How to Get Rich [Full Interview with Dave Ramsey]

bring on a pandemic I got cash that's how I went bro walk me through how you ended up scaling that if you had advice that you could give 40 year old Dave what would you tell him I am super thrilled to be here today because uh Dave's a legend and uh I'm gonna I'm gonna give a little bit of an intro from my perspective of you this is a little scary um and I actually wanted to take the first like few minutes to um actually just kind of like hype Dave and I think it's because like on in the marketplace of attention right now I actually still think you're underpriced um I still think that you are underappreciated for the amount of value that you provide to the audience at large and flattery will get you everywhere come here um but one of the things I wanted to hit on it was um like I see and I'm sure you do or your team does like there are a lot of people who take I would you know I'll use the term fake gurus but a lot of people who haven't achieved you know a 100th of the level of success that you have that take a lot of shots and at you and you know a lot specifically around your views on debt but sometimes just in general and um you know we have a big belief that at acquisition.com that the only people who ever hate you um are never ahead of you uh and I feel like that's been extremely true and it's been tough for people to be ahead of you in general um but I just want to give context for my audience that number one uh you've been doing this for three decades yeah a little over you know three decades uh and your overnight uh three decade success yeah for real yeah it's just in time to get old [Laughter] and what I'm going to be directing the the conversation today around is actually around business stuff so Dave has a zillion things on Personal Finance I mean I think that was the you know the wedge product that absolutely a lot of everything um but because our audience is predominantly business owners I want to focus on how the actual building of Ramsay Solutions and kind of some of the things that you that you learned along the way some of the big mistakes that you did some things that you'd go back in time and would have done differently um and even as you've kind of scaled the brand so that's kind of the direction okay that work sure okay so um can you give a little bit of background in terms of how Ramsay Solutions the education business which was the first business correct and they've all kind of evolved together okay um how did that come to be and then what was your thinking around the business model at that time and like what has it evolved into oh well um all of it started uh extremely primitive I mean like one plus one equals two barely you know kind of thing and uh so like for instance we started I I went down there's a talk radio show or talk radio station in Nashville at the time that was in chapter 11 bankruptcy and there was a guy doing a bad financial show like a Saturday Night Live skit you know on there I went on as a guest on the bad financial show and I didn't have any books I just went on for fun I was actually promoting a real estate Club I was in and um he said hey I hear you're helping people with your fork with foreclosures and helping them stop getting their car repoed or if they're having financial trouble over at your church are you doing that and I said yeah I'm just kind of doing that for fun just to help folk it as a Ministry at the church and he goes wow if you've got any questions about that call up and phone rang and he never got any phone calls he didn't know what to do didn't even know how to put the guy in the air and so um he said hey come back let's do that again because his phone never rings and so I went I did it like two times and then he quit and then we went down talked to that guy that that was running that station into letting us work for free and so a couple guys me and a couple other guys went on the air uh answering questions uh uh in a really heavy hillbilly twang uh WWE tell you in you're talking Nashville y'all call in I mean it was it was nasty buddy I'm telling you it was nasty and uh but with information was good and the phone rang yeah from the very first day at about the same time I had finished writing uh on my laptop in my living room uh on the very first version of Windows this is 1992. uh my first book and I self-published it carried home in the trunk of my car got a thousand copies and I went on the radio and said hey I'll get my book and um some people did and uh and the 18 months later edu to get to your question yeah we moved the uh card table out of my living room and one old beat up desk from the days when I went bankrupt and opened an office in 800 square foot month to month rent and me and another guy another guy was gonna Financial coaching the way I teach to do that I was going to continue to do that and when we launched a in April of 1994 a class on how to handle money it was actually how to avoid bankruptcy um and one of the lessons was on the different types of bankruptcy one of the lessons was on how to stop a foreclosure if it's an FHA if it's a VA or if it's Fannie Mae different processes to stop a foreclosure um and you know all these different things and the people that came weren't bankrupt they were just making a lot of money and spending it all okay so they were broke it was all the money comes in all the money goes out only the names are changed to protect the innocent but they weren't behind on their house payment right they just were fighting with each other in their marriage and they didn't know how to do a budget and no one ever told them about insurance so I took the bankruptcy and the Foreclosure lesson out and replaced it with a uh uh retirement lesson and here's how Investments work lesson uh compound interest whoa and which is you know still for the general public causes their brains to just go melt down in a wonderful way the first time you see compound interest right and so yeah we that was called life after debt um in April and uh four people came the first night I sold three of them so for you digital people I had a 75 conversion rate set up right but um I'm telling you it was primitive overhead projector bad suit you know that whole thing and then we changed it to called it Financial Peace University the five months later in September six months later and now Financial Peace universities had 10 million people go through it and 50 000 churches have taught it unbelievable so for context the services that you had was education with some level of service kind of like holding accountable or keeping them consistent on top of that which the reason that I I was really intent on talking to you was that in the space that we're in today and obviously the the marketplace has changed a lot you have an education business and I would say that the vast majority of quote education businesses are not perceived as legitimate [Music] um how do you think you've been able to anchor in it like it's it's very clear that ramp Solutions is a legitimate business obviously um but what do you why do you think that so many of them are not perceived that way um like what's the Gap what are people missing there I I honestly don't know I I know that um in the financial World in general and I think most of your listeners and you and I agree to this that there's a lot of us I grew up in that world and and I'm a nerd by nature and got a degree in finance for God's sakes and so I in other words I thought the way to fix everything was with the math um and math treats the symptom right not the problem and what our brand differentiator and it may be the difference in what you're talking about as well is that we did come to understand that it's a behavior problem it's personal finances 80 Behavior 20 head knowledge I've said that like I don't know eight million times in 30 years and um but it is and the problem with my money is the guy in my mirror if I can get him to behave he can be skinny and Rich and we've talked about this all these lines these riffs that we do and we do them over and over and over and over and over again and but it but but that's the differentiator that's the thing they said oh yeah because I mean knowing how to do a budget is different than actually doing one knowing how to live on lesson you make or that you should is different than actually doing it knowing that eating 73 Donuts will make me fat is different than not eating 73 Donuts right yeah personal testimony but the um but yeah that that stuff I I think that's the difference and then what has happened is that if you go through and you do the stuff that we teach and we've got the systems in place to help you be held accountable to do it and encourage you when you're struggling and scared and hopeless um but if you're arrogant and prideful either way we're going to be there in your grill uh saying we love you so much that you need to change if you do this stuff and you actually make the changes due to the accountability that that because you keep doing what you've been doing you'll keep getting what you've been getting so you got to change the recipe so if you change the recipe you have success and lives transformed is legitimacy that gives you legitimacy and so in in other words I don't know if they set out to be illegitimate but they didn't maybe they didn't have the uh the the life wasn't actually changed you know if I join a gym yeah and then I don't get anything out of that I don't have any weight loss no increased muscle tone no um you know increased aerobic whatever whatever it is you're trying to accomplish if I don't get any of that even if it's my fault yeah it feels like the gym is illegitimate I don't think the Gym's necessarily are legitimate but the results were illegitimate yeah and so then you get labeled that way yeah and so I hear people say Dave Ramsey stuff doesn't work the haters right right and uh it absolutely does not work unless you work it yeah like I guarantee that I can make you that personal guarantee shifting back to the business um explain to me how how the actual products we developed over time so in the beginning you had the education and then you had the services that layered on top of that was that the main thing for like a decade or and and like walk me through how you ended up scaling that was that all through media but we had the yeah okay the radio show didn't make money for a decade [Music] um because I don't pay you to do radio uh even today I don't get paid by radio stations I have a clock split with them and so um and we didn't have anything to sell when we split the clock in so we didn't make any money so whatever we put in the radio was lost dollars um but it was the megaphone it was the uh the the lead mechanism uh okay and so we we I started doing some speaking and then I thought hey we could do like a little public event in town because we were on only on the air in one time but so we were on the radio and announced and I think we had um I don't know 100 people or something come out and um paid us like 40 bucks or something to sit for three hours or five hours or whatever it wasn't listening to me Yammer in my hillbilly twang about getting out of debt and so we had live events started to develop we had the little book so we had a little bit of a publishing thing going and we had the class itself which is a long form It's a combination of 12-step and curriculum so to speak um and and and so radio publishing Live Events those were the first and what becomes Financial Peace University we're the first element oh and one-on-one coaching one-on-one counseling we called it in those days we now call it Financial coaching um so there's no confusion that we're not licensed therapists um because some people can't seem to it's not clear but anyway coaching is hard to mess that up so um yeah so we do that and each of those things grew at different rates and so there were different times in the 30 years that um Financial Peace University was bringing in the Lion's Share of the money and then publishing would come up and pass it uh Live Events has pretty much always been a slightly profitable but really good secondary lead Source okay so if you come to a live event um because you heard us on the radio it's going down the funnel the marketing funnel so to speak and then they might buy Financial Peace University which is you know a nine week commitment and a higher you know instead of a 20 event ticket it's eighty dollars to go through it or whatever they so we were working at that and there are always books on the back table too so uh and so once those things worked and the book then we had a New York Times you know the book eventually evolved and was purchased by a publisher and became our first New York Times bestseller um once that happened and then we start doing a bunch of we start getting more and more radio stations and doing more and more media so instead of just doing a little local news guy we actually with the book tour the first time got on the Today Show and uh and and that opened up something then that opened up something and then pretty much been doing New York media for 25 years um obviously all that's free but it's lead generation and so if I were to say this back to you the radio station served as the big megaphone to gather attention and then point it in a direction and one of the places you'd point it in the earlier days was the live events which functioned a little bit as a conversion event for you guys from a business perspective and then those people would get funneled into whatever was appropriate for their budget uh you know either they'd buy some books or they'd buy the curriculum or they buy the curriculum and some 101 Council uh 101 Financial coaching um and then that machine has been what you've continued to spin the wheel on and then Gathering more and more and more media yeah we've got and we've got more and more product mix okay I mean we've got uh you know we ended up uh I advertised for a stock brokerage firm um and then when I sent the leads the people would go over there the local broker that they went to would tell them to do stuff that I had just told them on the air not today and so that didn't work and um people are pissed off and uh yeah and so we said well guys y'all can't do that with the leads we send you well you can't tell us what to do and I said I can tell you you can't advertise so we're not going to be on the air so we dropped those Folk and um so the product Suite from there that was the core initial product mix and then what we did was uh we would hear about some need that was a a similar thing but a finger off of that so for instance a local coach at a Catholic High School was took my financial piece book and started teaching his seniors because they needed to know about personal finance with and then call me up and goes hey I hope you don't mind I'm like well I don't mind and I'm kind of complicated but let's work together on this let me so I went over and spoke to him a couple times our sweet kids and he's a great guy to Greg Carson he's a friend of this day that was and we ended up out of that developing a high school curriculum that's now been taught in 48 percent of the high schools six and a half million kids have been through it and so um you know that was again another product line and the edge Solutions is another department if you will inside of Ramsey today and pretty substantial revenues for high school college and even Middle School curriculum and and then uh you know Corporate America says okay we'd like for our employees to get this stuff so we take a modified version of the Financial Peace University that doesn't have as much of the bible stuff in it um and we have to not violate um some HR rules and stuff so we had to change some to make a little more vanilla on different things and uh it's called smart dollar and gosh man watch I don't know 10 000 companies have now taught it and including big ones like U-Haul and uh uh Costco all of their employees have gone through it so that's a whole other product line but it's you know there so the brand Suite or the product Suite continues to evolve uh as we look at different things where we can serve uh we took over all the publishing so we do all our books now uh self-published have for about a decade how do you think about spinning out new products like what to do versus like because there's obviously focus in a business right you have limited time and resources like how do you say this is going to be something we're going to just partner with someone on or this is something we're going to bring in house and actually own entire really or just not do it all and ignore and just let somebody make some extra cash on it and we just don't worry about it yeah um well one thing we don't do is we don't um we have made a conscious philosophical decision to not sell Financial products so we don't sell insurance we don't sell Investments we don't sell real estate we endorse people that do but they don't work for us they're advertisers of shorts endorse in our Ramsey trusted is what it falls under that brand so some of them are have ads on the podcast some of them we say go to the website and fill out form you find the realtor we recommend in your area this Ramsay trusted that kind of thing and so that way when I'm giving real estate advice someone doesn't say oh he's just trying to get us to do that now they still say he's trying to just get us to be a real estate lead but that's a different thing he's trying to sell me a house or he's trying to sell me a mutual fund we don't endorse particular mutual funds uh and we don't um sell Investments like that so you can't say the reason Dave does insurance is because or says term by term insurances because he owns a term insurance firm because I don't and you know one of the lies out there floating around is I own half of Churchill Mortgage which I don't own a dime of it'd been nice if I had and they've done really well and I don't I don't have for some of Xander insurance or both advertisers been with me 26 27 years consecutively and um but I don't own any of those they're just they're they're friends of mine but I'm doing business with them for three decades and they do really well and they do a great job for a listener and so those are media Partnerships they're sponsors that's all they are I mean they're just advertisers on the on the original talk radio show which is now like you guys I mean your podcast and YouTubes and tick tocks and everything everything yeah what have been some of the major beliefs that you had to break along the journey from and if so what's what's top line revenue today across all of the portfolio I'm calling portfolio I'm using my own language but across Ramsay Solutions Ramsay Solutions uh revs will be a little over 300 million this year okay so for context in terms of size here for my audience 300 a lot uh so what what were some of the because you know a lot of businesses grow at least in my observation of businesses is they're they're step Wise It's they'll they'll grow they'll grow and they'll hit something and then they stay there until they figure out whatever that thing was and then they go super fast again and then they hit another wall and they keep going what have been some of the you know two or three major pivot Points in the business in terms of your lessons or beliefs that you had to reshape that allowed you to break through to new levels of growth you know I think because the product line was so uh diverse um the different ones of those were stepping at different times and it caused our actual Revenue growth to not stair step but it could be fairly smooth interesting on a curve got it um but like you know if we went for instance to Financial Peace University it went through different seasons where it would go and then it would stop and it would just sit you know and we're kind of in one of those stop and sip modes now because we're making this transition uh from being primarily Church distributed okay uh because churches aren't teaching classes like that in this current environment as much as they used to yeah and so we've got to have a more direct consumer uh digital uh distribution methodology and we're discovering that right now so it's plateaued right now got it Financial University is awesome it's excellent but it's but from a business Revenue perspective business model it's you know it's big spike would have been the mid-2000s okay I mean it made it went crazy up and it was kind of like the 800 pound gorilla revenue-wise inside the building and then it moved over to the other thing so uh what are the your question is not the stair step a question your question was uh what are some Milestones along the way like lessons you had the shift that allowed you to be an entrepreneur that could get to I mean 10 I mean do you remember when you hit your first 10 million years yeah first 30 in your first hundred and your first you know any any big changes that happen in you as a person that that you can denote and say I learned this and this is why we were able to break through that yeah I I figured out um fairly early that um that organizations are not going to outgrow the character and uh intellectual capacity of their leadership primarily me and so if I'm if I remain dumb in some of the areas I'm dumb in then we're not going to be at 600 million you know I've got a uh or somebody else will be doing it and if they remain dumb they can't you just can't do it I mean there's stuff you don't know and so I was uh I grew up in a real estate household Mom and Daddy were in residential real estate business and so I've been selling my whole life straight commission for me but self-employment is a H isn't my DNA I don't know how to think about working for someone uh and some and when you grow up in that world you know you learn to kill it and drag it home because you ain't got anything to eat if you don't kill something to drag at home and so um very tactical and so I couldn't Spell strategic when we started and we got large enough that we started hiring these things called mbas and these people that actually had and uh now over the years I've got a ton of mbas on the team and I love the NBA programs most of them that are out there they do a really good job of teaching but one of the things I learned almost universally about mbas they are heavily steeped in strategic thought and so uh the mbas on our team and me about uh 20 years ago made a really good trade um they taught me how to think strategically because I didn't know how and I taught them how to work so it was a good trade and so would you say that basically them coming in and talking strategy was a like a big unlock in terms of growth critical thinking skills I the way you solve a business problem how do you you know I would just go in there and go okay the answer is activity just go run into the wall enough times and the wall will fall down meanwhile the NBA standing over the side going hey Dave over here there's a door yeah I could just walk around really I mean you don't have to run in the stupid wall this is dumb and so uh because they're looking down on the maze yeah the Labyrinth and can see the way through and I'm just going just get after it just get in there and hustle you know and you need to have both you have the energy of the hustle and grind and the uh because when in doubt activity is the answer but um unfocused unplanned activity is um not always fun it causes pain sometimes too so we're much better at uh well my friend Jim Collins calls calibrated cannonballs now than just firing cannonballs which from a branding perspective because I think you've developed a really strong brand what are what are some of the deliberate decisions you've had to make to associate with versus not associating with in order to continue to strengthen the brand expand the media because I would imagine like in the flywheel that is Ramsey Solutions the media is a huge part of that and so like what has been one of the big things that kept that wheel spinning and expanding compared to the many other people who try to to top you I mean even the people who try and get more audience more earballs yeah I uh I don't know we discovered I don't know how we figured it out it was accidental I guess it was people getting pissed at us in the early days we you know like we would endorse something on the radio just local T local radio station and you know go to such and such a car lot well somebody go over there and they go the guy tried to screw me Dave he'd call me up on the air or call me up at my house you know find me in the mall the guy you sent me to is a dad gum crook Ramsay and so now I can't trust you yeah and um and I would lose the advertiser because I would have to cancel them because I was ashamed yeah of them and uh so somewhere along the doing stupid stuff like not vetting who we're going to associate our brand with uh instead of just buying it just oh we were so happy we had an ad sold you know the middle of Revenue my God and then you figure out that doesn't play well because you're destroying your credibility with the market we figured out we were a trust brand and radio endorsement taught us to be trustworthy worthy of trust and uh so we're very careful uh as a matter of fact just a few minutes ago I came out of a meeting where I turned down two potential advertisers and the sales team said we think we need to turn these down but before we do it's a lot of money we need to uh ask you and I said yeah that that guy if we put that guy on he's gonna it's gonna cause our audience is not no that's not so would you send your sister there would you send your mom there would you send your friend that you play softball with uh you know would you send them over there and if they don't pass that acid test we don't put them on the air so if I won't really buy it or I don't really believe someone should buy it for their own good um I mean like 100 of the things we advertise I don't necessarily buy personally in my stage of life but I'm not the market for them either so um but but I do believe in them and I believe they're good for you and um sometimes we mess that up we've endorsed things we shouldn't have endorsed in the early days even I mean it's it's uh uh in the last few years I've had a really disastrous one that was a mess and it's caused me all kinds of problems but um you know initially started out good and then turned bad and we didn't we didn't cut them off fast enough uh and it's our fault for not cutting them up but we weren't doing it for money we were trying to help people yeah and so it's a trust brand and so no single relationship Advertiser endorsement is uh it could not possibly give you enough Revenue in our world yeah to offset the damage it will do if they don't take care of the customer yeah because people all we've got is trust and if they don't trust us for that they also aren't going to trust us when we tell them to get out of debt yeah they're also not going to trust us when we tell them hey this is going to affect your marriage you know the advice we give is no longer trustworthy if the endorsement is not trustworthy so the whole stinking thing ends up revolving around this word and uh so we spend a lot of time discussing and vetting and uh cheeseclothing the whole it's a mess but yeah it's it's okay it's worth the effort I agree I'm with you on that and I mean I think that you know at acquisition.com we try to do the the same kind of approach which is like how can we be as trustworthy as humanly possible because you know we do Equity deals and so yeah we have a huge vetting process and you know 99.99 of the audience I have will never do business with me but I still need to treat you know everyone so that the reputation which compounds is based on trust so that we can do deals and just to be very uh uh transparent it um it's emotional for me and most people in this building when that doesn't go right yeah when we mess that up somehow because we our intent is to never mess that up and when it gets messed up it hurts our feelings more than it does anybody's mental mind gave me this quote you might like it he said never risk the empire for a pot of gold there it is that's a great one I love it So speaking of pots of gold so 300 million is where you're at right now what do you see as the as the next thing to get you know Ramsay solutions to 600 million like you were saying earlier like what's the what's the path forward there like what do you see is the Strategic opportunity what are you investing in right now um well we're seeing an explosion uh with our every dollar app for one thing it's um it uh with minimal effort honestly has caught fire so we're gonna pour a little more gases on that while we're at it we're gonna put some effort into it since it's working and uh we do think that Financial Peace University is going to stair step again we've got to finish we've got to find that um methodology for delivering those age-old principles in a new in a new way we are a platform and delivery agnostic I don't care how we get it to you but we got to get it to you and it's not and efficiently with the least friction possible so people actually do this stuff and so that that's there um uh some things are going are logistically have uh in the last say 20 of the 30 years have be not they didn't shrink they grew but they don't have the logistical ability to grow uh Revenue wise as much and an example That'd Be Live Events there's only so much of that you can do and it doesn't it doesn't hockey stick right you because you you have the bottleneck actual bodies on a stage yeah and bodies to set the stage up and that kind of stuff and number of cities you can actually draw a crowd in and that kind of thing so um the only way you can hockey stick that thing would be to run the prices where they were just not for the average guy and our whole thing we do is for the average guy so um so that's gonna if they ever if it stays the same or grows at five percent and something else grew up fifty percent it's going to get to be a smaller and smaller piece of the pie right mathematically but still not be something we're ashamed of we love Live Events and not we're one of the biggest event companies in America we do it great Live Events but uh but it's gonna end up that one's not probably going to be the answer um unless now streaming could um it would have to monetize for the first time but I suck on monetization but uh but it's good at getting information out there uh so I I I um we don't see hardcover books as being something that's going to hockey stick uh in the coming years but I do think they're going to continue to be a a valid part of the mix um so it's probably more a digital application and delivery because it's the easiest to scale and lowest cost of goods and um and it uh more easily iterates than anything analog and uh the rate of change uh has exponentially increased in 30 years it used what used to would take us five years to see unfold in the marketplace is unfolding in five or ten weeks right now yeah and um how fast uh entire social media platforms become irrelevant is is kind of amazing and uh so you know betting the whole thing on one delivery mechanism uh Dom and so um ah in my mind anyway but yeah so I think whatever it is is gonna like an app like a budgeting app or a delivery digitally of FPU or delivery digitally of our entree leadership which is our small business uh teaching and coaching uh you only have so many physical coaches for small business guys right and uh that's got a limiting factor do I want 3 000 of those people in the building no I really don't yeah I'd rather figure out another way to help you folk out there and that that is um not as Manpower hungry so when you said the every dollar app just kind of like took off is that like a micro example of how product iteration works for you is like let's throw something together let's see how it works and then if it starts taking off disproportionately to like the effort you say okay now we're going to invest more resources in it yeah we put a huge amount of effort into building it and launching the initial yeah um it was a major initiative and a push and then it kind of you know it was had a good growth rate but it really wasn't but something shifted in the marketplace I mean later in the last four or five months okay uh and the way the consumer uh is viscerally responding to the word budget uh differently than they were certainly uh 10 years ago but probably even 10 months ago and so when we develop things so we're gonna you know we've always iterated it we've always updated it we've always made it better every time and all that kind of stuff but um there just seems to be uh some attention that we didn't cause so why not join the parade yeah right I think probably someone that's the the macro economic environment has changed a little bit in the last you know in that period of time people are probably feeling the need for a budget and it might be that I mean I think the product the original launch on it was uh it's probably coming up on 10 years you know so okay in the um you know the the number of people that are walking around adults that have have uh never lived in a world that wasn't a smartphone world is much larger than it was 10 years ago yeah and so the marketplace has shifted in that regard with the the the iPhone the uh um whatever whatever smartphone is native to a much larger percentage of the population than it was uh when it was launched so we may just be seeing that demographic shift and then um they're aging into it yeah because they you know that age group I mean if you're 28 you you wouldn't ever think of doing a budget on paper it would not occur to you that that no more than you would hand write a letter in cursive you know I mean it's just absurd so but you know when I started all this that wasn't neither one of those was that unusual right So speaking of of the app in particular as is a an increasingly large part of the pie um how does it measure compared to the other pieces like just by percentage you've got the events you've got the education you've got Entre leadership you've got the app you've got the Live Events um like how how do how do those divide up in terms of uh like size for Ramsay Solutions the Ramsey trusted items which includes National advertisers and uh the whole uh smart Victor Pros all the endorse all the people we endorse for um investing all the real estate agents although there's about eight thousand nine thousand different uh people that we endorse in different areas tax really all that tax and um real estate and investing uh through Ramsey trusted and then you've got a singular National Advertiser like a church or mortgage for mortgages that kind of all that falls under Ramsay trusted so that's a lot under there but uh the the uh the national uh associations plus the Strategic alliances we call them the the what used to be called the ELP program probably amounts to 40 percent of the revenue really um and so not let are not putting on back to our earlier conversation not putting on one that's bad yeah is a big deal there yeah because you're going to mess up the whole thing you know you're going to mess up the Empire with that singular bad pot of gold and so we have to you know to be a real estate agent in Ramsey trusted you really are we're really going to do the stuff we tell you do or we're really not gonna let you in there I mean it's a big deal you know and so because we love you and we love our customers and we want everybody to have a Little Love Fest we don't need anybody pissed off so yeah you're really going to do this stuff so that's uh uh probably uh I think it's probably saying about 40 percent of the revs right now but that's half that had gun building too in terms of the 1100 people that work here uh entree leadership is probably uh 15 uh you know something like that uh Financial Peace University is probably 15 percent um you know uh every dollar is 10 maybe or less it's less than 10 percent um but they know they just kind of fall out like that publishing and Live Events together not that huge Revenue but again they're almost they're like almost yeah they're almost lead Gathering yeah things so um I'm trying to think what else falling in that p l but just something like that there's the big ones yeah that's big rocks how do you think about reallocating or reinvesting Capital within the business versus taking it out of the business as an owner um well we we uh don't randomly if we have something we can I can get more Roi here on something that we have a high belief in than I could anywhere else I mean certainly on mutual funds are real estate right I mean I love mutual funds in real estate but I mean I can get a thousand percent ROI on launching a product yeah and I can't even approach that on this other stuff so I would rather deploy the capital here but I don't need to deploy it stupidly so um when in doubt uh we take it home and we doubt take it out yeah yeah that's it and plug it into the you know plug it in the generosity and plug it into some more real estate or mutual funds so um I'm gonna I'm gonna pivot a little bit on the on the investing side because I wanted to give you uh something that you might not know but you did a a podcast with graham Stefan and he was so much fun he's a great guy yeah Grandma's Graham's a nice guy he's done he's done a great job too on his stuff man yeah he's fought in your Footsteps in a lot of ways well he no he's he's different but I mean he's doing he's good he's we like him yeah Graham's a good dude and he showed you his investment uh portfolio oh yeah that's like a thing he does when he has people on I'm like I don't know Graham I don't know if I'm qualified to help you with that yeah you said something to him that massively changed the direction of how we invested just so you know yeah well so I just wanted to share that with you so I think you had said loosely well before I look at this if this were your brain or your knowledge or your experiences what percentage of this pie would you say is real estate versus stocks versus anything else and he said well because he had asked you do you think I'm over indexed on real estate but when you asked him the question he said well I mean I guess probably 85 of my knowledge is around real estate and I think his portfolio kind of reflected that you're like well then that's a perfect mix for you and for me as we were coming out of the of our liquidity event we'd probably taken about 40 million home before that wow good for you that's awesome it's not 300. the 300 is gross dude you know the difference in Gross in that and um but anyways and so I had during while I was growing the business I I basically just didn't really invest at all I mean I just put it in indexes and was like I'll deal with it later um and then we had the included event and I had I talked to probably every guy that I know was who was richer than me and was like what should I do with all this and the answers that I got were as different as there are people under the sun yep which left me more confused than anything and so the reason that that little piece of advice that you gave to Graham was so meaningful for me was that it was personalized because everybody told me what they did and what had worked for them but you know one of the guys I asked was like oh take all that and buy one huge building and I was like I don't know anything about I was like I really I don't want to risk everything on one building he's like well I've been doing this 30 years like that's what you should do it's like I'm gonna mess this up that scares the crap out of me yeah yeah tenants and termites and toilets and all that stuff I have no idea any of that stuff works right and so when I thought back on when I looked at that pie and thought okay well what's my knowledge base it was like it's all business everything I've done has been business and all the money I've made has been business and so um I showed that clip to Layla my wife and I was like I think I think this is what we should do I think we should just stick to business and just buy businesses and grow them and so I love it that's what we did with acquisition.com wow good for you that's a great wow but that little piece of advice changed the direction of how I mean how we allocate all of our assets and what we do because it's funny because if I was going to write a five million check into a building I I got like you know three or four deals that were around that size in terms of check size and um I'd get all the way to the end and I was like I don't know what [Applause] trusting that this is a good deal like I had the Excel sheet and the you know projector returns all the stuff and I was like I don't feel good about this because I don't know when on the flip side if I'm going to write a five million check into a business I feel fine about it because I'm like oh I know how like I know I've I don't know everything obviously it's sure it's your sandbox right yeah and so um anyways that's beautiful I love that that's what what happened was we had a product that we called wealth coach for a little while and uh we ended up doing these very small but I don't know we charged more than we ever charged like a thousand bucks or something we always charge 20 bucks so to come to those little seminars and we ended up talking to these people they were millionaires or five million and 10 million and I I kept asking them okay what do you put money into because they're they've actually done it they had money like you've actually done it you have money and so it's not someone with a theory yeah on Tick Tock you know and so um what I kept hearing from them was this array of all kinds of different things so I couldn't it wasn't the answer to the question wasn't a certain investment made them Rich what it was was they put money and stuff they knew yeah and I mean one guy was a car dealer and he had a massive classic car collection which for an ego driven person is a horrible idea right but because because you can lose your butting in any kind of collectible yeah but for somebody that is in the car business and his gr his grandfather had a dealership and he his father had a dealership and he had he he knows that loves it yeah he goes out in the garage and pets the cars I mean you know say guess what he's making that portfolio seriously gave him a great return now do I recommend to the general public go get a cart no no put money in stuff you understand and you love and don't put money in stuff because it sounds fancy um or somebody you know it sounds sophisticated because there's something that happens when you get money you think that everybody that has money is sophisticated about their investing and what I figured out was almost no one is yeah they're very primitive I mean a lot of people I talked to were farmers and we went throughout lots of land they got dirt man that's it just dirt and it doesn't even I mean they don't even necessarily plant it but they just buy dirt and one guy at 8 000 Acres of dirt you know and I'm like in Kansas you know I'm like golly I wouldn't need more good I don't know anything about that kind of dirt I like real estate but that would scare me to death yeah but for him it was the most comfortable natural thing in the world to your point and so I just learned that put money in stuff you love and you understand don't put money and stuff because it sounds sophisticated because you're getting ready to lose your butt because you're trusting some guy who doesn't have any money who's trying to sell you something and um driving a bad car and um so yeah uh we'll name the bad car but anyways yeah I mean that that's that's where that came from it's just anecdotally hanging out with those folks and researching it and it gave me peace because I was starting to make bank for the first time and I'm like I need to be like doing double backflip limited family Partnerships or some kind of crap I don't even know what they are but I probably ought to be doing one if I'm making this kind of money and and then I and you talk to a guy and he's like yeah you ought to do a double backflip with a Twist and I'm like yeah yeah but get right up to it and I'm going you know I don't half understand no I think I'd rather just bury it in the backyard than that because at least I know where it is you know yeah it's funny though because even with the dirt example um there's a guy who his entire investment strategy explained an interview he's like you guys are going to be bored about what we're gonna do for the next 55 minutes because I can explain it in five and we're like and I you know I'm listening I'm like okay here you know here's it he's like okay so what I do is I find a city and I find the main street because usually there's a main street that goes through the middle of the states the oldest street whatever it's like and then I take a ruler and I go out 30 miles he's like and then I buy all that land he's like and then I wait 20 years I love this guy and what are the any questions yeah he's like so what do you want to do with the rest of our time together they're like so how do you hatch he's like oh buy it in cash because you can't you know can't take loans on land and uh yeah that's that's what I do and we've been doing that for many many many I had dinner with a guy the other night that a two billion dollar net worth and he's second gen but his dad was dirt doing dirt not unlike what your friend was doing and um then he couldn't get the bank to do the deal he was borrowing money to do the dirt and so he bought the bank it was a little Hometown Bank and they screwed with him and so he bought it and he's like okay now they'll behave and um then he started making money on the bank and got in and got to figure out how bank and and now they own like 15 or 20 000 Acres three wineries around the world and a whole bunch of banks a bunch of Community Banks and they and their billion multi-billionaires and so yeah but it started from that and they don't really do anything else the wineries are more of a fun project I don't I think they know what they're doing with those probably the way he was talking he knew wine and um the uh but the uh but he knows Banks he knows dirt and that's where all their money is yeah and they're they're not Diversified for having as much billions with an S you know I mean it's it's interesting those kind of people are enthralling to me and it's interesting because most of the the billionaires that I have looked at they usually make their money in one or two vehicles that they know exceedingly well where they feel like they have an unfair advantage and like they they get there not because there's a Marketplace Advantage but because they have an information Advantage they know it better exactly exactly and if you go through the Forbes 400 I think it's 67 last time I looked or first gen they're all billionaires now you don't qualify if you don't have a b and um they're first gen and I think I looked at them of the first Gins uh it was 90 something percent were business driven so it was Michael Dell you know Bill Gates um Hobby Lobby David Green um Chick-fil-A sure Kathy um you know and so they started a business and it led to either they took it public or they just monetized the crud out of it and it just has a value Marketplace valuation Oprah yeah you know um but you know the the secret of Oprah's wealth is not her Celebrity Status it's the Empire she built under the Celebrity Status and so uh you know you go down those things like that and you go okay you can get to one to five million dollar net worth with your 401k and your paid off home yeah but you you know mathematically impossible to get to a billion in your 401k it's not possible to do it yeah so you got to do there's other strategies to be involved if you're going to do that so I wanted to take a quick second because uh it would be hard for me to to talk Dave Ramsey without talking about debt and um a lot of people so in my audience um I'm kind of dead agnostic I don't talk much about it um but a lot of people don't know that I actually have no debt either and so everything I bought to this point in my life has been cash now I'm not against that I just kind of talk about uh you know when I get right at the edge or something I just I end up not doing it um it's been that way with most kind of loan things in general and I read uh Financial or Total Money Makeover um years ago and you have this line in there about debt that was I'm going to try and say it back to you as I understood it because there's there's obviously the biblical component but for everyone who might not believe in that um I wanted to give at least my rap my rational understanding of how you see it which is that debt introduces risk and risk when it when compounded over a long enough time Horizon no matter how big a number you acquire any number multiplied by zero is still zero and so if you know that you're going to be playing this game for a very long time even a small amount of risk when you're going 200 miles an hour you can flip the car that was my understanding of how you saw debt is that accurate that's that's how I I saw it or at least I interpreted your view on debt now that line is actually from Warren Buffett um he uh and one of his his famous annual reports they're they're very cheeky and fun to read and especially the opening paragraphs or so in one of those he was talking about you know down year like 08 um you know we soon discover that Leverage is not always your friend yeah those of us that could do math realize that any number multiplied by zero is going to equal zero yeah and that does that for you so yeah it's um again having grown up in the real estate business one thing you're going to do in the real estate business when I was growing up if you said I'm going to be a real estate investor they took you to the hospital they took out your risk meter and they broke it with a hammer and they put it back in you're not allowed to perceive risk if you're going to be a real estate guy because and because it's ever it's a glass half full or Eternal optimists everything's going to work out because real estate's always awesome it's the most awesomeness um parade you can't mess this up the renters will pay your rent oh God that or pay your mortgage you how can you mess this up and you know so if if a little bit of Leverage is is good then a lot of Leverage is amazing and uh and that's how I went broke yeah you know I leveraged up to my eyeballs on had a bunch of short-term notes in the bank called to the unthinkable and call my notes when they got sold to another bank and they saw a 26 year old kid owed him a million two on the 90-day notes doing flips this was before chip and Joanna told us how to do it and so and do a flip oh my God and we didn't have HG to channel to tell us how to fix up a house I without cable TV I did this stuff and so um yeah so that's where it came from and then what happened to me because I lost everything following the borrow all you can because it works plan um I had to stop and go uh I think I've got a bad set of rules the Playbook I've got sucks I keep losing and and my kids are getting skinny I mean this is not working so when I did that the first as you said the first uh door I went through was I was I had just become a Christian and so I started studying the Bible and so for my as a matter of faith I started reading scriptures and all the scriptures say negative things about that it doesn't say it's a sin they say you're going to hell but it's stuff like the borrower slave to the lender you're a fool if you co-sign I mean it says these things in scripture and then you talk to old rich people and they go well you stay out of that boy you know and okay that's kind of Grandma gods and Grandma's ways of doing it so what did I miss in Academia when I fell in love with leverage from an academic Viewpoint because how is it it's incongruent to me that if this book of wisdom and these people that are long in the tooth with gray hair that have proof social proof they've got money and they kept it are all saying avoid debt what is it that we're missing in academic land with my intellect so spiritual social proof now I got to solve it intellectually and what I ended up doing I ended up speaking at uh Vanderbilt to a group of mbas early in my career and it it forced me to because I knew I was going to go in there and get tackled right because they're going to go you're primitive you believe the Bible you know you don't know anything and you don't know how to do math and I know I know how to do math as a matter of fact it's about all I know how to do I'm a math guy so what I figured out was was that in business debt or real estate debt business is not publicly traded um no one includes all the math mm-hmm they leave out a risk factor associated with that mathematically and so we look at a very inaccurate and primitive measure of Leverage and so if I can borrow this money at two percent and I can invest it at eight why am I not making six well a you left out inflation B you left out taxes but aside from that um and that's pretty basic because this is the argument it's that it is that the argument is that primitive right but you did not adjust for the risk you took on because I think we can all agree if you have a business that's doing 10 million Top Line and you've got uh 12 million dollars in debt you have a lot more risk than if you had two million dollars in debt and even two million dollars is more risk than if you had zero debt we can agree that debt is equal to risk and if we can agree to that then we ought to be able to assign if we're going to really get down in the analytical jungle we can assign a mathematical formula that well Tada there is one it already exists we just never applied it in that in the investment World they teach us to adjust you don't compare an aggressive growth stock mutual fund that has a high peaks and valleys on the graph volatile with a growth and income fund which has almost no Peaks and valleys so a growth and income fund may have a beta of a 0.8 meaning it is only 80 percent as risky as the s p when you're comparing it to an aggressive growth stock mutual fund that might have a 2.0 meaning it's twice as volatile risky and so in that world we're taught I mean one of the first things you've learned doing financial analysis in that world is the bet you use the beta as an inverse in the math and you and you flip it on its head and you multiply it through and you adjust for risk mathematically so that you can then say after you adjust for the volatility the 0.8 versus the 2.0 versus the s p is a 1.0 it's your Baseline when you adjust for that risk uh the perceived Return of the aggressive growth stock mutual fund at 20 ready to return where the other one's making 11.2 it goes away it neutralizes it and you might end up with with a risk adjusted that 11.2 will come up and the 20 will come down yeah risk adjusted and then you can actually compare apples to apples but you've risk adjusted for the volatility and mathematically we don't do that in business right we just go I won't buy bulldozer let's go get 50 000 at the bank yeah and I think I can do it I think we can push some dirt and that that is your risk analysis well kiss my butt that is dumb okay and and people do that all the time and so what I determined was is that I'm going to go if you want to compare two dry cleaners you know one has debt one doesn't I've got a risk adjust for that mathematically and you have to apply a beta formula that I present that to this group of mbas and they're all sitting there with their jaws on their lap going uh no one ever said that and I said it's because it's never been said no one no one does it in the world no one no you're not trained this way you're trained that way in only one bucket of Finance all the other buckets of Finance zero real estate people do this zero none they do not analyze risk and so if you take risk out then unlimited leverage right is logical but if you say unlimited leverage they go oh not quite maybe 80 maybe a 70 maybe a LTV right and uh you know but if you push them up to the edge they can actually feel it a little bit because they there's a remnant of a risk meter in there but it just doesn't function anymore that's where that came from oh I love it probably more than you want it but yeah no no I wanted to uh to kind of hear your take on it and uh because obviously you know in the business acquisition world there's also debt that's that's factored in now we've done all all cash deals um up to this point um but I wanted to just kind of hear your take on it uh and I I quit Warren Buffett a lot he's a big yeah but even though even in the public of traded realm you know if you we were taught and and still taught bonds or debt and so if you're looking at a company with publicly traded stock it has a heavy Bond weight yeah you discount the pde you don't compare that stock Apples to Apples where the company has no bond rate zero bonds that's zero then I bank that then on short-term debt they're sitting over there debt free you you would give them some benefit on their stock analysis mathematically we're taught to do that but again it does not transfer from the mutual fund world or the publicly traded world to the real estate world or the small business World small business uh privately held businesses don't even I mean I know people that do you know do have a billion dollar Top Line and honestly they don't even look at they just they just some a lot of them just don't borrow money they don't even know why they don't borrow money they just don't borrow money because somebody told them to one time and they go I like not being in debt I could sleep better and that's their entire analysis you know uh me I've got analysis and I can do the country boy thing too and say I just sleep better bring on a pandemic I got cash yeah I I'll I'll bring us home because I had a and I could talk to you all day um and I appreciate you taking the time to to you know talk to me and the audience the game I've been honored it's fun fun conversation if you had advice that you could and I'll keep it specific to business advice um that you could give 40 year old Dave would you tell him then that like you know now that you didn't know them play incremental long ball don't look for the home run um I keep waiting for somebody to call me and for this to get easy one phone call and it's all over and it's like oh now I don't have to think about it anymore someone else is gonna do it for me it's all automatic it's never going to be automatic it's never going to be easy it's um it's a hustle and grind it's a claw you're going to make a bazillion mistakes make mistakes that are experiments that you survive you put out a hypothesis you survive the experiment to live another day to have another experiment put out another hypothesis another product that fails another idea that fails and our failures at Ramsey are not in New in number and in money are way greater than our successes the only thing is we survive them a we didn't have debt and B we never bet the farm on one horse and so from a diversification standpoint we never pushed all the chips to the middle of the table on one hand and so we're not looking for the singular home run we're looking to survive and fight another day and keep iterating and the the culmination of that the accumulated value of those iterations are what we call the gleaming mountain of success which turns out as a pile of garbage and mistakes that you're just standing on rather than laying under it I love that uh one of the things that we have in our community is a 100 gold 100 golden BBS no silver bullets there you go that's one that's exactly you know you beat me that's much better than mine I would have just gone with that you know it's the same thing I keep waiting on the phone call but uh I mean it's never I've had a couple of my thoughts yet and then I was um found out they were just people and they weren't Magic well it's funny because I joke with our community because a lot of my community small business owners you know probably you know from a hundred thousand dollars a year to 100 million dollars a year is probably like the broad brush stroke of the people who are listening to this um and the biggest thing a lot of them suffer from is you know shiny object syndrome is that yeah as soon as something starts to get hard something new looks easy and so they jump from the hard thing to the easy thing and really it's just uninformed optimism and then they get into it and then they have informed pessimism that's beautiful that's beautiful yeah I mean by the time it shines you're late you're late it's too late I mean if you think Tick Tock is new you're late yeah it's already not new it may have already turned down and we while we were talking right now well I mean if if we have a second let me know um in terms of how because you've survived survived a strong word uh you've thrived uh platform agnostic you know you have you I mean you were in radio you've done live stuff but then I see YouTube clips uh of your show pumping out every day you guys crush it on YouTube and you do it kind of your way um how have you thought about navigating platforms as they come and go and how you kind of reinvest in where where are we going to make a bet and say okay we're going to start expending resources here or is it just if there's attention we'll go there like how do you think through that uh we try to go there and then we expend resources based on uh results and so um the YouTube shorts that we've been pumping out is only about a year and a half old and uh we're getting incredible results uh but we're getting results on those as an example um we don't view those as life transformation items okay we view them as lead magnets to lead you to the long-form show to Financial Peace University to a book which are life transformation items so um they're um free advertisements that cause people to get in get a little sample you get a little old lady standing in Costco with a sample biscuit right and so you get a little sample and um uh get a little sample biscuit and then you may go buy the whole thing in the freezer uh and but so we I would not do in other words our philosophy on like changing lives is while we're here we would not only do YouTube shorts because they don't change lives um okay we would not only do uh the new long-form tick tock six minutes seven minutes we would not only do that uh because it won't change a life um and so it's got to lead us somewhere and based on its response on doing that or just general activity around whatever the item is whether it's a long form or short form uh it is we're gonna we're gonna pour gas on where we're seeing stuff work and you know so we don't you know for the last two years we put uh little to no effort in growing Twitter [Music] um Tucker Carlson might change that it may become a broadcast medium and uh so we'll probably be on Twitter next week well Elon is definitely yeah pushing Elon and he's gonna but I mean they're if it's not going to just be a uh a cauldron for trolls uh then um and it's actually going to put out some positive information uh in a way that is consumable and could grow and if if Elon proves that with Tucker I mean we'll jump in there and try it right now and all that is we're not going to put a ton of money on it or uh resources or bandwidth on it but we're I this week we were discussing we're probably gonna try it and uh tuck what Tucker's doing and what elon's doing with Tucker and with that whole idea of broadcasting there um because Facebook live is didn't work I mean it's not working no um not from our perspective anyway but we're still there we're not we didn't abandon it but we're not putting effort on it we're YouTube shorts yeah we're in a lot of people in this building working on that every day yeah you guys crank those yeah they do they put out a bunch of them when you think about content for you are you because you're recording 12 hours a week correct four days a day oh 15 hours okay well not counting commercial yeah we do three hour talk radio show every day the entirety of your kind of content creation and then the teams take all of that and disseminate it through all the the channels uh I do a podcast that I just took over that's color driven on leadership in small business called entree leadership took that over in January that and the Ramsey Show are the only two things I'm on but Ramsay network has about 10 shows that are YouTube and or radio and or I mean we put them on everything but um I mean the Ken Coleman show is the only ones on talk radio 75 stations plus podcast plus YouTube um deloney John Dr John deloney has a huge show on uh podcast and YouTube Only The Rachel Cruz with George Campbell the smart money happy hours but we saw dust to every one of those every one of those can we say soda we're going to take uh pieces and clips and do all kinds of things with them instead of we don't go create uh well I say very seldom do we go create a YouTube short of anyone in the building or anything in the building it is clipped from something we were already doing so it's repurposed uh content that was already developed for something else you know highly edited yeah I I mean because I've I've observed what you're doing and thinking like how can how can we do even more of that kind of stuff lots of payroll yeah we're our media is um all right well uh this has been phenomenal and uh I'm honestly just so grateful that uh they they had me and my team out here um to uh this is considered Ramsay Studios is that what this would do yeah um and uh just also so grateful for that one tiny tidbit that wow I'm honored I had a tiny bit to do with all that you do man you're amazing I'm proud of you well done means a lot I appreciate it well thanks so much for having coming on the game thank you brother hopefully the something in the future absolutely you can count on it

Channel: Alex Hormozi

Views: 1,001,761

Keywords: Alex Hormozi, Alex Hormozi Business Tips, Alex Hormozi Gym Launch Secrets, Hormozi, Business guides, Business tips, Skillsets, Skill Stacking, The Game Podcast, mozination

Id: jvXOOddDg_s

Length: 66min 5sec (3965 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 13 2023