← The Game with Alex Hormozi
The Game with Alex Hormozi
Do This If You Want to Build A Business You Love (Dave Ramsey Interview) | Ep 871
00:50:58
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- [00:00]
Alex Hormozi
You're about to see a fascinating conversation I had with Dave Ramsey where we talk about how he makes money. The advantages of in person versus remote, a project that he lost millions of dollars on that I think has underlying lessons that any business owner can take from them. And finally, five stages of scaling all entrepreneurs go through. I think you're gonna love it. Enjoy. Welcome, everyone, to the game. I'm here with Dave Ramsey, the man, the myth, the legend.
- [00:23]
Dave Ramsey
Honor to be back with you, my friend. I'm so excited with everything that's happening with you guys. You're blowing up, man. I'm proud to watch it. It's great.
- [00:30]
Alex Hormozi
Well, thank you. We're. We're trying to. Trying to follow in the Ramsey footsteps. There's so much stuff that I had written down and prepared for today, and I doubt we'll get to all of it, but if you could walk me through just kind of lay of the land in terms of Ramsey Solutions as the business exists today, because I think it'll be helpful for the audience to give context.
- [00:46]
Dave Ramsey
Yeah. What. What ended up happening with us was weak. Classic entrepreneurs, you know, we were a wee bit add and so, you know, just something. Something flashy and shiny went in front of us. We would look at it because. But it all came through the funnel of or the filter of. Does this serve our mission? And our mission is just to help people with common sense, education, and empowerment in some area in their life. It started in the money piece. And so when I first started, I was doing a free. I was working for free at a talk radio station, doing a little talk radio show on the local station. And I print a little book, started selling it out of the trunk of my car. So publishing was born. Right then we did an event at the local Ramada Inn. So live events were born. And so each of these. In those days, everything was analog. Of course, the Internet comes along, and one of these kids working for me comes in and goes, hey, we need a website. And I'm like, what's that? And so we built a website on one of those tiny little antique. You ought to look them up. They're cool. Those little first little Apple computers, the first little. They look like a little shoebox. And he built it, built us a site on there with cold fusion. And it was pitiful, but it was still cutting edge. It was a big time deal in those days because nobody had a website. We had one of the first people had a web store to sell stuff because it was a platform again, platform, platform, platform. So we're Platform agnostic. And anytime we see a new owner emerging platform, analog or digital, we're going to put our toe in the water and keep doing the ones we're already doing. We're not going to abandon them. If they die on their own, fine. If something runs its course, we're done with it. But, but, but you know, we just go on and do the next thing and guy walks in my office in the early 2000s says we need a podcast and what's a podcast? I know what this is. And we were one of the first, certainly one of the first in talk radio to put a podcast out because the talk radio people resisted it. They were afraid it was competition. So on and on and on and on it and now we end up today we've got about 14 profit centers here inside the organization today there's about 1100 of us, 650,000 square foot campus that were, you know that you've been here and hung out with us at our home. And so we've got the Entree leadership brand where we're teaching leadership and coaching small businesses and we've got events around that, books around that. The book we're talking about today is from that, that idea. And we've got a huge coaching business in that area, coaching small businesses. 200 and fewer team members and we're not real good with the large corporate goobers. We don't help them much. So and then we've got the, obviously we've got all the stuff in the money space. Financial Peace University is now digital. It's no longer a VHS or a DVD or an even an MP3. It's a digital format. We're rolling that up into slowly, we're in beta to slowly start to move pieces of that into the EveryDollar app which is the largest budgeting, one of the largest budgeting apps on the planet right now. We've had 50 million downloads with that. That app is huge. It's exploding and it's a fabulous, it's very robust. Our tech team has done an incredible job. So that's the digital, very scalable thing, you know on, you know one of the barbell and then we've still got coaches over on the other end and we still do small high end ultra VIP platinum events where 25 people go to my event barn at my farm and hang out with me for a weekend. So we go all the way. You know, we stretch the spectrum from the high margin, high touch, expensive thing all the way over to free on the every dollar app or free on the podcast consumption or the YouTube consumption. Probably more of an answer than you wanted, but that we're all over the place and all of these things don't have to do with just is there another way to preach this message? Is there another platform? So we're platform agnostic. Someone said you're, you're a best selling author. No, that author is one of the things we do. You're a talk radio guy. No, but talking on the microphone is just one of the things we do. We're not. And we're not, we're not married to any of them. I got one wife and that's, that's plenty.
- [05:05]
Alex Hormozi
All right, I have a bunch of follow ups on that. So with all these different profit centers, number one is what you have 14. And it's been how many. It's happened 40. How many years? 35 years. 40 years since you started?
- [05:18]
Dave Ramsey
About 35 years.
- [05:19]
Alex Hormozi
35 years. So it's roughly like one profit center per, per two and change years. Right. Two and a half years. Almost on the nose.
- [05:29]
Dave Ramsey
That gets started more than that because we've killed some along the way.
- [05:33]
Alex Hormozi
Yeah, even better. So what makes something worth pursuing versus what makes something a no? Is it just, it's on mission? Because I would imagine that there's, you have resource constraints, you can't do everything that you would love to do. So what makes something, quote, worth doing versus not worth doing?
- [05:48]
Dave Ramsey
Well, these days we are much better. In the old days, I was just, we just did it. I mean it was like stupid. I was just stupid. But nowadays we actually do run a beta on something and we look at the ROIs and we look at the customer acquisition cost, the ROAs and so forth, and we're looking at, you know, is, is this a good use of our bandwidth, of our marketing bandwidth of our, of our leadership time frame, you know, the time invested overhead committed to this project. And so I mean we can, you know, we, we drop a lot of stuff in the test bucket and but if it doesn't, if it's not going to have a great, great roas, if it's not going to have a great conversion and if it's not going to have a great margin when we're done, we can't afford to do it because of opportunity cost. We can afford financially to do it. But the missed opportunity on something that was working 10x of what this little thing that we fell in love with over here but sucks, we have to just let the thing that sucks die. And it didn't make it out of the test tube, that's all it amounts to.
- [06:57]
Alex Hormozi
You take more of a test test quickly, lots of ideas, kind of strategy, and if something, something hits, then it's. Then you double down on those things. That's kind of how you think through kind of new product or expansion of kind of like profit. Profit centers, I think is what you said.
- [07:13]
Dave Ramsey
Exactly. And, or can we, you know, can we iterate it 5 or 10 degrees and cause it to work? I don't kill everything instantaneously, but I mean if we're going to invest even enough to get it into the test tube, we're going to, we're going to iterate, iterate, iterate before we kill it. But when we lose hope that the thing is going to have a scale or have a margin that is commensurate with the resources committed, as you said, then when we lose that hope, we've got to be grown ups and go, eh, I really like this thing, but it's not good business.
- [07:46]
Alex Hormozi
So with these new endeavors, the first thing I wrote down when you brought it up was who does new? And the reason I bring this up because I'd imagine a lot of business owners have many ideas. You said it earlier on, shiny object, like, oh, this looks exciting, this looks exciting, this looks exciting. But for something to work, you typically have to have talent overseeing it. And I would imagine at the point that you're at now, you're probably not overseeing each of these new profit centers or new ideas. Maybe they're brought to you and you review the metrics, but you're not really driving, unless you are, in which case this is an open question, who does new? Because are you gonna take resources from something that's working? Are you bringing somebody new in or do you have a specific testing department? That's all they do. And then they hand it off to somebody else. Like, can you walk me through that process?
- [08:29]
Dave Ramsey
Probably a hodgepodge of a little bit of all of that. I don't do it. No. But what we have created is this collaboration freedom for anybody to throw an idea on the table and then you got to defend it, you got to make a case for it. And so you can't just throw it out there and go, well, you guys go do that now because I'm so smart, I came up with it because ideas are a dime a dozen. People who can implement them are the problem. Any one of the profit centers, for instance, entree leadership, okay, so it's got several components to it. It's got a digital component, entre leadership, elite which is a digital coaching product for small businesses. Right. So if somebody comes in and says, I got a great idea to add something, a tool to that digital product or whatever, that's usually going to bubble up somewhere in that entree leadership team from the vice president. Who's running that? Jason, or, you know, John Felkin's our senior coach over there. So he's got a lot of him and his coaches, they're on the front lines. They're interfacing with the customer all the time. The customer is going to throw needs at them. They went, okay, we need to serve this need. How can we do that? Is that a digital thing? Is it a coaching need? How are we going to fill. So fill the need. Fill the need. Fill the need from an entrepreneur's perspective. But what we do is we give a lot of power to the vice president of that particular business unit or sub business unit to bubble things up. And then on top of that, if somebody's in another whole area, they're more than welcome to, you know, pull. Pull the pin on a grenade and throw it over in another area and go, hey guys, I got a great idea over here. I want to blow some stuff up. And so, but again, you've got to defend that and then you've got to defend the. The resource usage to take it forward, to take it past gleaming idea that I had while I was on the running trail this morning, which you get a new idea every freaking morning if you're doing this, you know, it's just in. 90% of them suck when they actually come in. But when they're on the running trail, they're all great, you know, before they see the light of day in the actual business climate. So anyway, I'm convinced that, you know, everything Ramsey has done has been on about 10% of our ideas. 90% of them, when they made the light of day, sucked. And some of them really suck bad. But, you know, you don't know that sometimes till you get in there swinging. So all that to say it's bubbling up. Occasionally we'll have something that doesn't have a home. And we have a special projects wind team that is an incubator. It's a shark tank, if you will, for ideas that don't, they can jump in. And so you've got some senior leaders representing several of the disciplines that sit in there. And special projects works on two things. Broke. Things broke. You know, some an area's got the flu and it's, you know, we're not meeting budget, we're not hitting our revenue goals and it's a, you know, it's a good sized thing and it's problem I sit in that, I sit in that work team. That's one of the things I sit on. It's one of the groups of work groups I sit in because I'm entrepreneurial and I love working on broken things. And we'll take a baby thing in there that doesn't have a home, an orphan and you know put, put it in NICU in there and let's get this thing, let's get it nourished, let's see if we can get it moving and see if it can survive. If we can get the thing to where it's past beta and it's actually, the business has actually got some social proof. We'll make it a new profit center or we'll drop it into one of the existing ones even though the idea didn't come from them and go look, this fits over here the best. So we're going to drop it with you guys and you know, we'll send a leader. When we send it over there we'll put a new leader on it and, and, and then start to staff it out.
- [12:08]
Alex Hormozi
So when you put a new leader on it that, so that was the. Who does new. That was kind of the heart. So when you put a new leader on is that you typically pull like a junior, like if you VP is head of a division you pull somebody who's kind of one of their right hand. They get the opportunity from a career pathing perspective that they can run this new thing or like how do you think through, through bringing those leaders in? Are you mostly yeah. I would just love to know how do you think through, through that part?
- [12:32]
Dave Ramsey
Probably 80%, maybe even 90% of the time it's in house and we're constantly working on bench depth around here and so we've got somebody waiting in the wings and it might be them that birthed the new idea and brought it into special projects, you know and so they may have been rocking the baby for a little while and then they just get to, they get to grow it on up, right? They get to give the orphan a home and they become the new momma daddy of the thing. So yeah, that's how I like to do it. Because if the person, if it was born in their heart they will, they will fight all the enemies internally and externally for the survival of their baby. I mean and they'll champion the cause baby. I like, I like champions. You know they paint Their face blue and, you know, and, you know, ride a horse with a big sword coming through the thing to get every. And sometimes you got to set them down. I would lot rather try to take somebody like that and pull them back and polish them a little bit than trying to light wet wood.
- [13:38]
Alex Hormozi
Light wet wood. That's a great analogy. Well, when you, when you start these new divisions, and I think I want to. The reason I'm hitting on this is because I think it. If you asked 100 entrepreneurs, what's the number one thing that you wish you could do, it would probably be more new stuff. And so this feels like a very, a very relevant thing to talk about. And I think that happens at all levels because, you know, in the beginning you're just barely figuring out what's going on. And so you're just trying and seeing what sticks later. You have more resources, so you think you can do more. But oftentimes you also distract the team. They feel whiplash. And then sometimes the core business starts to falter because everyone's looking at the new shiny toy rather than the main game.
- [14:19]
Dave Ramsey
We started it with one area and it was tech because tech was exploding 20 years ago. And so, you know, we had the web department. You know, that's what it was called. It's how lame it was. Right. And so, but these, so these, these, you know, these programmers and tech people are all sitting in a room, but they're getting paid off the P and L of that profit center. So the guy or gal running that profit center wants some freaking accountability. But instead we had them just over here. They were on their own little island and we had to break that up. And that's when we busted it. It was about 20 years ago. We went to this matrix approach.
- [14:58]
Alex Hormozi
Well, this is a great segue. So with each of these VPs, I would imagine these are among the most valuable people in the business. Right. Because they're fundamentally running a business unit.
- [15:08]
Dave Ramsey
Yeah, they got literally a P and L, and they literally get paid off the bottom. Would they get billed for portions of the overhead, the rent for the building in their area, as if they were, you know, a standalone business, so to speak. So we're job costing, if you want to use accounting terms. And. And then they get paid off that bottom line. So if they, if their bottom line goes zoom zoom, their personal income goes zoom zoom, I want them to be very wealthy because that means they made me a lot of money. And so I love it. And yeah, and we want everybody in the building doing that also, though we have a high respect for the C suite. We have a high respect for that senior marketer and the value that they bring. Not just the entrepreneur running the vice president's role or again, a senior VP sitting some of those. And even some executives, some of our operating board members sit in some of those seats. But that's how it all rolls up under a business unit.
- [16:05]
Alex Hormozi
And then the C suite, I imagine, gets kind of compensated from the company overall.
- [16:09]
Dave Ramsey
Yeah, because what I've got is our operating board is half C suite and half business units. And so what we've got to have is we've got to have this. We have to have an accounting system and a budgeting system that serves the business units and notifies the rest of us if the business, how the business unit is performing. And so it's not really optional. You've got to do that. And if you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur that came out of sales or marketing, you might not know how to do all that accounting stuff. And so I got to roll some accounting support up under you to make sure that you get to keep doing the stuff you're good at. But we also actually want to count.
- [16:51]
Alex Hormozi
The beans and pay them, you know, pay taxes.
- [16:54]
Dave Ramsey
Yeah, there's stay open, stay out of.
- [16:57]
Alex Hormozi
Jail, all the good stuff. I get. I get this question a lot. So I'm curious, your take on it, equity packages, stock shares, anything like that, or is it all pure based on bottom line profit? Is that the kind of the performance compensation component of the leadership that you bring in for either business units or C suite?
- [17:15]
Dave Ramsey
You know, when we first started sharing off the bottom line with people, that's when we had to answer the equity question was, are we going to let someone have stock? Okay, so our end game, we decided a long time ago, endgame is not going public. Endgame is perpetual operation generationally. And so it's what Simon Sinek calls the infinite game. Okay, so we don't have an exit to an IPO planned. We're not doing that. We've decided distinctly 25 years ago not doing that. We don't have a sale of any kind to a VC or anything else. We don't have a liquidity moment anywhere on the horizon at all. If you do, it would change what you're doing. Maybe. Okay. Because if you're going to take the thing public and you give some people some equity, that's not a big deal. Okay. But if you're running it infinite like that, and about the only thing that we're a hundred about the only person in the building we're 100% sure still going to be here is me. Everybody else could might someday want to leave or have to leave. And so. And I didn't want that. I wanted everybody to stay forever because I love our people and some of my best friends are my leaders here that I mean we do stuff socially with our wives and husbands and everything else. I love them. I've got high respect for them as human beings, as their spiritual character, everything. But still I have over, over all these years found that sometimes people leave and I cry a little, but I cry a lot if they took stock with them. And so we don't have any equity positions at all. And you make unbelievably good money when you move into leadership and you're paid off the bottom line here like lights out scary good money. Like nobody, nobody does what we do. We're so freaking generous because these are the people that are running the thing. They're the people that this. They deserve to get paid like they're a partner. And so I, I have zero greed over that. But you don't own anything. I own 100%. Well I don't own the stock anymore. My. It's in my kids names from estates and planning standpoint. But. And they're you know, my grown kids. My. The next gen of grown Ramses. So. But I mean I got 1% to be clear. But the only voting stock. But the. But anyway, no. In order to. No equity. There's no equity any anywhere except Ramsey's. That's it.
- [19:53]
Alex Hormozi
Oh, I love that. I'd say Layla and I have a similar perspective on acquisition.com in that it's kind of our forever business. You know, we plan on just continuing to own it and continuing to operate it. You know we will, we'll enter. We kind of see it as the goose versus the eggs at least how. How we think through it. Which is probably like we use a different analogy but similar. You have 14 profit centers. Those are the eggs. And then the goose is like why would we get rid of Acquisition not Comets. It's the mothership, to use your language. So it brings. So that brings up two different points that are probably somewhat related. So one is, is 100% of Ramsey in person or anybody. Is anyone remote?
- [20:32]
Dave Ramsey
No, we all work at work. Yeah.
- [20:34]
Alex Hormozi
So there's no like, like you don't have like exceptions where like you know, like editors for social media or you know, maybe some of the coaches or something like that could be remote. Everybody moves to, to Tennessee Yes.
- [20:49]
Dave Ramsey
And the, the. With the exception of the occasional temporary thing.
- [20:55]
Alex Hormozi
Yeah, of course, contractors.
- [20:57]
Dave Ramsey
But in terms of the actual structure, and the reason is very simple. Our quality of communication in person, communication quality goes way up. And so things are actually communicated. We all know this. Anyone that's got walking around since knows that 85% of communication is, is body language and tone and not words. And so when you are sitting beside someone, you can feel the spirit of what's going on. And you are getting a whole different quality level of quality of communication. What that does is it increases two things. It increases trust and it increases productivity. And then those two things increase speed because organizations move at the speed of trust. And so when I am not sure because I'm using a text or I'm even a zoom, and I'm not really sure what she meant or he meant, I can't really tell if they were being passive aggressive. But if you're sitting with them, you know, if you're sitting with them, you know, and I can go, just go walk around the building. And I can feel the air. I can feel it in the air. I've been leading a long time, and I teach my leaders to do this. There's an old book, a thousand years ago, in Search of Excellence. It was the Good to Great book before Good to Great. Before Jim Collins did it, it was back in 92. And you know, they studied great companies. And one of the things the managers did, they did management by walking around. Just walk the floor of the plant if you're in manufacturing and feel the vibe of the workers, feel the speed, feel the energy in the air. Look for chaos, look for dirt and filth versus organization. And I walk through, I smell food inside of our building. No, that's not cool. We have a cafeteria. You don't eat at your desk, leave your salmon somewhere else. Nobody wants to smell that crap, right? And so you know that just little stuff, but you just walk through and you can kind of tell, you know, I walk past people, they're. They're on a, they're on a coaching call, on a zoom call with somebody. And I just pop my head in there, you know, smile, wave and disrupt the whole call and then leave. Spread hate and dissension, right? So that kind of thing creates a cultural level of trust and productivity. I call them drive by communications. I can just drive. I can walk past and I read through the weekly reports and so. And so's mother's got cancer. And I walk past, just touch them on the shoulder and say, hey, man, I'm praying for your mom. Sorry about that. Third, you know, six, eight second interaction that does not occur if they're remote.
- [23:46]
Alex Hormozi
I think you might like this. I think it was either Uber, Airbnb, someone can correct me in the comments, but the. They did a research study. Cause I think they were trying to prove or at least definitively know whether in person versus remote, you know, which one is better, et cetera. And they, they found an it depends answer, which is, and I talk about this because obviously we're in person. We have a big, big headquarters here in Vegas that especially, especially for the first third of someone's career. So basically, like call it 18 to 35 is where those people get a disproportionate upside for being in person because of all of the unstructured that occurs that's not on your, quote, career path. You know, like, if you're sitting right next to marketing and you're in sales, you know, you, you overhear, you know, what, what's going on in terms of the organic stuff, you overhear what's going on in the paid side, you start learning a little bit more about funnel, you know, about landing page and conversion rates and things like that. And then all of a sudden, when you are on a sales call, you know, with a business owner or whomever, and they bring something of that up, you're like, oh, I actually know something about that. Because. But if you were in an only zoom environment, you lose out on all of that. And so I'm a big advocate because I obviously have a big percentage of the audience that I have that's in their early twenties beginning their career. I would encourage you all to work in person. I really mean that.
- [25:10]
Dave Ramsey
I did read one piece of research that you get more chances at promotion in person than if you're sitting at home and you're only on the calls commensurate to the task assigned to you. And so, you know, we can add to this even further. You've been here, we've got this massive, fabulous cafeteria restaurant at Ramsey. So. And on top of that, we drop several million dollars a year into that to subsidize the food cost. So you can eat here for about half of what you can drive down the road and, you know, get a fast food burger or whatever. Why do we do that? Because when people eat together, oh, that adds a whole nother level. When you break bread with someone else, it changes everything. And so what happens is people that don't work together end up eating together. And what you're Talking about occurs. They learn from each other. They, you know, they talk about stuff they're working on. Sometimes they just talk about personal stuff, but then the next time an issue comes up, they trust that person because they've actually developed a bit of a relationship with them. I look over in our tech guys and we got a bunch of techies in here, a bunch of programmers and stuff, and they're all over there huddled around some table playing some weird board game thing that I don't even know how it works. And you know that only programmers would play, right. And, or some weird card game, Dungeons and Dragons type stuff or whatever, I don't know. And they're having a blast and they're playing together and eating together and that changes the whole vibe of the deal. I will tell you that if you just are only concerned about a task and that's it, a simple tactical do this thing, that's fine for remote, but our stuff is always hundred percent of the time we want more out of the interaction than the simple task being accomplished. And that's why we've stood firm on this. And we've lost some people to that. They want to go work and have work life balance, which or whatever they call it, and so that they can work from home. But what that actually means is I'm not playing to work eight hours, right? Because if you're working eight hours at home, you're not talking and interacting with your family. So I don't know how you added hours to your family unless you're cheating the company. And so I don't, I don't, I don't understand it, but I'm not mad about it. It's just why we've decided to do it. And then. But some people, some people jet and we've lost some good people over that. And so we've had a lot of discussions about it here, but we're pretty firm on that.
- [27:46]
Alex Hormozi
There's a couple dovetails that I'll hit on that. So one is you talked earlier about bench depth and I would imagine that one of the best ways to build the bench depth is having more people cross functionally learning in person from other leaders at cafeteria, at the water break area and what have you. You also spoke about trust. The speed of the company is based on the speed of trust. And I 100% agree. And I think that translates into faster decision making. And so I'm a big believer in the speed of decisions is the speed of the company, which can only be based on the trust that people have. If you have to double check every single thing. Then all of a sudden an approval process has to get put in place and then bureaucracy kills everything.
- [28:24]
Dave Ramsey
Well. And it interferes with delegation. The essence of delegation is trust. And so when I can let something bubble up from the bottom it's because I trust the people that the idea is going to get filtered and vetted. We're not going to go drop a million dollars on a bad idea. You know. And so it's not. I trust the competency of the people. That's a, that's a form of delegation.
- [28:48]
Alex Hormozi
And I think you spoke to two things that you spoke to both competence and intention. Right. So intention, you know, like are they good at their job and. Or do they. Do they mean. Mean well. Which I think it kind of ladders up to on brand versus off brand. Is this a Ramsey thing to do? Is this the Ramsey way? So if just because I think everybody loves the good story. What's the most. What's the biggest goof up you've had in 35 years on something that was off brand for Ramsey? That you're like, man, I can't believe we did that. Right? Like. And what, what then? What'd you do about it afterwards? Because I'm sure every business owner's had a big goof up and been like, shoot, that was bad.
- [29:26]
Dave Ramsey
You know, I don't know if it was off brand. But. Huh. I think one of the most expensive things we ever did was that we got about several millions of dollars into the building of a debit card.
- [29:47]
Alex Hormozi
Okay.
- [29:48]
Dave Ramsey
A Ramsey debit card. That it wasn't off brand. It was right on brand. But, but, but what? This. It was one of those things we didn't know what we didn't know banking regulations and. And so forth. So we're looking for a click and mortar bank to park the thing in because it's. We're not in the banking business. We're certainly not going to open a bank. Good lord, no. That would be. There's no way. But there's tremendous revenue potential in the transaction fees. And so we're looking at the Ramsey debit card and it's something that we could promote. We could brand. It had a nice little gazelle on it. Had a nice little R on it. That kind of stuff. And we screwed around. That thing was born in Special Projects Committee. It was a baby. It was an orphan. And we put, we brought it. That's a deal. We brought in an outside guy that knew the banking world and he stood still with us today. Works in another area. He was brilliant guy, really smart, and I never want to lose the guy. But we got down into that thing and it, you know, of course it has to survive through the pandemic. And that, that slowed everything down, shut everything down for a while. I had to back put it on the shelf, get off the shelf and dust it off. Okay, get it going again, get the beta pick back up, get the alpha picked up first and get the beta picked up. And I think we were at about 10,000 people in beta, okay. And the, the, the, the outside fraud bots started hitting the thing and we thought that the bank had the, the software to catch all of that. And then we're looking at, okay, we're responsible for these overdrafts that are being created. We have to cover them in our contract. And real quickly the thing starts going sideways and I'm like, man, I'm so many millions into this thing. I really don't want to kill this thing. But we're looking at the risk and the upside and we just, we blew it up. We killed it. And I still got one of those little debit cards in my folder. I carry it to remind me of how stupid I was. We weren't stupid really. We did everything correctly. But what we, we were ignorant. We did not know what we didn't know about what our exposures were. And once those exposures became evident, we just had to go, oh, this is way scary. I can't breathe. And we're not doing this.
- [32:21]
Alex Hormozi
Our losses could be infinite. Huh?
- [32:24]
Dave Ramsey
Yeah, exactly, exactly. I'm like, yeah, if I write, you know, if we lose the several million we've got in it, that's, that pales in comparison to how bad this could be if we don't stop. So we're going to stop now. And odd thing, the bank that we were working with later went sideways and was in the news and blew up. And so I think, I think God protected us by letting us exit the thing early because we would have gotten the opportunity to exit anyway or we would had to move the whole project to another bank when that bank blew up. But it was a click and mortar bank thing.
- [32:58]
Alex Hormozi
I feel like a lot of people have had that same, like this is such a good idea on paper. Why is this not working the way I want it to?
- [33:03]
Dave Ramsey
Exactly. And it was working. The customer loved it. We would have been able to track for the customer, track their expenses and give them report and feedback the data we could have reverse furnished back to the customer was going to be, oh man, it was going to be beautiful.
- [33:18]
Alex Hormozi
Oh, yeah. I mean, I see it. It's a, I mean, it would, it's compelling.
- [33:22]
Dave Ramsey
And, and the, you know, and we had written so many of the APIs and so much of the tie ins, you know, to get all that stuff, we're running it on every dollar in the beta. But yeah, it got hairy.
- [33:36]
Alex Hormozi
Well, let me pivot from something from the super tactical of that to zooming all the way out. So a lot of entrepreneurs, myself included, you start to build a lot of wealth and then there's also the biggest percentage of your wealth sits inside of the enterprise that you run. And so how do you think about family office? You start getting this money that comes into the business or comes out of the business. Excuse me, do you have any kind of mental framework that you work through in terms of percentage reallocation to new investments within the overarching structure? And where this gets more tactical for me to you is Laila and I have run almost everything inside of acquisition.com and that means, like we own buildings, we own apartment complexes, all that stuff. It still sits in acquisition.com. obviously there's entity structures and things like that, but in terms of the team that helps run it, because, you know, acquisition.com primarily is an investment. You know, it started as a family office, but it just, it spun up these other profit centers, to use your language over time. And so I'm curious, have you. Do you completely separate church and state to use that language in terms of Ramsey personal versus. Can you just walk me through how you think through that?
- [35:00]
Dave Ramsey
No. We have done all other investing outside of Ramsey Solutions and in separate legal entities as well, for risk management purposes. That simple. And also for estate planning purposes. So for instance, the campus that you were on is probably a $600 million asset, roughly, something like that, maybe you own in cash. Yeah, Yeah.
- [35:30]
Alex Hormozi
I just wanted the audience to. I just wanted the audience to know. Sorry.
- [35:34]
Dave Ramsey
So when we, when we bought the dirt to start laying the first bricks on the first thing on it, that was a 10 million dollar purchase. And it's the largest purchase I'd ever done in my life. When I bought the dirt and I was freaking out and I'm like, now I got to build something too, you know, now that I bought the largest thing, now I got to do something even bigger. And it's like, we're going to cash. So we cash flow everything, as you said, but we immediately drop that into the children's trust so that I'm not the owner. And. And so you Avoid any, you don't avoid capital gains on the, or I'm sorry, estate tax on the basis of what you put in there, but you do on all the growth. And so while we've owned this property, it's doubled in value. And so there's hundreds of millions of dollars that have now avoided estate tax by that being over there. Plus, if someone wants to sue Ramsey, which apparently is a hobby for some people, and then they, you know, that's not on the plate because Ramsey does not own the campus. Ramsey is a, Ramsey Solutions is a tenant of the Children's Trust. And then, you know, same thing if we, we own a bunch of other real estate because I love real estate like you do, and I just buy that and then drop it into an LLC and if it's anything over 10 million, I drop it into a single standalone LLC so that all risk associated with that property is contained within that property. And from a, from a litigation standpoint or maybe anything else, but and also then that gives us some other estate planning things we can do with. Because partial interest LLCs can be with one of the kids can be. Or a kid entity, a trust can be greatly reduced in appraisal value and you can slip more and more of that into the estate plan and not have taxes on it. So we've been doing a bunch of that for 20 years and playing with all that stuff and that. So the reason was estate taxes and risk management is the only reason it's there. Philosophically, it's all in one lump.
- [37:45]
Alex Hormozi
Well, that's exactly. And that really teases to the heart of it because for sure the entity structure from a risk protection perspective, then you know, from a succession planning and avoiding estate taxes later, that 100% makes sense. I was curious about the actual team. So like, would the same legal team that does Ramsey stuff do some of these other deals? I asked because this is me selfishly asking because my, my, you know, my, my estate attorneys, you know, who manage all of that stuff. And I have our M and A attorneys that handle a lot of our, our, our deal flow. A lot of times we share, I share the same resources, same same people for things that are quote personal versus acquisition.com and I was curious if you had any like, like basically if you had had a mistake from that, that I don't know.
- [38:35]
Dave Ramsey
No, I have used. I've done both. So all accounting for the whole thing is in house. Ramsey accounting team does it. Okay. Taxes are, have been outsourced forever anyway. Estate planning has been outsourced forever. Nuanced. Litigation has been outsourced forever. But a little thing, if I need a, if I need somebody to look over a lease or verify that we wrote the LOI up. If we're doing a. I bought a piece of property this week and you know, with. Or I've got it on loi, I don't have it contracted. So, you know, well, my real estate team, which does not work for Ramsey, walk down the hall. They do sit here, but they don't work technically for Ramsey. They walk down the hall and run it past the general counsel. Somebody at the general counsel on the legal team.
- [39:23]
Alex Hormozi
Probably.
- [39:24]
Dave Ramsey
Yeah. But minor stuff, but pretty quickly. If anything gets like, if you're, if we're rezoning a piece of property, my legal team here doesn't know how to do that. I've got, that's going to be an outsourced guy. I'm going to bring in a zoning attorney that knows what the flip they're doing and knows everybody at the county that can walk it through. Because my guys would be stumbling around not knowing what they're doing down there. General counsel would be, man, this, that.
- [39:47]
Alex Hormozi
Was, that was super helpful for those of you who are, you know, further along in the path. Like some of this stuff that we're talking about with asset protection and entity structure, although it's something that you don't. I didn't, I wasn't like, I don't wake up every day and be like, man, I can't wait to learn about asset protection. But it's, you know, I did not.
- [40:04]
Dave Ramsey
Anticipate when I was 64 years old that I would own zero. I don't even own my cars. I don't own anything. Everything is in an LLC and my wife holds the LLCs. I actually am a very poor individual. You know, we built this again, we referred to it several times. But we love our campus and I'm proud of it. Property. We've done a good job with it. But we're. And we're sitting on the interstate. Six store two six story buildings with big, huge Ramsey Solution signs on them. And I thought, because I'm a real estate guy, I thought, okay, traffic count. That's branding. You know, people going up the interstate, they see Ramsey and they stop in and watch the show here because it's on the glass and it's all this customer interaction and, and it was like, we're, you know, the stuff we're teaching is working for us. So it's proof text for the customer. Right. And so it's branding and it's all positive, positive, positive. I had no idea that when you did something like build this building and put it on the interstate that you basically should have put right under the sign the words sue me or bull.
- [41:06]
Alex Hormozi
Yeah, nice bullseye, right?
- [41:07]
Dave Ramsey
Bullseye. A little bullseye, yeah. Because I think people, some people got from that, that this is now a target rich environment. And then we've had to spend, we've had to spend some money convincing them otherwise. Because I don't do well with this kind of stuff. I really don't negotiate. I'm going to pound you into dirt. And I've got some of them that are six and seven years now that I've been, that have been sitting in court and I'm not going to quit, I'm going to destroy them because I cannot stand the thievery that that represents. I can't stand a thief.
- [41:43]
Alex Hormozi
I love this so much. I could talk probably another hour on this, but I would have pivoted for the sake of the audience. Can you walk me through the six stages of scaling that you talk about in your book?
- [41:56]
Dave Ramsey
Well, we came up with what we're looking for because the best selling book we've ever done and probably the most known thing in the entire Ramsey brand has been the baby steps. And that was the total money makeover book, 12 million copies now. And what we discovered from that, teaching people the seven baby steps, this is what you do if you want to go from broke to wealthy, is when people have a clear path, it gives them hope and they don't have paralysis of the analysis and they don't have. If you have a clear map to get to Florida, your anxiety goes down. If you're on the way to Florida, you know, and if you need a clear path. And so I didn't have a clear path running a business and so I'm kind of making it up as I go. And I got a lot of bumps and scars and bruises and I went slower than I should have because I didn't know what the next step was. So as we've coached ourselves now through 30 plus years and about 10,000 small businesses, we're observing that businesses go through five stages. It starts with a treadmill stage. When you're by yourself, you're a solopreneur. All revenue is based on you, all production is based on you. You don't even really own a business, you just own your job. Because if you don't work, nothing happens. And so you come home from work and you flop down on the Couch I would when I was at that stage and Sharon say, what'd you do today? I don't know, but I did a lot of it and I'm exhausted. And so you just run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run, run. And it's. If it's to be it's up to me. Is not a motto, but it is the motto. And so, man, you get her done. And that is fun. It's invigorating. It's a fun time. You're still, you still believe this business thing is going to be easy, but it's not sustainable. You don't meet 10 year treadmill operators because you run out of breath. It's too hard. If you just own your own job, they end up closing, going to work for somebody or they end up growing the business. So what do you do to grow? Well, each of these stages we figured out there's some things you do to level up. On that one, it's pretty simple time management. You got to do what our friend Berger at E. Myth says, and that is to work on the business, not just in the business. So you've got to allocate blocks of time. You got to start blocking time and say, all right, I got to work. I got to have. I got to start thinking about something other than freaking Friday and pay, you know, and the second thing is I got to learn how to hire people and I got to bring all my first folks and. And I can delegate to them so that someone is creating production and someone is creating revenue. Both. That is not just me. So that if I'm hurt or I'm on vacation or one of my kids is sick and I need to tend to them, the whole thing doesn't stop. And when you do that, you level up. You know, get your first hire, you start a little bit of baby delegation here and you get some good time management. You go to the Trailblazer stage. Trailblazer is just chaotic. It's crazy. I mean, you're trying to herd cats. You got 10, 15 people and they're running in 16 directions. Nobody knows what nobody's doing, but we're doing a whole lot of it. And it's communication is. Is really fun and there's a lot of passion and a lot of zeal. It's a good stage. I love the Trailblazer stage. But again, it's. It's eventually so frenetic that eventually you start to go, I really want to get a little bit more sophisticated than this, because this is killing me. And so how do you do that? Well, you start actually doing some planning, which is a whole new idea for the tactical person like me. Because when in doubt, I bust something in the nose, right? When in doubt, I'm a run into the wall, let's go do something. Not if I run into it enough times, it'll fall over. And I just start, you know, I got to stop being so tactical. I got to start thinking about long term. I got to start really developing my first layer of leadership inside my team. That takes you up to the Pathfinder stage, or that's Pathfinder up to Trailblazer stage. Trailblazer stage is the middle stage of the five. I skipped one. And Trailblazer stage is the middle stage of the five. This is where you actually where I first started hearing about strategic thought. I'm so straight commission, sales guy mentality, tactical guy. That when someone said we need strategic thought, that sounded like corporate America. And I went, no, you just ought to go get your work done. And so. But then I started hiring some guys and gals that had MBAs. And, and they started, I think 100% of the MBA programs teach strategic thought as a primary thing. And so they start teaching me the value of strategic thought. They're like, look, you don't have to run into the wall. If you turn right and then turn left, you go around the wall. It's a lot less energy, you burn less calories. Calories. I'm like, how'd you know that? Well, I got above it. I had a 30,000 foot view. I wasn't just looking at the day to day, the moment to moment. Thank God it's Friday. Oh God, it's Monday. And so we blow past that and we start actually doing strategic thought. So they, my MBAs that I hired and other people taught me strategic thought. I didn't know it and I always laugh and say I taught them how to work. So. But you know, so we did that and then you moved to Pathfinder as the fifth. And that's where it's really sweet, man. You're bailing money now. Everything you got your systems in place, the processes in place, planning is in place, what revenue level this is around.
- [47:16]
Alex Hormozi
I'm sorry, what revenue levels would you like? Treadmill is like zero to a million.
- [47:20]
Dave Ramsey
You know, we tried to attribute it to that and we could do that with our journey, but we really couldn't. It changes from industry to industry. So if I'm dealing with a guy that's got one heating an Air truck. And he's fixing. He's doing H Vac. When he gets to 20 trucks and 70 employees. Is he there? No, he could still be. He wouldn't be. Treadmill. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's Pathfinder versus Trailblazer. Right, so. Because he could still be doing some of the dumb stuff three layers below what it looks like he should be doing. And that's. That was me. That's what I did. The last stage is what we spent a lot of our time on, which is where we are today. And that's the legacy stage, where you talk a lot about succession. What's your end game, how you gonna hand off? And you've got a bench depth. It's the ultimate bench depth is how you're gonna replace yourself and, and move to the family office mentality, as you said, and those kinds of things. So we walk you through those five stages, show you a clear path, and then there's six drivers that drive those. I won't cover them all right now, but, you know, it's. You know, it starts with personal growth. I am the problem and I'm the solution. I'm the thing holding the business back at every stage. And so I've got to get better at every stage. Right? And purpose and people, the quality of your hires, the quality of your culture, the quality of the connectivity and the culture with the core values, all those things evolve as you go through the stages and profit planning and then you just cycle back through those six drivers. We think we've been through the six drivers at Ramsey probably somewhere 10 to 15 times while we went through the five stages because they change as you, you know, it's like you read a great book and then four years later you read it again and you're a different person. So you see different things and so you change as you go through. But that clear path between the six drivers working to get through the 5st has set a bunch of our folks, our clients, our customers free. So we decided to put it into a book. And that's what building a business, your love is.
- [49:30]
Alex Hormozi
Well, Dave, I think we're close to close to time, but I wanted to personally say thank you for the impact that I think you've made on millions of lives. I'm sure you hear it every day, but I just, I want to say thank you because I think sometimes when you're. When you're at the top, you don't. You don't hear it as much. And so I think it's real good stuff.
- [49:55]
Dave Ramsey
Well, thank you, brother.
- [49:56]
Alex Hormozi
No, for real. And I think your heart is clear. I think people see what your intention behind it is. I mean, the man owns a $600 million campus in cash. He doesn't need your money. It's nice, right? But he doesn't need it. And I think. I think it's really cool what you've done. I would love to talk for another hour on even, like, going from personal finance to the entrepreneurship brand, but I know our time is limited, so, anyways, I want to say thank you again for coming on the game, and I'm sure my audience will definitely have a couple moments of PTSD hearing some of the stories we went over, and maybe hopefully avoid future PTSD by taking a right and then a left left.
- [50:44]
Dave Ramsey
Very cool. Well, thank you for having me. Let's do it again.
- [50:46]
Alex Hormozi
Yeah. No, awesome. Thank you. Hey, if you enjoyed this conversation, this is actually a second long form conversation I've had with Dave. I had one, I think, two years ago. It's one of the top videos on the channel that people seem to love, and so if you like this, you'll love that.