DAVE RAMSEY: Build a Business That Lasts

23:35Inside the building. And they finally fired him. And I thought, okay, that's the Red Sea moment. I really, the hand of God protected us. Wow. Because it would have, that one guy, if he had had his way, would have flipped the switch. He said, somebody's going to sue us with you on the air. And I'm like, why do you think I'm going to get sued? He goes, because y 'all are so boring that somebody's going to go to sleep at the wheel and wreck their car. Oh, my gosh. Wow. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I mean, it was abusive, toxic, to say the least. We didn't even use those kinds of words in those days. But honestly, it was like when he left, it was like, oh.

24:11And then Gaylord bought the thing and it took off. Wow. Amazing. And the ratings went through the roof. And we really did get to the other side of the sea and get the tambourines out and celebrate. You know, I mean, it was real. That's fantastic. I kind of think in the life of an entrepreneur, over the course of years and decades, you're probably gonna have several moments like that and i was reflecting back we've been watching the chosen gail and i and absolutely love it but there's this scene where you know jesus feeds the 5 000 and then a couple episodes later the disciples are all panicked because they don't have enough food and he's like did you forget about the feeding of the 5 000 exactly five minutes ago you know exactly and i thought i was journaling the other day and i thought back through my own history and i thought i forget too yeah you know it's like every new thing it's like i forget the whole history.

25:00And like, this is a unique situation, but it's not. Has that been your case too, where you've had those throughout your career? Yeah. I mean, we've had times, and again, sometimes it's not, I didn't forget, but I'm also well aware that I'm not the Messiah. And so God can allow a farmer to go broke by the crops not coming in. It does happen. And the farmer could be a faithful person. So I don't get to tell God what to do. So he could choose to use a pandemic to end Ramsey Solutions. He could choose to do that. And so when you're in the middle of that battle, trying to keep cash flow coming in because entire segments of the company evaporated, right?

25:40Like everybody. And I wasn't in the plexiglass business, so we had a problem, you know? And so it's like, but in that situation, you're looking and going, okay, God, we want to know what you want us to do with your thing. If you want to close it, it's yours. We hope that's not your plan. Okay, how can we be diligent? How can we be good managers, good stewards while this is going on in the middle of whatever the crisis is that's coming at you? But the disciples, how did they forget? But they also know that, I don't know, one town over, there's hungry people. They're really there. And so even though Jesus was in the vicinity, and so it's real, there's a reality to the world we live in, the fallen nature of the world we live in.

26:20And so So we've got to balance that with our faith, and it's this weird moment where you're just looking for the Holy Spirit's guidance. You know, you talk about, well, in the title itself, Build a Business That You Love. And I want to know, what about Ramsey Solutions do you love the most? What it's become? Like when you walk in every day, what just makes your heart swell? It has to be two things. It can probably be one thing. The obvious one, and it would be obvious to anyone, is that I'm very, very proud of the number of people that this team and I have been able to help and give hope. Whether it's in the mental health field with Dr.

26:58John Deloney or the money field with the rest of us, careers with Ken Coleman, whatever. Wherever we're able to give someone biblically-based common sense education and empowerment, which gives hope, that's our mission. And we get to hear that now. And it's fun these days because it's weird because the YouTube thing and all that is like, now I'm talking to like 21-year-olds. Yeah. And we got off a ship, a cruise this summer in Iceland. And the kid working, he was like 21 years old, young guy, is working the passport control. And he's like, you're the guy on YouTube. And it's like, thank you, thank you.

27:36And it's like, you know, that was the most bizarre one, you know. I was like, wow, yes, I am. But only YouTube, right? I mean, we didn't have that with talk radio. But you still get to see the scale. There's a lot of healthy pride that comes from that. And I'm not under the impression I did it by myself. I'm not under the impression our team even did it by ourselves. I think God gave us favor in the marketplace to do that. The second thing that I didn't see coming, that one you can kind of see coming. It's like what we're here for. And it worked. So the thing I didn't see coming, tremendous pride with our team.

28:10We have incredible culture and an incredible team. The quality of human beings that work in this place and the depth that they care and their level of competence and their compassion for the customer and how serious minded they are and fun that they are as well simultaneously. I had no idea I was going to be doing that when I started. Yeah. I thought I just, there was a whole bunch of broke people and we go help them. I had no idea I was going to need a thousand folks, 1 ,100 people in this building and more to come to cause that to happen. You know, the entrepreneurs find, and they'll find in this book too, that people are our greatest blessing and they're also give us their most trouble.

28:52Yeah. Simultaneously. Talk about that a little bit, because I certainly have experienced that. That resonated with me too when I read that. Yeah. Simultaneously. I mean, it's like our greatest joy and our greatest sorrows come from our folks. And every time, it's the biggest pain point in entree leadership. When I'm talking to a small business person, they got 40, 50 people. They're like, what's your biggest problem? People. It's like getting good ones and getting rid of the bad ones. It's like, the bad ones drive us crazy. And so it's been a constant 35-year slog to add enough steps to the hiring process to try to build the right kind of people and then add enough processes that aren't corporate goobery stuff, not bad, but just where we actually are engaged and we didn't just hire them and set them free and then wonder why they messed up.

29:40That would be dumb. And I did do that at one point. But nowadays, we're really all very collaborative. No one in this building, including me, does anything hardly by themselves. That creates an accountability. It creates a matching of the activities to the values, the core values of the organization. Are we going to to be aligned to those things. And it exposes when someone's not. So the thing that ends up being said around here, someone will come in, they've been here five months, five years, or 10 years, I'll come in and go, you know, I think my season at Ramsey is done. I don't know who first said that and someone heard it, but I hear that.

30:14And all that means is, is that their enthusiasm for the crusade has waned and they're being set free to go do something else that God's got for them. And that's not horrible. It's not a bad thing. Dave Ramsey's a cult leader. No, I regularly ask people to leave, so I know I'm not a cult leaver. They don't do that in cults. Again, a new set of problems. That's one of the drivers. That's the third driver in the six drivers going through the five stages. As you get a little bit more sophisticated, a little bit more scale, the quality of people changes. I have gotten comfortable talking about, have you forgotten?

30:52I haven't forgotten this one. I can tell you that with confidence, somewhere around 90 % of the time that someone leaves here, we get an upgrade. Isn't that so true? We would say the same thing. Gosh. Absolutely. I feel like people don't know that. You know, small business owners who are maybe in the early stages of their business, they feel so fearful about letting somebody go. There's so much scarcity. Or when they quit. Or when they quit. Oh, how are we going to make it? He left. It's like, I didn't even notice. Yeah. We just reload. We should be calling to all of us. Okay, I have a funny story back.

31:21When my early days of publishing, I was at Word Books in Waco, Texas. Oh, yeah. and I left to come to work at Thomas Nelson this is the first time I was at Thomas Nelson and so I went in and told my boss and he said you know we're really sorry to see you go and I said yeah I'm just afraid that everything I was in my late 20s I'm afraid everything's going to fall apart at the company and he said have you ever thrown a rock into a pond he said how long did it take for the hole to fill that was the pin and the balloon I think he just called you a rock I was kind of like, you might have a point. Check, please.

31:57And the scary thing is it's true of everyone. Right. So one of the things we've learned from that is to constantly be working on our bench depth. Everyone in the organization is constantly working on their replacement, including me. And so, yeah, we've got to do that. One of my best friends was our CFO for 13 years. And he said, when I hired him 13 years before, I'm going to retire at 60. It's been my goal since I got out of college. My wife and I have talked about it. We're going to retire at 60. And we're like, eh, we'll see about that. As he starts approaching 60, he says it again. I'm like, okay, so where's your replacement?

32:28Because you ain't leaving until you've got your guy in here and training. CFO at Ramsey? I mean, come on. Yeah. So you've got to get this right. And sure enough, he hired a guy two years before, and that guy is a brilliant CFO. But he benched depth and covered his replacement and did that. But I think the thing is normative because the larger the team gets, the more we realize it's a rock and a pond. It just disappears. The hole fills in quick. When it's five people and one of them leaves, that's 20 % of your workforce. Yeah. And it has more of an impact. But also you're still early in your competence and confidence in yourself to hire, attract, and keep the right people.

33:09If a good person leaves and goes and gets a, in air quotes, a better job, you go, okay, what did we do wrong? How could you have a better job? This is the best job. I mean, we're the best place. So how could you get a better job? You couldn't have. Well, there is a lot of better jobs. And so not only they double his pay, but, you know, they actually know what they're doing over there. And so, you know, that kind of stuff. So we're having to learn that stuff. And every time Crazy got in the building, we found out what door they use. And we put a lock on that door. Like, I'm going to ask an interview question differently now to search for that one thing.

33:38Because the drama that occurs when you accidentally let Crazy in the building. It shuts down all productivity, all trust. Everything just gets clogged up. The sink's clogged up and the water's running over into the bathroom floor. Everything's a dadgum mess. You have to stop what you're doing and deal with crazy. And all of that's because, again, back to me, it's my fault. We let them in the building. So we're doing way too much between my ears rumination about how that occurred. Why did that happen? How did that happen? How did I miss that? How was I that dumb? And it's like, well, you weren't.

34:13you got duped, but next time you won't be because you're wiser for the scars. Yeah, absolutely. It's really good. I want to talk some more about succession. We just started on that. And you and I had a conversation in a plane about 14 months ago about this topic because we've been going through that same exercise. And by the way, that's one of the stages you talk about, the legacy stage. It's the last stage. It's the last stage. We're not going to be able to get to all five stages in building a business you love. So you're going to need to buy the book. But I do want to talk about when did you first start thinking about succession for yourself?

34:4416 years ago. I was 48. Very specific. I was 48. Wow. I ran two full marathons in one day, my first and my last. Oh, my goodness. And not doing that again. And I thought I was going to die. Don't forget that day. Yeah. And I'm kidding. But around that same time, I was starting to see some family businesses and ministries fall apart because they had zero plan. And people, a lot of them were close friends. And I'm watching a life's work just melt down because at the back end of the ministry or at the back end of the business, the founder refused to let go. And I thought, okay, I teach stewardship.

35:35I keep saying, and I truly believe God owns this, I don't own it. So if I'm a good manager, a good manager would plan for their replacement. And to not do that is to be a bad steward, to be a bad manager. And so I've got to start working on this. And I had no idea what to do. So I just started doing what we always do. We start looking for best practices, right? And so I started interviewing family businesses and a few ministries that had successfully done Gen 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4. I've actually found two that were sixth to seventh generation. Wow. Very interesting. That's impressive. Very interesting dynamic when you've got 76 cousins that are stockholders.

36:14You know, I mean, that kind of thing. And they're second, third, and fourth cousins. They're not first cousins. So that's Gen 7. That's a weird place to be. But most of the time where people fall apart is one to two or two to three. A couple things we discovered was that it's a family business and you're going to do a succession plan. the business is not going to be any more functional than the family. Yeah. Well said. If the family's dysfunctional, don't expect them to all of a sudden be functional human beings at the office. Yep. Whatever's screwed up, you know, in their upbringing and all that stuff, it's all going to come out in this process.

36:46And Gen 1 to Gen 2, me, you, Mike, the guy, a gal that gutted it out, that bootstrapped it, that held on, that has dirt and blood under their fingernails and all this stuff, scratching and clawing, and we're hardheads. and we're stubborn and that's how we got here. But we also then start to get the self-importance thing, a Messiah complex, and that we also have all the answers and no one else can do it like we can do it. And that's the ultimate micromanage. Actually, sometimes I run into Gen 1 to Gen 2 that Gen 1 is good at delegating, oddly enough, inside leadership, but they can't see themselves at delegating ownership.

37:23Uh-huh. Yeah. And a little different thing. And so trying their fingers off of it, it's the most emotional transfer is one to two. Two to three, they're not nearly as emotional about it. But one is like, ah. Too oftentimes their identity is tied up in it too. Totally. And so like, what will I be if I'm not that? And so we get into all that and we start teaching people that and we start looking at it. At Ramsey, we figured, we found some of the Venn diagrams and stuff, some of the people that had done academic level writing on family business transfers. And one of them just shows, okay, you're a family member, you're an owner, you're a team member.

38:03And some people are all three. Some people are only one. Some people are two of those. And the Venn diagram intersects in the middle. And you've got to start looking at that and talking about roles and who's playing what role. And what tail is wagging this dog? Is the spouse at home calling shots by throwing grenades over into the business? Well, they're trying to take your church away from you. It's not your church. And yes, they are.

38:29and your spouse's insecurity starts to come out of your mouth when you do that. I actually heard that phrase, can you tell, one time. And so I was sitting with a pastor trying to coach them through it, and they were just looking at me, and we didn't get anywhere. And we figured out later it's because the wrong people, it was an unqualified appointment. The spouse at home was throwing the grenades. We found at Ramsey that we had three things we had to transfer. Leadership, which we were good at. We had leadership that would survive me, no trouble. Ownership, which meant the next generation of Ramseys had to be trained to be wise, competent owners, whether or not they were in the day-to-day of the business, if they're going to be the owners.

39:05In my case, I have three grown Ramseys. Had to train them. And so we went through a decade, 16 years of that. We're still in the process of that. And leadership was in place. Our hardest one was brand transfer because it was all Dave Ramsey and we couldn't transfer a brand. And we started toying with what became the Ramsey Personalities model. And it was a great idea. Like a lot of things, I had no idea how hard it was going to be and how many mistakes I would make along the way. The current stable of Ramsey personalities is absolutely incredible and definitely can carry this. I was off for a month.

39:43Sharon and I spent a month away on a vacation recently, and I do the show with one of the Ramsey personalities, our Ramsey show, our big dog. When I came back, they told me that the ratings were up. Kind of hurt your feelings a little bit. Yeah, so you planned to be less important and dadgumph it didn't work. So, you know, it's like, ouch. I have had that emotional experience several times. The first time we changed the name from the Dave Ramsey Show to the Ramsey Show. That's a succession planning marketing piece. We changed the website from DaveRamsey.com to RamseySolutions.com, which cost us.

40:19We lost a lot of money because we had to reset all the SEO stuff. And it took a while for the bots to crawl and all that stuff. and probably cost us several million dollars to do that. But the other one wasn't going to live. Yeah. It died with me. So you had to do it, even if it took a step back to take four steps forward. Yeah. So we're having to do these things. But every time I planned, you know, I came on the air and I went, The Ramsey Show. And we decided not to announce that we were doing it. We're just going to do it and see if anybody noticed. Nobody noticed. It hurt my feelings. I went home.

40:52I told you, I think I'm going to cry. Nobody cared. One affiliate out of 640 calls, zero comments on the podcast. Amazing. Six weeks later, some guy posted in the YouTube comments, I think Dave might be retired. Did y 'all notice they changed the name? Wow. It's like, nobody cared but me. I was it. And so the emotional part of that is what I'm pointing out. And it's humorous to look at it, but it's very, very real. When you plan and you say, we're going to do this, and then the earth starts moving under your feet. Yeah. You're like, oh, we're really doing this. and this is the right thing to do.

41:27Your higher self says to do it, but the little kid that wants affirmation is like, oh. So how did you deal with that? Because I think people get stuck. I cry every day. No, I'm kidding. We need to ask Sharon. No, I do okay. The thing I have to just say, okay, as an act of my will, what do I want? Do I want when I'm gone my children and everything I've spent my life building from a business perspective anyway, to all be in trouble because I wouldn't deal with my little boy feelings. Wow. And they would all be let, they'd be really, really bad. And so, uh, you know, it'd be a mess if we didn't do it because, and we've all seen someone who's in the pulpit who the whole thing rests on their speaking and their personal delivery, their personal charisma.

42:17And we can name names, but we won't. We can name like a long list. Like most of them. And they don't plan. And then suddenly they're gone. And the whole thing comes caving down. And we've seen, I mean, Rush Limbaugh was a friend of mine. That brand just evaporated and they knew he was dying. They knew for two years he knew he was dying. At first he knew he was very sick and then he knew he was dying. They did have a handoff after his death, but it took them six weeks to announce it. And it was almost a 700 station network and it's under a hundred now. And he was an iconic figure in the marketplace.

42:56Agree with him or not agree with him, that's not the point. The point is that, and I'm not picking on him, his job was to do radio. He wasn't running the business. His personal stuff is in really good shape because I know the family, and I've met with his wife since then, and they did a really good job at home taking care of her and making sure her next, all that stuff, wonderful job. But the actual perpetuation of the brand was gone because they didn't do any kind of handoff. He could have brought in some people on the air with him and tried to do what we've done here. It's painful, though.

43:36You have a big company. You know, like you said, 1 ,100 people and all the radio stations you're on and everything else. But do you think this is important even at the small business? Oh, always. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. The number of times I meet with a guy who's got 20 team members and five trucks doing heating and air, His son is 26. And his son just got handed the keys because he died of a heart attack at 52. And the kid has no idea. Yeah. He was on a truck fixing a heat and air. And now he's running a business because mama was at home. She didn't know what was going on. He was the closest family member that had a clue.

44:08And he didn't have much of a clue. And the number of times we've sat with them and tried to help, you know, give him a crash course in how to run a business with Entree Leadership Materials and bring our coaches around him and just try to help him. Because they've got mama sitting there crying, and the son is like overwhelmed at 26 years old. He has had zero training. Doesn't know how much the payroll is. Doesn't know what anybody's paid. He was a tech on a truck. Right. And all of a sudden, that story, man, I've seen that story. That one may make it or may not make it, but the data that we have studying these companies and ministries is if the founder, as they fall back into the grave and grab their chest, tosses the keys out and says good luck, the probability of making it's very low.

44:52So the more gradual, the better is one of the principles we found. That's really good. Because you can, you can phase out. So like 16 years ago, you know, working on the personalities, our kids are being trained. My son, Daniel comes up through the ranks. We weren't even talking to him about leading the thing someday at that point. And then about six or eight years ago, we started talking about it, put some of our top leaders around to mentor him, to teach him. He still wasn't reporting directly to me. And three and a half years ago, He stepped into the president's role. I'm the CEO, and we share offices beside each other.

45:25And it was 50-50. I was running C-suite. He was running business units. And then with the idea that over the next five to 10 years, we're going to gradually put more and more and more over on his office, less and less and less on mine. Because, again, the more gradual, the better. And I can still mentor him. And I get the joy of working with my son directly on a daily basis, solving business problems, fighting the dragon, right? That's a blast. I mean, I would do that the rest of my life, but it also would be a curse. because at some point he needs the dignity of walking in what he has earned, the competency that he has shown until he shows the competency.

45:59That's not true, but he has. And so the goal is for someday for me to not be CEO at all. Yeah. And the only thing I'll do, my retirement package is I'm going to keep yakking on the microphone, but that's just because I want to do that. And I can do that and stay out of the way of succession. Right. Because we've got, you know, we've got the Ramsey personalities going, They're fine on brand transfer. And Daniel and the leadership team's fine. And the Ramsey next generation's fine as the ownership and the leaders running it. And I can step to the side. Then at some point, I'll even turn loose to that last piece of ownership.

46:30What would you say to the business owner that is thinking about succession with a family member, but not sure that family member's right? In other words, what should they look for? When should they go ahead and pursue that? And when should they say, no, I really need to get somebody from outside? Well, you're looking for a couple things. One is train up a child in the way he should go, and when he's old, he'll not depart from it. And the old King James says the way he's bent. And so you got great daughters. Some of them are not bent like this one. That's right. Not designed like this one. And that's not a slam.

47:04That's not anything. I was touring a plant where the guy who was getting in the last stages of a succession, a couple of his kids were very high in their leadership team. me a couple that weren't even in the business. And then he had, we're walking through and he goes, that's the art department up there. And I went, oh, okay. He goes, my daughter works up there. And I said, oh, she runs your creatives. And he goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no. She is a creative. And I said, she doesn't lead them? And he said, no, no. He said, if your job's climb a tree, hire a squirrel. Don't hire a dog. Some people are dogs, some are squirrels.

47:36And so it's okay. What are you made to do? And so, you know, Rachel, my daughter is made to be on the microphone. So the chances of her reading accounting spreadsheets and following KPIs and watching what the business is doing, pretty close to zero. She will do that as a competent owner only because she'll have to as an owner. And she's been trained. And she's been trained to. But day in and day out, that would be, as a guy who used to work here would say, if you asked me to do that spreadsheet stuff, that would be leukemia to my spirit. You know, it's like, that's pretty graphic. But yeah, but it would be.

48:07I mean, because she's made for the spotlight and made for the microphone. own. And if you put my son Daniel into doing that, he'd be pitiful at it. He needs to be doing what he's doing. She needs to be doing what he's doing. So you're looking for how they're designed. And the old disc model or our friend Smalley did that old book we used to read our kids, The Treasure Tree with the golden retriever and the beaver and the otter. Yeah. You're looking for that and saying, okay, what fits there? And then don't ask them, don't ask a golden retriever to be a beaver. Then if you've got someone that has that, the natural bent, then you start pouring into them and teaching them the tactical competencies to be able to carry the weight of the thing because it's too heavy to carry if you don't have those two things, the natural bent and the tactical competencies.

48:53So you've got to build into that. And then we told our kids, do not come to work at Ramsey unless God calls you. It's too hard. It's too hard to be in my lens of something Dave said 25 years ago, because some duper will dig up something stupid I said, and that's possible. Just too hard. Don't come. And so Daniel almost didn't come. We tried to talk about him. Rachel, she was coming from the time she was 15 years old. We put her on stage and she went, I'm doing this. And Denise, even her, she was working for our friend Nancy Alcorn at Mercy Ministries when she came out of college. And we gave her the opportunity to take our family foundation and run it.

49:35She's the ministry minded. That's how she's wired, how she's bent. And she said, no, I don't think God's released me from mercy. That means I taught you well. Is she still there? No, she was there for many, many years. And probably five years after that conversation, she called me one day and she said, do you think we could still do that? Because I think I am released now. It's been five years. I'm like, okay, let's sit down and talk about it. And she's been running the family foundation now for quite a while, but that's not technically part of Ramsey, but it has a lot of interface with us here.

50:03But that's how we did it with our three kids. But if there's no one that wants it, that's willing to fight for it, yeah, let it go. Close it or sell it or something. Sell it to a team member that's coming up that does want it and that's hungrier than one of your offspring, that kind of thing. Sell it to the employees in an ESOP. I don't care, whatever you want to do, but have an exit strategy for God's sakes. Because the problem is if you don't do this as the founder or the current owner, Gen 1, 2, whatever it is, as they age, everyone is asking in their minds, what's going to happen? The vendors want to know.

50:41I do$2 million worth of printing with Ramsey every year. Am I going to lose that when Dave dies? The vendors want to know what the plan is. The customer wants to know what's going to happen. Are you going to disappear like so-and-so did. They just disappeared one day and we lost all that. The customer wants to know what's going to happen, especially if they're investing in something that's a longer term product line. Instead of buying a book is one thing, but a longer term investment. And the team, you cannot keep talent if they think this thing's going to fold up like a Walmart tent the first time Papa dies or Mama dies.

51:15I got no future here. This thing's going into the wall like a NASCAR wreck. And so you got to go, look, here's what's happening. Here's what's happening. Don't know exact timeline, but here's our plan. Here's our plan. And that's what I started talking about at 48 years old. I'm going to start putting people in the spotlight other than me. Leadership's in place. You know, the next generation is really, really young and we're going to start letting them sit in the operating board meetings, but not say anything because they don't have anything to say yet. And so they sat there for a few years silently and watched how we made decisions and being trained by the current leadership team to be good owners and how the owner, current owner, makes decisions.

51:54So all that is transferred, mentored, discipled gradually over time. But we've been talking about it publicly for eight years or 10 years. I mean, we transferred 99 % of the ownership from an estate planning standpoint 12 years ago while the basis was still low and got it all out so it doesn't get taxed into oblivion and get shut down by the stupid estate tax. I own 1%. I own the only voting stock though. So I'm still in control. But I mean, we did that. It was a tactical thing, but we tell people that. We tell them. And so they got a real comfort then and going, hey, they got a plan. Yeah. They just want to know you're going to do something.

52:31What do you say to the business owner who's kind of in your season of life who says, but I just love the business. I don't think I'm ever going to retire. Like, I want to just, I want to die working because this is so much fun. Yeah. Well, you're going to kill the thing you love. You're going to kill your kids or whoever the next gen is. And you're going to kill the business you love by your selfish desire to eat candy all day long. And so I love running the business too. And I can sit in and add value for the rest of my life as long as I can do that. So, and the interesting thing is that I'm often invited.

53:06We're down to about 80-20 now, as I said. but even in that 80 % that I'm not involved in, it's not unusual for one of the guys or gals in that area to go, hey, come sit in with us. We're brainstorming this and we'd like to know your legacy, your analog view on this digital issue, which is really about all I've got. And so, but yeah, we'll sit down and look at that. And so you get invited to participate without having to be the only dog, big dog on the porch. You can just sit over the side. And for you Gen 2s that are listening, that Gen 1's having trouble turning loose. One of the secrets we found, it's not been a hard thing internally, but we've seen it with other businesses where they do this well.

53:43If the second generation will constantly pay ridiculous cornball levels of honor to the first gen, constantly go, that is a level of humility that the team loves because they don't think they were born on third and act like they hit a triple. and it makes it easier for the old dog to let go and go, yeah, at least I'm in a seat of honor. I'm not in a seat of dishonor. We're going to stick him in a nursing home so that he just gets out of the way. We're not doing that. We want him to sit in. We want her to sit in because they can still add value and they can still hang out and work. So again, as a Ramsey personality, I'll be in a bunch of the creative meetings, obviously, because I'm writing content and I'll be involved if we're publishing a book in Rachel or one of the other personalities, I'll be sitting and looking at that.

54:32I'm getting a manuscript on another one that's being sent to me today. And I'm not technically in the loop on that because it's not an operational thing. But, you know, as the senior Ramsey personality now, I get to participate. So I can still get my juices from that without being such a central figure that my leaving jams the machine. And that's the trick. You know, you just got to redefine who you are. and go, okay, what is it I'm really doing? And what is it I'm really getting joy from? I feel like we could do a whole show on succession. Oh, I think it's easy. It's such an important topic. But we're out of time.

55:08And I cannot believe how fast this hour has gone. I feel like it's flown by. We got three quick, just really short answers on your part, questions that we typically ask. And it's all about the double win, winning to work and succeeding at life. So in this stage of your life, in this season of your life, what's your biggest obstacle to getting the double win? I have to constantly stop and say, let them do it. Yeah. You did hand it off. Don't take it back. Handed it off. Don't take it back. And they're doing okay. They're doing okay. And they are doing better than okay. Freaking revenue is up. Ratings are up.

55:42Jeez, I mean, it's sickening. But yeah, don't undo what you worked 16 years on the legacy piece with your mouth. It's really good. How do you know when you're personally getting the double win? I think the fruit is there. Our marketers would call it social proof, but there's actual a reality there. And so is home life happy? Is it content? Is there spiritual and personal growth there? And then the same thing over at work. Is all of that happening? And so, I mean, there's been times that, you know, we were strained at both ends. Sure. And so we know what the other looks like. We know what the double lose looks like.

56:25It wasn't a complete loss, but the double scary time is. And so we're enjoying the rhythm of being grandpa and papa, Dave, and Mimi. We're enjoying the rhythm of some travel and some stuff, just some fun stuff. I'm enjoying the rhythm of just going and speaking for some of my friends that have events doing that because I've spent my whole life doing events for ourselves. Very few outside ones. And I'm jumping into preaching at a church and that kind of stuff. I'm enjoying that. Last question. What is one habit or ritual that helps you do what you do? Cornerstone kind of habit or ritual. I have a rigid morning routine and I have for, gosh, 30 years.

57:05The routine changes. I say rigid. It's rigid at the moment, in each season. But it has changed over time. When I was training for a marathon and included a long run in the morning, not doing that. Nowadays, that looks more like walking the golf course for two miles with the dog. which I did this morning. I'm doing something moving, moving, moving. I'm doing something in a book. I'm doing something in Scripture. Sharon and I have the old man, old lady recliners right next to each other, and we just come in there, get the call. I mean, we wake up. We got up at 5 this morning for no apparent reasons because we just always have.

57:38We do the same thing. And we sit there. We talk. We'll pray. We'll talk about what our calendar looks like, where we're going, what do you got tonight, what do we got this week, what do we got next week. We do the calendar like we do the budget. where we compare and align and don't step on each other on that. And, you know, I'll go through a handful of emails in the mornings too, and I'll pop in. I got off social media in terms of being a follower or user of it because it's just too much trash in my brain. I check our Instagram stuff, and I follow probably 15 people, mainly our people and me, and I don't read comments.

58:17If you read comments on any article or anything you've ever done, you understand why some species kill their young. And so it's like, oh, gosh, these are the dumbest humans. So I just quit doing it. I'm just not going to put that junk in my brain because I can't come in here and function then if I've got some guy who's griping and he lives in his mother's basement. I mean, he has to say something. It's just like silly. So I quit doing that a long time ago. Last time I did that, I really got involved in Twitter, and I had a blast really. Back when Twitter was new and you could fight on Twitter, I had a blast with that.

58:48But anyway, that's... What could go wrong? Yeah. So four or five things. There's spiritual, intellectual feeding, relational feeding, prayer, and prescriptural being the spiritual, and physical, get out, move your body, doing something every morning. And that takes me an hour and a half, two hours. Yeah. But that's 7.30, so I still got a whole day. And that's our season in life. Yeah. You know, if you're a young mom with three little kids, you can't do that. But you can have some structure, something. Absolutely. And you better have because otherwise the kids are in charge. And so your tank gets empty.

59:19And so, yeah, when I had little babies, or if the little babies are over, if I've got a seven-month-old granddaughter that spent the night with us the other night. And so if they're over and they're just crying, I can't just sit there. Well, I'm busy, right? I'm doing email. We've got to go get the baby. But so, yeah, you do flex with that. And, again, your morning schedule will look different depending on your season of life. But I think that has, it served me really well because of that personal driver we were talking about. Yeah, really good. Guys, the book is Build a Business You Love. The subtitle says it all, Mastering the Five Stages of Business.

59:54And I would say, even if you're thinking about starting a business and don't have a business, this will give you the roadmap, those red blinking lights that'll help you know what the waypoints are on building a successful business. So Dave, thank you so much for this time. And this was fabulous. Thank you guys. You guys are great. Appreciate you having me.

1:00:23So Megan, what surprised you about that interview? I don't know if anything surprised me exactly, but I think the thing that I loved the most and really appreciated was Dave's vulnerability. I think it's so easy when you look at somebody that you respect and you kind of see the public part of their story that you can kind of assume that the end of the story was always true. Yeah. You know, that maybe they just have some magic that it was easier for them or they're wired differently than other people. And maybe they never had to experience what you did or what you have. And I think what we learned today was that's not true, that Dave has faced all the normal challenges.

1:01:02In fact, the reason that he was qualified to write this book and create a roadmap is because he's been there and done that, and he has the battle scars to prove it. And I think that's hopeful for all of us. It's not really supposed to be easy, per se. And it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong if it's not easy. You know, because I've known him for 30 years, I've known him in a lot of different seasons. Yeah. You know, I knew him back when he was at WTN. That's the first time I met him when I went down and heard him broadcast. and I had some of those same impressions that his station manager had.

1:01:32You know, I thought he's got this thick Southern accent and he's talking about cutting up credit cards. Nobody's going to ever buy that. And so I just kind of dismissed it. And I was talking to him about becoming his literary agent at that point. And I literally went home and my wife, Gail, your mother, said to me, well, what did you think? And I said, I don't think we're going to pass, which was hilarious. and then you know several years later then we we got together on the total money makeover yeah and you know that was a huge positive outcome and a great relationship but the thing that i felt the most when i was listening to him was pride just i just felt proud over how he's developed over the years because as he's matured what i see is a guy that sort of originally sort of thought he knew everything you know he had the humility of the bankruptcy went through yeah but he was full of answers and he still has phenomenal answers, but I've seen the real wisdom and the pause before he answers and such a good listener and so vulnerable.

1:02:35And willing to be humble enough to admit mistakes and to talk about what he's learned from those. And his secret to success is not that he's done it all perfectly. It seems to me like, if I were to say, part of his secret to success is he's been a really good student. Yes. He's been a really good student of life. He's been a really good student of his mistakes, of his successes as well. And he's put those into practice. And he's willing to do the hard things. And I think that's the difference maker. And serious self-awareness. Yeah. I mean, for him to realize that he wasn't always the kindest and most gentle and that needed to be moderated, I think that takes real humility and self-awareness.

1:03:14Yeah. I will say, at the end of it, when we were talking about the succession plan, I had no idea he thought about this 16 years ago. Yeah. And, you know, I gotta be honest, I feel like we've done succession pretty well. Yeah. But I thought, Ooh, I wish I could go back and have started more. I mean, I think I was always kind of conscious of it, but to be more conscious way back then, but of course, 16 years ago, you weren't even in the business. It's true. Took me more years. Barely. I mean, it wasn't long. Yeah. It wasn't long. Yeah. Anything he said about succession to surprise you? Well, I love that he talked about that tension between Gen 1 in Gen 2 of, wasn't exactly the way he said it, but, you know, having to face your own mortality and realize like there's a collision coming with the end and there's no way to get around that, you know, nobody gets out alive.

1:04:02And so to reframe it as an exercise in stewardship and actually of love for the people that you're serving through your business, but also the people in your own family and your team, et cetera, the people that you have stewardship over, I think is so important because it's not really about what you want at the end of the day. It's really about what's the best for others. And I think that's powerful because it can feel like, you know, it's all slipping through my hands or what does it mean? And, you know, and I think all that's normal. Like that's not not happening. It's just that also there's something more important.

1:04:36And in some ways your most important work is how you leave it. This is where the double win comes back full circle. Yeah. Because if you're only invested in your business and your identity is tied up in your business, you're not going to make that transition successfully because it's going to feel like you're losing literally everything. But Dave has wisely invested, and as we advocate with the double win, in all these other domains of life so that the thought of losing the business doesn't mean he's losing his life. Yeah. And he's not actually losing his business. He's just changing roles as time goes on.

1:05:09Yeah. And I think there's real wisdom for all of us. Such a good conversation. I loved it. So fun. I'm just proud to know him and proud that he's my friend. Yeah. Well, guys, if you've enjoyed this episode of The Double Win Show, we would be grateful if you would leave a review on wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm going to give you a little hack. If you go into ChatGPT and you just give it some things that you like about the show and ask it to write a 75-word review of the show, it'll take you about two minutes and you'll have a beautiful review that you'll be proud of. So I hope you'll do that.

1:05:41It'll help us get the message out because we're trying to launch a movement where people can win at work and succeed at life. That's right. Thanks for listening.