The Ramsey Show - App - The Best Ideas of Tomorrow Come From the Crisis of Today (Hour 2)

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

Ken Coleman, Daniel Tardy, EntreLeadership Theme Hour Tools to get you started:  Debt Calculator: http://bit.ly/2QIoSPV Insurance Coverage Checkup: http://bit.ly/2BrqEuo Complete Guide to Budgeting: http://bit.ly/2QEyonc Interview Guide: http://bit.ly/2BuGnZE Check out other podcasts in the Ramsey Network: http://bit.ly/2JgzaQR 

Live from the headquarters of Ramsey Solutions, broadcasting from the Dollar Car Rental Studios, it's the Dave Ramsey Show, where debt is dumb, cash is king, and the paid-off home mortgage has taken the place of the BMW as the status symbol of choice. It's an Entree Leadership Theme Hour here on the Dave Ramsey Show. The panel is back. As we answer your questions about business, particularly small business, lines are wide open. The phone number is 888-825-5225.

You're out there trying to stay open. You're out there trying to think what lessons you've learned from this process so that the next time something happens, you're ready. You're out there making decisions about whether to furlough, lay people off, or take pay cuts, or whether we can create a new product line. I don't know what it is. You want to talk, we're going to talk. Ken Coleman, Ramsey Personality, number one best-selling author of The Proximity Principle,

expert on helping with jobs and careers, is with us. Our executive vice president of Entrez Leadership sits on our operating board. Daniel Tardy is with us as well. And Daniel and Ken and I have all worked on small business issues, not only for ourselves here at Ramsey, but working with the Entree Leadership tribe, which is quite vast. It's a number one bestselling book that I did a few years ago. And for years we've worked together on these issues. Open Phones, again, 888-825-5225.

So, guys, I'm thinking there's a couple of things. I'm thinking about a small business person out there right now, and we want to teach them or walk beside them how to walk through these times and not get caught up in outside variables to make your decisions and take advantage of the opportunity to change. You know, I've noticed one thing I've noticed. I'll just throw this out there. Among the large businesses that I'm watching that are having substantial trouble,

they're too big or they think they're too big to completely pivot, completely develop a whole new offering in 24 hours. They're stuck in an industry somehow so deep that the way they do business can't even change or what they're doing to do business can't even change. And I noticed around here, for instance, that we got a tremendous amount of energy, Daniel, when we went into a war room with our leaders and we said, all right, whiteboard everything. All bets are off. All bets are on.

Let's find some way to help a bunch of people and let's create some short-term revenue let's do some stuff we wouldn't have done three weeks ago uh not from a uh ethic standpoint but just we were thinking longer term we were moving slower we were more careful to heck with all that let's jump in and man some cool stuff came out of that. We pivoted. Well, Dave, you bring up a great point. And especially in small business, you have the ability to pivot. I want to talk about a word that it's been getting thrown around a lot, and that is that this is unprecedented. You turn on the news.

This is unprecedented. It's unprecedented. It's Ken Coleman's favorite word. Well, and I've been using that word. It's not a terrible word, but think about this. I was journaling and kind of in my quiet time this morning. I thought, what is that verse that says, there's nothing new under the sun? Ecclesiastes 1.9. There's nothing that's been done that will not be done again, and there's nothing new under the sun. I thought, you know, how can something be unprecedented

and there's nothing new under the sun? And the truth is, coronavirus and the shutdown, and at the practical level, unemployment rates. Sure, all that stuff is unprecedented. But what's not unprecedented, especially for leaders, and this is to your point, Dave, we have faced unexpected challenges with unknown outcomes. In fact, every time I open my email, there's some kind of unexpected challenge with an unknown outcome. And so as leaders unprecedented okay yeah but what's precedented is i'm creative i can focus and i can rally the team and come up with solutions and my job as an entrepreneur is to create solutions to problems that's right that's

what the very definition of an entrepreneur is oh and, and make a living doing it, you know. But things are created. I remember a guy did a devotional for us many years ago, and I watched that happen around here in the last three weeks. Things, everything that you see or experience is created twice. I remember this guy saying that. First, it's created in your imagination, in your creative, in your mind. You see it in your mind mind and then you put it down

on paper speak it and start to actually take the clay and form it we've got a construction project that has not let up one iota because construction workers are apparently oblivious to all this and so they're just going like crazy next door and i was out there walking around about two hours ago standing there looking at this building which we built two years ago and another building is coming up that we're building right beside it and this whole bunch of grading and i was thinking about that that we saw all of this in our minds and then we put it all on paper the city saw it and approved it and then the you know the architects saw it and the contractors saw it and now the subcontractors are doing it uh you have to stop and go okay i need to see a new thing and speak a new thing yeah well i love the idea of ed's vision right but i'd love to hear both

you guys talk about if i'm a small business owner right now i'm thinking about in six months i don't know what i see in six months well Well, yeah, I'm glad you bring that up. I want to address that, okay, because that's the issue. This is the leadership lesson we've got to learn from this situation around the globe. I'm not criticizing anybody, but let's just get real and set the context. We've got leadership decisions that are being made that affect the entire global economy based on models, and so we're looking at models and modality versus reality. So let's break this down.

What does that mean? What that means is that leadership is already hard. But you throw crisis into leadership. By the way, that's the price of admission. What do you as the leader have to do? You can't operate on what you don't know because that's the greatest fear that we as humans have. So when we start thinking about six months from now and where's this thing going to go and what's it going to do, that's what we don't know. And there's enormous pressure to react and to lead and make a decision on what you don't know.

But here's what you have to do. That's fear-based leadership. Fact-based leadership is what do I know right now? And to Dave's example, that's what has happened at Ramsey Solutions. And I'm thrilled to be at a place where I see it happening. I see the results of it. And here's what you all are doing. You're saying, okay, here's what we know right now. Yeah, but here's what I know. My restaurant is shut down. That's what I know.

And here's what I know. I can still get delivery. That's right. And so I can get Sharon Ramsey to come down here and pick up fillets because she's going to keep cooking. That's it. And so she's buying high-end fillets from the local steakhouse over here that are better and cheaper than they were at Whole Foods. And we get to support our local guy down here. We're still giving him money.

But that guy pivoted, and he's got quite a meat market going down there right now, I'm just saying. Yeah, he just became a drive-thru business, right? And so is that going to make up for everything that he lost? No sit-downs? No, because he had a huge sit-down business. But he let what he knows guide which way he goes. They're pivoting.

Here's what we know. Craig Groeschel and Bobby Grunewald said this to me once, blew my mind, good friends of ours. They said innovation is at its best under limitation. So let these limitations do what Dave just described. Get imaginative. Because when you're limited, that's when you are at your best at being innovative. And right now, we are limited. So embrace it.

We may discover a whole new way of doing business that was better. Yeah, I think we will. Than you were doing business. Some people will. Yeah, the best ideas of tomorrow are going to come from the crisis of today. Ah, that's good. Ooh, that's almost cliche right there. You could tweet that one.

Daniel Tardy joins us this hour along with Ken Coleman as we do an Entree Leadership Theme Hour. If you're running a small business, talk to us. We want to help you. We love you. We think small business is the backbone of the economy. We're crying with you and for you, but we're cheering with you and for you right now too hold on we'll be right back with you this is the Dave Ramsey show folks I love telling you about well-made well-thought-out products today I'm talking

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Plus, I like the way these guys do business. Grip 6 is determined to help build and modernize American manufacturing. To learn more and get this month's Dave Ramsey special, visit GRIP6.com. That's GRIP6.com. The Message of Hope series does continue tonight. Each of the Ramsey personalities did a Message of Hope over the last week that are posted on our YouTube channel. Go to Dave Ramsey's YouTube channel. You can find them all there.

Pretty incredible. They were all excellent. And we decided to do an Entree Leadership Message of Hope, and it's Chris Hogan and me, right? That's right. Hope is greater than fear. I see that. We're looking out our glass right here. It's on the billboard. Hope is

greater than fear. We have this huge AV thing over our cafe and over our meeting area that we could see out of the studio, and it's had that one thing burning on it for two weeks now. It does help to sit here and look at it all day. I'm telling you while we're on the air. So message of hope for business owners.

It's at 6 p.m. Central. Chris Hogan and I are going to break down the four areas business owners need to focus on during a crisis. You'll get a plan to move from crisis mode towards confidence. And join us. It's free. And so if you want to watch this, you can catch it on DaveRamsey.com. You can catch it on our web. I mean, on my YouTube channel, of course.

Easy way to get an RSVP on it is just text HOPE NOW to 44222. A message of hope for business owners hope now no spaces no dashes one phrase hope now to 44 222 or you can look at entree leadership's youtube and channel and facebook channel as well james make sure that's going to be on my dave ramsey show channel too as well all right let's go take some calls then christopher is with us in Florida. Hi, Christopher. Welcome to the Dave Ramsey Show and Entree Leadership Theme Hour. How can the panel help you?

Yeah, I'm 24 years old. I own a lawn and landscaping company here in the Florida area, and I've been doing really well the last six months to a year, and I'm just trying to look and see when is the right time to start growing the business. I've been working like crazy for the last year, and I'm getting tired, and I want to start expanding and trying to make some more money. Well, are you working right now? I mean, is your governor allowing you to cut grass in Florida?

Yes, we're considered essential. So I have state law allows me to work. Okay, good. All right. And we've been busier than ever now since this is happening. I've been busier now ever than I've been at any point in time. Hey, Chris, I'm inspired to hear that you're 24 and you're already asking these kinds of questions. That gives me hope for your generation and beyond.

Tell me a bit about your business. How many team members do you have? Are you running several crews? Is this just you and a lawnmower? What size? It's just me. Basically, I'm a subcontractor for multiple different companies. I do rental properties.

I do bank-owned properties. And I do bank-owned. But I run them from three different vendors, basically. And so I have a kind of a variety of set-out, too. So, you know, one acting up, I've got steady flow. And so basically, it's just me i oh there's no debt on the business i have two big lawnmowers i've got all the equipment um you know i pretty much have built it up to where i can pretty much handle just about anything there's nothing that i can't do except for the fact that i don't have the crews to do it. You know what I'm saying?

I have to turn down some work. I want Ken in a second to talk about what's critical when it comes to hiring and building a team. But I want you to hear first of all, you're at a really cool spot. You've built something. Thank you. And it's working. And you're talking about expanding. And you're about to go from what Michael Gerber in the book The E-Myth calls going from owning your job to owning a business. You're at this critical

threshold of you're doing all the work, you're getting paid to be the doer, the chief everything officer. And it can feel a little scary to think about hiring and expanding. And there's some new challenges that are going to come with that, but it's really fun because you can start delegating and you can get your life back. Sounds like you're not sleeping much right now. And so you can't sustain this forever, but you're in a cool spot. And I think you're at exactly the right time to start looking at expanding and building a team. And I'd love for Ken to unpack that a little bit more. Yeah, Christopher, my thoughts on expanding is expanding is a scary word.

And you mentioned a moment ago that you just don't have the courage to expand. And I want to know what the fear is in a moment. But let me tell you what I think expanding looks like for you right now just reproducing yourself as a laborer now daniel's right you're the chief everything officer of the founder but you're also the guy doing all the work and the way for you to make more money is to get more jobs yes or no correct correct so the way you get more jobs is you reproduce yourself and i think that's a much more digestible idea for you. You've got to find somebody who's hungry, who wants to make some money,

and you think they've got some good character. And you really take your time making sure they're a good person and you can rely on them, and you train them how to do everything you do. I mean the way you hold the weed trimmer to the way you drive that thing or the way you pack the mulch, whatever. You literally reproduce yourself. You do that, guess what? You can add how many more jobs?

What do you think? How many do you think? I mean, if I could get somebody to do what I do, I mean, I do basically about 80 to 100 yards a week. So if I can do somebody that can do that, then, I mean, we're going to double profits in no time. Yes, sir. Yes, sir.

Now, so what are you afraid of? What's the big fear? What do you need courage to do? My biggest fear is the financial step to take. You know, it's just kind of hard that I have found to take this step. Of course, I'm not doing it with debt or anything like that, but it's so hard to do it, you know, that financial step of doing it. You're very wise.

You're very wise. Your most're very wise you're your most scary hire is your first one your most scary fire is your first one the one that'll tear your stomach up the most and it's not that you become calloused and don't like people it's that you understand you're not going to die from it in either case, if hiring somebody or hiring someone. And so you're going to be very careful because you're wise. It's a healthy fear. It cannot be a paralyzing fear. You have to grow. You're going to die if you don't grow. And so time to add somebody. The conversations I had when I hired my very first person, Christopher. I was 32 in this business. I said, I'm not sure I have enough work for you. If we don't, then this isn't going to work out.

As long as I can get enough work, you're going to make good money, and you can help me get some of the work if you want, and you can get the work done. And if you kill something and drag it home, I'll share it with you. And that was the conversation. And, you know, for years after that, many times people would be interviewing. They'd say, well, what happens if Dave dies? And we would say, you're screwed, you know, because I was the whole product.

Nowadays we've got tons of other streams of revenue that are not Dave-personally related. I'm still not ready for you to die. I'm not signing up to die but the point being the point being that that um that the risk alleviates as you do get bigger if you've got 10 people and you lay off one you got a 10 reduction in force if you got one person you lay off one you got 100 reduction in workforce so it just it it it does get better as you get a bigger but just be honest with them just tell them it's a brand-new gig. Katie is with us in Texas. Hi, Katie.

How are you? Hi, I'm doing good. How can we help? I am a new salon owner here in the San Antonio area, and we can't work anymore, so we have to close down. And that was my only source of income right now was the hair salon so at this point i don't know what to do i don't either um exactly uh it because obviously you you with social distancing with strangers it's very difficult to cut hair um

right i mean tardy and i are bald so it's not a problem. Coleman's looking a little shaggy over here, I'm just saying. If I could get her here, she could slick back evangelist look. You can charge Coleman for three haircuts. Folks, I hope you hear all this hate coming at me because they wish they had my frock. Anyway, so here's the deal.

When you go back to work, it's going to be with a vengeance because there's going to be a line of people around the block needing their haircut. Agreed? Right. How much money were you making prior to work, it's going to be with a vengeance because there's going to be a line of people around the block needing their haircut. Agreed? Right. How much money were you making prior to the shutdown? Monthly? Roughly, I was doing about $11,000 a month, and it's just me right now.

So I have like five more open stations that I was trying to get filled that I didn't get it filled. Well, I'll tell you what, if you know anybody looking, they're going to be really in demand as soon as the floodgates open. So if I were in your area and I needed a chair, I'd be talking to you because you can put them to work because there's all these people that haven't had a haircut in a month or more or whatever, or color, hair coloring or whatever is all the stuff that haven't had a haircut in a month or more or whatever or color hair coloring or whatever is all the stuff that people do with that but um yeah there's going to be a pent-up demand is what we're saying so what i'm going to do is anything i can to hold on stock grocery shelves or whatever until it's legal to cut hair again and then katie bar the door get ready this is the dave ramsey show do you know who is a prime target for identity

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You can do it at Entree Leadership's YouTube channel or Facebook channel, Dave Ramsey's Facebook channel or YouTube channel. If you want to make sure you get hooked up, just text the word HOPE NOW to 44222. HOPE NOW to 44222. Ken Coleman joins me this hour, Ramsey personality and host of the Ken Coleman Show. Also on the panel, our Executive Vice President of Entree Leadership, has been working with small businesses like I have for decades. Daniel Tardy also sits on our operating board here at Ramsey. Alyssa is in Indiana. Hi, Alyssa.

How are you? Good. How are you? Better than I deserve. Your small business question for us, or your business question. So I had a question because I am a registered nurse. I've been a nurse for five to six years now and I work on like postpartum mother baby floor and I also do lactation consulting and I've thought about many

times over the last couple of years whether or not I should do a consulting for lactation on my own, outside of my home, just so that I can actually see patients in their home and do things maybe over the Internet, things that aren't available through the hospital. And I'm just kind of wondering if that's a good idea. If it's not, how do you know? Financial end, I just don't even know where to go with it. So I just thought I'd ask you guys. Do you know anyone else i just don't even know where to go with it so i just thought i'd ask you guys do you know anyone else who has done that not personally no do you know of anyone else at

a distance that has done that that you see that person over there is doing what i'd like to do it looks a lot like what i'm thinking of i know that people do it in other like cities and towns but i don't know of anyone close to me that does it. If you could just get a name of someone who's actually doing it, I would just pick up the phone and call them. And what research can you do online? Because this is not just a town a little bit away. This is probably a national phenomenon. And what's the industry look like?

And what can you learn about what the need is in your area, how to determine the need, what is the pricing structure, how does that vary? You have to look at all those things so you have a good idea of how the business operates. And then you're looking locally if there's nothing in your area and you get some data. Daniel, I'd look at some data on the amount of potential clients based on that industry and what that looks like. Yeah, that's definitely true. You know, I missed this, Alyssa. Are you still employed?

Are you still working through a hospital right now? Yes, sir. Okay. This is a great spot to be in because the data is important, asking questions, finding exactly what Ken and Dave have said. I would do all of that. And I would also say this is a good time to experiment. You can do some of the stuff on the side and see if you can get a few clients

while you still have your day job and you've got that income stream. And you may learn some things. You might find out it's easier than you thought. You might find out it's harder than you thought. You might find out, oh, my pricing is off. Well, while you still have your day job income stream, experiment, see if you can get a few clients,

if you're gonna do some content on whatever you mentioned, YouTube or online, that type of thing. This is a time to mess with the model and tease out all of the kinks. And then once you get some revenue flowing in, you've got a confident footing to put your next foot on. You don't want to have one foot on the dock, one on the boat for too long. But at some point, you know, there's a boat there. I can get in it and we're going to be selling that boat for you so let's say that you developed uh let's just let's announce to whoever your clients might be that they can choose uh a you can counsel them uh with zoom

over the internet at this price or b i will visit you in your home at this price, and get you a series of clients and figure out what the problems are. You might say, oh, I don't need to charge that much to do an in-home, or I need to charge twice that to do an in-home. You know, you do a few of them, they're going to start to say, God, that takes up more time than I thought, or that was nothing. It was no big deal, And I overcharged her. But or she may be so thankful that it's a luxury, you know, a concierge type situation where you're getting you're dealing make money in this experiment stage, experimental stage. You've just got to fail some and figure out what works and what doesn't work.

And you'll get clues and hints, and you'll start to piece those together to create an offering on the Internet and an offering in person that are viable and real. And you can do all of that while you keep your day job, as Daniel said. I think that's very, very important that you do all of that. But I'm excited for you. I think this is awesome because there's two things happening there in medicine on the consumer side. One is there's a low-cost, quick, efficient methodology of delivering something digitally, help, instruction, content, coaching, encouragement, whatever it is digitally.

And then there's the other end, which is the high end. It's exploding in medicine, and that's the concierge medicine, where docs are you can pay a fee and just have a doc at your disposal that way. They come to your house. And they'll do whatever you need to do you know and so uh for people that have a schedule that's unbelievably busy and have um uh that so you could you could actually work kind of the high end and the low end simultaneously and have a really cool product line there and really help these ladies in a very, very big way. Because it sounds like, you know, I don't know much about it. I mean, I've got grandbabies and I've had babies,

so I've got two generations of having a lactation nurse come in after a baby was born a couple times, and then we go home, and you're pretty much on your own. That has been our experience. And so you've got to deal with all that then, and then it's just, you know, the grandmother steps in with her opinion after that or whatever. And so is there a follow-up process after they go home? Is there a product along those lines?

I don't know. I know absolutely nothing about it except from a grandpa's perspective. And one of the ways she can learn while growing on the side is who else is doing this well on social media? YouTube, Instagram, Facebook. Start to emulate some people that you think are doing good things online. You start your own social media accounts, and that's a way to provide some free content to get the actual coaching clients. Well, and I don't want business leaders to miss the principle here, and that is, you know, Dave, last summer, we started talking about here at Ramsey, this language that we got from Jim Collins, where you shoot bullets before you shoot cannonballs. And the idea is that if you're on an

old battleship, and you've got a limited amount of dry powder, you use a little bit of that dry powder to shoot a little musket ball to see if you can hit the enemy ship. And you keep shooting and shooting and shooting to calibrate and get it dialed in, and then you go, boom, we hit it. Now shoot the cannonball. You know, that's so important because what we went through, we went back through the history of this company, the leadership team did, and we said, you know, the things that we have been highly successful on

were uncalibrated cannonballs that hit. Our biggest experience were uncalibrated cannonballs that hit our biggest experience were uncalibrated cannonballs that our biggest embarrassments were uncalibrated cannonballs that missed but we really didn't have any calibrated cannonballs which was pretty freaking embarrassing meaning that we had just kind of said let's try this and just jump in and uh that's very entrepreneurial but after a time it's very painful and it's also stupid you can try stuff small and adjust gradually and calibrate rather than just jumping in the deep end well doing it that way lowers your risk and so you're more likely to test more and eventually you know what's going to hit what's not going to hit lowers the pain

and the embarrassment too which goes with the risk i guess guess. But, oh, my gosh. Yeah, it's very, very important to try lots of little things. And then that's what I meant by take the – this worked, this worked, and that worked, and stitch those together in a patchwork that create a business model and a business plan. And, oh, by the way, you start over every day on that because about the only thing you can count on is change. Always testing. Market disruption. Boy, are we in the middle of a market disruption. Some of you that were delivering everything in an analog,

you were thinking about doing some digital things, and you don't have any choice right now. So you now have digital offerings for the first time in your life, or you're sitting there wishing you did, and you need to get off your butt and create them right now. You need to find a way to serve your customer while they're at home today. Is there a delivery mechanism? Is there a, I mean, can you deliver to their door physically, or can you deliver to their

computer? And man, it's going to change, man, the market disruption. Market disruptions are a way of life, though. Yeah, that's right. They really are. This is an Entree leadership theme hour on the dave ramsey show business leaders make your life easier with fresh books whether you're starting a business or you've been at it a long time, FreshBooks is one of the smartest decisions you'll make this year. FreshBooks is

an accounting software designed for people like you that lets you do the things like automate your invoicing and your online payments so you get more time to work on your business. Try FreshBooks for 30 days free at freshbooks.com slash Dave Ramsey. It's an Entree Leadership Theme Hour on the Dave Ramsey Show. A message of hope for business owners tonight with me, Dave Ramsey, and Chris Hogan. If you want to watch that at 6 p.m. Central, we're going to break down the four areas business owners need to focus on during a crisis and how to move and build a plan from crisis mode and actually have as much confidence as you can have when it's going crazy out there.

It's a free resource to business owners from Entrez Leadership. If you want to watch it, you can do so at the Entrez Leadership YouTube channel or the Dave Ramsey YouTube channel. Or you can simply text and we'll send you an RSVP link, make it real easy for you. Text the word HOPE NOW to 44222. Text HOPE NOW to 44222. Ken Coleman, Ramsey Personality, host of The Ken Coleman Show, and Daniel Tardy, Executive Vice President

and Operating Board Member here at Ramsey of the Entree Leadership brand. Join me as the panel to answer your questions this hour. Cindy is with us in Florida. Hi, Cindy. How can we help today? Hi, Dave. How are you? Good.

What's up? So we have a small business and after fighting to find out why our largest customer was behind on their payments, they surprised us with a letter that stated that they were changing the terms of our contract, not just for us, but all their vendors to 120 days. They currently have, we currently have a 15 day terms with them and obviously going to now four months later, it cripples us. And in order in our business, we have to provide parts, and our part vendors have not changed their terms with us, which is usually 30 days. We had offered to the customer, which is a very large billion-dollar company,

we had offered a discount with slightly extended terms that we thought we could handle, but we've received no response. And we feel that that probably means that they went to some other company that may be willing to accept 120 days. What percentage of your business are these people? Probably 60%. Okay. What do you guys do?

We handle material handling equipment for warehousing. Okay. And you're selling to someone who doesn't want to pay you for 120 days. We do service. Oh, service. Okay. You're doing service, and they don't want to pay for service for 120 days. Yeah. Correct.

What's your total top line? We're probably about a $300,000 a year company. Okay. So this is like 150, 180 grand. Correct. A year. Okay. Cindy, I'm curious.

Did they change these terms, I assume, because of what's going on with the disruption and coronavirus stuff? Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. I mean, there's two things that come to mind. First of all, I don't want to lose a long-term relationship over a short-term problem in the environment. In other words, if this has been a good relationship and then something changed that's really putting them in a tight spot. I don't agree with what they're doing. But if I put myself in their position, I kind of get it.

And so I want to call and negotiate and work through it and see if I can salvage the relationship at some level. The other thing I'm going to tell you is having any one customer be more than 50% of your top line is a one-legged stool. And you do not have a diversified portfolio. Therefore, your risk is super high that any one customer can take you out. So as quick as I can, I'm looking for new business in addition to this great customer that I've had up to this point. And or different product lines even or different offerings to create new business. Because, yeah, that's the biggest danger here is that, you know, they own you. Right, exactly. danger here is that um you know they own you and um right exactly yeah so i i have um done one of two things in businesses uh within our business that have run into that one is i find a work

around and i dump them in the street and don't work with them anymore. It takes me a little time. I have to make up the revenue, and I have to say, I just choose to not deal with people who are going to bully us, okay, by using their size to demand ridiculous payment terms. The second thing that we do is we choose to accept it as a portion of what we're doing, but it cannot be the only way we do this. I have a vendor called Ingram that does this to us. They pay in 120 days in the book publishing business. They control 98% of the bookstore distribution of books in America

unless you sell directly to the bookstore. So, for instance, Barnes & Noble, I can sell directly to them, but if I want to get in mom and pops or the airports and that kind of stuff, I'm pretty much going through Ingram. Amazon also buys from Ingram, okay? But Ingram pays me in 120 days. When I print books, the printer wants me to pay immediately when they invoice me for the printing cost of the books. So my cost of goods sold has to go out in 10 to 20 days from delivery,

and then I ship the book to Ingram and I don't get paid for 120. I have accepted that as part of the cost of doing business in the publishing world many years ago because you're not going to change them. They own that market. They're the 500-pound gorilla. On the other hand, I now sell more books off the DaveRamsey.com than I do through Ingram. So I did a workaround as well because I didn't want them to control my stinking life

and destroy my cash flow on the publishing arm of our company. So it's exactly the same thing you're facing. The good news is that we didn't allow them to become 50%, and they didn't change suddenly in the middle and just destroy us. And that's where these guys are. So, you know, what you're going to have to do is limp for a little while while you do some workarounds uh and and bring in more customers so that they're not there um but you know i used to have collections problems in some other areas and we just went to ach meaning that we just um there's a business model thing we just changed it these people wanted to pay whenever they were going to pay and it while we spent half our time

chasing down checks and so no if you want to be on that, we automatically draft you on the 8th of the month or whatever the day is. Otherwise, you don't get our endorsement. Otherwise, we don't stay with you. So we changed the business model. We expanded the customer base. We did some workarounds. And or we accepted it. Do you feel like there's ever a time, Dave, that it makes sense to offer a discount incentive to pay net 30 or say, hey, we want this business bad enough.

She did. They ignored her because she's such a small fish compared to the size of them is what she's saying. Did that what you said, Cindy? Correct. Yeah. It's worked with other large companies that we do business with, especially since we do have a contract. And others were willing to, a lot of them are trying to push us to cards so that they can earn points. Yeah.

That we've held firm to ACH payments, which is what they've typically been doing. But then they laid off all their accounting departments. So that's where we've had hard times. Well, in this case, you've got to tolerate it until you can build a long-term strategy where you don't need these guys anymore. Exactly. Exactly. You hold your nose until you do the workarounds, until you get a diversified customer base. The only other thing that popped into my head was that we have done was we would develop something where we had a unique brand offering,

a product offering that they couldn't get anywhere else and so then they had to change their policy if they wanted us and and we were okay if they didn't uh and so you know in other words if you want a dave ramsey thing there's only one place you can get that from ramsey right and so we can then demand and so if you had a a type of service or a way of doing the service that was unique and maybe even copyrighted or trademarked or then they can't get that anywhere but from you then that then you can hold them captive and get them back in line but uh right now it's the tail wagging the dog i'm sorry for that, Cindy. But that's just some ideas.

We face the same stuff over 30 years many times, I promise you. It's not unique to your situation. It is extra nasty during these times, though. That puts this hour of the Dave Ramsey Show in the books. Thanks to Ken Coleman, Daniel Tardy. Thanks for stopping by, guys. Thanks for having us. Entree Leadership Theme Hour.

You can catch the message of hope for business owners tonight at 6 p.m. Text the word HOPE now to 44222. In the middle of these uncertain times, Ramsey Solutions wants to give you some hope. For the very first time ever, we're giving you Financial Peace University free for 14 days. Go to DaveRamsey.com slash hope so you can watch from home.