Entreleadership

Introduction

And So It Begins

Have you ever been broke? I mean, can’t pay your electricity so it gets cut off? I mean, have your home days from foreclosure? I mean, worrying about how to buy food for your children? I have.

Have you ever been broken? I mean, you set out to live your dream by opening a business and for a while everything goes great, then things start to happen? Bad things start to happen. No matter how hard you work or how smart you are the, dream turns into a nightmare. You invest every ounce of who you are emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, financially, and physically into your dream and it still hits the wall and disintegrates. Have you ever been broken like that? I have.

Over twenty years ago I set out to live the American dream of owning and operating my own business. As a young twenty-something go-getter, I grew my real estate investment business quickly. I started from nothing, and by the time I was twenty-six I had over four million dollars in real estate with over one million dollars net worth. We owned and/or managed hundreds of rental units, ran three rehab crews, and quickly grew our little empire. However, I had built the business with too much debt and had managed and led poorly. Our primary lender was sold to another bank, and after looking at our situation, they made the fateful decision to limit their risk by calling all our notes—all at once. I spent the next two-and-a-half years losing everything I owned. We were sued a gazillion times, foreclosed on multiple times, and we finally went bankrupt. There I sat with a new baby, a toddler, and a marriage hanging on by a thread, a broke and broken man. I was so scared and so scarred that I surrendered. Completely.

This is not a book about recovering from failure; although, if you are going to lead and/or own a business, you will learn those lessons either in small ways or, sadly, in big ways. However, it is good for you to know the root, the DNA, of our tremendous success in every area of our business in the twenty-plus years following the crash. My total surrender following my failure is at the root of our tremendous success today.

Today we have hundreds of team members, millions of customers, and tens of millions of dollars in revenues. Our company started with very humble beginnings on a card table in my living room, after the total failure during my twenties.

This book is our playbook. Within it, I will show you the same methods we use to achieve unusual levels of not only financial success, but more importantly, tremendous satisfaction and joy from our business. The point is you can win in business and have a blast doing it.

What you are about to read is not a business and leadership book that is theory. This is not a book with formulas based on research. This is a book with principles that were discovered by experience. If you look closely at these pages, you will see they are dotted with lots of blood, gallons of sweat, and many tears. This is the personal playbook of an ultra-successful EntreLeader. You are about to learn from me and my team of leaders what we have learned by DOING IT. We are practitioners. I wrote these chapters in between attending marketing meetings, solving team-member issues, and brainstorming ways for making our customer service even more excellent. I actually do this “winning at business” thing every single day.

Surrender

So how does my surrender play into our success? I was so broke and broken, at the bottom of that valley, that my personal faith was deepened dramatically. As a Christian I made the decision to run every area of my life as consistently with the Bible as I could. Whoa, don’t freak out on me. You are NOT about to enter the Christian theology of business zone. I promise not to pummel you with my faith in the coming pages. However, it is important to relate that once I started over and opened our new business, I decided that I would follow the spirit and the direction of Scripture to operate our business. I am convinced that those principles, woven into the coming pages, are the reason we win.

Even if you aren’t a person of faith, you have to believe in hard work or you won’t win. You have to believe in treating people like you want to be treated or you won’t win. You will discover, as I unpack the principles we follow, they are very akin to common sense. There is very little that is mystical or weird about how we work, except that we win. Whether you are a person of faith or not, you will agree and nod as you read this book.

At the Start

We started our business of teaching people to handle their money on a card table in our living room. We started with one-on-one counseling and some speaking engagements. When all the hours of every day were filled, we decided to hire our first employee. But I soon found out that I didn’t want employees. Employees come to work late, leave early, and steal while they are there. None of them work as hard or care as much as I do. So I resisted a normal employee model and relationship so much that I have quit using the word employees. I call them team members, and I mean it. I make our leaders and our team use the phrase, “team members.” What’s really weird is that we demand they actually act like team members—members of a team. We want givers in our organization, not takers. Takers leave our group really fast because they don’t fit in.

So I hired my first team member, Russ Carroll, to help me with the financial counseling load. We moved our little bit of furniture out of my living room into a U-Haul truck and then to our first little office. I remember busting my knuckles on the door when I was carrying a desk to the truck. That desk is still in our building, and it probably still has somewhat of a blood stain on it.

We hired a lady to be our secretary, bookkeeper, receptionist, and everything else that needed to be done. With long hours, lots of uncertainty, and passion, we slowly began to grow. We looked up a year or so later with seven people on our team and a little better and bigger office. We were still very much pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. It was at this point, with seven team members, I began to realize the need for developing other people to help me lead. That was a scary thought. Like most young entrepreneurs, I was very confident that I could get the job done and that I could motivate and lead people reporting to me to get the job done. But I was really unsure about letting go of enough control to let someone else lead. We formed our company into three departments (which later became divisions), and I began to pour hours and hours into the three men running those three departments. My goal was for them to be able to know what I would do at any given time in any given situation. The process of mentoring them into the young leaders we needed was slow and thorough. But my trust in those men has grown every day for twenty years, and today, as we have fought and bled together, they are some of my best friends and most trusted advisors.

As we continued to grow, it was time to grow more leaders. At that point we didn’t have the luxury of time that my three EVPs and I had when we were growing, so we needed another plan. When in doubt a teacher . . . teaches. I am a teacher. Since I teach people every day how to handle their money we decided the first thing we needed for growing leaders was a class. I started teaching a class on our operational and cultural playbook. I taught the class from five to six every Tuesday night. Since we close at five thirty, team members who were interested in how we run and grow our business could learn thirty minutes on my time and thirty minutes on their time. At first ten or twenty people came. Then my team started asking if spouses or pastors or friends or family members could attend because the content was, and is, so rich. Since we were just running the lessons through the copier, and it was easy to add people, we opened up the class to anyone who wanted to attend. As I taught through the material a couple of times, we saw that we were growing confident and competent leaders. Before we knew it, there were close to a hundred people coming—and most of them didn’t even work for us.

The Playbook Is Born

Sometimes I am not very smart, but I quickly realized that so many people yearn to learn how to lead well and to run their own business that we needed to expand the class. So we started teaching, and charging for, a weeklong cram course we now call The EntreLeadership Master Series. The response was huge and ultimately the reason for this book. Together in these chapters we are going to work our way through our playbook. The playbook that has caused unbelievable success, the playbook that was birthed in pain, and the playbook that was written one mistake at a time. Our championship team is no accident. We have intentionally built a culture, a value system, and operating principles that cause us to win. The vast majority of the plays in the playbook are from our mistakes. We screwed up, that screw up brought us pain, and we vowed to never get hit that way again.

Making mistakes and learning from them is crucial to winning. Learning from others mistakes is less painful. Henry Ford said, “Those who never make mistakes work for those of us who do.”

It is this spirit that built America, and it is this spirit that has caused you to pick up this book. If you can relate, or want to relate, stay with me and I will show you how to win.

Introduction

Chapter 1: EntreLeadership Defined

Chapter 2: Start with a Dream, End with a Goal

Living Your Dreams, Visions, Mission Statements, and Goals

Chapter 3: Flavor Your Day with Steak Sauce

Making the Most of Time Management and Organization

Chapter 4: “Spineless Leader” Is an Oxymoron

The Easier Way to Make Hard Decisions

Chapter 5: No Magic, No Mystery

The System, the Recipe, and the Truth about Great Marketing

Chapter 6: Don’t Flop Whoppers

A Practical Guide to Launching Your Dream

Chapter 7: Business Is Easy . . . Until People Get Involved

Hiring, Firing, and Personality Styles

Chapter 8: Death of a Salesman

The Art of Selling by Serving

Chapter 9: Financial Peace for Business

Bulletproof Principles for Money, Debt, and Funding Your Future

Chapter 10: The Map to the Party

Grasping the Undeniable Relationship between Great Communication and Great Companies

Chapter 11: People Matter Most

Building Unity and Loyalty with Your Best Resource

Chapter 12: Caught in the Act

Amplifying the Success of Your Business through Recognition and Inspiration

Chapter 13: Three Things Successful People Never Skip

Dealing with Contracts, Vendors, and Collections

Chapter 14: Show Me the Money!

Compensation Plans That Fire People Up

Chapter 15: Mastering “the Rope”

Delegation: The Best Way to Build a Business Bigger Than You