third of the way there. I'm a half of the way there, three quarters of the way there. And so that was just one of her goals. She would have never, and she told me this, I would have never gone to Scotland if it weren't for this simple path or this simple plan that we put together. And yet again, Chris, it was so simple, but yet it's just that very first step that people have the most trouble with. Once you get them on a path to something that they can see happening, again, you just get out of their way and let them do it.

So, I mean, it really makes them feel more empowered. Oh, 100%. Because you can do this with anything. You can do this with a nagging debt. You can do this with maybe you want to save for a down payment on a house. And what's really cool is when they get two or three of them going at the same time and they have these things, you know, maybe they're saving a little in their 401k, maybe they're putting a little bit down towards a vacation, maybe they're putting a little bit down towards a down payment on a house. And what happens is they become these very whole people,

like, man, my life is in full gear. I'm in control of my life. You know, my input is creating an output for me. I see progress. And you talk about loyalty. I mean, that's, it's one of the best ways that you can make that happen. That is awesome, dude. I love this whole package, man. I got to get ahold of your book and you can get ahold of it. It's out today. The blue collar cash, love your work, secure your future and find happiness for life can rescue you find on amazon the um you know i love that and what's funny is a lot of people don't realize like 20 bucks you just skip a cup of coffee at starbucks there's your 20 bucks for the day uh that's for a day um the um you know you don't get the little brownie too you gotta skip the

brownie and you know whatever but but who needs really? Just make your coffee at home. It's, it's all better. So I love the vision. It sounds like you've got the financial instruments too, to help guide people to make some good instruments, whether it's I guess with life insurance or other things to put them, put their stuff in 401ks and that. Yeah, we, we've always had a 401k plan. And the one thing I love about that particular device is the fact that I don't benefit from it at all. Okay. Whether someone goes into the plan or not, it doesn't, you know, the more people that are in it, it's not necessarily a situation where it makes me more money or anything like that. You know, there's contributions. And, you know, here's another really cool little secret. If you try to save a dollar on your own and you pay, let's say, a quarter in taxes, okay, you're going to put 75 cents away into your savings account, right?

If you save a dollar in a 401k and that company matches a quarter, now you've got a dollar and a quarter. So for every time you put away 75 cents, that other employee in their 401k is putting away a dollar and a quarter. So for every time you put away 75 cents, that other employee in their 401k is putting away a dollar and a quarter. That's a 50 cent swing. Yeah. And an interest rate that you could never find anywhere else if you think about it.

So I love it when I see the people in our office open up their statements because they're like, I'm a 401k millionaire. You know, I'm a 401k millionaire. And they're 21, 25, 28, maybe 33. And to see the people accumulating these thousands of dollars in these accounts and knowing that they can sit at the bar that night with their beer next to their buddies and say, yeah, my retirement's covered. How about you? It's just a really cool feeling to see them go through that. That's freaking awesome, dude. And I'm glad to get people involved in these investments early on so they can plan for their future because that makes a real big difference.

So anything more we need to know, Ken, about you, your book and everything else? Well, I just wanted to say that, you know, if you're a parent or a grandparent and or uncle of someone that you think is trying to figure out what they want to do with, with their, their world, this is a great book for you to read first. It's, it's an easy read. It's quick, a lot of great stuff in there and then give it to them and have them read it. And then you can have some real quality conversations about what their path

might be. But more and more in addition to that, I should say, if you're someone who's already in their mid-30s or whatever, and they're stuck in this job that they hate behind a desk or whatever, and you think that you might want to work with your hands and do something that you're really passionate about, this book is definitely for you to help you transition from what you're doing into what you could be doing and be happier for it. Because at the end of the day, we're all looking to finally hit our goals. We're all looking to get unstuck.

And if you can learn how to see your future and then how to divide it into pieces and then go get it one piece at a time, you're going to love living a life of anticipation and your path towards comfort, peace, and freedom is going to be crystal clear. And it's just the only way to live. That was a great book to read, even if you don't want to go into blue collar. I mean, great way to run a company, great way to motivate employees. If you're an employee, great way to find motivation, you know? I mean, you can't,

as an employee, you can't always go to your employer and be like, inspire me and give me better financial. And so it gives you that thing where they could just take the blueprint that you have in your book and they could reverse engineer it and go okay so what do i do and what's what's what's my plans even though they they may may or may not have an employer that cares um but it can definitely give you the thing because i've always thought of that when people just go to work all the time and they don't have any sort of long-term sort of goals or care about what they want to take and do. I mean, for me, there is kind of a day-to-day where I'm just like, there's bills to pay. But, you know, I have a long-term vision and stuff like that. But those monthly things kind

of help. They just, you know, I just keep picking away at them. But yeah, you know, it's a great way to do it. And I like the idea, the concept of the triad, the comfort, peace and freedom. That's always good to have, you know, I mean, feeling that you have those aspects and giving you a comfort level. I mean, I know I sleep better when I got money in the bank, I got a belly full and, and I have some sort of acquiescent peace where I feel like, yeah, today was a good day, you know, a good week or whatever the case may be. So there you go. Check out the book. It's Blue Collar Cash by Ken Rusk.

Love your work, secure your future, and find happiness for your life. Give us the.com so people can look up Ken to take a look at your website and books. You can go to KenRusk.com or you can go to BlueColorCash.com or follow us on Ken Rusk Official at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Awesome sauce. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to go to thecbpn.com.

Refer to your family, friends, relatives. If you like the show, give it five stars. Go to iTunes and write up a great review of it. We've had a few people do it so thanks to my honest members who did that and the kind words that you did we loved them i cried a little bit i got a little acclimbed and you touched me and uh so if you want to do more of those feel free anyway guys we certainly appreciate you guys thanks for tuning in oh if you want to see the video version of this you can go to youtube.com for sure that's chris voss

and see uh how good looking ken is in his wonderful office library that he's got there. You definitely want to check out his book collection as well. He's got his main one right in front of him. Thanks, my honnest, for tuning in. We'll see you guys next time.