Transcript of Dave Ramsey on Shawn Ryan Show Podcast

And I read that book on that little deployment. It was about three weeks long. Came back home, sold everything I had, paid all my debt off.

DAVE RAMSEY: No way.

SHAWN RYAN: Yep. And I’ve lived like that. Paid my house off, sold everything. All the stuff that I didn’t need, that I had loans on. And it had, you know, I guess, equity in some of it.

DAVE RAMSEY: And so what, the switch flip, you just realized it’s not giving you joy? The stress of the debt didn’t offset the fun of the…

SHAWN RYAN: Exactly. And then, I mean, I was hesitant, because I really liked my motorcycle and I really liked my BMW at the time. But the peace and the freedom that came from getting rid of my mortgage payment, credit card debt, and all the other stuff car payments, it just… That was probably 15, 16 years ago. And I’ve just lived like that ever since.

DAVE RAMSEY: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: And even today, you know, I’m debt free. I build my business, never took on debt, only grew as much as what I could afford at the time. And I mean, now we’re building, you know, we went from the attic of my house to this. Now we’re building a 7,000 square foot studio out in the woods. And all of it, there is zero debt. And so I just want to say thank you.

DAVE RAMSEY: Thank you. That’s a great story. I didn’t know that part. Been friends for a while. I never heard that part.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, and then, you know, you continue to be a mentor of mine, and we had a discussion at your house, what, a couple months ago, and I was looking for a CEO and wanted to get your advice on that. And you told me, don’t get a CEO. You have to be the CEO. And I think you mentioned you’re probably looking more for a COO. And you just met Eric downstairs. This is the beginning of his third week. So I wound up hiring a COO.

DAVE RAMSEY: Okay.

SHAWN RYAN: So I just want you to know that everything you say, I take it in. And I know a lot of people do. And so this, what I’ve built here is somewhat of a product of your mentorship.

DAVE RAMSEY: Wow.

SHAWN RYAN: So.

DAVE RAMSEY: And I didn’t even know. Wow. That’s very cool.

Dave Ramsey’s Background and Achievements

SHAWN RYAN: Well, now, you know, that’s neat. Now, you know. But everybody starts with an introduction here. So here we go. Dave Ramsey, you’re a legend of the personal finance world who’s helped millions climb out of debt and take control of their money. You’re the host of the Ramsey Show, a nationally syndicated radio program that’s been teaching money management for over 30 years. You’re an eight-time best-selling author, including Total Money Makeover, the book that changed my life. Your newest book, “Build a Business You Love” is set to release on April 15th. Tax Day. Is that an accident?

DAVE RAMSEY: Who knows? Like it was a good day. I don’t know.

SHAWN RYAN: You’re the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions, a company that’s all about giving people hope through practical, no-nonsense financial advice. You’re introduced into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2015. You’ve been a husband to Sharon for the last 43 years. You raised three children together. And most importantly, out of everything I mentioned, you are a Christian.

DAVE RAMSEY: Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: And I’m sure I’m missing a ton there, but 43 years. Congratulations.

DAVE RAMSEY: Thank you.

The Secret to a Successful Marriage

SHAWN RYAN: So let’s kick it off. What’s the secret to a successful marriage?

DAVE RAMSEY: Wow. Well, the joke that I always use, which is accurate, I tell her if she leaves, I’m going with her. And then she just giggles. But the truth is, I met God about two years after we were married. And she probably wouldn’t—we still wouldn’t be married if I hadn’t because the guy that she married was a twerp. He was a hell-raising, beer-drinking hillbilly with a big temper and wasn’t much of a man, much less much of a husband. But he’s a good salesman because I talked her into marrying me.

But thank God she’s not still married to the same guy that his life has been transformed by Christ. And so every year a little better, every year a little less dumb, every year a little whatever. Nothing perfect, obviously. But we’ve both grown in our faith and in our relationship steadily over those years and went through hell, losing everything in our early days. And, you know, that was a defining moment in relationship and everything else.

But, yeah, I’m not the same dad I was when I started. I’m not the same husband I was when I started. I’m not the same man I was. I’m not the same leader I was when I started. Thank goodness. You know, good Lord. Who would want to just sit in the same poop all the time and not change anything, right? I mean, you got to change, you got to get better. And the thing that has impacted that is just trying to figure out how to do those things. And the instruction manual I used was the Bible. Because I didn’t know anything else. But I was pretty much a wild animal.

SHAWN RYAN: Really.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: I can’t see that with you.

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, it’s a long time ago, but.

Dave’s Spiritual Journey

SHAWN RYAN: So you didn’t grow up going to church? Christianity, none of that?

DAVE RAMSEY: None, no. It’s in my heritage. My great grandfather was a circuit riding preacher and this kind of stuff, got his old Bible from the 1800s. That’s pretty cool keepsake. But my parents were just, you know, they weren’t particularly angry about it or anything. We just didn’t go. And the people we ran around with weren’t church people necessarily, or Christians of any kind. If you asked them, they would have said they were, but I don’t remember… my grandmother, when I was like 9, they were in church, she paid me $10 to memorize the Lord’s Prayer. That’s the closest I’ve ever come to, you know. And if we went to her house, we went to church, but hated it, didn’t want to go.

I mean, little kids getting all dressed up and not being able to squirm and yell and whatever and miserable. But that was 10 times in my life. Maybe. But no, I didn’t know anything. I was just a character.

Growing Up in Tennessee

SHAWN RYAN: Where did you grow up?

DAVE RAMSEY: Just over the tracks over here in Antioch. Antioch, Tennessee.

SHAWN RYAN: Antioch, Tennessee?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: What were you into? What was it like growing up?

DAVE RAMSEY: It was… Nowadays it’s a very international community, but in those days it was just suburbanites and just redneck kids. I mean we were just hillbillies and all. Most of our parents had grown up on the farm and had moved to town to take a job or something. And so they bought all these little, you know, some nice little suburban homes and it was a little suburbia, Leave it to Beaver and so.

But I mean this was a neighborhood where it’s blue collar, maybe some white collar, but I mean it’s a different world. A long time ago. But neighborhood where little boys got in fights and big boys got in fights and it wasn’t like we have anything today. I can’t think of one of my grandkids being in that situation today at all. But it wasn’t horrible, but it was just tough. Just tough neighborhood, you know.

SHAWN RYAN: What did your parents do?

DAVE RAMSEY: The real estate business.

SHAWN RYAN: The real estate business.

DAVE RAMSEY: Owned a residential real estate company there in the Harding Mall area. And so I got my real estate license three weeks after I turned 18. That’s what I was going to do. I was going to be a big real estate guy.

SHAWN RYAN: Were they successful realtors?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, I mean they were in it for many, many years. They had finally closed it in one of the downturns and went on to other stuff. But I guess they were in it for probably 10 or 15 years. Most of my growing up years. That’s what they did.

And so that was the good news because they were very entrepreneurial and taught us, you know, took us to sales conferences. And so we were, you know, I’m sitting in conference, 12 years old, listening to Zig Ziglar, you know, talking about attitude. And I’m like, yeah, okay. But I learned to sell early. And that’s… I grew up in a salesman’s household. So there’s a lot of wonderful qualities come out of that. And also you get grit, you know, out of a situation like that. You learn how to deal with a bully. You learn how to deal with, not back down on everything that comes at you.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, I think that’s good lessons that seems like we’re starting to lose these days.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, I mean, you can learn them without them necessarily being in that environment. But yeah, it’s something that moms and dads, we have to be really intentional with our kids to let them fail, let them get a bump, let them develop some grit, some character, some courage. You know, how do you handle a high intensity conflict situation, and not something like you’ve done. I don’t mean that, but I mean, just in business, if you just got somebody that’s going to bow up, what are you going to do? You’re just going to walk away every time? Sometimes walking away is a good idea, but sometimes metaphorically, busting them in the nose is a real good idea too.

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting how, I mean, so with you growing up like that and then you’ve built like this massive business, how did you teach your kids grit, courage, stick with it, stand up for what you believe in? Well, totally different environment.

Raising Children with Strong Values

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, it is. And, but you know, we just, again, we, in our house, we were doing it through the lens of scripture, through the lens of, okay, perseverance matters. Rejoice in your suffering because suffering produces perseverance and perseverance character and character, hope. And so perseverance means you’re engaged in something that is uncomfortable and there’s friction oriented. And so put them in some situations like that.

And so, I mean, not with anger or not anything like that, but it’s like, don’t helicopter them out of every little thing. Let them flop around in a little bit and, and then talk about, okay, what would Christ do? How do we handle this? What’s the tough aspect of this? What’s the compassionate aspect of this? And you know, what’d you learn? And what was God talking to you about while you were sitting there in this thing?

And you know, you’re dealing with this teacher that’s a jerk. You’re dealing with a situation, you know, a social situation or whatever as your teenager, all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, we just walked through all that as far as working around the business and stuff.

Anytime we’re doing anything, I’m a. One of the things we grew up with too was hard work ethic. I mean, you just work. When in doubt, just go to work. Shut up, just go. Leave the cave, kill something, drag it home. I mean, something needs to move. And so we taught them that.

And if you’re going to work around Ramsey and you’re a 12 year old working the book table or shipping department or whatever, you got to work twice as hard, three times as hard as everybody else. And you got to be three times as cheerful as everybody else and kind as everybody else and strong as everybody else, because otherwise you’re not going to be respected. They’re going to assume you’re a wussy little boss’s kid that’s worthless.

And so our kids, it was not. It was like they were coaches’ kids. We were tough on them around the business. And so, you know, my middle daughter Rachel was working the book table and Williamson and one of my guys, one of my leaders, looked over and saw her goofing off, looking on her phone and they’re like, you don’t do that here. And he corrected her, you know, and she’s like, she tells that story and that’s good. That’s exactly the environment we wanted to put them in. So, you know, those things are the building blocks of having a high quality life. So you got to put them in there. It’s a big deal.

Starting Young in Business

SHAWN RYAN: When did you… When you grew up with an entrepreneurial spirit, when was your first business?

DAVE RAMSEY: 12 years old. I told Daddy, I said, I want to go down to the Kwiksack and get an Icee. I need some money. He said, you don’t need money. You need a job. He said, your lawnmower’s in the basement. Go knock on the closest 50 doors.

And I said, oh, I don’t know. He goes, I get in the car. And he took me down Nolensville Road over here, little print shop. Printed up 500 business cards, said, “Dave’s Lawns.” I said, “Dad, that’s a little overkill. I just wanted an Icee.”

He came home and he said, “Go knock on the closest 50 doors and ask them if you can have the opportunity to provide their lawn care needs. Don’t look at your feet and say while you’re standing on the man’s front porch and say, ‘You don’t want me to cut your grass, do you?’ You go in there and you throw your shoulders back and you smile and you give them service and they’ll hire you.” And dad gum if it didn’t work. I had 27 yards to cut at 12 years old.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

DAVE RAMSEY: Which, you know, I think it’s called child abuse now, but made me keep a profit and loss statement on my business. My income minus his lawnmowers I tore up equals net profit. But it was, it was, you know, and I loved it. I, I it because I always kind of been a little business nerd, I guess.

And so I’m cutting slugger Carnahan’s yard for $3, and my buddies are working at Burger King Whopper floppers. And, you know, they’re making this long. This is 70s, right? So they’re making buck and a quarter an hour. So I’m figuring, all right, I got to cut this grass in faster than two hours or I’m making only what they’re making.

SHAWN RYAN: You were thinking like that already.

DAVE RAMSEY: While I’m mowing, I’m like, going, looking at my watch, going, I got to get these dollar per hour. I got to keep this. I got to make this work. And that’s how I price the yards out so I can make more. I wanted to try to make about double what my buddies were making if they were flopping whoppers at minimum wage. If I’m going to sweat like that, I need to make some money.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow. So 12 years old, you’re going, that taught you confidence. That taught you responsibility of business.

DAVE RAMSEY: And you’re already thinking, interacting with adults, you know, and acting like you have your crap together.

SHAWN RYAN: How long did that last?

DAVE RAMSEY: I guess the rest of my life. Oh, the yards.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, the yard.

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh, man, I cut enough grass by the time I was 18. God said I never had to it again. I ain’t cutting grass in a long, long time. Oh, man. Yeah. No. When I took off to college, when I got up into high school, I started doing home repairs, too, because they would buy an old house and fix it up, and they’d put me in there to fix it up, or one of their buddies would buy a house in the real estate business and put me in there 16 years old to paint it and change the dishwasher out and that kind of stuff. So I did all that. So I paid cash for my first car doing that. And then that’s how I actually paid for the first couple semesters of college. Just working my butt off, swinging a hammer, turning a screwdriver no good.

SHAWN RYAN: And did your… Did your dad instigate that or…

Learning Practical Skills

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh, yeah, he could do it. He could fix it. That neighborhood we were in, everybody had a tool belt. Everybody could fix anything. And so you didn’t throw stuff away in those days. You had it repaired or you fixed it, you know, today, you know, our stuff’s throwaway. We don’t, you know, send a tea. There’s no television repair shops in today, you know, but in the old days, you know, you’d send it over there, they’d put a new tube in it or something, you know, or we would take it apart and look at it and see if we could figure it out. And so, yeah, those guys all turned a wrench on their own cars. So we all learned to turn a wrench on a car and that, you know, it’s all wonderful heritage to have.

It’s not necessary to be successful, but I’m not uncomfortable. I remember when I was taking my wife out on a date in college. I think it was about our third or fourth date. I think I had $1.16 in my checking account. I was so broke, I couldn’t pay attention. And I had a 1974 Monte Carlo that I was on the third engine and the second transmission and I had changed them. I’d run the wheels off that car and it had 200 something thousand miles on it. It was a piece of crap.

And I was explaining to her how someday I’m going to be a millionaire. And we went across the railroad track and the muffler fell off my car. But I had a crash, my toolbox in the trunk with a towel to lay on and a towel to pick the muffler up and a 9:16 wrench to run the U bolt up. And it had fallen off before. So I knew how to fix it and just rolled up under there, fixed it and dust my hands off. When we went on the date, she’s like, just fixed the car and got back in right after you tell me you’re going to be a millionaire. Okay? She thought I was full of crap because I was what?

Teaching Entrepreneurship to Children

SHAWN RYAN: You know, just like we were talking about before the interview. I mean, I got two little kids and I really want them to become entrepreneurs, you know, I just, I see the… I’m experiencing the freedom that you get. And, you know, with that being said, it takes a tremendous amount of self drive and as you said earlier, perseverance. But I think your kids are… your kids entrepreneurs. So what age do you, what age did you start instilling that into them?

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, I just… Sometimes people get from a job working for someone else the illusion, and it is a delusion or an illusion that somehow that’s safe. And if you’ve ever been on the other side of that table where you’re actually the guy making the payroll, you know, they’re not safe because, you know, you gotta run this whole thing right or, oh my God, we’re going to, you can’t pay them, but they’re under the illusion that this stuff’s automatic because they just get their check on Friday and everything’s okay.

And so what the first thing we did was break that illusion with the kids is that, you know, your success is not dependent on plugging into some safety mechanism somewhere. Your safety mechanism is your ability. Your safety mechanism is your skill set, your safety mechanism. And so even if you’re working for someone else, you’re self employed, you just have one client and you need to go, okay, if I’m an architect and I lost that job, I wasn’t leaning on that particular firm for my future, my life, the quality of my life, I was leaning on my skills as an architect.

And so if you’re going to do that, do it in such a way that you’re always marketable, but you view it as, I’m dependent on me, I’m self dependent. And then what? That does automatically lead you into wanting to run your own thing. You know, you don’t want to work for somebody else because you want to go, you know, I will take the risk of, I will accept the fact that there is risk. I’m not delusional about it and I’m going to just do it anyway.

And so entrepreneurs don’t necessarily have to start something from the ground up. My kids haven’t. They’ve come into Ramsey and, you know, are the next generation of leaders and owners of that organization. And all three of them are very capable, very different personality styles, very different approach to that, but they’re just not under the illusion that someone else is going to do it for them or that their success is dependent or entitled or it’s none of that, it’s sowing and reaping.

SHAWN RYAN: What age did that start and how did you instill that into them? How did you show them?

Teaching Kids About Money

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, you want to be age appropriate. I mean, you’ve got babies, so don’t send them to the salt mines. But you know, three or four years old, we start to go, okay, there’s consequences and cause and effect going on. Again, the Bible talks about sowing and reaping. You’re going to reap what you sow. And so, you know, as quickly as we could, we started teaching them three or four things about money, which were life lessons that we back into this conversation.

It’s like all kids need to age appropriately, need to learn to work, to give so that they’re not self centered, they’re other centered to save. So they’re future oriented, not just present oriented, which is emotional maturity, which not going to have much of that at 4. And to spend wisely. So work to make money, then save some, give some and spend some. And then you get opportunities to teach them and let them fail under your wing.

And so, you know, early, you know, it’s as simple as, okay, you’re four, your job is to pour the dog food into the dog bowl. This is your dog, it’s our family dog. But the dog eats because you put the food in there. And when you do that, you get a dollar. Or your job is to clean up toys in your room, which when you’re four usually means mom and dad clean up 80% of them. And we make a game out of it and we sing songs. But you’re the best room cleaner in the world. I’ve never seen anyone clean a room as good as you clean a room. You’re amazing. And here’s a dollar and then we get some of those dollars together and we go to the store sometime and we get something. And that’s as a result of you being the best room cleaner in the world.

And it all begins with something that primitive and that simple. So it’s positive reinforcement, but emotionally you’re starting to tie. Work equals money. Work equals money. Because I meet 50 year olds that don’t know work equals money. They haven’t figured that out. Nobody ever taught them. And they’re still waiting around for somebody else to fix their freaking life. And so I didn’t want that.

And you know, and by the time they’re 10 or 12, it starts to get pretty sophisticated. And then we said, okay, we’re going to do the money aspect. We said, we got, you know, your car when you turn 16 is your responsibility. But we’re going to help. We’re going to 401, Dave. We’re going to match. So whatever you save, I’ll match it. If you save nothing, get ready for a real nice Bicycle. So your little butt’s going to be walking because you’re going to pay for your car. But I’m going to put whatever you save now, I will tell you, you’re starting young. Make sure you put a limit on that. Because the third one figured it out. Yeah, he had 15 grand. And I’m looking at buying a $30,000 car for a 16 year old. Not a chance.

SHAWN RYAN: Damn.

DAVE RAMSEY: So we talked that down and we worked that out and he ended up giving some of that to a ministry. And there was an earthquake in Peru about that time and he’d been down there on a missions trip and some of the kids down there didn’t have anything. So he gave some of that money that, and we matched it, the whole thing anyway, but some of it was generous. And then he bought a real cool jeep, but it still wasn’t 30,000 freaking dollars. But I had to keep my word because I had set this thing up. So I’m warning the rest of you, make sure you put a limit on it. But we did that on all three of them.

And I’ll tell you to this day that they had great pride the way they drove the car, the way they took care of the car. Their friends didn’t leave crap in the car. You know, you take care of my car. I worked for this. And they did, they worked, they babysat, they cut grass, they worked at the company, they sold books, whatever. They at the company, they were working for us, whatever they had to do. But yeah, we just. So it built character and confidence and dignity and responsibility and all of those things got woven into this little money lesson of you’re going to save, you’re going to save, you’re going to save, you’re going to save, you’re going to save, you’re going to give, you’re going to give, you’re going to be other centered, not just self centered. This whole axis of the world doesn’t run through the top of your little head. It ain’t about you, baby. And so we’re going to be selfless, not selfish. And we just talked about that like I guess all the time. And they probably got sick of it, but they turned out.

Early Career in Real Estate

SHAWN RYAN: So it’s okay, man, that’s great advice. And so you started, you start. Back to you, you started, you were a real estate agent at age 18. How did that start?

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, I turned 18 and I passed my real estate test like two weeks later and I sold a house like three weeks later. Which who pass a house from an 18 year old? What Kind of. But I talked some guy into it, a guy from high school, $42,750 on East Ridge Drive off of Haywood Lane, right over here in Antioch. And that house today would be 800 grand probably, you know.

But I went off to college and I was to get a degree in real estate because I wanted to be. I wanted to do commercial real estate. Mom and dad did houses, residential. And I wanted to do big numbers and I thought I was cool or whatever. And so my goal was to be a big, you know, like a shopping mall guy or whatever, all that stuff. And so. But I went, moved my license down to East Tennessee and went to the University of Tennessee and I lived in Maryville, Maryville is how it’s spelled, but over there we call it Merville, Tennessee. And drove back and forth to UT and sold real estate there. And while to get through school I made enough to get through school and I graduated from there. And when I got home I had a couple jobs and then I ended up working for a home builder. And then I left that and started buying houses and doing flip this house. And that’s when I got wealthy.

SHAWN RYAN: How many years did it take you from, I mean, how many years did it take you from selling houses to buying your first house?

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, I mean, I sold houses all the way through college. And when I got out of college I went to work for a home builder selling houses. And I worked there like a year.

SHAWN RYAN: So how old?

DAVE RAMSEY: I bought my first house probably to flip when I was 22 or 23, something like that. And I flipped it. But there wasn’t cable TV to tell you how to flip this house. There wasn’t TikTok and Chip and Joanna hadn’t been born. I mean, it’s so, I mean, it was not. This was just me going out there digging up a foreclosure deal and talking some banker into loaning me the money. Because I borrowed money up to my eyeballs and I was doing flip this house. And so, yeah, we started from nothing. And by the time we were 26, we had about $4 million of real estate and a little over a million dollar net worth.

SHAWN RYAN: By 26, you had $4 million in.

DAVE RAMSEY: Real estate, made 250k that year, which, and that’s a million dollars now a year. But I had too much debt and the bank looked down and said, there’s a child that owes us a million dollars. And they were our notes and we spent two and a half years losing everything. And so by the time I’m 28, I’m bankrupt. Made 250k one year and the next year I made 6000. And the odd thing is when I was doing really good is when I met God. I met him on the way up, but got to know him on the way down.

Finding Faith

SHAWN RYAN: How’d you meet him?

DAVE RAMSEY: I went to a sales conference with my beer drinking buddy and we were so stupid. We would go to happy hour and then go make sales calls and couldn’t figure out why people wouldn’t buy from us. That’s how stupid we were. So, yeah, anyway, we go to a sales conference, me and him, and we’re sitting on the back row up on top, and we’re kids and this guy comes on stage and makes 400k a year and we’re like, I gotta. I want to be him.

So, okay, here’s the five things I want to learn from him before he came up, because we knew the guy was coming and we’re like, I actually used that. Our little questions. He didn’t have our questions, we hadn’t submitted them, but he somehow answered every one of those questions so he had credibility. Before he walked up there, he was a great speaker. And then by the time he read our mail, he owned us.

And he said, and there’s one more thing. And we’re like, no, there’s not. We got all. That’s it. That’s all we got. No, there’s one more thing. “If you don’t know this man named Jesus, you need to get introduced because it will change the way you do business. You change the way you do relationships. And business is all relationships. You’re going to be more successful when you understand how human relationships work. And you will not understand that except through Christ.”

And my wife had been ragging on me to go to church and I don’t go to church. She’s like, we’re going to church. I’m like, who are you? We got married and she remembered she was a Baptist and so she forgot that prior to marriage. Then she comes home and, oh, we’re going to. No, I’m not going to church. Sunday’s when we drink beer and watch football and she would cry and get mad and go out and find her little Baptist people and go to church.

So then I come home from the sales conference and I’m like, I think we ought to go to church. And she’s like, who are you? What you doing with my husband? And so we went into a couple of churches and they were boring as crud. I’m like, if God’s here, if he was here, he left. Because nobody here is excited about it. And if there’s a God, you got to be excited about it. I mean, come on. Hello.

And so we go in the back door of this little church over on Oaker Boulevard over here, Christchurch, and you know, you sit on the back row so you can eject in case they get weird, you know, or in case they get. I don’t want to talk to people. I’m just here, I’m checking this out, you know, you probably didn’t do that, but that’s how I did it. I want to be able to eject.

And couldn’t get away from that place because this old school pastor, he’d stand at the back door and shake everybody’s hand as they left. Only about 400 people in there. And his wife was a big squishy woman. And she’d give you a big Jesus hug, you know, like grandma hug. And oh, man, that woman hugged me into the kingdom.

And I’m standing there and he got up on there. I thought Christians were wusses. That’s what I figured. I figured they were a bunch of sissies, you know, and that’s how I grew up. And so this guy stood up and he was a man, and he’s like, “this is what the Bible says. And if you don’t agree with that, you’re what’s known as wrong.” And he would call out stuff in the political spectrum and say, “this is morally wrong, our nation.” You know, stuff. And I went, you know, that’s right. And he’s got like a backbone and stuff. Wow.

And, you know, they had this choir up there, and this is a long time ago. I mean, this is 80s, right? So everybody wore a suit to church and all this kind of stuff. In those days, you didn’t come in with coffee and shorts, hat, you know, but nowadays it’s what I wear to church. But. But then you certainly didn’t. But there’s woman in the choir, starts waving her hand, raising her hand. I’m like, Sharon, if they get snakes out, I’m out of here. This is crazy. You know, and it’s like, so, yeah. And, you know, somebody says something about the Holy Spirit. And I said, I don’t have any idea what that means.

And we just kept coming. And we didn’t know what was drawing us back, but we found out later it was the spirit of God. We could feel it, and it was just attractive. And Sharon was pregnant with our first kid and we were making money. But, you know, Jaguars and Rolexes weren’t satisfying. How long? It wasn’t enough.

# SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, sorry to interrupt. But I see it didn’t take me long to figure that out. I don’t think a lot of people ever figure that out. You see it all over social media – the greed and the flash. I think it actually detours a lot of people. They think it’s unreachable because a lot of it’s fake.

You know, they have businesses now where you can just rent a jet, not even fly in it, just take a picture in front of the private jet. Or rent a Lambo or whatever. They put all this on social media which makes people think success becomes unreachable.

When I finally started making money, I bought some dumb things – the BMW, the chopper, all that kind of stuff. I’m just curious, how long did it take you to figure out that possessions don’t fulfill you as a person?

# DAVE RAMSEY: You know, I don’t know that it was a singular moment. It was probably on a gradient, truthfully, because that was my deal. I’m going to go get some stuff. I was in acquisition mode from 18 to 26, 27. And it worked, by the way, except it didn’t stick because of the principles I used built a house of cards.

But the concept worked of “I’m going to go get some stuff.” And I went and got some stuff. But you start to realize pretty quick – it’s like, you know, if you eat enough lobster, it tastes like soap. I love lobster, but I never had lobster until I was 12 years old and Red Lobster came to town. I thought, “Man, I’m going to eat all that I can get. I love this!”

But I always just laugh and go, if you get enough of anything – enough cars, enough suits of clothes, enough houses – eventually you just go… it’s unfulfilling. And it doesn’t take a genius to grasp that.

Finding Meaning Beyond Material Possessions

Probably what happened was I started going to church because my wife was dying for me to do that. I’m sitting there and they’re talking about Christ and they’re talking about being – it’s not all about you. First will be last. And those that are happiest are those that serve, and the most fulfilling thing you can do in your life is serve and not gather up another Jaguar or Lambo or jet or chopper.

I’m in there for other reasons, but that’s gnawing in there also. So I think it was probably almost a byproduct of a spiritual shift and going, “Okay, I’m no longer lord of my life. He is. I’m going to change that. You’re in charge. What do you want to do? Because I obviously screwed this up. I went bankrupt, I lost everything.”

My wife thought she married Sir Galahad. Turns out it was goober. I mean, obviously I don’t have my crap together, so obviously I need a new instruction manual. I need someone else running my life other than just me, because I’m pretty self-sufficient, but I need some instruction.

When I went broke, I wasn’t just broke, I was broken. And so you hit that bottom. And then with that I go, okay, there’s nothing wrong with getting some stuff. Get some nice stuff. I just drove a really nice truck up here today. The house you’re building is really nice. The house I live in, you’ve been there, is nice. There’s nothing wrong with that.

But what’s wrong, where it becomes wrong, is if you are asking the stuff to do something it’s not capable of, which is give you peace. And only the nail-scarred hands can give you peace that passes understanding.

That’s what I got early, there in my 20s. And then I’ve been able to rebuild from losing everything over the last 35 years and become much wealthier than I was before. But I don’t have any emotional or spiritual attachment to it at all.

I got a super expensive sports car and I parked it in front of a burrito place. The other night I went to speak at this church thing and a kid comes in, he goes, “Hey, is that your car outside?” I said, “Yeah.” I thought he was just admiring the car. And he goes, “I just hit it.”

Kid, you have no idea what it’s going to cost. I go out there, it’s a little ding about like this on the thing, but that’s probably going to be $50,000 or something. And he’s like, “I don’t know. My insurance, I don’t… My parents are going to kill me.” He’s like 17 years old.

I’m like, “Here’s what I’ll do. I’m going to go over here and puke in the bushes and you’re just going to go home and we’re not going to worry about it.” He goes, “You’re letting me go?” And I’m like, “You can’t do anything about it anyway. It’s out of your control. You’re over your skis and I’m not real happy and I’m not mad at you.”

I got home and Sharon’s laughing at me and she’s like, “Yeah, your problem is you just don’t care. You like the car, but you don’t love the car. You’re not worshiping the car. It’s just a fun car.” It’s a ridiculously cool car, but I’m not attached to it. So I can just let the 17-year-old go home and not kill him.

We’re asking those things to do something for us that they’re not capable of. It’s almost like asking your wife or your husband to be your Jesus – they’re going to fail miserably. Your husband’s going to leave his underwear on the floor and you’re going to realize right quick he’s not Jesus. You can’t ask things to be God that aren’t capable. That’s the problem with idol worship. That’s the core of it.

# SHAWN RYAN: When you mentioned that your business mentor said you need to implement Christ in your life into your business, what did he mean by that?

# DAVE RAMSEY: I think he just was saying your character has changed and you become other-centered rather than self-centered. When you’re selling, if you’re a taker, the people buying can smell it on you. If when you’re selling, you’re serving, they can smell that on you too. So again, selfless or selfish, other-centered or self-centered.

We teach the sales team at Ramsey, you work at a five-star restaurant with the best wine list on the planet. Your job is to be the best server possible so that when the people leave doing business with Ramsey, they’ve had an experience like a dining experience where they were served.

If you’ve ever noticed, fine food is one of my favorite sports. In that kind of setting, the server makes all the difference because they’re not just slapping stuff on the table. You can have the finest food, the finest wine list in the world and still have a crummy experience because you weren’t served.

# SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. So how would a sales pitch have gone without that implemented? And then what did it look like next?

# DAVE RAMSEY: Well, it’s manipulative without. Because my goal is for me to win if I’m selling. All I care is that you buy. I don’t care whether you buy the right thing. I don’t care if you need it. I don’t care if you finance it and the finance contract ruins your life. I don’t care about you at all. I’m trying to get a unit out the door, and you are a unit of production for me. You’re not a human being that I’m trying to make your life better.

So it changes the language, changes the body language, and we all know it. Even people that aren’t in marketing or sales know it. When you go into an ice cream store, you can feel it. Are they there to help you, or are you just another dip?

You meet someone and they light up. It’s very contrived now, but it’s “Welcome to Moe’s!” I mean, like, “We’re glad you’re here. Come into my house.”

We were at a nice, wonderful restaurant down in Mexico a few weeks ago, and we walk in, the guy’s Italian, and it’s like you went to his home. He met us at the front door with a glass of champagne. “Come into my home.” And he had great joy in making sure that you had an amazing experience. I think the food was good, but I got lost in the moment that he created. It’s just fabulous. I love that kind of stuff.

# SHAWN RYAN: Very cool. So, yeah, it sounds like be personable, listen to what they want.

# DAVE RAMSEY: Help them. What would you do if it’s your little brother? What would you do if it’s your mama? Make sure they got taken care of. Treat every one of them like that. That’s a great message, blow their mind.

# SHAWN RYAN: What went wrong in your business that you went bankrupt?

The Bankruptcy Story

# DAVE RAMSEY: We had $1.2 million in 90-day notes because I was buying property, fixing it up. I had rehab crews running. So I’d buy a property, fix it up and flip it. At the end of 90 days, you’ve got to pay the whole thing or you can renew the note, pay the interest and renew it for another 90 days if the bank allows that. And they did, because I’d never lost money on a deal.

If I had a house that we didn’t get finished and it took six months instead of three months to get it fixed and sold, I paid the interest, renewed it and it’s not a problem. The problem was when they looked down and said, “Oh, we want it all right now.”

So basically I had 90-day notes coming due for $1.2 million. And it’s all tied up in real estate. You got to move it all right now. Well, there’s a word for real estate sold super fast: it’s cheap. I started giving stuff away to meet the note obligations, so the income stopped because the income was from the profit. And the profit all went away because I was selling it so cheap to get rid of it.

I really wasn’t in over my head. I had a million dollars in equity. I was sitting at 75% loan-to-value ratios. So that was all working. I hadn’t really lost money on deals. I lost money on a couple of them here or there, but I was making enough to cover that. I was pretty good at it.

But I had built it on this fragile, unsustainable platform where the bank had control of my life. I didn’t realize that they had their hands around my neck until they started squeezing.

When that guy walked in and said, “You’re going to pay all this right now because we’re not going to renew any of this. We fired the guy that did these deals with you.” I’m like, “Why?” “He shouldn’t have done them.” I’m like, “He didn’t do anything wrong. He was doing what you told him to do.” Anyway, big argument.

So we had that bank called their notes, and then the second largest bank had $800,000 with them. And they heard through the grapevine that Dave was in trouble, so they called their notes too.

We spent one year making $250,000. The next year I made $6,000 because all I did was sell the houses. All I did was just try to do the right thing and pay the bill and be honorable. But it didn’t matter. They were coming after me. Every time I would make a move or do anything trying to help them get their money, they would stick me again. So I was bleeding from every pore.

I was bound and determined I was going to make it. And I almost made it, but I didn’t. I ran out of emotional and spiritual fuel. I was a baby Christian. I was really struggling with the idea that a Christian doesn’t pay his bills. That’s awful. There’s nothing about bankruptcy in the Bible, so what allows this?

They’re coming to take the baby bed next week on one of these lawsuits. They’re going to take all the furniture out of our house. I got a brand new baby and a toddler. Marriage is hanging on by a thread.

# Dave Ramsey’s Bankruptcy Experience

SHAWN RYAN: And I’m like, oh, so you had kids when this happened?

DAVE RAMSEY: I had two kids. Rachel was born in April. We filed in September. So she was a little baby and Denise was a toddler. And Sharon would have left, but she didn’t have a car. I mean, it was awful. And I stood in the shower as hot as I could stand. I’d just stand there and cry. I was so scared. I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t know what to do. And, yeah, so. But I just ran. My tank ran dry. My emotional, spiritual courage, whatever you want to call it, is dry. I didn’t know what else to do.

And finally they’re coming to take the furniture. And I got all redneck. Like, I took everything else. They can’t have the baby bed. I couldn’t get another baby bed. So we filed on Thursday night, Thursday afternoon, to keep them from the truck backing up at the house on Friday morning. I took it that far. Two and a half years of hell.

SHAWN RYAN: That was two and a half years?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah. Water got cut off. And I’m not proud of this, but I went and hooked the water back up and then they cut it off again and then I went and hooked it back up again and then they took the water meter out because I kept turning it back on. Pirates. My own water. We had two little kids in the house. I didn’t know what else to do. I was so broke I couldn’t breathe. And it’s awful. And my fault, all of it was my fault. And there’s the shame and the condemnation and then you start to heal. And those scriptures. There is therefore now no condemnation.

SHAWN RYAN: So how was it? Was it a two and a half year long process of them taking everything?

DAVE RAMSEY: From the time they called our first notes, we thought it, we said, okay, and I gave them the middle finger, I’m taking you people out of my life. And I started selling everything. And I really was under the illusion I could sell enough of it fast enough to just pay them all off and be done and then figure out something else to do or whatever. But I couldn’t get it all moved. And then they started foreclosing and I had unsecured notes out too, and they started suing me on those.

I got sued like 78 times. We were on a first name basis with the old boy at the sheriff’s department that brings those pink lawsuit papers. Yeah, Sharon is like, “Come in, Harold, got cookies on.” But it was hell.

Payne is a thorough teacher. So it’s no wonder Dave Ramsey doesn’t borrow money. When they say the borrower is slave to the lender in Proverbs, I went, uh huh, yeah, got that one. Got that one. The rich rules over the poor and the borrower is slave to the lender. Got that one. I will never be another banker’s slave ever in my life except where I make deposits. And none of you people will ever have that power over my life again. I gave you that power once. I’m not stupid enough to do it again. You’re going to put me back in shackles.

Building Ramsey Solutions

SHAWN RYAN: Well, I think I know the answer to this, but I mean we’re having discussions about private equity and all this stuff. I mean, have you ever taken any of that?

DAVE RAMSEY: Nope.

SHAWN RYAN: Nothing?

DAVE RAMSEY: Nope.

SHAWN RYAN: Everything’s built grassroots and…

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, we’ve organically cash flowed. Everything is the business answer to the question. The reason was that again I didn’t simply go bankrupt and I didn’t simply meet God in the process. The whole thing melded together and it took me all the way to powder to ground zero and went okay.

So when I started talking about opening up a business again after that, when I healed, I mean I went back to doing some real estate deals just to eat and I was able to get some food on the table. But a couple years later I started learning this stuff. The Bible says, get out of debt and learning biblical finance, which is common sense. And I thought, okay, I think we can do this.

And Sharon and I started saying, okay, we’re going to handle our marriage by the book. We’re going to handle our kids by the book. We’re going to handle our finances by the book. And you know, the beautiful thing about going broke is you no longer care what everybody thinks. So I’m not taking a poll. I love you, I appreciate you, but you don’t really get a vote. We get one vote. Jesus gets a vote. He’s the only one who gets a vote.

And so this is how we submit yourselves one to another. This is how we’re going to be married. That means I got to dry dishes, and that means I got to serve my wife as a high quality husband. And so how do you lead? How do you hire and fire? How do you, anything I could figure out, I’m going to do it this way. Whatever this book tells me, this is what I’m going to do.

And these people in my life that are new friends in my life, to the extent that they’re doing one of those things well, according to this book, I’m going to listen to them. And so I had like one friend who had an incredible marriage. He wasn’t a great business guy, but I could learn how to be a husband from him. And I had another guy who’s a great business guy, wasn’t necessarily incredible at his marriage, but I could learn some Christian business principles from him. And so I took that and put it all together.

God’s Company

And so all that is to say that the first principle was, I don’t own the business. God owns it. I’m a manager. Old English phrase in the King James is steward. I’m a steward, which just means I’m a manager of other people’s property. So I don’t own Ramsey. God owns it.

And so when I started it, I’m like, okay, God, what do you want to name your business? And sat there with a yellow pad and nothing, couldn’t hear anything, didn’t know what to name it. And I kept on and I thought, what we’re going to do is we’re going to help people. We’re going to give hope. We’re going to help people that are hurting. Like, we’re hurting.

And, so I sat there with a yellow pad. I’m like, okay, God. Next morning, an hour, sitting there with a yellow pad, nothing on it. And I wrote down a couple things, and I’m like, that wasn’t God. That’s last night’s pizza. And, you know, figuring out the difference in the Holy Spirit and pepperoni, right?

And finally I wrote down “light.” And I honestly looked up and I went, you’re just really not good at marketing. Light consulting. I mean, light. Light. That’s awful. I’m having this argument with God, like, he’s worried about me.

And I was over at the church doing something, helping this little couple that had their car payment behind, and they had these concordances in the church, these books that you can look up what the Greek or Hebrew meaning is. And I thought, okay, we’re going to open this business. We’re going to help people, and we’re not going to rub their nose in our Christianity, but they’re going to at least know where we got the information. This is where we’re coming from, okay? So we’re going to talk about it, but not be thumping people with it, right? Because nobody wants to be Bible thumped.

And so anyway, I opened that book up. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if the word light only appears one time? Because there’s always multiple Hebrew words or multiple Greek words for the word light. And so I’ll go down through there. Sure enough, there’s a Hebrew word, but it applies, shows up like 10 times. Okay, that’s not helpful. And so then there’s a Greek word for light that shows up multiple times. And here’s another Greek word that only shows up one time in scripture. I thought, well, I wonder what that is. That’s interesting. It’s Matthew.

And I pull open the English Bible, I’m like, okay, the word is “lampo,” which obviously we got our word lamp from light, right? And so I flip open the Bible and it says, “Don’t hide your light under a bushel. Put on a lamp stand for all to see.” Which is what we were promising to do, that we were going to be a light to people. Okay? That’s you, God. And so the company that actually owns Ramsey is called Lampo.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

DAVE RAMSEY: The Lampo Group, Inc. is the actual corporation DBA doing business as Ramsey Solutions, ran it that way, publicly facing for a long, long time. But we started doing some branding shifts. But so God named the company. It’s his company. He runs it. I don’t own it. And if he decides to bankrupt it or it’s not going to be generational, it’s his. He gets to do with it, what he wants to do with it. Just like that stupid car that the 17-year-old backed into.

Taking Care of People

And so now based on that, God, what do you want to do with your company? How do you want your employees treated? How do you want your team treated? How do you want people to be compensated? How are you going to treat the girl that gets cancer that works on the front desk? Oh, we paid her and she wasn’t at work for three years. For three years she’s back at work. One of my best friends. I love the girl.

SHAWN RYAN: She beat it.

DAVE RAMSEY: You know what? God would do it, but what would Jesus do? He would take care of her, her family wouldn’t, oh, you got cancer. We’re going to write you up for not being at work. And you get rolled up three times, you’re going to get fired. Right? I mean, I don’t think that’s how God would run a business. So we’ve done stuff like that.

And we had a kid get hit in the head with a ball at camp over in North Carolina and his daddy, I was in Scotland, but my leadership team did this and they called me to tell me they chartered a plane to send dad over there because the camp, the hospital called and told the dad, the kid’s got four hours to live. You can’t get to Asheville, North Carolina from here in four hours, but you can if you charter a jet. And you know, if that was me, and my kid is over there. What would I want somebody to do for me? Well, we sent him over on a jet. And the good news is, again, kid made it. The hospital was wrong, thank God.

But we don’t do any of that for any reason. But the interesting thing is when you love your people well, the rest of them are watching. And it becomes one of the best places to work in America because it’s one of the best places to work in America because God runs an incredible business.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I run this very, very similar to that. I really got a great relationship with everybody that works there. I care about them. I consider this like a family to me.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, I can feel it when you walk in.

SHAWN RYAN: And you know, I got a question for you though, and this is just something that I’ve struggled with, is sometimes I feel like my generosity…

Dealing with Betrayal and Generosity

DAVE RAMSEY: May be.

SHAWN RYAN: Somewhat of a weakness. And so what I mean by that is people see the generosity that I have and there have been a handful of people that come here and they take advantage of that. And so how do you, as a business owner, I mean, how can you tell the difference? How do you have the foresight into that? How do you deal with it when it happens?

DAVE RAMSEY: That and even worse, they… You find out later that somebody’s betraying or stealing or they leave, and then they say nasty things about you after you did something for them. I gave a guy a car one time, and then he’s on a Facebook group. I hate Dave Ramsey Facebook group. And I would like to tell you, I know the formula for that. I don’t. It still hurts my feelings, and I still get pissed off. It’s like I want to go find the guy and choke him, but, you know, but I’m not going to.

The thing I have struggled with the most on that – I’ve got good friends in my life that have walked with me for 30 years, and I got a group of guys that I hang with that don’t work at my company, and a lot of them have been friends for 20, 30 years through this whole spiritual journey. And so I’ll just vent with those guys. I’m like, you know, and they go, “Okay, look, you got 2000, 1500 people or so that used to work at Ramsey. You got 1100 that work there now. Four of them are twerps. Keep the ratio of how much rent you give in your brain to those four.”

Because it really should be about 1% of your thought pattern instead of 25% of your thought pattern. Because I don’t know about you, but I get mad, I get hurt, and then I just ruminate on it. I just run over and over, and I can do this, and I can do this and shut that Facebook group down. And I’ve called out some of these people a time or two, but I end up spending too much of my calories on the wrong things then.

And it’s hard for me, is the answer to your question. That’s a real human emotion. But it doesn’t invalidate the idea – you’re not going to get to the end of your life and go, “You know, I regret helping that lady who had cancer.” You’re not going to go, “I regret giving that, helping that guy with a jet. I regret, you know, whatever the story is,” where you did something that was generous or whatever, use some of God’s money that he let you manage to do something for somebody, one of his other children. That’s what it amounts to.

And, you know, God has some crazy kids, man. Some of them ain’t right. And so, you know, you just gotta go. And I wish I was better and stronger about just letting that roll off my back, but I’m not. I’m trying to tell you it’s probably not gonna quit hurting. When somebody does you wrong, is it transformed? But it doesn’t mean you don’t be generous.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah.

DAVE RAMSEY: That’s the point.

SHAWN RYAN: But I… I can’t stop that. That’s just part of who I am.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: At the same aspect is that… I mean, has that transformed you into somebody who’s a little more guarded?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, probably. And I’m probably a little wiser about the generosity because I don’t want to throw good money after bad. That’s not… Obviously, I don’t want to be a blessing to somebody who’s going to do something silly. That was not the intent. And so you’re probably just a little more… I was probably a little more disorganized or chaotic in the generosity. Now I’m probably more precise.

And I think about the unintended consequences of this, and kind of sometimes I think, well, if I do all this and then they decide they’re going to be nasty later on social media about Dave Ramsey or something, how am I going to feel? Am I still going to be glad I did it? And I’m like, yeah, because when we give someone a large severance package or something, you know, we’re overly generous there, or we take care of somebody and then later, you know, we’re really not doing that for what we get from it, so let it go.

I have to just have… You could tell I have this conversation with myself a lot. But, yeah, I’m probably more guarded. I’m not cynical. I don’t want to get cynical. But I do want to be more intelligent, more wise about what are the unintended consequences of this, and am I overdoing it out of some kind of sense of weakness or something? Or is this exactly what God would do right now? Because it’s his money? What do you want to do with your money, God? How would you treat this guy? This gal? You know what they’re going to do later? And I’m trying to figure that out. I’m still trying to figure it out. I don’t think I’ll get it figured out this side of heaven, but it’s a fun journey.

The Birth of Ramsey Solutions

SHAWN RYAN: So backtracking just a little bit. So was… I’m sorry, what was the original name of the business?

DAVE RAMSEY: Lampo.

SHAWN RYAN: Is that what was born out of the downturn, the consulting business?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah. Yeah. I first started helping people stop foreclosures because I was a foreclosure and I used to buy foreclosures. And so I know how to stop foreclosures, and house is three payments behind. I know how to work the deal with the bank, the deal with the mortgage company and get them caught back up and keep them from losing their stinking house.

And so people was… First thing I did is people would come and pay us a couple of hundred bucks and we would help them get caught up on their credit cards and their car payments and get them on a budget. And there wasn’t a class, there wasn’t anything. It was just me sitting in a room with a yellow pad and a calculator, and I would call the credit card companies and yell at them and work because they’re complete twerps.

SHAWN RYAN: How did you market that? I mean, coming from somebody that’s making $6,000 at $6,000 a year.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: Do a consulting business.

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, I… Number one, I, again, I went back to doing some real estate deals. That’s what we were eating on.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

DAVE RAMSEY: And I was doing the other stuff at church, just as a ministry. The pastor called and goes, “Hey, there’s a guy in my office getting foreclosed on. Can you help him?” I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll be over in 20 minutes.” And I sat down and that’s the first time I ever did it.

But once you do something good, you know, you help, you show that you have a talent in a church, they’ll have you do it all the time. So I was over there almost every night, pretty soon with somebody that was blowing up in their finances, and I’m showing them this is what we learned, this is what we did. We screwed it up. And that, you know, our story of failure kind of took some of the shame off of them so they could start to heal.

And then we could, okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to sell this car and we’re going to do this, and I’m going to get you out of this. But it’s going to be painful. But you can make the turn on this and you can get back on top of it.

And then a guy from a restaurant chain that went to our church called me and said, “Hey, one of our managers has got an IRS lien. Can you help him? The company’s going to pay you a $250 fee to go help him.” And it’s the first time I ever got paid to do that. And I was doing real estate deals to feed the family back after being broke.

And so I went over to that guy, that restaurant, and sat down with that guy, and we refinanced his house and paid off the IRS, which was really not rocket science. I don’t know why they didn’t know how to do that. But anyway, I helped him get out of that. And then the guy goes, “Hey, I want you to come over one of our managers meetings and teach this stuff that you’re teaching in that Sunday school class. This get out of debt, get on a budget stuff that you’re teaching that Sunday school class on.” “Okay?” He goes, “We’ll give you $250 to do that.” You don’t pay me to talk. “Oh, yeah, I’m in.”

And then he paid me $250 plus $500 in restaurant credit to go to another city to do one of their other managers meetings. And I’m like, oh, this is so fun. And Sharon and I, and I started doing a little bit more of it and just kept… Sat down, wrote a little book and nobody would buy it. And there was no Internet, you know, there was no platform to launch something on.

And then I went on a broke radio station that was in bankruptcy and agreed to work for free. And they allowed us to come down and do this horrible talk radio show. It’s like a Saturday Night Live skit. Two hillbillies, Darrel and his other brother, Darrell. WWTN. We’re talking Nashville. I mean, it was all awful. So bad. But the answers to the questions where people were in pain, the phone stayed lit up every day. And in a matter of months, we had one of the highest rated shows in the city.

SHAWN RYAN: Are you serious?

DAVE RAMSEY: And we were awful. But it was, it wasn’t anything to do with the broadcast quality, to do with the ability to speak or enunciate or properly form a vowel. You know, it had to do with, we love people and we were just helping them. We were doing it for free. We were just doing it for fun. We weren’t getting paid. It was just kind of a ministry, kind of a cool thing. And I’m going to do a real estate deal. I want to get off the air, feed my family.

And we told the guy around the station, you know, “If we’re really bad, you can cut our pay in half” because he wasn’t paying us anything. But it just, it took off and then Gaylord bought it out of bankruptcy. And it was a big FM station. It’s a huge FM station here today in Nashville. And we were there for 20 years. And that launched the whole thing.

Then we started getting paid because we could sell ads because of our ratings and we’re getting paid for the ads and we could, you know, but it’s all about just, again, helping people and just showing them these common sense things. And it turns out common sense, as Ben Franklin said, is not very common.

SHAWN RYAN: So it was the company that bought them out of bankruptcy that kind of… You turned it into a business.

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, that’s when we actually started making some money at it. And we didn’t even know we had ratings because they didn’t show up in the book because we were in bankruptcy. And so we didn’t… We were illegal because we didn’t say the call letters. You’re supposed to say the call letters once an hour on radio. It’s FCC guideline, you know.

And so we’re just talking. And there were no commercials because nobody wanted to buy on this station. You know, we thought three people were listening and two of them were in our family, you know, but the phone was ringing. We knew that. And we said, “We’re going to do a little seminar at the Ramada Inn.” And 600 people showed up. Holy, holy shit. And I’m like, oh my God, there’s people out there under this radio.

SHAWN RYAN: What time span are we talking here?

The Rise of Dave Ramsey’s Radio Empire

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh, you know, we were on the air for maybe a year. And then we just launched and we said, and then they buy the thing and the tower was broken. They fixed the tower and it’s 100,000 watt FM flamethrower. So it covered from Alabama to Kentucky, all of Middle Tennessee. And all of a sudden this thing’s like a blowtorch. And they started telling us, you got to say the call letters. As a matter of fact, we’re going to change the phone number, make the phone number the call letters.

So we just started. We went from never saying the call letters to every 30 seconds saying them, which drives ratings because people would know the call letters to write down the ratings books. And so the thing went, it was there. It was what we call phantom cum, meaning it was there, but nobody knew it was there. And then we activated it with proper handling of the stupid radio. And we didn’t know what we’re doing.

And they took us to three hours. And the guy running the thing, he goes, “I’m going to put two of your three hours against Rush Limbaugh. Rush is on the other station.” And I was like, “Are you trying to shoot us in the face? You can’t beat Rush Limbaugh. It’s freaking Elvis. He invented rock and roll. I mean, there’s no way.” Because Rush was the man. I mean, he was king of the hill.

And we beat him. You beat him in Nashville. And that was the beginning. Gave us a story to tell with ratings. We didn’t beat him anywhere else, hardly ever. And he became a friend later. But, oh, my gosh, we were like, oh, you know, the King. And so we couldn’t believe it. The ratings came in, went, this is wrong. It’s not wrong. We have a huge radio signal. It’s FM. He’s on AM. We’ve got this other great lineup around you. Gordon G. Gordon Liddy. Remember that guy? He was on in the mornings before us.

And so the thing blew up, and then we were smart enough somehow to say, “All right, we’re going to stay on your station. But you don’t own. We don’t want to be employees. Don’t pay us. You don’t own the show. We own the show, even though it’s worth nothing.” But because someday I want to syndicate this thing, someday I want to put it on other radio stations, and I’ll take no money right now, and I’ll make my money selling books and doing seminars and doing some consulting work.

I can make my money doing that. And radio lost money for 10 years on our P and L. We couldn’t sell enough ads to cover our costs for radio. Well, we started syndicating it, meaning we got other people, other. We went to Russellville, Kentucky, and that guy put us on. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, put us on. Jackson, Tennessee, put us on. Then Jackson, Mississippi, put us on. And then Spokane, Washington, and then Seattle. And we just. One at a time.

Wow. And there’s 640 stations now in the network today. Wow. It’s the second largest talk radio network in America. Sean Hannity’s number one. We’re number two. But it just. It was 30 years of scratching and clawing, fighting and pushing and pulling and putting up with radio business.

SHAWN RYAN: What did that develop into? Where did you go from radio?

Expanding to New Platforms

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, as we’re going on radio, you know, then the guy walks in my office, what, 10 or 15 years ago, the Internet and broadband is starting to have market penetration. And he goes, “We need a podcast.” And I said, “What’s a podcast?” And he goes, “Well, a couple people are doing them and they’re charging, like a subscription thing, and you can make money on it, and you put it behind the paywall.”

And I’m like, “I don’t think I want to do that.” And he goes, “Oh, man, we got to try it. He goes, where it’s going to go.” And I said, “I got this huge talk radio thing. Why would I want to do that?” And he goes, “Well, just take the same exact show and let’s just put it on the Internet.” I said, “All right, but we’re not going to charge for it. Put an hour on there and let’s see what it’s doing.”

And we ran it that way. And talk radio people were freaking out about podcasts. They were afraid it was going to put them out of business or Rush refused to do one. He didn’t want to be disloyal to the radio business. And other people would put out a podcast, but they put it behind a paywall, meaning you had to pay for it.

Now we just put it on there, help enough people, you don’t have to worry about money. So we just put it on there. Just put it out there, see what happens. And then XM Radio before that, you know, XM and Sirius were two companies, and we went up on both of those as soon as they came in, and then they combined and they couldn’t figure out what to do with us since we were on both of them. And they ended up giving us a whole channel for a while on the pair. I think we’ve got probably half a channel right now on there.

And so we just jumped on anything and everything because we weren’t in the radio business. We were in the helping people business. So we’re platform agnostic, and so you could jump to anything.

So then the podcast, I’ll never forget, I was with Brian Mayfield was one of our top. He was our top sales guy, and he had been promoted to run all of our broadcast stuff. And we were in New York and we got off the plane, we’re heading over to do a thing. And Aaron, he goes, “Hey, you know that podcast that kind of working?” And I’m like, “What do you mean?” He goes, “I think we made a million dollars on it last year in ad revenue.” And I said, “For an hour?” And he goes, “Yeah, you can’t run many ads on them. They’re not like radio radio’s full ads. You can put just a couple ads on there an hour and so we made a million dollars.”

He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, why aren’t we making 3 million and put all three hours on there?” And he goes, “We’ll do that when we get home.” So we put all three hours on there and then YouTube started, started popping up and people started putting stuff on YouTube. So we put it on there. And then, you know, Spotify joins the scene and we jump on Spotify.

So anybody comes along, we jump on all of it. And some of it is better than others and some of it’s, you know, for a time one of them will shine and then it’ll dim. You know, there was a time we thought SiriusXM was going to own the world and obviously they don’t. And so we’re just trying to help people and wherever they are, that’s where we’re going to go. And that’s worked out really good for us.

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, rewind it a little bit. So you’re doing the radio show. But this developed into books and coaching and in person coaching and courses. When did all that start happening?

From Radio to Books and Beyond

DAVE RAMSEY: We started on the radio in June 25th of 1992. I kept doing real estate again because we were doing that for free. We did a couple of little seminars here and there and I wrote a little book and I started selling a couple of those. I mean we sold maybe 10,000 of them or something. I couldn’t get bookstores to take it. I couldn’t get anybody to take it. I’d sell it on the radio and then we had to. They had to mail me a check to a P.O. box and I had to cash the check and mail them the book. That’s how hard it was. Talk about friction. Oh my God. It was ridiculous.

And so that’s not. But everything was analog so that’s the only option you had. And you couldn’t get the bookstores to take it because I was a little self published author and the little book was ugly and it worked. It was a good book. And so that had that working.

And at the end of the year of 93, I told Sharon, I ran some numbers and I said I think we could do between seminars and launching a class, which I hadn’t launched at that point, and the sale of these books and some one on one coaching, I think I can make $65,000 next year and quit doing real estate and go all in on financial Peace. The book was called Financial Peace. The class was going to be called Financial Peace.

I think if we go all in that year, I made 130,000. And I said, “I think if we take a pay cut in half, I think this is what God’s telling us to do. We’re doing God’s stuff. We’re helping God’s people. God owns the company. He’s running this. I think it’s time to take this and do this.”

And she said, man, she was hurting. We were still bleeding out of every pore we were eating. Making 130 grand and 1993 is a lot of money. But we talked about it and. And fretted over it and prayed over it. And then one morning she woke up and she said, “I think God’s saying, you need to do this. I think you’re supposed to do this.” And I went game on and stopped doing all real estate and dove all in January 1st, and that year I made $61,000. I was pretty close on my estimate, and I don’t make that anymore. That was the worst year I ever had.

SHAWN RYAN: When did. I mean, the book that I read was Total Money Makeover.

DAVE RAMSEY: That was the second one.

SHAWN RYAN: That was the second one.

The Publishing Journey

DAVE RAMSEY: It was actually the third one, technically, Financial Peace. The book was the first one. It took off that year. And I. What I did was I kept. Every time I got a call on the radio that the book didn’t answer their question, I wrote it down. I kept a little log of it. And, okay, so I updated the little Financial Peace book and put in five more chapters that answered our most frequently asked questions. There was no such thing as FAQs in those days.

But I just, okay, the book needs to be the answer to every question. And so what I would do is anytime anybody would call, okay, here’s the answer to your question. Here’s exactly what you need to go do. And I’m going to mail you a book because it’s going to tell you exactly what I’m telling you right now, and I’ll give it to them on the air. But that gave me a mention on the book every day. And I sold 148,000 of them that year. When I once started doing that with a new cover on it, little green cover.

And an agent called me and said, “You need a publisher.” And I’m like, “No, no, I don’t. You don’t know the difference between margin and royalty, do you? Margin big, royalty little.” And she’s like, “I don’t need a publisher.” I said, “I need a publisher when it’s in the trunk of my car. And nobody would take the book now everybody takes the book and I’m cashing the checks.”

And she goes, “Well, I got a big company, a Viking penguin, who wants to come down and visit with you from New York.” And I’m like, “I’ll always sit down and talk to somebody. I’m not mean about it. But if they think they’re going to buy this book, they need to bring a really big truck full of money because. And I’m going to keep control of every bit of it. Because it’s not my book, it’s God’s. I’m supposed to manage it, not some New York publisher. I’m in charge of this.” And so I said, “I don’t think they got enough money to buy this book.” And turns out they did.

SHAWN RYAN: They did.

DAVE RAMSEY: And we did this very unusual contract where I control every aspect of the book. And they did a lot of stuff for me. I was not sophisticated enough to do at the time. I didn’t understand. And so I was still so primitive and green. But they got a world class publicist, and I’m on the Today show and People magazine, all these other major national hits to launch the book and relaunch the book in hardback now.

And we sold 293,000 of them that month. And it hit the New York Times. And all of a sudden the whole world changes. And that book has now done 3.2 million total since 19, including the ones I used to carry in the trunk of my car in 1992. So it’s a long time and it’s still in hardback and it still looks exactly the same because I control all that and I still get royalty checks from those fine people. They’re sweet as they can be.

And then we went on and that was a two book deal. The other book didn’t do that well. And then Total Money Makeover came from Thomas Nelson here in Nashville. Mike Hyatt was the CEO of that. And he comes over and he goes, “You need to do another money book. It’s been seven years.” And I’m like, “I don’t really have anything else to say. Everything I said is in that book. It’s what I say every day on the radio. Why would I do another? Tell somebody, like something new?”

And he goes, “Well, that book’s what to do. This is how to do it. You need to do a book on the baby steps and show people tactically, you know how to do this.” And that book’s done 14 million now. It’s crazy.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

DAVE RAMSEY: That’s the biggest thing we’ve ever done. It’s nuts.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a damn good book. I hope everybody listening.

Expanding the Business Beyond Radio

DAVE RAMSEY: I didn’t want to do it because I thought it was insincere because I had this other. I’d already said a lot of the same stuff, but I didn’t talk about how to do it. And so “Total Money Makeover” legitimately was how to do it. And obviously that was needed.

SHAWN RYAN: What other aspects of the business, as you start developing, you started with the coaching, went to radio, went to podcasts, books.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, we just kept looking and going, okay, where is there a need? Where’s somebody we can get help with this material? And so a guy, a coach up here at the Catholic school, Father Ryan here in Nashville. Coach Carson dropped by the office one day and he goes, “Hey, I just want y’all to know. I feel like I ought to tell y’all I’ve been buying these Financial Peace books, and I’m taking my high school seniors through it. I’m showing them how in my math class how to do this stuff.” And he goes, “I didn’t want y’all to think I’m stealing something. I just want you to know we’re doing it.”

I went, you know, that’s really cool, because ever since I’ve had a single book, first thing, people pick up a book off the table, they look at me and go, “Why isn’t this taught in high school? Why didn’t I know this stuff before I was a broke 30 year old? Why didn’t somebody teach me this stuff?” And I’ve heard that my whole career.

And I went, “Okay, hey, Coach, why don’t we work together and we’ll kind of use you as the guinea pig. Let’s start developing actual curriculum for high school students out of it.” And see, you having to use an adult book for kids, and the kids don’t have to know what some of that crap is.

And so we filmed a little thing and put it on VHS and put it in his class. And then we put it a couple other places, and then we got thrown out of three or four places because I said Jesus in the video. And they freaked out. So then I got to learn a whole new thing about law, which I didn’t know. Supreme Court rulings on what can be taught in public school and what can’t be taught and ended up in this big legal mess.

But we fixed all that and we’ve got it to where we can actually. Side note, you can actually use scripture and talk about God in public school as long as it’s instructive. You’re not trying to convert them. And so you can say “Jesus said, don’t build a tower without first counting the cost.” And you can say “Ben Franklin said, save money.” And you could say “Mark Twain said this about debt.” And you can, you know, it’s instructive. But you can’t say, “Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life.” So you can’t proselytize. And there’s very clear stuff on that.

Now, a lot of public school administrators are cowards, and they think anything that says Jesus should be thrown in the street. And so they haven’t done it. But now we’ve gotten 6 million students through it, and 48% of America’s high schools have now taught that curriculum. And that was 25 years ago. We started that. It’s a massive business.

Wow. And now we’ve opened up a full econ curriculum to go with it because apparently we need to teach what capitalism is. I didn’t know that was a problem. But we need to. So we’re now doing that, too. And there’s a lot of. Texas, Florida are the latest two that have just passed mandatory personal finance class in high school. And guess what? We can help them with that.

So, yeah, and we’ve got a. Then we had, okay, the Financial Peace class, ended up going through 50,000 churches, and about 10 million people went through it. And we said, okay, let’s take that class, which is a very religious class. It’s all about what God says about money. And it was taught in church and very in your face, not subtle at all. And corporate America didn’t want that much in your face, which is understandable. But they wanted to teach their team that.

Because your team, if your team’s worried about their money, they’re not thinking about work. While they’re at work, their productivity goes down. So we ended up reconfiguring all that in a much more palatable way called Smart Dollar. And now U-Haul and Costco and many, many other companies teach that, buy it from us as a curriculum and HR benefit to the team. They can go through the class.

And so we just keep doing stuff like that. Something pops up, and we launched a budgeting app, gosh, almost 10 years ago now. And iterated every day, almost. It updated, updated, updated. And it’s freaking incredible. Every Dollar. And I think we’ve got 56 million downloads now on that or something. Holy cow. It’s just. It’s just. But, you know, again, none of it’s easy. You just stumble backward into it, look confused and stumble forward. But we just keep pushing and keep pushing and keep pushing. But yeah, you just monetize the connectivity and the service that you’re providing. And sometimes you do stuff just because you need to help people and you don’t make any money on it, and that’s okay too.

Building a Sales Organization

SHAWN RYAN: I mean, I know that, you know, back at the beginning you said that the money kind of came to you. People just came to you and offered you $250 to go speak to their, to them and their employees. But I mean, when did you, when did it have to start kind of transitioning from, from, hey, people coming to you to somewhat of a sell. And did you find that?

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, I mean, like, if we’re. We have a sales team that sells the curriculum to high school. Yeah, we have a sales team that sells the Smart Dollar to corporate America. Okay, so we’re going after. They’re not calling, they’re not lining up around the block. We got to go get them. Yeah, we gotta tell them where they’re. A lot of times they don’t even know where they are.

And so you have to go through the whole process of being approved as a curriculum before the school board at the state level, and then the local county can decide whether they want to buy it or not. And so you gotta go. And then some character will stand up and go, “You can’t have Dave Ramsey here because he likes Jesus and we don’t have Jesus anywhere and all this stuff.”

Hey, dude, you need to actually read the curriculum. You kind of sound foolish because it’s really not a preaching curriculum, son. It’s just a teach little kids not how to get into debt. And you probably wished your kid had learned it, so you probably ought to before you just start being a left wing barker. But anyway, we just work our way through that stuff.

And yeah, we have to be proactive in sales. And when we were doing the church things, we had 38 people calling churches all day long and putting the pastor through the thing for free. And so he would see what it is. Because pastors aren’t comfortable usually talking about money because they don’t want to be like one of those churches that talks about money all the time. And so they end up going too far the other way and never talking about what the Bible says about money, which is also a disservice to their congregants. Because if you’re pastoring, you ought to teach people what God says about marriage, what God says about money, what God says about leadership, what God says about that’s your job as a pastor.

Biblical Principles About Money

SHAWN RYAN: And so, you know, what does God say about money?

DAVE RAMSEY: I mean, there’s 2,500 scriptures dealing with money and possessions. Some of it’s very nuanced and almost funny. And I mean, the four or five main things that you think about is debt. You know, borrower, slaves to the lender. There’s not a debt is not a sin in the Bible, not even close. But 100% of the scriptural references to debt are negative. And so it’s your heavenly father who loves you, who’s crazy about you, saying, son, it’s dumb. That’s what it amounts to.

And there’s a lot of scripture about planning and budgeting. You know, the mind of man plans his ways, but the Lord directs his steps. And I already quoted the one from Jesus, don’t build a tower, you’re building a house. Don’t do that without a blueprint. And don’t handle your money without a detailed thing of where the freaking money’s going. So have a plan, get out of debt.

The house of the wise are stores of choice, food and oil. Wise people save money saving, investing. Ecclesiastes says, spread your portions to seven, yes to eight, for disaster may come upon the land. Diversification is in the Bible. Don’t put it all in one place. Foolish man devours all he has. If you spend everything you make, you’re a fool. God said that, not me.

And so, you know, the scriptures like that sound like grandpa. It sound like grandma. It’s common sense, you know, there’s nothing in here that’s like, woo, you know, you’re right. I mean, it’s just like, no kidding, dummy. But I didn’t know any of it and I thought you just borrow all you can. That’s what I thought. And I did. And it cost me. And so, and people don’t, people don’t know.

And one of the funny ones is almost nuanced is Proverbs 17:18 says, “One lacking in sense cosigns for another.” Cosigning alone, you’re lacking in sense. The contemporary English version, the CEV says “if you co-sign for someone else, you’re an idiot.” That’s what that version says.

And so, you know, but. And guess what? I’ve co-signed some loans and 100% of the time they turned out bad back in the day, you know, and when I was going broke, my old boy stepped in, tried to help me and co-signed for me and it cost him I had to go back and pay him later and his wife still don’t talk to me. It costs you 100%. You know, you co-sign a loan for your little boy and then your little boy is an idiot and runs a car in a ditch with no insurance. And now you’re stuck with a $30,000 bill because you were trying to do a nice thing for someone and you did it a dumb way. That’s co-signing. That’s in the Bible. Who knew?

SHAWN RYAN: Interesting. How are you at the, how are you at the work life balance? I mean you have a, you have a business empire. Your husband, your father are your grandfather too.

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh, eight kids, eight grandkids.

SHAWN RYAN: Eight grandkids. And so how, I mean, how do you balance it all? Are you able to switch it off?

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: You are? How do you switch it off?

Work-Life Balance and Family Priorities

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, full disclosure, let’s go back to launching the thing when we opened that first little office at $61,000. My wife grew up in a hard-working farm family in East Tennessee. Her daddy owned a market. And when you own a market, a convenience store, you work. You come home at 11 o’clock at night you work. And on Thanksgiving, we waited for Thanksgiving dinner on her daddy until he could get the store closed at noon because he opened for breakfast. They sold biscuits and he opened for breakfast and he closed at noon on Thanksgiving, came home, but Thanksgiving, Christmas, only time he closed, he was there all the time.

So that’s the family she grew up in. So she’s not going to whine. She’s quite the opposite. She’s kicking my butt out. “Go get some work done. What are you doing sitting here? We’re hungry. You need to go do something.”

But the first two years were maybe two and a half years from the time we opened that second office under Lampo. And we start teaching Financial Peace with an overhead projector and a bad suit. And I’m teaching it at night, every night. I’m doing the radio show every day in the afternoon and I’m in the office in the morning doing counseling. And so I get up, go to the office at 7:30, I get home at 11:00 at night for two years.

So I didn’t have work-life balance then, but it was agreed upon that that’s what it took to get the ball moving. And it was not going to be forever. We’ve got to figure this out. We got to staff it, we got to change the business model. We got to do something to get it where we can but it takes oomph to get the thing over the hill. Once you get it rolling, then you can start to back off a little bit.

So from then on I start learning and I’m again, I’m a young guy at that point trying to heal emotionally and financially and spiritually from this horrible event we’ve been through. So I’m still, you know, this guy, right? Still freaking out. But we quickly figured out that work-life balance is not a true thing. What you need to do is wherever you are, you need to be 100% there.

And so what happens is people that say they want work-life balance, they go home at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, which is fine, but then they turn on Netflix or they open up their stupid computer and they’re looking at their Instagram account. They’re not interacting with their family. Or they’re doing work emails once they get home. And they call that work-life. That’s not work-life balance.

Work-life balance is when you get home. Game on. I’m looking at this little three-year-old’s eyes. I’m in the floor playing and rolling around. My wife and I are actually having a conversation without a phone laying there. And so that’s “you be where you is” is a big deal.

That’s the first thing we did. The second thing we did was as the kids start, as we start going along, then we said, okay, I’m going to work my butt off and I might go on like a Total Money Makeover book tour is 42 days I was gone. I was like some kind of musician or something living out of a bus. But we knew that going in. We said, okay, at the end of 42 days we’re taking everybody to Disney. But there’s going to be a period of time here, dad, you’re all you little people’s part is don’t drive your mom crazy because there’s going to be a time that we’re all going to be right together. And when we’re at Disney, we weren’t worried about the book.

SHAWN RYAN: Gotcha.

DAVE RAMSEY: You know, and so we’re there. So then the next thing we did was we said, okay, no birthdays and no proms and no hockey. Ice hockey championships, they’re on the calendar first. No events during those days. So we did a lot of live events in those days. We traveled a lot doing events. But if I’m going to be doing a live event, I may do six or seven in a spring or something like that. I’m getting ready to do a six-city tour right now. But there are none of them over my daughter’s prom date because I need to be standing there when that young guy comes in so he understands I’ll be cleaning my gun when he gets home.

So, you know, I’m not kidding you. And my daughter, you know, we’re going to be there and I’m going to be there for that picture and I’m going to be there for that thing. And so I didn’t miss those things. But I didn’t make every hockey game. My daughters were cheerleaders. I didn’t make everything. But we were there a lot. And we put it on the calendar and we said, okay, that’s. And when we’re there, we’re not sitting and doing emails on our phone in the stands while they’re doing it. We’re watching the freaking game. And you know, I coached Daniel in hockey for a while and my son.

And then lastly we went to a marriage conference and I picked a Christian marriage guy teaching. And it was really good. And I picked this up from him. He said, if you’re going to turn it off when you get home, it’s an intentional act to turn it off. Doesn’t happen automatically. He said two things. One is, when you and I started doing this, I would turn into the street where our house is, the cul-de-sac where our house was, and I would stop at the bottom and I would play two praise and worship songs. Switch.

And he said, the other thing is you don’t use the same tools on your family, the same weapons on your family you’ve been using to fight the wars all day long. He said, “When that pioneer comes in from hunting all day, he takes a musket, he puts it over the mantle and he turns around and there are no bears in the room to kill. These are children. There are no things to be done here. And this is my wife. And so I have to put my sword above the mantle. I have to put my musket above the mantle. I got to quit using the same mental gymnastics and processes because it’s a different skill set to run a business or win a business or to, you know, the rough and tumble of what you and I do every day that you, you don’t use that on a three-year-old.” So I had those three things helped me a lot.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you know, that wasn’t a general question I’m asking for myself because I struggle with that. And I’ve, you know, I think I’m through the 16, 18-hour days of lifting this thing up. And you know, I mentioned I’d hired a COO and we had a producer now. And you know, the team that we have is amazing.

DAVE RAMSEY: But, well, I started getting enough people on the team that were better at stuff than I was that I went, I don’t really need to be doing that. I suck at it. He’s good at it, let him do it. And you know, I could delegate, in other words, because I had high quality humans working on the team. That helped a lot. And then occasionally Sharon would go, “You’re not the Messiah. That’s Jesus’ job. You cannot be somewhere and people will survive.”

SHAWN RYAN: I think that, you know, for me it’s not just, it’s not just a worry of not being here. And I know these guys can run this without me. It’s, it’s. I love what I do.

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh, me too.

SHAWN RYAN: I love this and it’s. And I also love my family and it’s. But I’m just always, my mind is just going a thousand miles an hour all the time. And it’s really hard for me to shut it off. I mean, new ideas are popping in my head, new business verticals are popping in my head, new guests are popping in my head and just engineering the business to grow and to grow and to grow. And I find it.

DAVE RAMSEY: And obviously it’s working.

SHAWN RYAN: Really, it is working. And I just find it really hard to make that mental switch, you know, where you go home and you are 100% present with your wife and kids. And so it’s a personal.

DAVE RAMSEY: Nothing’s perfect. I’ve gotten emails when I’m on vacation. I mean, that happens. There’s nothing, none of this is pure, but it’s just a series of intentional acts. And you know, my dad used to say 90% of solving a problem is realizing there is one. And so just the idea, go, okay, if I can just turn off a whole lot of it, but not all of it at night. And you know, the inverse is true too, by the way. You can’t be constantly worrying about every little diaper needs to be changed while you’re down here trying to get your work done.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

DAVE RAMSEY: And you know, I had one old boy working for me. His wife called him 52 times in one morning. And I’m like, there’s a receptionist came in and she goes, “This is nuts. And all I’m doing is answer the phone for this guy’s.” And I said, “What is going on?” I went on, sat down his desk. I said, “Man, she called you 50 times.” He goes, “Yeah.” I said, “You probably ought to just go home. It’d be easier. Take the day off, go figure it out.” And he goes, “I don’t want to so bad.”

But yeah, that’s the other side of it, right? You got to be able to leave your home at home. And truthfully, you’ve got the kind of wife that I do to where, you know, I’m not getting even. When the kids were little, I’ve never gotten stuff dumped in my lap from family problems in the middle of the day. She’s not a high maintenance woman. Quite the opposite. My wife did not say, “Wait till your father gets home.” She took care of it. I can just tell you so. And that’s one of the reasons we were able to grow and do things, because I was able to concentrate and I didn’t have a wife that called me 52 times in the morning, wasn’t needy. You know, that kind of stuff.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, it’s. My wife’s very much on board with this. But the one thing she says to me is, “You know, Sean, you need to be present when you’re here.”

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah.

SHAWN RYAN: “You cannot be at work.”

DAVE RAMSEY: And she’s right.

SHAWN RYAN: And making that mental switch has been. It’s been tough.

DAVE RAMSEY: I’m still working on it, but, yeah, it’s not hard. It’s just worth it.

Building Ramsey Solutions

SHAWN RYAN: So how many. So you grew from doing this out of a church? How many employees does Ramsey Solutions have now?

DAVE RAMSEY: Just under 1,100.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, 1,100 employees and your facilities, it’s incredible.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, we’ve got a great campus. I’m real proud of it. God has blessed us beyond our wildest imaginations. Crazy. Out of control.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s talk about culture. So I know culture is extremely important to you in your business, as is to me. I’m building out our culture. I’ve been building it since the beginning. And I just want everybody to be proud of where they work. Enjoy coming to work, not going home, going, “Oh, shit.” You know, everybody complains about their work. Almost everybody. And so I’m really curious to hear how you built the culture of Ramsey. I never hear anybody. When we do a hire, we get a lot of people from different networks around the area that apply that can’t stand where they work. We’ve never had one person apply from Ramsey.

DAVE RAMSEY: No. Why?

SHAWN RYAN: Because they love what they’re doing there and they believe in what you’re doing. And so I’m just curious to hear how you built the culture and how you keep your employees so proud of what they’re doing. I’ve only seen a couple of places like this.

Building a Strong Company Culture

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, number one, it’s not perfect. We need to say that out loud. But again, much like the other discussion we were just having, it’s a matter of being very, very intentional about it. The first thing I think that I remember is we got to about 60-something people. And I hired an HR director, which I didn’t want. That felt like corporate crap. You know, I didn’t want to do that. It sounded like… And one of the first things I told him is “you’re not hiring anybody manager. The leaders are going to hire their own people. That’s not your job. But your job is just to help us understand some of this HR stuff.” Because HR in corporate America has way too much power as far as I’m concerned. I don’t want them to have the power. I want them to just help us get the work done.

The guy’s name was Rick Perry. He was brilliant. And he retired from Ramsey not long ago. He worked there for decades. And we would have something blow up or some kind of a problem with the team or whatever. And the way I’ve always done everything is we just… The leadership team makes the decisions in a collaborative style. We all get in a room and we argue about it and we figure it out. I don’t walk in and go, “I have the answer.” Because I don’t a lot of times, or I may, but I don’t go “I’m the guy that owns it. You have to do what I say.” It’s not because I’m afraid to tell somebody what to do. If they need to do it, I’ll tell them.

I told you I did an exercise with a ministry thing with Seal Team 6 one time. And you and I talked about that offline. I just loved watching those guys get together at the end and debrief. I asked if I could stand with them. They got in a circle, and I asked if I could stand there with them. The guy said, “Sure. And don’t say anything, just listen.” I wasn’t planning to say anything, but I didn’t know who was a senior officer by body language or by input or by criticism. They all took down problems. They were very blunt, very clear, very kind. But you couldn’t tell who was the leader. It was very democratic, so to speak, when I watched them debrief that mission or that exercise we had done – what went right, what went wrong, all that kind of stuff.

Discovering Our Core Values

So that’s kind of what we do. But I didn’t know that that was a common thing. I just did it. And so everybody’s more than welcome to argue with me. As a matter of fact, it’s preferable if you argue with me. Because if you don’t have anything to add, why are you here? So let’s get in a room, let’s do the same thing. Let’s debrief this thing.

So we would debrief it, and Rick would sit in there because he’s an HR director, and we would go, “Okay, we got it here. We drive it. Take it to ground. Here’s what the answer is. Here’s what we’re going to go do.” And then Rick would say, “Whoa, whoa, let me make sure, because I’m going to write it down what the value was. What was the value system, the core value that drove this decision? Why did you all come to this decision? Because all of you seem to… You went around and around, and boom, you landed on it. Why did you do that?” And he’d write it down. He goes, “Okay, that’s a core value.” I don’t even know what a core value is, but okay, sure. And we’d get up and go on our way.

He started collecting those, and he wrote down like 16 or 18 things. He said, “This is how Ramsey makes decisions. This is who we are. It’s not who we wish we were. It’s who we are. It’s not aspirational. This is it. This is the way we decide to do stuff.”

And the stuff he wrote down was accurate, but it was horribly worded. So we got in a room after a few years of looking at that stuff. That is how we make decisions. And this is a training tool. We can show everyone in the organization this is how we make decisions. These are our core values. And if you get these core values, then you will know what to do. If we’re not there, you will know what Ramsey would do. You can finish my sentences because these are the core values that caused my sentences to come out of my mouth.

Some of them were a little bit redundant, so we ended up with 15 and later 14. And we put better titles to them and better descriptions. And then we used those to say, “This is who we are.” And we reinforce those. I taught one of them for 30 minutes in staff meeting to all 1,100 people yesterday. We do it over and over. And this is who we is. This is who we is. You want to be a we? This is it. If you’re not this, you’re not one of us. This is who we is.

Our Core Values in Action

The one I taught yesterday was marketplace service. If you help enough people, you don’t have to worry about money. And so your job is to blow the customer’s freaking mind. If you help enough people, go make sure they get help. They called you. They came in contact with us. God sent them to us because they were hurting or they had an opportunity, and we need to give them hope in that area with a biblical common sense answer. Your job, no matter what you do here, is to blow their mind. If you’re shipping a book, if you’re writing a line of code, if you’re in HR and you’re recruiting, your job is not like crazy in the building. Your job is put people in a seat that are going to be crusaders. Because our job is to help people. And we won’t have to worry about money, and we haven’t had to worry about money.

Another one is we don’t gossip. No gossip. You hand your negatives up, and you’re going to have negatives. There’s 1,100 opportunities in the building for you to be pissed off. So you’re going to have problems. Human beings are in this building. You’re not going to like one of them. Something’s going to happen, it’s going to hurt your little freaking feelings, or you’re going to get frustrated with leadership. Welcome to life.

Hand your negatives up. You can have your negatives. Don’t be belligerent. But you can come into any leader’s office and sit down and go, “I don’t understand. I’m really frustrated. Help me.” You can do that anytime. You cannot do that at the water cooler with a co-worker and go, “Leadership’s a bunch of idiots” because that’s disloyal and I will fire your butt. I have no tolerance for that crap. If you’re going to do that, you need to do it in a Facebook group after you quit. Leave me alone. I’m not going to give you money to run me down.

Henry Cloud says, “I don’t understand why people pee in their own cereal and then gripe because it tastes bad.”

SHAWN RYAN: Don’t shit in your own backyard.

DAVE RAMSEY: Exactly. And people do it all day long at jobs. All they do is sit around and talk about how stupid the place they work is. And these are the people that give them money to feed their family. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. If the people you work for are stupid and you stay, what’s that make you? Stupid. So hit the road. Don’t let the door hit you in the butt.

We have this talk all the time and about once a year we got to fire somebody. But most of the time there’s no gossip because we don’t do that. And if someone starts to say something, they go, “Wait a minute, we don’t do that.” And you don’t have to have even a leader. It could be somebody that joined the company three weeks ago and they go, “Hey, wait a minute. They told me in onboarding we don’t do that. If you got a problem, you probably ought to take it to a leader because I can’t help you with that.”

If you’re sharing negatives with somebody who can’t help you fix it, that by definition is a bunch of crap. And we don’t do that. That’s one of the 14. And it’s weird. It’s very weird, very strange. But it’s very clean. The air is clean in the place. There’s no bad smells.

SHAWN RYAN: Everybody holds each other accountable.

Creating a Healthy Work Environment

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, we just love… Because everybody wants to work in a place where you don’t have to watch your back. Somebody’s not knifing you from behind. In most places, you know, you’re trying to get your work done while looking over your shoulder and that’s just counterproductive.

So stuff like that, we just kept doing and reinforcing. I was having lunch with my son who’s our president yesterday and he was telling me about a thing that’s going on. I said, “You know what that guy says that we all talk about?” He goes, “Yeah, I know what you’re going to say.” I said, “Good. What am I going to say?” He goes, “We get what we tolerate.” And I said, “Okay, don’t freak. You’re going to let that go on? You don’t sit here and tell me how frustrated you are about it – fix it. You get what you tolerate.”

I’m going to be kind, be clear, and be gentle. But sometimes your job is that you don’t get to work here anymore because you’re not a “we.” And you’re more concerned about your little toxic problem or whatever it is you’ve got than actually being a part of this team and getting work done and helping the people that aren’t here.

This organization has been blessed, and we are blessed to be a blessing like Abraham. That means that we exist for the people that are not inside the walls of that campus at Ramsey. We exist for the people outside those walls. And if you don’t be centered on them, you’re not one of us. And we just talk about that with that kind of voice all the time. And we have for 30 freaking years.

People choose. They run out of steam. They choose. They start to think we’re incompetent. That happens all the time. And they leave. They quit. They go do something else. That’s okay. That’s fine. Just, you know, if your spirit leaves, for God’s sakes, take your body with it. And that’s our stuff we talk about until everybody’s sick of hearing it. But then it sticks.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, it’s interesting, too, that you… I mean, you’ve always done it, but you picked that up when you did the exercise with Seal Team 6. That is the culture of the Seal Teams – everybody’s vested, everybody has ideas, everybody dies.

DAVE RAMSEY: And nobody dies at Ramsey. That’s serious.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, and so that’s something that I brought here. I love to hear ideas. I love to flush it all out. We call it a hot wash. And I love to hear critiques. I don’t want yes-men that are just like, “yes, yes, yes, yes.” We flush everything out. All the positives, all the negatives. So it’s just… Thank you for sharing that. It’s reassuring to hear that.

Managing Team Dynamics

DAVE RAMSEY: But then sometimes folks that you thought were going to be with you a long time, their brain goes and leaves. And then you got to sit down and have a hard conversation and go, that’s not… Can’t be here. And I’ve had some of my best friends that work there because they’ve been with me for 20 years. I mean, these are band of brothers, band of sisters. We fight together. We take on freaking Covid idiots, and we take on all this other crap that we all have to deal with out here in the marketplace and all the haters, and you take on all the negative press or whatever. Because somebody’s always got something to say, and you take on all that stuff together, and you fight, and then you win, and then you fight, and then you go to the super bowl and you lose in the last play, but you almost got there.

And you do that for a long, long time. And then after 20 years, they decide that they’re not going to be there or that they don’t want to participate in this culture anymore. And it’s really painful. But they can’t stay because I’m not quitting. So we’re going to keep doing it this way. And so somebody’s got to leave, and it’s not going to be me. That’s not how this works.

But, man, we just have to have those difficult conversations we call them, and they’re a regular part of the rhythm, too. You can’t… John Maxwell says you can’t sanction incompetence, because if you sanction someone not doing their job, now, if they got cancer, that’s different, right? But I mean, you don’t sanction someone that’s just a half butt, because all the other studs are looking at the half butt going, wait a minute. Yeah, that’s okay. No, that ain’t okay. Now, you can give somebody some grace if they’re going through a personal thing or, you know, lots of grace, but I’m talking about just in general. We’re playing to win the Super Bowl. You better take your block and hit it.

SHAWN RYAN: Well, Dave, let’s take a quick break, all right? And when we come back, we’ll dive into your new book, okay?

[Commercial break removed]

SHAWN RYAN: All right, Dave, we’re back from the break. And man, I got so excited to talk to you that I forgot to give you your gift here. Everybody gets a gift.

DAVE RAMSEY: Gummies. The same gummies, man.

SHAWN RYAN: Vigilance League. Gummy bears. Legal and all.

DAVE RAMSEY: I got anything left from the last time we met. So this is perfect. I’ll refill my stash.

SHAWN RYAN: We’ll send you a whole bunch, but love it.

DAVE RAMSEY: Thank you.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. But you know, I did have… Before we do dive into your book, I just had a couple of questions, just random questions. One is about Generation Z. And you know, I’m sure you hear it a lot more than I do, but a lot of grumblings on… It’s tough to buy a house now, interest rates are high. What advice do you have for Gen Zers? A lot of them seem, how do I say this? A lot of them seem to think that it’s impossible to be able to afford a home and to get ahead financially in today’s economy.

Perspective on Generation Z

DAVE RAMSEY: You know, I’m actually in love with Gen Z. It’s one of my favorite generations. We’ve got about 450 of them on our team. Wow. And they are, they do share one characteristic with the millennials. They’re very bifurcated, meaning they’re either awesome or they suck. There’s no middle ground. They’re not posers. Gen Z’s really not posers. They’re really not. They don’t do facade.

They’ve grown up with a magic wand in their hand that they can push a button and stuff happens. They’ve grown up being able to answer any question instantly. They’ve grown up with influencers that aren’t real, that haven’t earned the right to influence. And so they’re very careful. They’re wise beyond their years in that sense.

And so what we end up with is the ones we end up talking to in the money space. I’m talking to ridiculous 22 year olds that are calling in that have… This guy called me the other day, he’s getting $150,000 saved. He’s 22 years old. I’m like, how the freak did you do that, man? I didn’t, I couldn’t do that. Was 22, I borrowed it, but I couldn’t do it. This is impressive. They’re very impressive, very serious minded.

And then there’s another group that’s entitled and victim based and they’re like, “capitalism has failed me.” You know, no bull crap. But you know, there’s kind of been that in every generation there’s always a group of entitled whiners and there’s victims and there’s always the ones that are victors and there’s always a percentage of each.

The overall answer is that I give to folks that are struggling with the ability to afford life or to afford to buy a home, those kinds of things is you’re making the mistake of thinking that because something tipped today is your situation, that it’s going to be your situation tomorrow. Life is not a still shot. It’s not a single frame, it’s a film strip. And a hundred percent chance the next frame is going to be different than the last frame and the next frame. And you’re going to go through this thing because if I, you know, when I went bankrupt and I was in my 20s, if I had said, “okay, that’s the definition of Dave, I now that is my identity, I’m an idiot,” you know, I would have been still sitting there, right?

But instead I go, okay, no wait, that’s just where I am today. That doesn’t necessarily define tomorrow. And so maybe today you can’t afford a house with current interest rates and your salary, your income. That does not mean that’s the case tomorrow. Interest rates will change, house prices will go up and hopefully your income will go up. And maybe you need to adjust where you live.

Because when I started the radio show 33 years ago, there was a large number of people that could not afford to live in downtown Manhattan in New York City, 33 years later, there’s a large number of people that can’t afford to live in downtown Manhattan. Some of the most expensive real estate in the world. You can’t live in Silicon Valley and make minimum wage today. You couldn’t 20 years ago. You can’t live in San Diego and buy a home which would be double the national median average on homes. If you live there making entry level and you throw boxes at Costco, you can’t do it mathematically, by the way, you’ve never been able to do it.

So you’re going to choose to live somewhere else or do something different. And when you make those choices, the frames change and you’re going to be okay. But you have to say instead of, “I’m going to sit here and whine and I’m going to be a victim of the circumstances.” Instead I’m going to control the controllables, which is what I make, where I live and what am I doing to better myself so that I make more and choose to live in a place that I can buy.

I had a couple on my radio show do a debt free scream yesterday. They paid off their home. At 37 years old, he is a middle school math teacher and she is a stay at home mom. How in the world did they do that? They live in a town that is in the middle of nowhere in Kansas. It’s outside of Wichita, which means there’s nothing there but groundhogs. Right? Prairie dogs. Sounds like where I grew up. I said, what’s your home worth? $125,000. And they paid off their home. But he’s a middle school Math teacher, makes $65,000 a year, his wife stays at home with the kids and they’ve chosen to live in that location for whatever reason they may have started there.

I don’t know how long they were there. I didn’t get the full history and bio on the family, but they did a debt free screen. They’re 30 some years old, have a paid off house, but they’re not sitting in the middle of San Diego going, “oh, I make 65,000 as a middle school math teacher and middle school math teachers are underpaid so I can’t buy a house.” No, you doofus. You’re sitting in the wrong place with the wrong set of numbers. You’ve got to change something here. And when you change, then you’ll go on to the next frame and you’ll be just fine. So make more, move, both, wait on interest rates to come down, save some money, pile up some money, get ready for the market to slow down, pick up whatever the market’s going to do. 100% chance that it’s going to be different five years from today.

SHAWN RYAN: What do you think about crypto? I mean, I’ve heard you speak on crypto. You hate it. I don’t know if that’s changed at all. I mean, I believe the Trump administration just put some into the… What is it, the reserve? Bitcoin, Cardano, Ethereum. And is it XRP?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yep.

SHAWN RYAN: And you know, I’m just curious, you know, that the space just seems to be getting bigger and bigger and evolving and more people are taking it seriously. I was just curious.

Cryptocurrency and Investing vs. Speculating

DAVE RAMSEY: I think it’s going to continue to get bigger and I think it’s going to continue to get better and it’s going to continue to stabilize. I mean, it was a volatile wild, wild west crap show for a long time and it kind of still is really, but it’s not nearly as bad as it was when we first started talking about the subject. So I think it’s getting better, it’s getting more sophisticated, it’s probably therefore getting safer. But even when it stabilizes and becomes more normalized, so to speak, and it’s got a little track record to it and you can look back, go okay, the last 15 years, here’s what it’s done. Not the last 15 days. Then you’ve still got to say, okay, what do I want to install, invest in?

And what happens with people with gold or crypto or a lot of other things is they confuse the concepts of speculating versus investing. And that’s why I’ve come out so hard on crypto, because I have people calling and saying I’m investing in crypto, which is an oxymoron. You can’t. The only thing you could do in crypto is to speculate. The only thing you can do in gold is to speculate.

Speculating is a short term play because if you look at a long term play on something that doesn’t have a track record, crypto, you can’t look at a long term play. You’re really gambling. Speculating is, I’m putting some money in playing with this. I think I might make some money. But I’m really not thinking 40 years, I’m not thinking 25 years, I’m not thinking I want to retire from this. But this is speculating. Even if you’re a home builder and you build a home that doesn’t have a buyer, they call it a spec home. They’re speculating, it’s a short term play. They didn’t build a rental property they’re going to keep for 25 years. They built a piece of inventory that they want to turn right now into money.

So speculating is short term. Investing is long term. They’re not the same thing. If you want to speculate, which would not be your, you’re not betting the farm, you’re not betting your quality of life, you’re not betting your wealth building portfolio on it. You know, I’ve got friends that are worth a hundred million dollars and they’ve got, you know, they put a million dollars in crypto, but if they burned a million dollars in the middle of their kitchen floor, they won’t miss it. That’s speculating and that’s a proper view of that.

If you want to do that, I’m not going to yell at you about it. But the reason I’ve come down so hard on it in the public eye is because I got people not putting money in their 401k and good mutual funds. They’re not buying a house. Instead they’re putting 100% of everything they have in the middle of the roulette wheel. And that’s stupid. You know, that’s just ridiculous. You wouldn’t do that with anything that doesn’t have a long, wonderful track record.

And so, and generally where you want to be with investments, what Buffett talks about is true. I want an investment that is creating wealth, not changing in price. There’s a difference. So when Home Depot stock goes up or Apple stock goes up, it’s because they made a profit. Because they put products in the marketplace, there was wealth created. When crypto goes up or gold goes up, it’s just because somebody else wanted it more. It’s not creating anything. It’s what’s called a commodity. And so you speculate on commodities.

If you wanted to buy futures in corn or if you remember the old movie with Eddie Murphy trading places, right, you know, frozen orange juice futures or something stupid was that. That was kind of funny, but if you want to play that, if you want to day trade in stocks, that’s speculating, it’s a short term play and it’s just right over here next to gambling. It’s not what you would do for your long term. And so it should be money that you could set fire to and you’d be okay with it.

If you do that, then you can talk about, okay, how does bitcoin work? What is the actual chain? How’s the whole thing? Yeah, sure, I get all that. That’s not the issue. The issue is I talk to 26 year olds who go, “I’ve invested everything I have in bitcoin and it’s 200 or it’s 50,000 bucks and I don’t have anything else but that.” Why didn’t you go to Vegas? Same dadgum deal, man. I mean, if you’re pretty good at Texas hold’em, you probably got as good a shot as you do at bitcoin.

But I mean, if you chart bitcoin and you don’t see risk, you’re dumb because it’s all over the freaking world. And that tells you it’s a highly volatile short term play. And you’re trying to ride this thing out. It’s got a cool factor to it because it’s technology and everybody wants, it’s a fad and everybody wants to be in on it and all that kind of stuff.

And the funny thing is, in my world, I get so much hate because these guys, it’s like a cult. It’s like if you don’t believe in it, you’re going to hell. They’re like, “Ramsey’s completely invalidated everything he’s ever said because he doesn’t believe in this.” And I’m so emotionally and psychologically sold out on this one particular thing. It’s like George Camel, one of our guys says, “It’s like Mary Kay for young men.” But, you know, I don’t care if you want to do it, but just be able to burn the amount of money you put in there in the middle of your kitchen table and not miss it.

Working with Gen Z

SHAWN RYAN: Makes sense. Back to Gen Z. I mean, what you got 400-something Gen Zers working for you?

DAVE RAMSEY: Over half our team is in their 20s.

SHAWN RYAN: Very, very innovative generation, very passionate.

DAVE RAMSEY: We’re talking about culture earlier. I mean, they’ll charge the gates of hell with a water pistol. They’re passionate, they’re missional. And you give them a mission, you give them something, work that matters and we’re helping people and they get enthused about it. They’re crusaders, they’re wonderful for Ramsey.

SHAWN RYAN: What are some things that they, you think they could work on? I’ll tell you a frustration I have is our social media department. It’s always, you have to have a Gen Z running your social media. In my opinion, you shouldn’t have anybody under 30 years old doing that.

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, I don’t think we do. I think all of them are in their maybe early 30s.

SHAWN RYAN: But yeah, we contract some stuff out and time and time again. I think Gen Z has a very entrepreneurial mindset.

DAVE RAMSEY: And because they’ve lost faith in the traditional systems, are cynical about traditional systems and sometimes in a toxic way, sometimes in a good healthy way, suspect of the man. Yeah, almost like hippies or something.

SHAWN RYAN: One of the things that I see is when we contract stuff out to somebody from Gen Z is they seem to be, in my experience, which is very limited. It’s not like we’ve gone through a million of these people or anything. But they stack too much on their plate. Whereas they want to do our stuff and then they add more and then they add more and then they add more and then we see productivity and quality of the content creation start to diminish. I’m just curious if you have any insight on that or any advice.

DAVE RAMSEY: No, I think it’s just back to probably some real clear guidelines and accountability to certain behaviors that we want. And so what we’ve had to do with… It’s not just Gen Z, but it does appear there is in content creation. I don’t understand this because I did not grow up with this thing in my hand. It’s not native to me. When I was a kid, there was a rotary black dial phone on the wall with a cord, and so if you’re talking to your girlfriend, the rest of the family was hearing it.

But these guys, they’ve been content creators since they were six, and now you’re asking them to create content. And so what we’ve run into sometimes is they’re just so accustomed to doing it. It’s just part of their psyche. It’s a developed skill set just to exist in their generation. And so sometimes we run into some arrogance with that. Like, “because I’ve been doing this my whole life, I’m going to tell you how to do this.”

I got socks older than you, but because I’ve been doing this my whole life, I’m going to tell you how to do this. Now we got confused. You work here, and so now we got to start again. You’re really good. That’s why we brought you in here. But you’re not the only one who ever had an idea. And no, you just stepped out over the line with that piece of content. And that’s not in our voice, it’s not in our brand, and it’s in your brand. But your brand’s now going to conform to ours if you want to stay here.

And it’s just accountability. But it’s very seldom with… It isn’t a level of arrogance, but it’s not malice. It’s not like they’re being belligerent about it. They just, it’s native to them. And so it just requires some clear leadership and accountability.

And so, in the instance what you talked about, what I might do if I was facing that is, I would go, “okay, look, if you want to take on some other projects, that’s fine, other than just ours. You’re a freelancer. You don’t work for us. But let me go ahead and warn you that we’re looking at the quality of our stuff. And the instant you get too much on your plate, we’re probably not going to be able to work with you anymore. So you really need to temper this and you need to manage it. And as soon as I see it I’m going to bring it up again and if I bring it up two times as starting to be a real issue.”

I’ll just be real clear like that and just not mean. But just go, “I’m not okay with you filling your plate till the food falls off. And that’s not cool. And I don’t want to be the food that falls off.” And I’ve had that, we’ve had that. And again, it comes from a positive place because they’re so empowered they think they could do anything because they can, they can just push a button. Crap happens and our minds are like, wait a minute.

They have an abundance mentality, but it’s a weird one versus a scarcity mentality where you and I are like, okay, resources are limited, act like it. And it doesn’t even occur to them that you can’t get something automatically because they have their whole life.

Trump Administration and Economics

SHAWN RYAN: It’s a damn good point. Let’s talk about the Trump administration the first couple of months here. How do you think it’s going with the economics?

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, economics, the reason you and I and Joe and Theo all did interviews with President Trump and obviously Joe’s the 800 pound gorilla in that. But we all have major top 10 podcasts and we all… And then Joe came out and entered and endorsed him and probably three weeks before that I did. And I don’t do presidential, I don’t do politics, I don’t do endorsement. But I did it mainly based on the economy. It was not the only thing, but I’m concerned about some of the same things other people were – border, woke, all that stuff, but happy about all that stuff.

But the economics… And I said this on the show on our because I knew I was going to get flooded with anti-Trump hate because a fair portion of my audience are not conservatives. But the economics, oddly enough is as much psychology as it is math.

Let me give you an example. If I as a small business owner believe that things are going good and they’re going to go good, I hire, I buy equipment, I stock up on inventory, so I create an economy. Hiring people creates a positive economy. So I’m acting based on my feelings, based on my psychology. And so it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy that if enough people believe things are going to be good and they start taking actions as a result, they cause things to be good.

And that’s what I felt like. And I still think the Trump administration is going to deliver. It’s what Ronald Reagan delivered when he turned the economy around. It was more about hope than it was some tax change.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay?

Trump’s Economic Vision and Tariff Strategy

DAVE RAMSEY: It was more about this guy believes in America. I believe in America. He believes in capitalism. I believe in capitalism. And I believe that the free enterprise system and freedom and the ability to go open a business and live my dreams, I believe in that. He believes in that. He’s going to cause that to happen. He’s going to create an environment where that works. And so I’m going to go do it. And that’s what we did under Reagan. And that’s what Trump is delivering when he’s making these fabulous vision casting statements about we’re going into a golden era. You know, he’s speaking it into existence almost. He’s trying to. And if he makes enough people believe it, they’ll go do that on the offside. Then he’s doing that fabulously.

And then the games he’s playing with the tariffs are scaring the crap out of the stock market. The stock market’s down since he’s in office and it had been up considerably before that. But there may be method to that madness. I don’t know. I’m not privy to the inside workings of this administration. I don’t play in that world. But you know, there’s one benefit that will come from that, is the bond market prices could go up, which will drive their interest rates down, which also will drive the economy.

So if you drill, baby drill, which is about somewhere around 1/7 of the national economy is energy related. If you get 1/7 of the economy boom and you get interest rates down and get real estate moving again, even if the stock market goes down, the stock market will come back because that’ll stimulate everything. It’ll get to moving. And it’s not him physically doing anything, it’s all of these words.

And I know he’s, I think it’s obvious he’s trying to do some other things with the tariffs other than tariffs. He’s trying to get compliance on borders being shut down. He’s trying to get compliance on them dropping their tariffs down, which they’ve ridiculously cut our throats for years. A lot of these countries have the trade deficit and you know, they’re charging us 100% tariff and we don’t charge them any. And we’re all sitting around and now we decide we’re going to charge them something. We act like we’re the bad guys, which is ridiculous.

So politically or policy wise, that’s ridiculous. But the offside is that it’s destabilizing the markets because people are worried instead of inspired. If you get more of them inspired than worried, the thing will pick up and it’ll get moving. And I still think that’s what’s going to happen. I think the offset has just been the destabilization of all the tariff discussion has destabilized and offset some of the positive feelings that would have caused.

So in other words, a business person sitting today is going, okay, I think all this stuff’s going to get really good over here, but I don’t know what these tariffs are going to do to us. And so instead of hiring and buying equipment, they’re going to kind of wait and see how that happens. So we’ve had a delayed effect on Trump having a positive effect on the economy. And this probably because of all the yak, yak, yak around the tariff because the actual physical tariffs that have actually happened is almost zero. It’s just been discussion.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow, I didn’t realize that he’s just…

DAVE RAMSEY: Throwing grenades over there and shaking things up. And you know, I mean, actually, how much have prices actually already been affected by a tariff? Almost zero so far because they get right up to it and then they go, oh, wait a minute, they conceded and we’re going to wait, we’re going to give another 30 days and oh, well, that one, we’re going to do that, but we’re going to take out all these others.

And you know, if you, it’s hard to follow even if you chart it all, exactly what all is really happening. I guess if you’re in the middle of it, you would. But I don’t care enough to chart it, so I’m not going to fool with it. But I’m really excited about where we’ll be in 12 months. Okay. Still, I’m predicting that I really… Ramsey’s gearing up. We’re getting ready. We think there’s a wave coming and we want to ride it.

Government Spending and Job Cuts

SHAWN RYAN: Nice. What about, you know, and I agree with what he’s doing with the tariffs and I like to see us stand up to this. On the flip side too, you know, I also really like Doge and what they’re doing.

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh man, that’s just incredible.

SHAWN RYAN: But you know, look, I don’t know much about economics or the economy or anything, but I do see, you know, I just had Secretary of the VA on earlier this week and you know, VA, nobody likes the VA and it’s overstaffed. And you know, just for some context, there’s 480 something thousand employees at the VA. The US army has 450,000 active duty members. So they’re definitely heavy and they’ve gone through USAID and all these other places.

DAVE RAMSEY: And it’s a good idea going bad.

SHAWN RYAN: They’re cleaning out. I get what they’re doing. They’re trimming the fat. I think the fat needs to be trimmed. You know, the national debt. Understand all that. My fear is, I mean, the VA Secretary is looking to slash 83,000 jobs here. So when you look at the hundreds of thousands of jobs that are going to get cut from government positions, are we going to see, I mean, is that going to affect us?

DAVE RAMSEY: No, no, because they’re not. It’s not enough in total jobs to cause like an unemployment crisis or something, which you would have to have to, you know, that would lead towards probably a recession, contraction of the economy because there’s not enough people that have money from their job to spend. So they spending and that contracts and that’s what a recession is.

But I don’t think it’s small enough, you know, it’s a little bit like, you know the old joke, major surgery is surgery that I had, minor surgery is what you had. And so I mean, when you lose your job, you’re 100% unemployed, you don’t really care what the unemployment rate is and you really don’t care about the philosophy of the Trump administration or Elon Musk’s ideas. You just lost your job. And so for that person that’s losing their position, it’s huge. But in ratio, in the entire economy, the number of jobs, it’s not going to be the end of the world.

And it’s offset by the savings, the deficit and the debt going down and the chance we could actually get a balanced budget again. That’s very productive for the economy because every time there’s a deficit, remember what happens is, okay, those jobs are harmful. Lost jobs are harming the economy. But also if you don’t have the lost job and that job creates extra debt. Deficit is financed by debt, right? When you spend more than you make, they finance it by debt. That debt is sucking money out of the economy. And so it becomes a parasite. It’s a tick on the butt of the economy, sucking the blood out of it.

And so that’s the problem with the overspending is it pulls money out of the currency which if it’s out here, moving around between your business, my business, and we’re buying, you know, we’re spending money at the restaurant, we’re going on vacation, and we’re buying a Southwest air ticket, and we’re doing all the other things. We’re moving the money around. They put it on shelf and now the economy is smaller. And so that’s not as bad because of all these lost jobs. So there’s an offset there.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

DAVE RAMSEY: So, you know, again, I think what little trouble would be would be more than offset by that. And the other thing, it has to be offset by what we were talking about earlier. Okay. What does the average business person like me that’s got a substantial business, but not a huge business. I’m not General Motors, I’m not Apple, but somebody running a business like mine, which 54% of the economy is companies that are 500 people and smaller. Small business is the mathematical backbone of the American economy.

So the guy that has a heat and air company that’s got 400 people and a little small fleet of trucks and they fix heat and air on people’s houses, what’s he looking at? Okay. He feels a lot more positive about government waste being chopped off at the knees than he does negative of some of those folks losing a job.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

DAVE RAMSEY: And again, he’s the one making the decision to spend or to hold his cash because there’s a storm coming. Am I going to invest because there’s sunshine coming or is there a tornado coming and I got to put plywood on the windows and pile cash and get ready? Because when he piles cash in macro, when a whole bunch of businesses pile cash because they think a storm is coming that freezes the economy shut. But when they believe the sun is coming and they believe more in Elon causing Doge causing the cutting the sun is coming than he does those lost jobs.

SHAWN RYAN: Okay.

DAVE RAMSEY: So again, I think it’s an offset. Both are very real and they’re very personal if you’re in them. I’m not trying to discount. If you work for the VA and you’re going to lose your job, I’m not happy for you personally. I’m happy for our nation addressing waste, though, because 100% of the intelligent human beings walking around realize that the waste is really freaking ridiculous.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I’m with you. It’s just, I think it’s something we have to go through no matter what.

DAVE RAMSEY: Oh, it’s like… And the fact that they’re actually doing it, not talking about it for the first time in modern history. Everybody’s talked about it. No one’s ever done anything. Not in the GOP and not in the Dems. None of them have ever done anything. It takes this wild animal to go in there with a machete and a bunch of Gen Z’s with algorithms and start stacking those cash flows and looking at this, going, well, look at there. We’ve got a transgender college that we just put $150 million in India or whatever. I made that up. But I mean, stuff is coming out. It’s just…

SHAWN RYAN: It’s insane.

DAVE RAMSEY: It’s like science fiction is so bizarre.

SHAWN RYAN: Yeah.

DAVE RAMSEY: It’s not even quite… It’s not even a debate about how whacked it is. It’s just whacked.

SHAWN RYAN: Let’s move into your book, Build a Business You Love. What’s the premise of it?

The Five Stages of Business Success

DAVE RAMSEY: Well, you know, we talked earlier when we first started talking about the Total Money Makeover that you read. And it goes through the seven baby steps. If you’ll follow that clear path, it’s the shortest distance between normal finances, which is broken in debt, to wealthy. If you follow those seven baby steps, it’s a clear path. And it’s proven—tens of millions of people have done that now.

When we’re working with small businesses, Entree Leadership is one of our brands that we work with small businesses. I love small business people and I am one. I’ve been one my whole life. I believe it’s the free enterprise system and I just like the type of man and woman that does that. They’re just my people, you know, I just like them. They’re no nonsense. They get crap done, you know, and the same things make them afraid or mad that make me afraid or mad. And so I just connect immediately. And again, I am one. I’ve been running a business almost my whole life.

So we started working with these businesses and in most cases, what we were teaching them was stuff like core values or how to hire and fire or some basic marketing stuff, some basic accounting stuff, some basic finance stuff—stuff that they weren’t doing because they were too busy doing the business rather than actually running the components of the business.

We’ve been teaching them and coaching them about 10,000 businesses now. We’ve worked with and been doing events for them for years, big leadership events and that kind of stuff. You know, again, the best-selling book, we’ve got software, we got all kinds of stuff to help them, apps, all that.

The Business Baby Steps

One of the things we figured out about four or five years ago—we started working on it—was that businesses that win go through five distinct stages. And there are six drivers of business that drive you through those stages and it helps immensely. It becomes the baby steps for business. If you know what those are and what it takes to level up and go through them.

You don’t necessarily want to go through them super fast. That’s not the point. On baby steps, you’d want to go through them as fast as you could. Like you said, sell all your junk and get out of debt. Now we move on up a step. Now we start saving and investing and that kind of stuff.

With this, it’s more the maturation of the business cycle as you go along. It’s what we went through and then we started observing, it’s what they were going through. And then we figured out that if we can show them that these, that this clear path exists, that it gives you hope that you can go through it.

When you’re just out there wandering along and you don’t really even realize there is a path or you don’t even realize there is a stage, you don’t do the stuff to level up, to get better. And so once we start showing them this system, these five stages, and they go, “Okay, I’m at stage two. What do I need to do to get to three?” “Okay, this is what you do. And here’s your six drivers. And here’s how that applies in this situation.”

We figure we’ve gone around those six drivers at Ramsey in 30 years. Probably as we went through the five stages, we probably went around those drivers probably somewhere around 10 times.

SHAWN RYAN: 10 times?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, in 30 years. Because every time you go through, you get a different version of it. Driver number three is people. And so the way we hired and fired when we started was way different than the way we hire and fire today.

So every time you come around to people and you go, “Okay, I’m going to get better with culture, I’m going to get better with hiring and firing, I’m going to get better with attracting the right talent.” But then I move around it and that leads me into planning, which is another one. And you start going through it. Then you go, “Okay, well when I go up as another stage, it’s a whole different set of problems with people that I didn’t have before.” And so I have to have a whole different level of skills with that that I didn’t have before or a whole different level of planning than I had before.

If you’re planning a small thing, it’s not as hard as planning a bigger thing, obviously. So the drivers cycle through and we end up going through those.

Stage one is when you open a business, when you first start, and sometimes people stay there the whole time, God help them, is the treadmill operator. Which is what it sounds like. You’re on a treadmill.

SHAWN RYAN: This is the drivers of the stages.

The Five Stages of Business Growth

DAVE RAMSEY: No, this is stages. Stage one is the treadmill operator. And so when you start, all of us are treadmill operators and the treadmill operators run, run, run, run, run. Don’t feel like you’re getting anywhere. But we’re real passionate about it. We’re going hard and you get home at night and you flop back on the couch and your wife says, what’d you do today? And you go, “I don’t know, but I worked my butt off,” and you’re just working like a crazy person.

You’re responsible for all the producing of everything. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. You’re responsible for all the revenue. If you don’t come to work, place doesn’t make any money. So in a sense you don’t even own a business. You just own your own job. Because if you take a vacation, everything falls apart. If you’re not there that day, if you’re sick, everything falls apart.

It’s very self dependent, which is kind of gratifying. It makes you important for a minute. It’s also exhausting and you don’t want to stay there. It’s not good. You will flame out if you stay in that one. But everybody starts there 100%. Now you may only be there two weeks. You may be smart enough to start hiring people or have enough capital to start hiring people immediately. This may not be your first go round on a business, so you’re better at time management.

Moving from Treadmill to Pathfinder

The thing you do to level up from treadmill to pathfinder, which is the next one, is you have to get time management going. I was doing 16-hour days – I’m on the radio, I’m doing overhead projector teaching Financial Peace University at night, and I’m at work all day long. My wife was like a single mom for a short period of time there for a couple of years.

I remember standing in that Holiday Inn one night and I had a kidney stone and I’m completely covered in sweat. But I had to finish the lesson. Then I finished the lesson, I started giving refunds and I couldn’t give refunds, I had to get the money. I finished at 11 o’clock at night and went to the emergency room. That’s what you do in the treadmill stage, right? You suck it up, buttercup, and you get it done.

But you can’t stay there. It’s not sustainable for your family, it’s not sustainable for your health. It’s not a good business model. So you start to learn to manage time and get intentional and go, “I’m going to switch it off when I get home and I’m going to hire some people.” So I’m not the messiah. Other people can be important too and bring ideas and carry some of this weight. I can have other people that produce revenue and other people that produce the actual goods and services so I don’t have to be the producer and the revenue producer.

The Trailblazer Stage

Then you get to that next stage – Trailblazer. Trailblazer is a fuzzy middle. It’s the middle stage and it’s kind of whacked. You’re really kind of getting your traction. Things are starting to happen. You’ve actually got some other people on the team that are intelligent and you can count on. You’re starting to build your band of brothers and sisters that are going to get it done.

But you really suck at systems, you suck at processes. Too much stuff is manual and it could be automated. Your accounting software usually sucks at that stage. You’re not really keeping good books, the books aren’t automated. They don’t automatically produce the payroll at the end of the month.

We had like 22 spreadsheets going and an accounting system. Then we would take the numbers off of those and stick them in the accounting system and then try to create payroll once a month. It was this ridiculous thing. It was just very unsophisticated. All it was was we had scaled up a very primitive system, and it was now a very large primitive system.

Our systems and processes were broken, and we weren’t doing hardly any planning. We were very tactical. It was just like, whatever’s in front of us, get it done. We didn’t think about a year from now, we didn’t think about two years from now. We had to make payroll Friday. There’s a lot of chaos, but there’s a lot of business happening. So it’s kind of exciting, but it’s very chaotic.

You got to put the systems in place. You got to put the processes in place. And entrepreneurs like me, this is the part where I really push back. I never want to be corporate America. Negative parts of corporate America to me is bureaucratic bullcrap. Some little twerp in his little domain over here is interrupting business getting done because he wants to protect his little thing.

But we still had to get enough governance to get the quality consistent and to get the systems that were broken fixed. We were filling out pieces of paper. We were killing trees and it should have been in a computer program.

Strategic Thinking

The other thing we didn’t do is we didn’t do any strategic thought. As I said, we were all tactical. Everything’s hands-on. So I started hiring some guys and some gals that had an MBA. I started realizing as I talked to different MBAs at other companies that we were coaching that there’s something there.

I figured out that roughly 100% of the MBA programs do a really good job of teaching strategic thought. Get above the problem and get the 30,000-foot view. Then you know how to navigate. And rednecks like me, I’m just plowing through and the guy goes, “Look, if you would turn right and then turn left, you don’t have to kick the barn door down every time.”

You just took off, put the pedal to the metal and hope you find Florida. How about a map? And so I always laugh and say, the MBAs that we hired, they taught me strategic thought. It was not my nature because I’m very much in-your-face, in-the-moment, entrepreneurial, tactical. And I taught them how to work. That’s our joke around there, but it’s also true.

The Peak Performer Stage

That kind of stuff then started to help us move to the next stage, which is the peak performer stage. And that’s the fun one – you’re just printing money, you’re just bailing money. This stuff starts to come together, it gels, the culture and the team starts to come together.

You quit hiring dupes because your hiring process gets better. You quit keeping them because your firing process is better. Your systems and processes, you start to realize the importance of them. But they work for you. You don’t work for them. You’re not a bureaucrat. We stand on principle. We’ve got our core values. We know what we’re doing. We’re serving the customer.

Now all we’re doing is making each product better or new products that are even better concepts. We can add things to the portfolio. So we start adding a high school curriculum or we add a budgeting piece of software, an app. We can start doing that because we’re working in just strength now. We’ve got cash.

You’re making more money at this stage than ever. You never dreamed you’d make this much money. And I can go home at 5 and there’s stuff happening in the organization that I have no idea happened. And it’s all the exact right stuff and I’m happy about it. I don’t have to be in every little detail because I’ve got a team of leaders that I’ve trained, that have trained a team of leaders.

The only downside of Peak Performer is you start to believe your own clippings. And if you’re not careful, you keep doing only the same thing and you don’t iterate because if you don’t iterate in this market, you die. If you’re not constantly getting better, constantly changing, constantly polishing, constantly looking for a new thing to add while you’re being successful, but if you keep running the same play, all the other teams figure out the play.

You can’t rest. And the problem is you’re so good right now. And there’s so much money stacking that you start to think “I’m really good.” And that’s dangerous. So you got to constantly give the old shock to the system, get the cattle prod out and just go, “Okay, reset. We’re going for excellence.”

The Legacy Stage

And then the last one is just legacy stage. Succession planning. How are you going to hand this off? Are you going to sell it? Are you going to quit and shut it down? What’s the end game?

I started doing that 16 years ago. Started our succession planning and how we’re going to hand this off. How’s it going to survive after Dave? Because it’s not mine. I’m just the manager, so it really shouldn’t quit. God’s whole thing that he built here shouldn’t just dry up just because I die. That’s a bad idea.

So that’s really the five stages you go through. But there’s leveling up in a lot of detail, a lot of little nuanced things that you do in there. In 34 years, that’s the five stages we’ve been through. And we’ve watched as companies we coach go from treadmill to Pathfinder to Trailblazer.

When they’re sitting in Trailblazer, it’s really obvious to us that their problem is they don’t have a system. They’re pulling this out of their ear all the time instead of having a replicable process. You don’t have to make it up brand new every morning.

We just know how to coach them and know how to sit them down. So we said, we better put that in a book, because that clear path gives people hope and it’ll increase the speed of success and the quality of life for the guy and gal running a small business right now.

SHAWN RYAN: You mentioned the six drivers. Let’s go through those real quick.

Personal Growth as the Foundation of Business Success

DAVE RAMSEY: Okay, first one’s personal. When you start a business, most people think that the thing you start with is product and you can, and that’s normal. You got to. Okay, I got an idea. I want to start a podcast. I got an idea. I want to build a widget. I want to go into this certain kind of a business. I want to be in the heat and air business. I want to be a veterinarian. You know, you got a certain idea that’s product, the service, or the actual physical gummy bears that you create. Right. But you don’t really start there. If you do, you’re going to have a problem.

But it’s okay to have that in mind because that’s usually the thing that gets you out of bed and causes you to go do the business idea. But it really does before you get the product. It really does backtrack all the way. The top, the first driver is personal. And the personal issue is this. John Maxwell talks about in his book 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, which is his best selling book and my favorite of his, the number three law is the law of the lid. I’m the lid on my business. And so that’s personal, personal growth.

The growth of my business is dependent upon my personal growth. It will never get bigger if I don’t. And so I was 33 when we started this. I’m 64. Okay. And so obviously the guy that started this couldn’t run this today, that he’s not the same guy. I’ve read a bazillion books over those 30 years. I’ve had a bazillion experiences. I’ve had a lot of smart people yell at me and tell me how stupid I am and I need to do this different. And they were right and they were good enough friends to tell me the truth and I fixed things and stuff would break and we’d do a CSI on it and go, okay, why did the patient die? What’s the autopsy results? Well, that’s what happened. Or how did crazy get in the building, put a lock on that door?

And so we go through that stuff and we get better, get better, get better, get better, get better. So when you listen to Shawn Ryan podcast interviewing some of the neatest stories in the world, if you’re a business leader and you’re watching this mine, that podcast for the leadership principles that you’re hearing in that, the life principles that you’re hearing in that, if you go to a leadership conference, for God’s sakes, take 7,000 notes and be going to our leadership conference, read a book this year on what you want to get better at, like leadership or business structure or who’s writing in the business space. That’s smart. Learn from that.

And so the problem with my business is always the guy in my mirror. That’s the bad news. The good news is the solution of my business is always that guy in my mirror. That’s very personal. And that’s kind of what you and I were talking about when it was just you and me in the room at the house one night or one afternoon is that that never stops. You can hire a CEO or a president or COO, but still, if you’re the guy, you still got to get better. And one of the ways you can get better is hire people smarter than you. I mean, I got. We’ve got somewhere around 400 people that do software engineering. I’ve never written a line of code in my life. I don’t even know what they do, but I know that they are creating things that create revenue and help to other people. And that’s my job. It’s not to learn to be a coder.

SHAWN RYAN: Does it scare you when you don’t know an aspect of your business?

Embracing Vulnerability as a Leader

DAVE RAMSEY: Scares the crap out of me, but it doesn’t keep me from being responsible for it. And so, like, I dropped into one of those meetings because those are all Gen Zs, just about writing that stuff, and they’re smart. And I dropped in those meetings and freaking like, the military, they’ve got acronyms for everything. Three letter words, five letter words for everything in there. And it’s a whole different language.

And I’m sitting in this meeting for about 10 minutes, and I think they might as well have been speaking German. And finally I raised my hand, said, “Hey, guys, I’m just going to be really transparent right now. I’m a little bit scared because I pay all y’all, and I have no idea what you have said for the last 10 minutes. Would y’all take a minute and humor me and tell me what you’ve been talking about? I might be able to add value, but I might also just be a little calmer if I actually know what you’re doing. And I don’t have to know every detail. And I’m not asking you to. I’m not getting down your business. I just want to learn from you. What have you all been discussing?”

And they said, “Oh.” And then they told me, and I understood. And I went, okay. And it was something about the friction and the conversion rates were dropping on this particular webpage. We weren’t converting. We were losing the customers because of the way the thing was built. It was poorly designed. And they’re like, okay, this is this. And they were dropping all these acronyms around, basically making the sale. Now I know how to make the sale. I can help with that, but I can’t help you if I don’t know what you’re talking about.

So, yeah, it’s scary, but it’s also. I don’t have to know. But in that case, I was just curious and I wanted to learn, but I wasn’t really holding them up. I wasn’t the bottleneck. And if you’re the bottleneck, that’s where you get the problem in personal.

And so I’ve got to know enough about accounting to make sure the accounting team’s doing their job. I got to know enough about the results of the software engineers to know that I’m actually getting an ROI on that freaking $50 million in payroll. Right. I’ve got to know enough about marketing to be able to look. I got, you know, enough to look at the social media and go this low quality. You know, I don’t have to be a social media expert, but I gotta go. I’m not cool with this video. It’s jumping around all over the place. It’s bothering me. It’s half butt quality. I know you, you quick edited or whatever. It’s driving me nuts. That’s a discussion I had yesterday. And so that’s the way everybody’s doing it. And I said, “Well, that’s exactly the reason we shouldn’t.”

You know, I can bring that to the table still. But I don’t. So yeah, that, that’s. But it’s normal for something to feel. But if you only do stuff that you know how to do, it’ll never get big. You got to bring team people know how to do stuff you don’t have to do. So I need a good kicker, I need a good right guard, left guard, I need a good defensive lineman, even if I’m the quarterback and I don’t have to do all that.

And so I need a. My CFO is. And I’m this freaking Dave Ramsey. I mean, I know the money stuff, but my CFO is dad gum genius. He’s smart. He comes in, we get to do math, riddles and stuff together. I just love it. But thank God that I got somebody like that on the team so I can hand off handoff. And that gives me the ability to scale, the ability to grow. But I’ve got to grow enough. I’ve got to be willing to learn strategic thought to take me up. I’ve got to be willing to get better at those things. That’s the personal.

Finding Your Purpose Beyond Profit

Next one’s purpose. And purpose is why are you here? And I tell leaders all the time in business, if the only reason you’re in business is to make money, you will not make it. You will quit. You’ve got to have something beyond that. You and I have both talked off camera that we thoroughly enjoy what we do. And one of the reasons we enjoy it is we’re making a difference.

I mean, you brought some stories to light in this room, that needed to be done. And that was not. You didn’t do that for money. You did that because it’s really fun. And by God, it was the right thing to do. These are stories people needed to know. It’s ridiculous that they weren’t told. And Shawn freaking Ryan is who told the story. And that’s your purpose. Right? I mean, and you got to have purpose, and you got to identify it, and then you got to hire people that plug into that purpose.

And some of the stuff on the walls around this room are. They’re keepsakes from people whose story got told, who would not have been told were you not here. And if the guys on the camera don’t understand that, if they think they just run a camera, then you’re screwed. And so you got to have purpose.

And the same thing at Ramsey, man. I mean, if we hear somebody met God because they went through one of our things and they got out of debt, and then they heard we were Christians, so they investigated it. Everybody at Ramsey cries. It makes us cry because somebody met Jesus, because that’s our purpose. One of them, our purpose is, you know, we teach somebody. Teach number one, cause of divorce in North America today is money fights and money problems. We can get you on the same budget and get you out of debt and get the stress out of your house. And then you walk in our office and you go, “You guys saved our marriage.” Yeah. And game on. We didn’t save your marriage. You saved your marriage. But we by God, showed you how. That’s awesome. That’s our purpose.

And you got to have that and you got to say it and you got to look at it, and everybody’s got to be plugged into it, and that’s a driver of the business. If you think you’re in the heat and air business and all you do is make money by going in somebody’s house and turning on their thermostat, you’re not going to stay in business, and you think, oh, this is a great way to make some money. You’re not going to stay in business because you’re in it for the wrong reason. You’re in it to extract rather than to add value to the world that you live in.

And so, yeah, we’re going to get to product, and you can start there, but you better go back and take care of you. You better go to purpose, and that’ll bring you to people, and you start adding the right ones, the right hiring and firing. Get the right. As my friend Jim Collins says in Book Good to Great. Get the right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus, the right people on the right seats on the bus. And that is like a full time job. It’s like I spend 80% of my calories on that.

The Challenge and Joy of Managing People

SHAWN RYAN: Really?

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah. It’s people, man. They’re our greatest blessing and our greatest curse. It’s a constant thing. And some of my greatest, most wonderful things are the people that I’ve gotten to do this journey with that are on my team. And some of the biggest pains and scars I have in my life are from the people that have been on my team is. But it’s part of it, man. Your other choice is don’t dance, man. I want to dance. I’m going to get out there. I don’t care if I look foolish. Let’s have at it. So, yeah, you know, let’s do it.

So, yeah, that’s. People are a constant thing and they really are a great joy, by and large. But you always got that, you know that one or two stories like we talked about earlier? One or two or three. That, man, I must have been an idiot. I hired them and worse than that, I kept them. Ugh. And so, yeah, you know, I had one guy tell us in entre. We were standing in the hallway, he goes, “Yeah, man, my team.” I said. He said, “They’re awful.” And I said, “Well, you suck, don’t you?” And he said, “What do you mean?” You hired them and then you kept them and then you’re sitting here whining about them. Whose fault is this? It’s yours. So, yeah, leader has to deal with the people. You don’t have a choice. People’s the deal.

SHAWN RYAN: What is your strategy with hiring and firing?

DAVE RAMSEY: Our hiring is ridiculous. Might not be funny in here, but the line we always use is it’s harder to get on with us than it is the CIA or the FBI. I mean, it’s hard. We put you through the ringer. It used to be a whole bunch. It got to be too many interviews. We got it up to about. They averaged 15 interviews before you got hired. That was silly.

SHAWN RYAN: 15?

Ramsey’s Hiring Process

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, we got down to about seven now. We got out of control, but we just got so paranoid about making a bad hire that we wanted to spend the ridiculous amount of energy and time to get a good hire. But we do about seven interviews minimum. Now the first one is a 30 minute quick. Not 32 minutes, not 31 minutes, 28 to 30 minutes cultural review. And we spend about 10 minutes telling them who we are. Here’s our 14 things. Here’s who we are. And if you don’t want to do this, you’re not going to want to be here.

One is, we work at work. We don’t have remote work. We work at the office, believe being in the proximity of each other is valuable. And productivity, creativity, communication, everything is enhanced when you’re physically in the same space. And so even now, it’s kind of being popular because, like, Elon’s telling everybody to work at work, but we work at work, and if you don’t want to do that, you can opt out right now. We only got 28 minutes invested in this discussion, so.

And then we spent about 20 minutes listening to them. So two ears, one mouth is the ratio. There’s 30 minutes, 20 minutes listening, one 10 minutes talking. And they don’t let me do those because I talk too much, but I’m not that good at it. But you listen and you try to determine is this person going to fit? Are they engaged in behaviors that don’t fit here?

For instance, if all they can do is whine about how horrible the last place they worked is, then they’re going to do that about you. So, you know, if that’s how you spend your first 10 minutes in an interview, talking negatively about the last place, you’re probably going to do the same thing with us. It’s probably. We’re probably done.

Or if they, you know, they go, you know, I hate Christians, you probably won’t want to work here because the guy that owns this place and, you know, I’m a gun guy, as you know, but not everybody knows that. And because I’m supposed to be the get out of debt guy, but I mean, I’m a firearms enthusiast. I’m not anywhere near some kind of elite level or anything like that, but I like to shoot and I like to click and all that kind of stuff. And so. And I carry every day, all the time.

And so they ask, you know, our guys will ask and go, our CEO carries a gun. I’ve never seen it, but he carries a gun everywhere he goes. It’s legal that he can do that. And, and how you feel about that. And you know, some people go, I don’t want to work here. And that’s good. It’s good we decide that, right? Then you’re not a culture fit, because I do, and I’m not changing that for you to come to work here. So as a matter of fact, a whole bunch of people in the building carry, so.

And we actually have this wonderful training program and we do tactical training and fun stuff and it’s great team building. And go to my farm and, you know, run a thousand rounds and learn how to actually handle a handgun and all that. It’s kind of fun. But not everybody wants to do that. And that freaks people out. And if you’re one of those people that’s gun freaked out, then I’m a Tennessee redneck. I’ve had a gun in the back window of my truck since I was 12. I mean, come on. So that’s just the way I grew up. And I’m not worried about it. I’m not freaking not making a political statement. It’s just an actual fact.

So do you want to work here? And so we throw that out. We’ll throw out different things like that and just ask a question. It’s not like saying you have to do it. This is who you’re coming to work with. So you need to know. And so that little 30 minute interview that gets rid of. We either can them or, you know, that get. I don’t think 1 in 10 make it through that.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

Hiring for Culture Over Skills

DAVE RAMSEY: Yeah, because they thought that we were something that we’re not and. Or we thought they were something they weren’t. And we don’t hire people based on skill. Skill is important, but it is trumped by cultural fit, value system, enthusiasm crusader. Yeah, you know, I give somebody that actually freaking cares deeply and they lean in and they’ve got medium level skill. We can take a C player like that, make them an A plus player. But I can’t take an A plus player. They’ll perform at a D level if they don’t fit in.

And if they’re not, and if they’re not, if they think it’s just a job. If you’re here to collect a check, A J, O, B. How little, how late can I come to work? How much can I steal while they’re there? How many times can I be on my Facebook account instead of getting my freaking work done? And then I want to leave early too. Oh, and I need extra PTO because my dog needs his toenails done. Oh, geez. Get out of my life. Life’s too short. And how much can I take? How much of a parasite can I be? And the odd thing is people will reveal that pretty easily. And you go, you ain’t going to fit in.

Because the people here, we work and we care and we love each other and we got each other’s back and we’re getting this crap done. And you know, pretty quickly you go there. So we get past that and then we start actually getting into it.

But we’ve never hired anyone based on the number of degrees. I had one guy working for me a long time ago, he said, he came into my office, he said, I’ve got three graduate level degrees. He was a smart dude. And he goes, I’ve got this degree, this degree, this degree. And he goes, you know, in corporate America I could make double what I make here. And I said, good, you should. And he said, well, I need to talk about getting a raise. I said, we don’t give raises based on degrees, dude. This is a small business. Your raise is effective when you are. When you kill something, drag it home, I’ll share it with you. But collecting degrees is not. You’re not a thermometer. I mean, this is not what we do.

SHAWN RYAN: Not a thermometer.

Value Creation Over Credentials

DAVE RAMSEY: I mean, come on, man. This is not a thing. So we, you know, and sweet guy. And he worked there probably, I can see his face right now. I don’t know his name, but. And he’s a good guy. I still talk to him occasionally. He’d been gone probably 10 years, but he really had bought into that lie.

And a lot of people when you’re hiring, buy into the lie that the degree matters or the certification matters or what I made at the other place matters. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. What matters more is it matters only to the extent you can add value to the place you’re coming.

So, you know, four year. I’ve got a four year business degree. It’s so wonderful degree. I’m glad I got it. I use components of it almost every day. But the actual degree itself has never made me a dime. The tools it put in my belt, now, those tools are valuable. Extra knowledge that I didn’t have, that’s valuable.

So that’s the hiring. And we’re looking for people that fit in, that are a we and that are fired up. We love it if it’s not necessary, but. But if they’ve gone through something we do and it’s changed their life and they want to do that for others by working on the team there. It’s a crusader. That’s a really good indicator that you’re going to get on up in the interview process.

The Spousal Interview

And then the last thing we do is very controversial. Weird. But I figured out when I went broke, we’ve owned real estate that my wife never saw. I was out doing deals and she’s like, whatever you want to do, honey. Southern belle, right? And you got it, man. And I didn’t. I did some stupid butt stuff. And there were other times we did stuff. And she’s like, well, I knew that wasn’t going to work. I’m like, well, why didn’t you say something? You know? And she always had an opinion after I told you. So where were you when we were making the decision?

So I found that in scripture. And when I went broke and I was studying this. Money principles. And a money principle is this. Who can find a virtuous wife for her worth is far above rubies. The heart of her husband safely trusts her because she’s virtuous. She’s not a barking chihuahua, not a nag. She cares. She’s wise. The heart of her husband safely trusts her, and he will have no lack of gain. You want to build wealth? Listen to your virtuous wife. Okay, I wasn’t doing that. And I went broke.

So maybe I need to add that to the get out of debt list or the be on a budget list or whatever. There’s something I do. So we quit when we went broke. And I found that when I was studying all this stuff, I said, okay, I don’t make major decisions without sharing. We’ll fight about it. We might not agree about it, but we’re going to talk about it and we’re going to come into agreement or we don’t move forward. When in doubt, don’t.

So we’re going to. I’m not going to go make a $10,000 investment. And she says that’s a bad idea. Never doing that. Sounds like I’m henpecked, but I’m not. Because we argue about it sometimes, but not much anymore. But back in the old days, we did. And so if we get ready to do a large gift with some generosity moves with our foundation, our family foundation, Sharon and I look at it. I don’t do that. She doesn’t do it by herself. We do it together. We’re a unit. We’re married.

And now you are. You know, the preacher said. He didn’t say, and now you are a joint venture. And so I was running it like a joint venture. Like, I’m smart. I can just go do this. I don’t need my wife. And she would say, I’m an independent woman. I can do whatever I want. Yeah, you are, but it’s stupid. You know, maybe we ought to work together. Hello. And the people that build wealth work together. That’s. The data actually shows us nowadays.

So we quit making big decisions without that. And then when I got ready to hire our first person, I don’t know about you, man, but when I hired the very first one, that was scary as crap. I felt the weight of the responsibility for that family that was counting on me to give them the money and payroll that I had promised them, that it scared the pee out of me. And the second one was easier. The third one was easier. The 3,000th was really easy. But the first one scared me. I went, this is a big decision.

Sharon doesn’t work, has never worked at Ramsey. She’s never worked at the office ever. But we don’t make big decisions at the office without Sharon getting involved. So if we got ready to do a huge purchase at the office, like, I remember one time in the early days, we bought a phone system for $14,000. And that was like, whoo, nobody has phone systems anymore. But, like, Sharon has to come down to the office and sit and look at the phone system with my three leaders and me, and we make this decision, and she signs off on $14,000 back in the day. Because that was a lot of money then. Big decision. I don’t make big decisions out Sharon. So we don’t hire people without sharing in the early days. So when we got ready to get hired.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s interesting.

DAVE RAMSEY: The last step today still is what we call the spousal interview. And so the last step is after. Pretty dadgum sure this is God. We’re pretty sure this is a good move for everybody. God’s got us all together. But we’re going to go out to dinner informally with the person we’re hiring and their spouse and the leader and their spouse. In the old days, it was Sharon and me would take you to dinner. We probably did the first hundred hires that way with just me and Sharon. Wow.

And we go to dinner. And my wife is not. She’s. I’m the talker, obviously, so she’s pretty chill. Kickback. And the video I’ve seen on your wife would be similar. You know, you’d have a lot to say about this place. And your wife would be watching and listening and learning. And then I would. I learned I was. Somehow somebody taught me. I don’t know where it came from not to ask my wife as we were driving away what she thought. I asked her how she feels and her Holy spirit, women’s intuition. She could smell crazy a mile away. And I’m like a Labrador retriever. I’m like, I like everybody.

So I’m hiring her. Let’s get it, let’s get it. Let’s do it. Let’s do it, do it. You know, and she’s like, you know, I like the guy and his wife’s sweet, but I just got a bad. And she’s from East Tennessee. It’s Southern, right? So it’s a seven syllable word. I got a bad feeling 100% of the time, but go ahead. But go ahead, don’t worry about it. I just tell you I got a bad feeling. And a couple times I would say, okay, you think we ought to do it or not? Yeah, go ahead. 100% of those were gone in four months.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

The Hiring Process at Ramsey Solutions

DAVE RAMSEY: Something blew up her. And the other thing is, she almost never said that. I mean, three times out of a hundred, something like that. Most of the time she said, yeah, this is great. Let’s just do it. How you feel? I feel really good. I like it. I actually like his spouse better, which probably means he’s a good person because he’s smart enough to get her, you know, and so she just, you know, that’s a conversation. All right, let’s pray about it tonight. So we pray about it. Any change tomorrow morning, let me know. And then we call them, we tell the couple, y’all go home, pray about it and talk about it. And I would look at their spouse and say, I want you to tell him if you have a bad feeling. I want you to tell her if you have a bad feeling. Whoever it is, we’re interviewing, right?

And for some reason that is very controversial with some of the people out there in the hate land. But I don’t know why it’s controversial. It’s just like, I love my wife and I trust her, and I like her better than I like anybody I’ve ever hired. And so I’m going to want her on the team, you know. But that’s weird, but I’ve had some funny stuff happen.

We had one old boy who was a party guy, and, you know, we’re not. We are regular people, but we’re not like wild animal party people. And this guy was drinking and doing drugs and doing all this other stuff at a real high level, apparently. But he was smart and he was really good, and he’s a fun guy. He’s a great guy. But we kind of went through all this stuff, and his wife was country as cornbread, and she didn’t say a thing all night.

And I’ll never forget, we were at the steakhouse right down here. I could name it and I won’t, but it’s right over the hill here. You would know it. And I ordered key lime pie for dessert. I’ll never forget. My fork went to the key lime pie. In other words, we’d been there an hour and a half, woman hadn’t said a word. And she says, “Y’all are real religious, ain’t you?” And I said, “Well, if you mean like the Pharisees or jerks about Bible or something, no. If you mean we love Jesus Christ, yes.” She says, “He ain’t gonna fit in.”

SHAWN RYAN: Oh, man.

DAVE RAMSEY: I started laughing. The guy that had another leader and his wife with me, they started laughing. My wife is looking at me like I’ve lost my mind. We’re just laughing because me and my leader, and even the guy starts laughing because she just spoke truth, you know, she kept us because he was a friend that the leader and I knew from the broadcast business, and we really wanted him to come on because he’s a fun guy, he’s real creative, and we were just overlooking the fact that he ain’t gonna fit in.

And this woman spoke. She dropped a grenade in the middle of the table, dropped a bomb in the middle of the table. It was fabulous. We didn’t hire him. We’re still friends to this day. Friends with her to this day. But that’s what it’s for. Because we all get all excited about the positives that can happen and we overlook the obvious things. And the spouse will sometimes, if they’re wise and strong and their voice is used to being heard, will speak into it. And it’s fabulous. That’s our best part of our hiring process.

SHAWN RYAN: And I love to hear that.

DAVE RAMSEY: It ticks people off. They’re like, “You don’t have any right.” I got all kinds of right. My name’s on the side of the building. What are you talking about? I got a right, but, oh, well.

SHAWN RYAN: I’m going to implement that.

DAVE RAMSEY: I love that.

SHAWN RYAN: That’s a great idea. That is a great idea. What about firing? How fast do you fire?

The Firing Process at Ramsey Solutions

DAVE RAMSEY: For extreme misbehavior? Instantaneously. But that almost never happens. Somebody steals. I don’t really negotiate. That’s just, you know, sad day, we’re done. But most of the time it would be misbehavior or incompetence would be one of the buckets. And those things are things you can work on.

And so we have accountability system where leaders always are meeting with their team, doing one-on-ones once a week. You do one-on-one once every two weeks for an hour. And that’s where you listen to what’s going on with the actual work, you hear things personal about the person. How can we help you? How can we support you? What’s going on? You know, how can we love you well? And here’s some things we got to work on. You gotta course correct.

So there’s never anything that’s just like once a year we do a review. No, we’re once a week or once every two weeks. We’re talking about life and business and how’s it going. And you know, your salesman, you’re not making any sales calls, not gonna work. You have to get sales calls up. How can I help you get that done? What can we do? Is there an issue with your technology? What’s the problem? Let’s get it going. Let’s get it going. Let’s get it going.

And so we begin some basic course correction and confrontation there. Or you know, you can’t seem to get here before 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s not cool. We actually work here. You need to get your butt in the office, you know, and what’s the problem? What, you got an issue? Childcare problem? What, how can we help you? What’s going on? If there’s a real reason, let’s talk about it. But if you just didn’t get out of bed, that ain’t cool, you know, so basic stuff, right, you’re talking about all the time.

And then the next thing you would do is you would escalate it and begin what we call a difficult conversation. And a difficult conversation without going through the whole seminar bit on it that we teach. But it’s just, you sit down and say, “Hey, we’re both currently sitting on the same side of the table. I’m on your team, I’m not across the table from you. This is not a correction or a negotiation, but this is going to be a difficult conversation. No one’s getting fired today. But if we don’t correct some things we’re going to talk about today, we’re going to have to move towards that direction.”

And then you say, “Here’s the things. Now here’s a program and we’re going to meet and here’s the things I expect from you. And we need these things done by this date. And I’m going to check with you a couple times and then by that date we’re going to look and see did you do it?” And then if it’s something fairly simple and they correct it, you know, show to work on time or they get their sales calls up or whatever the issue is, or you know, you’re talking to someone in a way you shouldn’t be talking to them and that kind of stuff. Then they either do it or they don’t.

If they don’t do it, then you go, “Okay, now we’re going to have another difficult conversation and now it’s going to get a little hotter and nothing is going to happen today. But we’re probably one meeting away from you not working here.” So we’re just real clear, real kind, real direct. These meetings are about this long. We’re not going on for two hours with a bunch of emotion. These are 10-minute meetings. It’s just going to tell you here’s what we’re doing and this is the thing and I’ll help you. I’m here to support you, I’m going to work on it.

And then we would come in if they don’t improve and say, “All right, now we’re going to put you on a 90-day plan and during this 90 days you and I are going to meet every other day and we’re going to work on every one of these things. And at the end of that 90 days you’re going to have solved this problem permanently. We’re never going to revisit it again or we will be done. Or if you don’t want to enter into this very intense 90-day period, here’s a severance package today if you would rather do that. If you say my time at Ramsey is done, here’s a severance package today.”

I would say when that’s put on the table, probably 70% of the time they take the severance and walk out the door. Because you’ve already talked about whatever it is up to this point and they either think they can turn it and want to turn it and really want to engage to stay and be part of the team or they’re like, “You know, screw this, I’ll just take the money and go.” And we would rather give them a little money and not have to deal with it. Because you’re taking up a leader’s productivity too through that whole time to try to save them. And the number of people that we save at that point is fairly low. Almost all of them are saved prior to that conversation that starts a 90-day plan. But when you get there it’s a fairly low save ratio. But we’ll try it. I mean we want to give everybody a chance.

Because I got fired one time when I was 20, I was working for this company and this guy was just a character. He was one of the leaders. He wasn’t the owner of the company. I was doing site locations for a company called Mr. Transmission. It’s out of business now. I think there’s a few of them still open, but the actual franchise operation’s gone. And the guy that I reported to, I was doing real estate right out of college, doing site locations for him. I worked there for three whole months. He fired me.

And he came in my office one day and just started. “You little effer, your mother’s an effer.” And all these effers and all this stuff. And he’s yelling and screaming and he goes, “Get a box and get your ass out of here.” You know all this. And I’m like, “What did I do?” And he goes, “Doesn’t matter, you’re fired. Get out of here.”

And honestly, that was 40 something years ago. I still don’t know what I did. I probably did it. I probably deserved to be fired. I don’t know what I did. I mean, I wasn’t like the champion character, wonderful person or something. So it’s very possible. I just don’t know what I got fired for. And so that scarred me.

And I promised when we opened Ramsey that if someone left, they would always know why, they would never be surprised, and they would always know why. Not surprised is you’re not getting fired today. But we got to fix this. We got to fix this. We got to fix this. We got to fix this. They’re not going to be surprised. And they’re always going to know exactly why.

And so it’s not unusual at Ramsey for someone to—I’ve heard this multiple times—they tell their spouse on Monday morning or Tuesday morning, “This is probably going to be my last day.” Because they know when they come in that they’re done because it’s been so clear and gradual. It’s on a gradient up to that. And then their dignity is not stolen.

And they’re not long meetings. When you do finally say, “Today’s your last day,” that’s a six-minute meeting. It’s like, “You know, we’ve worked on this up to this point. We know we love you, but this is not working. And we’ve talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. So today’s the decision’s been made. Today’s your last day at Ramsey.”

“And what I want you to do is I’ve got a person, my HR director sitting outside. They’re going to walk with you to your car and collect your fobs and stuff and collect your computers and your access is already shut down. And then they’ll also make a time for you to come back in late in the day or after hours to sign the paperwork and get your stuff from your desk. Is there anything you need right this second before you go home?”

And that’s how long it takes. And they’re in their car 10 minutes after we open and they’re on their way home and they don’t have to do a walk of shame back to their team and clean out their stuff and have a box and go through like something from Office Space or something. And so they come back later. We’re not trying to hurt somebody. It just didn’t work.

But you know, people are funny. I mean the stuff that people come up with. Yeah. I’m not going to surprise them though. And I never have. And I’ve never fired anybody while I was angry. I’ve been angry, but I didn’t. I’ve never fired someone while I was angry. I go home, talk to Sharon, think about it, come back in the next morning. Then it’s almost usually kind of humorous how stupid the whole thing is and they just can’t work here anymore.

SHAWN RYAN: You know, I just learned a lot from that segment. Thank you. Yeah, I did, I did. And Dave, we’re wrapping up the interview here, but you are the money guy. So last question. Where should people be putting their money in today to invest?

The Truth About Millionaires

DAVE RAMSEY: First thing is you should never put money in something you don’t understand. Don’t put it because Dave Ramsey said do it or anybody else should do it. The second thing is if you’re investing, that means you have a long view of money. You’re putting it in something, you’re going to leave it alone a long time.

We did at Ramsey research, a research team, an airtight study, the largest study of millionaires ever done in North America. It’s in the book, last best seller I had called Baby Steps Millionaires. White papers in the back of it on the research. Research is airtight. We had another company outside from New York look over our shoulders on our methodology to make sure that the research process was not confirmation bias, that it was detail airtight because we knew that the left wing communist group would not like the results of where millionaires come from because they have an anarchist communist wealth equality agenda that’s absolute bullcrap.

We knew that would come at us, so we had to make it airtight. So if you disagree with the conclusions of this study, that is hard data that are known as facts, you would be what’s known as wrong, in other words.

And so one of the things we found was that 89% of America’s millionaires, that’s nine out of 10, are not millionaires because of inherited money. The great lie is that the rich have all the money and so the poor little people can’t get any money. This is the greatest country in the history of the world, the greatest economic system in the history of the world for the little man to get ahead. I’m so stupid I had to do it twice. So it’s possible. Promise you it’s possible.

79% inherited precisely .05% inherited a small amount like $5,000 from their grandmother, which mathematically makes it impossible for that to have caused them to be a millionaire. And another 5% inherited a substantial amount after they were already millionaires. Like maybe they got $250,000 when dad died, but they were already worth $2.5 million, so it didn’t cause them to be a millionaire. So 79, 5 and 5 is 89. That’s an example of that study.

The Boring Path to Wealth

Now, in that study, the sad thing was the process that people had used and the demographic data, the breakdown of wealth of who had become millionaires. Again, not they’d done it themselves. They were not inherited money was unbelievably boring. There’s just zero sex appeal. It’s just devastatingly stupid.

And here’s what they did. The average person in their head now, this is the first one to $5 million of net worth. This is not somebody worth $100 million. It’s not a billion. A billion’s a thousand million. That’s people with jets and seven cars, okay? But this, a millionaire drives a Toyota, okay?

And here’s what they did. They have a $600,000-$800,000 house that’s paid for and they have $800,000-$900,000 in their 401k because they’ve been putting money in mutual funds in their 401k for 15 years and the company matches and it’s in a Roth and they did some Roth IRAs and they had retirement investing and a paid for house. And the two together was a million and a half to $2 million. $1.6 million, $1.4 million, whatever.

Like 80 something percent of them looked like that. It was ridiculous. So pay off your house, put money in a 401k and mutual funds and that’s your first million to $5 million. And it’s like all of them. It wasn’t like statistical. I mean, it was. When you’re doing statistical analysis on stuff like that, if you can get something at 56%, like a poll on politics, I mean, you know, you get 48 to 42 to 52, you know, you get a 56% of the vote. You had a landslide. Right. We have 56% of anything. All this stuff came in in the 80 percentile. Wow. And it’s like all of them.

So it was not only statistically significant, it was ridiculous. It was actually factored back. And so, yeah, put money in a good growth stock mutual fund that has a long track record and fill up your 401k with that. Take the match, do a Roth IRA and do the same thing and pay off your real estate.

And some of them then would start buying other real estate. There were some other cool stories in there. One guy was worth $5 million and he had 100% of it in farmland. He was a dirt farmer in Kansas. He had a big farm in Kansas. And he’d been just buying a few acres and he’d buy a few acres and he’d pay cash for it. And he had like $10 million worth of dirt. And that was all he had. He didn’t have any money. He just had a bunch of dirt. So he had a $10 million net worth. It was great. But that was the weird ones. That was kind of fun. But most of them are a guy that, you know, he’s a mid level, 33% of them, 1/3 never made six figures.

SHAWN RYAN: Wow.

Surprising Millionaire Careers

DAVE RAMSEY: Number one career was engineer. Number two was accountant. Get this. Number three, teacher.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

DAVE RAMSEY: Number four, business executive. Number five, lawyer. Medical doctors didn’t even make the top five.

SHAWN RYAN: No kidding.

DAVE RAMSEY: They’re notoriously bad with money and arrogant with their money. But almost like a music artist or something. But you know, I mean, they’re either really good or they’re really bad. Like the music people and so. Or actors or the athletes. The same thing, all that.

But that was very interesting. And what we figured out was, okay, what have they got in common? Teachers, engineers, accountants, teachers, business executive, lawyer. They all are process people. You have to use a process to build a bridge or it falls. And it’s a set of principles you don’t get to make up. There’s no creativity involved. You got to do the right thing or it falls.

There’s one set of math you don’t get to… Oh, that’s a new way of doing it. No, that’s the way you build the bridge. Accounting. There’s not four methods of accounting. There’s one. There’s accounting done right and accounting done wrong. Teachers, lesson plan. They often were married to policemen. That was very interesting. Law enforcement, number four. Lawyer, business person. They’re running a business. They’re, you know, have to have a system. Lawyers, there’s a system of law, even though we all laugh about it. But I mean, there. You do certain things in a courtroom a certain way, or the judge puts you out. They don’t. You don’t have six different ways to try a case. There’s a set of standards. It’s a process. These are all process people.

So what they did is they figured out the money process and they did it, which was save and invest. Live on less than you make and pay off your house. And they just work the process. And so if you’re, you know, if you have a master’s degree in art appreciation, you know, you’re at a disadvantage because that’s all creative, subjective, not objective. And you’re not process driven. So you can do it, but you gotta adhere. You have to submit yourself to a proven process and you don’t get to make up your own version. And that’s who wins.

My Personal Investment Strategy

And so my investments, I’ve studied wealthy people for 30 years. They invest in things they understand. Like the guy with the dirt, he understood dirt, so he bought dirt. And they avoid debt, by and large. Not all of them, but most of them. And their investments are usually fairly boring. It’s not some super sophisticated family partnership, double backflip trust. None of them have that. That’s something on a movie or something.

These guys just put money in their 401k, paid off their house. I mean, so that’s what I do. I buy mutual funds and I buy real estate that I pay cash for. And I own Ramsey. Those are my three assets. And you’ve been on my farm, you’ve been on my house. I mean, everything. We just pay cash for it. And this campus, I pay cash for it. You know, everything.

And I love real estate. I’m buying a piece right now. I’m working on LOI today. Letter of intent today on nice piece of commercial. I love real estate, but I pay cash for it. And I put money in mutual funds because I believe in the American economy. Mutual funds are 90 to 200 of America’s best and brightest companies that are growing. I just don’t think you can beat that. And so I do.

And that’s why I don’t do the fad stuff. And I’m not taking a poll. I went broke. I don’t care what your opinion is. I’m going to do this. And I don’t need to impress anybody with how cool I am, because I’m not. I’ve ceased to be cool a long time ago. So that’s how we do it.

SHAWN RYAN: Pretty damn cool.

DAVE RAMSEY: That’s how we do it, dude.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Well, Dave, there’s just so much knowledge and wisdom in here. I mean, everything from how you run your business, how to be a father, how to be a good husband. I mean, just hiring, firing, all kinds of wisdom in this. And I just really appreciate you coming on, and I’m honored.

DAVE RAMSEY: I’ve been wanting to do it a while. I’m sorry it took so long to get around to it. No, I treasure our friendship, too.

SHAWN RYAN: Me too.

DAVE RAMSEY: And I’m enjoying watching your spiritual journey. It’s a lot of fun.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you.

DAVE RAMSEY: Real proud of you.

SHAWN RYAN: Thank you. Well, God bless you too, sir. No matter where you’re watching Shawn Ryan show from, if you get anything out of this, please, like, comment, subscribe, and most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you’re feeling extra generous, please leave us a review on Apple and Spotify podcasts.

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