The Ramsey Show - App - How Can I Budget for a Small Business? (Hour 3)

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Dave Ramsey & George Kamel answer your questions and discuss around business and leadership: Budgeting for business, "When should we buy an office space?" "I feel like I don't have money to grow the business," "How do I get my business out of debt?" Have a question for the show? Call 888-825-5225 Weekdays from 2-5pm ET Want a plan for your money? Take our FREE 3 minute assessment: https://bit.ly/3nInETX Listen to all The Ramsey Network podcasts: https://bit.ly/3GxiXm6 Learn more about your ad choices. https://www.megaphone.fm/adchoices Ramsey Solutions Privacy Policy

Девочка-пай Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the Pods Moving and Storage Studios, it's The Ramsey Show. We help people build wealth, do work that they love, and create actual actual amazing relationships. This is a special edition of the Ramsey Show. This hour is the Entree Leadership Theme Hour. Entree Leadership is our brand where we work with business leaders, business owners, and

answer business questions about your business, whatever it is, your personnel, your team, your payroll, your money, your idea, your product launch, whatever it is. George Camel, Ramsey personality, is my co-host today. He was for quite a while, over a couple of years, the host of the Entree Leadership Podcast. And he has gotten so busy with the money stuff that I fired him and moved him into that. And I took the Entree Leadership Podcast as of a week ago. And I taught you everything I know, Dave. I mentored you for months to take over this podcast. He was freaking out at first.

That's good to know because that way, if it doesn't work, we can blame you. That's right. I'm happy to take the blame and you get all the credit. I think that's in your book, Entree Leadership, that you wrote. That's how you delegate. That's what great leaders do. That's how you delegate. Great leaders look for a place to throw the blame.

All right. So here's the deal. Entree Leadership podcast is on every Monday. It is a call-in show as well. It is podcast only, so pick it up where you listen to good podcasts. And in the meantime, this hour, we're going to take calls from those of you that own or operate or want to know about business, Small Business Theme Hour, Entree Leadership Theme Hour. The phone number here is 888-825-5225. That's 888-825-5225.

Now, it is important for a bunch of you out there to understand that small business is basically the American economy. It amounts to 54% of the gross domestic product. Over half of the economy is small business and 70 percent of you work for small businesses or own a small business most people don't statistically work for large companies that's the misnomer everyone thinks oh well the big companies the huge companies that have 10 000 20 000 employees they're the employees, they're the big employers. They're the big employers, but they're not the biggest portion of employers in the nation. Well, when you think small business, a lot of people

think, oh, it's a mom and pop shop. It's a solopreneur. But small and medium-sized businesses, I mean, that can run the gamut to thousands of people. Yeah. You know, we define it for Entree Leadership as those of you that have 200 or less team members. We've got about 1,100 here, but we're still, in our hearts, small business at Ramsey. It's a pretty big, small business, but certainly not compared to, you know, whatever, big tech or something like that. We're just little guys on that idea.

So, again, open phones at 888-825-5225, a small business theme hour. Raleigh, North Carolina. Lee is up. Hi, Lee. Hey, guys. How are you? Better than we deserve. What's up?

I am so excited to be on this show. I've been a longtime listener and just looking for my chance to be on and ask a question here. So I'll give it a go. I use the EveryDollar budgeting app personally, and it's been a huge help financially for me and just keeping track of everything. But my bills, as a business owner, I'd love to have a very similar tool,

but these bills, they change all the time. So there are some things that remain consistent, but materials, anything like that. I run a painting business, so all that stuff kind of fluctuates each month, and I was wondering, is there a tool within the Ramsey stuff that would be able to help me with those kind of things? No, we do not have a small business accounting package, and that's what you need. As a matter of fact, you need one that does job costing. When you're a subcontractor, you want to cost out each job,

which is essentially running a profit and loss statement on each job. So you go in and you have a painting job, you estimate the job, and you contract for the job for a certain number of dollars, correct? Yes. Okay, then you would enter that into the job for a certain number of dollars, correct? Yes. Okay. Then you would enter that into the job cost with a particular job, put an address on it or however you label that particular job. And then all of the materials and labor that are associated with that job are charged to that job.

And then you put the income in from that job when the customer pays you. And now you can go back and go, well, I estimated it at this and I missed it. And I could, you know, I didn't put in enough for materials or I didn't put in enough for labor or put in too much. I almost overbid it here. I ran my margins up accidentally. And each particular job is operated like a separate business. That's what job costing means. So you need some accounting software that does that.

I would probably check with Home Builders Association and see what they're recommending on it. We've got a very sophisticated, but it's overkill for you, accounting software called NetSuite that is absolutely incredible. If QuickBooks has a business version out there, you might look at that. You may look for a cloud solution, but I don't have one off the top of my head. But whatever you're doing, you're looking for something that does job costing. Are you seeing anything, George? I mean, QuickBooks is what came to mind. Yeah. They may have some of those features at this point. Yeah. And there's another one that does, we used to advertise for them,

I can't think who it is, that it's a cloud-based thing. I want to call it ZeroRes. That's a carpet company, though. Oh. But it's something like that. Anyway, I can't remember, but it doesn't matter. You need to go out there and find something, Lee, that does that. You don't need something super expensive or complicated.

You've just got to do it on purpose, and you budget it by doing job costing. That's the big thing. And allocate a portion of your overhead to each job to where there's no central global expense sheet. All of it is allocated somewhere to a job, and that's what you want to do. So very, very good question. George, it's really important in personal finance, but also in business to tell your money what to do before the month begins. We actually did an episode, you and I, on the Entrez Leadership Podcast about this, about financial peace for business and the

importance of doing a budget. We actually talked to our CFO here to figure out what does a business need to think about when it comes to this? Because it is different than your personal budget. You have things that you wouldn't need to worry about in your personal finances. Well, it's different in that the things that are in it are different, but the concept's still the same. We're projecting for this coming month what our income's going to be. We could call it revenue in business. We're projecting what our outflow is going to be, call it expenses in business or unpersonal and the difference is called profit in business and so you don't want to project losing money so we've either got to cut expenses or raise revenues or you're going to be out of business

and a business that doesn't make money eventually is called a hobby so you need to change these things and you need to make you be on top. And so many people, and small business people in particular, are so enthusiastic. They're so excited. They're so good at doing their particular craft. They don't bother to budget before the month starts, and then they try to out-earn their stupidity. I might have known a guy that did that a couple of times. How happy were you when you hired your first accountant? Oh, I was so happy.

Best day of his life. Don't have to do that stuff. I hate it. It's marrying Sharon, hiring an accountant. I love it. Yes, yes. These are good rules.

Good rules, yes. It's an Entree Leadership Theme Hour here on The Ramsey Show. The phone number is 888-825-5225 if you want to talk business. Hey, you guys. Health insurance costs are only moving one way, and that way isn't down.

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That's chministries.org slash budget. This is an Entree Leadership Theme Hour. George Camel, Ramsey personality and former host of the Entree Leadership Podcast, is my co-host today as we take your questions about business. 888-825-5225. That's 888-825-5225. And that's what I would do, jump in. Now listen, a couple of programming notes here.

Number one, we did move George. He's doing a bunch of YouTube things. He's got a couple of projects, a book he's working on. And so he was just too stinking busy to do the Entree Leadership Podcast. He got too good for us. So I'm doing the Entree Leadership Podcast now and answering your questions. People are calling in and doing that. You can join us anywhere you listen to podcasts. Just look up Entree Leadership Podcast. It's one of the top business and leadership podcasts in America today, literally.

I mean, it's in, like, the top five or something. So jump in there and give us a listen, and we'll be taking your calls on that as well. The phone number here, 888-825-5225. Now, the other programming note is on the ramsey show which is what you're listening to if you have not subscribed to this show on youtube or podcast do it what are you waiting on you'll help us out a bunch if you do that and give us a five-star rating too uh if your mother said if you ain't anything to say, don't say nothing at all. So five-star ratings are welcome.

The rest of you just move on. And you're not doing anybody any good hating on us. So it helps us out, really. It does. And share the show. If you're listening on talk radio or TBN, let people know where you're watching or listening. If you're listening on a podcast, let them know.

You can click a link on that and share the link. Same thing on YouTube. So share, review, subscribe. Very important on this show, The Ramsey Show, and on any of our shows here, including my Taking Over the Entree Leadership podcast. You're the OG, Dave. There we go. Don't bring it back.

I don't know exactly what that means, but I guess I am. Okay, whatever you said. Mallory is in new haven connecticut hey mallory how are you hi dave thanks so much for having me on the show i'm so excited to be here we're glad to have you how can we help today so my husband and i are small business owners my husband's a chiropractor and we opened up our own private practice a couple years ago and we're on schedule to pay off those big doctor student loans by the end of this year and we were wondering when in the baby steps should we consider buying an office space instead of leaving before, I mean instead of leasing, before or after we pay off our home mortgage? I bought mine after I paid off my home mortgage, and I bought it with cash. Okay. I would not recommend that you go into debt.

You're not in the real estate business. You're in the chiropractic business. Definitely. Don't get confused. So this idea that, oh, real estate's an investment. I need to go into debt and get that. Everybody does that in small business. Definitely. Don't get confused. So this idea that, oh, real estate's an investment. I need to go into debt and get that. And everybody does that in small business. And it puts you in a serious pinch. You're much better off to lease until you can buy. The ideal situation is if you can find a property. This is what we did on our first building at Ramsey, our first office building.

Well, not our first one, our third one. We leased an 800-square-foot space. Then we moved to a 3,000-square-foot space. And then we moved into a 13,000-square-foot space within a 55,000-square-foot office building. The third move, we got a lease with an option to purchase for five years. During that five years, we scraped our nickels out of the corner of the couch and paid cash for that building. Exercise the option. So that's ideal if you can find a place. Now, in your case, you're probably a candidate for a really good office condo.

Okay. I've owned a few of those in my life. And, you know, something, because I'm guessing you're probably using under 10,000 square feet, aren't you? Definitely. Definitely. One to two. Yeah, I had a 7,000 square foot office condo across the street from our old offices

that we bought uh and put people in and i later sold it because we moved out of that location into these new buildings that we built but but yeah you you're a real candidate that's a that's a good size uh and honestly if someone owns an office condo that they don't need anymore they're a candidate to lease it to you with an option because they wouldn't mind selling it probably. So look around for that and see if you can find that. But it's okay if you're a renter for a decade on your business. Okay.

Are you all planning to grow the size of the business in terms of the square footage and need? I think slightly. We'd like to, once we finish paying off the student loans, we'd eventually like to add a second doctor to help with the workload. So we would need a little more space than to have the loan tables. We would like to grow a little bit, but we will never need, you know, five to 10,000. That's just's just would be too big at any time yeah so i mean if you over purchased a little bit for your growth you won't have a problem later for sure yeah that that's kind of what i would aim at then because one of the things that small businesses and you're not

going to fall to this but a lot of small businesses run into is they buy something and then they outgrow it. And then they're trapped because they own it. Yes. I like the flexibility of leasing until you know exactly where you want to go, how much you're going to pay, and make that a goal from the profits to save up that amount and pay in cash, which is a controversial thing in the business world. The truth is in most businesses, like 98% of them, rent is not a big line item in your P&L. Payroll is, but rent is not.

And so it's just a cost of doing business, and the flexibility and someone else dealing with the building breaking down, the heat and air going out, the roof leaking, all that crap, is really, really handy while you're trying to be a chiropractor. Now, I'm a real estate guy. I grew up in the real estate business, so I've always, you know, had an addiction to the ownership of real estate, but I've never borrowed money, since I went broke years ago, to buy real estate of any kind, including the properties that we're sitting in today. Well, people think it's a conspiracy theory, Dave, that you pay cash for all of these buildings. And I know, I know you

personally, and I know that you say all the time, we move at the speed of cash. Even with our own building projects, we're not going to continue until we have the funds to do it. Well, honestly, I grew up in Antioch, Tennessee, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think it's a conspiracy theory that God gave me enough money to do this. It blows my mind because it's a lot of money. My brain is just sometimes I'm just overwhelmed with gratitude and overwhelmed with I can't believe I'm here. But I am here, and we did pay cash, and we did it a little bit at a time. I mean, we're finishing up the Ramsey Event Center in the next two weeks or so.

It'll be completed, and it's the third building on this campus, and we've got plenty of room to grow, plenty of room to grow here within the event center and within the office buildings that we have. We can house about 2,000 people, and we have about 1,100. So we're ahead of the curve on all that. But the idea that I would have that kind of money, if you'd have asked me that in my 20s or even in my 30s, I would have said, oh, my gosh, no way. But it's happened very gradually over a decade that we put ourselves in this, that God put us in this position to do this.

It's blessings. So it's really, really pretty cool. This is an Entree Leadership Theme Hour. We're talking small business. And here's the thing. People ask us, George, do these financial peace principles from the Bible apply to business? Well, you know, the borrower is slave to the lender except in business. It's not in Proverbs. It's just the borrower is slave to the lender, period.

And cosigningigning one lacking in sense co-signs for another except in business it doesn't say that in proverbs you know uh jesus said don't build a tower without first counting the cost lest you get halfway up and you're unable to finish and all who see you began to mock you and say this man began to build and was unable to finish this idea of having a plan having a blueprint before you build a tower having a budget except in business it's not in there so there's no caveats to common sense or spiritual principles from scripture there's no caveats for business it different. Now, you can violate them if you want. It's not a sin.

You're not going to hell for it. It's just, biblically speaking and common sense speaking, dumb. Because you know how much I was worried about paying the rent in these buildings during COVID? Not. Didn't have a cash flow pinch here, boys and girls. Think about it. This is an Entree Leadership Theme Hour on The Ramsey Show.

It's an Entree Leadership Theme Hour, a small business theme hour here on The Ramsey Show. If you want to hear more of this kind of content for small businesses, we love small business at Ramsey show. If you want to hear more of this kind of content for small businesses, we love small business at Ramsey. We have been one for 35 years and we we've coached and worked with small businesses under the entree leadership brand for decades. And we have the entree leadership podcast that I now do answering questions just like we're doing today.

So if you want to join us on that, it comes out every Monday and anywhere great podcasts are sold. Be sure and check it out. That would be Apple, Spotify, et cetera, right? So Google Play, all that kind of stuff. We're everywhere. You can want to listen to a podcast. Oh, and it's on YouTube.

So be sure and check that out as well. All right. Allie is next. Allie is with us in Phoenix, Arizona. Hi, Allie, how are you? Hey, Dave, I'm great. How are you? Better than we deserve. How can George and I help? Well, I am a residential house cleaning company owner here in Phoenix, Arizona. And I have been trying to grow this business for the last six years or so. And obviously then the pandemic happened and we had our best year ever

in 2020. And then we ended up with an employee shortage, which obviously made it to where I had to cancel a bunch of clients. I wasn't making as much money and could no longer afford to pay for ads for employees. And I'm just having a really tough time growing right now with the lack of workers and then just finances. You know, trying to support my kids and pay well has been a challenge. I took out a loan, which was really stupid of me through Stripe in September, thinking that that would assist me in paying for ads for workers and training. And it ended up biting me in the butt big time. And since then, I haven't been able to pay myself. So I'm here to ask for your genius assistance. So what are your current expenses with this business?

Expenses are obviously payroll and travel time and fuel, all the insurances and supplies and equipment. And how many people are working for you right now? Right now, I actually only have two people, so three including myself. And how many would be ideal for you to grow and scale this thing? Ten would be awesome because then I can actually start working on the business instead of in the business. Do you have enough clients to support that or do you have a client issue as well? No, I could get clients pretty easily.

I was in B&I for a while and I could easily just go back there and get clients no problem. It's just the workers and getting them fully trained in order to send them to these places that, you know, the most expensive part of it and the most difficult. Okay, you're running two employees or three? Two, but I am in the houses. Two, and you're working in the houses as well, and you're not making a profit. Correct. I'm working my butt off.

So why would we scale this? Well, the opportunity is definitely there well then go get some opportunity you need more houses to clean with the three of you you got to get something profitable before you want to double it i don't want to double this it sounds like hell why isn't it making money right now uh just because of the lack of workers and no no no no no no no you don't have enough houses for the three of you to clean to offset the fact that all three of you need to make a living out of it we have tons of houses we're working like then why are you not making a profit on three people

working it if you were doing the solo would you be making a profit so okay so i was making a profit until I took out that loan from Stripe. How much do you owe Stripe? Stripe, it was a $15,000 loan, and then they added $2,000 on top of that, and I thought that that would help me to get employees. For advertising? Right, because Indeed changed their way of charging. It used to be I could do $10 a day, and now it's like $35 an application. So I wasn't able to afford ads to get the workers to clean the house.

You weren't able to afford their ads, and that's when you should have walked away from them instead of financing with them with Stripe. Okay, but $17,000 loan loan if you just quit paying that you're still not profitable well so today they take out 20 percent per transaction because they're out of what these are they pay you by stripepe? Right. So I have a scheduling software called Housecall Pro, and they use Stripe to process the credit cards. And so for every transaction that, you know, my clients pay via credit card, they're taking 20% to pay back.

You know, sold your soul to the company. It's like garnishing waste. I did. I know. sold your soul it's like garnishing waste i know so you have to shut every bit of that down and go get a different credit card processing and just process you haven't even got that many houses how many houses are you cleaning um i haven't added it up but we're still under 100 but i think it's like 75 three of you are cleaning 75 houses. Reoccurring, yeah. Okay.

Somewhere around there. Is there an hourly rate? Is there an average rate you're charging per home? Well, for initial deep claims, there is an hourly rate, which is $60 an hour. Sometimes $55 if it's not that bad. You have farmed out your scheduling. You have farmed out your payment systems, and you have farmed out your scheduling you have farmed out your payment systems and you've all and you farmed out a loan and you've incestuously woven them all together the only way you're going to get back on your feet is to break every bit of that

and that's going to mean you go get another way to schedule on another way to process payments where they're not taking 20 out and then you pay them when you can get around to it. But you get your business up and running first. They stand on the sidelines and wait on you. Right. And you don't have to have Indeed or Stripe to run a business. They're not that freaking powerful. So who do you recommend that we purchase ads from for employees? I don't know that I would purchase ads.

I think I would take the three people that you have and tell them I'll pay you 500 bucks a piece for your friends that come to work here. Right, and I did do that, but... What about local Facebook groups, neighborhood communities? Hey, Allie, let me tell you what I'm hearing. I did what you're doing for a while. What I did for a while was i kept waiting on someone to come along riding on a white horse to make business easy no and you're keep you're keep you're looking for some software some advertising you're looking for indeed and stripe and uh house scheduling company whatever it was called all these people to do this and make all of a sudden it's going to

be easy or if i just get more people it's going to be easy it's not going to be easy you're going to have to get down in the dirt with this thing you're not afraid of hard work that's not what i'm saying but no one's coming to save you no one's coming the calvary's not coming you have got to push back and you've got to fix this yourself and it's not coming. You have got to push back, and you've got to fix this yourself. And it's not like, oh, I have to go buy ads. You know how many ads Ramsey buys for hiring? Zero. We hired 300 people last year. We do not buy ads.

We post stuff on LinkedIn. We post stuff here or there, but we do not buy employment ads. They're generally useless. The type of people that come in off of them are the bottom of the barrel. Occasionally, you can get somebody good. And indeed, it's not a bad company, but you don't want to be a slave to them. They're taking 20% out, like George says, like a garnishment. They're killing you.

You have painted yourself into a corner, and employees aren't your problem. The problem is that you gave someone else control of your business in an effort to make this easy It's not going to be easy. You're going to make it hard again You have to do scheduling by hand on a spreadsheet You have to go down at your bank and get a visa processing system And just you know, get up get a merchant account with your local bank and you can process your own stinking car It's only 75 transactions a month. It's not like you can't do those at night after the kids go to bed.

It's not that hard. And so you can do this. And then when you get ready to scale and you get Stripe paid back, you may want to step back in with them. But learn your lesson, and that's don't fall. Good Lord. Yeah, run this thing at the speed of cash. How backward is it that a payment processing company put you in debt to them?

Wow. That is just gross. I'm sorry, Allie. I'm sorry this is a mess you find yourself in, but there's only one way out. It's to box it and you handle it yourself. It's the only way you walk out of this. This is The Ramsey Show.

Our scripture of the day, Philippians 3.14. I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Barack Obama said, if you're walking down the right path and you're willing to keep walking, eventually you'll make progress. Absolutely. All right, let's recap just a second, George, before we go to another call. This is an Entree Leadership Theme Hour, and I feel like I need to clean up some stuff I stepped in there. So ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Stripe, LinkedIn.

Stripe's a payment processing company. The other three are places that you can advertise or otherwise post jobs for jobs, and they do work. I overstated that. I said I would never use them. You're only going to get crap there. That was an over that was exaggeration they actually do provide in some cases the a good lead for a potential candidate to come to work for you or a good lead if you're a candidate for an actual job our best results for a high-end white-collar

job like stuff like two hundred thousand dollar a year programmers, that kind of thing, is LinkedIn. Okay, that's been our best results. But again, we don't pay for ads. We create a stir on LinkedIn. It's a social media situation, and we get leads that way. We also, of course, have a national radio show that we can say, hey, come to work for Ramsey, and people put in applications here as a result one of the ads is in your voice as a matter of fact that's right and well we have

to differentiate ads versus a job posting so paying to have a job post that is different than paying to have an advertisement where it pops up at the very top in your face exactly exactly now so i'm not trashing all of those companies, although I did. The reason I went there, the reason I exaggerated was the emotion. What was she feels like there's no other way to run her business. Like before the Internet existed with Indeed or ZipRecruiter, that it was impossible to hire people to clean houses. So what did they do back in the day? Well, of course, we had classified ads because there were these things called newspapers in those days.

Remember those? Now they're pamphlets, but they're one-tenth as thick as they used to be and much less credible in most cases. And so, you know, all of that to say, most small businesses have grown their team primarily by word of mouth for generations. And so she was just making these absolute statements that she's trapped, and if she can't get on Indeed, she simply can't grow. And that's what I was overreacting to so uh i was out of line so indeed don't don't be mad at me i'm not trashing you and same with zip recruiter same with other online services but if you feel like the

only way you can run your business is to buy something you can't afford then you you really have to adjust your thinking and that's what i was attempting to do with the two before but um i've helped friends get jobs just from social media posts where a friend posts i'm looking for this person i tag them they get in touch and all of a sudden a job happened with no advertising needed and so word of mouth is powerful even running your own little seo campaign that way within your social media posts is a possibility. All of that's there. And then the possibility of just growing slower is okay. But you don't want to take a business that's not profitable and double it.

And you certainly don't want to triple it. That's hell on earth. You'll double the profits that don't exist. Yeah, or the losses. You know, thank you, no. It compounds. Thank you, no. And now, if you have boxed yourself into a corner where you have more bills,

like she does, and in her case they were utilizing her payment system to actually dock her pay before she got her pay, if you box yourself in that situation, then you've got to structurally change something to get on your feet so that you have a chance to pay them. Because she's not going to stay open and pay them. You could hear it in her voice. She's not going to be there much longer she's running out of steam so that's why i was saying not to

not to cheat stripe and not pay them i want her to pay them but the best way they get paid is for her to quit paying them for a while and get some people hired and build that business back up and then start throwing money at the 17,000 to never do business with them again in that regard. Now, you can use them for a payment system or whatever. That's fine. I don't care. But never, ever, ever go in debt to someone that can dock your pay directly like that. Never go into debt to somebody, period. But never, ever, ever, ever, ever. They got a gun to your head. I mean, they own you. That's just awful. It just felt so bad for her. She's so trapped.

So that's a little bit of clarification on that. So when you're hiring, our best hires at Ramsey, we've got a group of thoroughbreds in the building. And thoroughbreds, you know who they run around with? Other thoroughbreds. And so we give them a bounty for bringing in their thoroughbred friends to join the team. And if they're a thoroughbred, they also know what a donkey looks like. And they don't want donkeys working beside them. And so if they got one of their friends that's a donkey, they don't bring them over here. But most thoroughbreds run around with other thoroughbreds. You become who thoroughbreds you become who you

hang around with and so that's what you're looking for it is a an internal referral system or even a client referral system you could ask somebody that you clean their house and say hey who used to clean your house i'm looking for some more help yeah do you know anybody that i could hire i mean you can just word of mouth shake the bushes out there, but this idea that somehow the only way to operate your business is to be tethered to a digital service that you can't afford, that's very, you know, you're boxing yourself in a corner. You're trapping yourself with your own mentality, and that's what I was trying to break. Thank you for the clarification. There we go. I feel clarified. Do you? Okay, good. I'm glad you do.

All right, Olin is with us in Wichita. Hi, Olin. How are you? Hey, Dave and George. It's an honor to be on here with you guys, huge Entree leadership fans, and I'm excited to get hit up the head of the two-by-four today. Well, how can we help, sir? So, my question is, how do I get my business out of debt after 13 years? I bought my lawn irrigation business at age 19 for $25,000, all of which I borrowed.

And the business has grown since then, and so has my liabilities. And 2020, 2021 were kind of poor years. We, you know, we did end up taking the IDL. But in that time frame, too, actually, we built a new building and bought some land for that. And going forward, 2022, we had a really good year. We had good growth. We had, you know, 13% net profit at the end of the year. But, you know, just a lot of it went to servicing debt.

And, you know, we want to keep growing. But I'm kind of, you know, in a spot where I'm like, do I try to sit here and take care of debt, or do we keep growing, which is, you know, in our current cycle, it's going to take more debt. So I'm curious to see what you would recommend. Well, it's kind of a Dr. Phil moment, isn't it? How's it working for you? This thing of every time I want to add debt, every time I want to grow,

I add debt, and it's led you to calling us and saying, hey, I don't like being in debt, but sort of do because yeah i want to keep growing and i like that and and now i'm just really confused with myself that's what i heard what what's the total debt now i know go ahead what's the total debt uh we just around 900 000 how much of that's the building how much of that's the building in the land um the building would be about 500 000 of that okay so tell me why you need a half a million dollar building to cut grass well we don't cut grass but i thought you said you did lawn work and irrigation we do irrigation fertilization um So we're in the weeds now.

I mean, is this a warehouse to store your equipment and product? What's going on? It's some office space. We've got four or five offices in here. What's your gross revenue? And warehouse. Last year, we were just at $1.4 million, which was up about 50% from the year before. That was not due to you having a building.

Your 50% increase in sales had nothing to do with that building. Well, when you operate out of a small building in two locations and community... You can rent a building. It wasn't due to a half million dollars worth of debt. It might have been due to you getting into a better facility, but it wasn't necessary for you to go into debt to do it. So here's the thing, if you want to get out of debt, the first step, stop borrowing more. That's the first step. And you're not committed to that yet. When you get committed to that, then you can start taking the steps to get out of debt.

That puts this hour of the Ramsey Show in the books. We'll be back with you before you know it. In the meantime, remember, there's ultimately only one way to financial peace, and that's to walk daily with the Prince of Peace, Christ Jesus. Hey, it's George Campbell. If you like what you heard in this episode and want to know more about getting started on the Ramsey Baby Steps, go to ramsesolutions.com and click on the Get Started button. We'll help you figure out the best next step for you based on your specific situation. That's RamseySolutions.com and click Get Started.