You Don't Have an Income Problem. You Have a Money Plan Problem with Tony Bradshaw

[00:00:01] Welcome to Business Finance and Soul. My name is Shaun Enders and I'm a curious entrepreneur. I love exploring business, personal finance and consciousness. I'll jump around topics, offer my opinions and occasionally interview interesting people. Looking forward to going on this journey. Let's be curious together.

[00:00:29] Hey Tony, welcome to Business, Finance and Soul. Thank you for sitting down with me. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I'm really looking forward to it, Shaun. Yeah, I'm really happy because I love your background. It's so varied and follows kind of a similar path to myself in terms of where your interests have been. And I know a lot of people know you as someone who helped scale Ramsey Solutions and now coaches leaders and entrepreneurs.

[00:00:57] But what I think is fascinating is that you've lived through some tremendous growth, wealth, leadership and then raising a big family. I'm interested in understanding more of the operating system behind all of that. So if somebody were to spend a week with you, what do you think that they would discover about more of the way that you approach life, business and money that people might not expect? Wow, that's a heavy question actually because I don't know that I really have what I would call a system.

[00:01:27] It's more of like a flow. So, you know, I think when I was 25 years old and realized I was broke, the first thing I did was kind of start learning about money and then reestablishing my cash flow. So like I think that's a teaching that I represent. It's not really about budgeting. It's more about cash flow. Like where's your cash flowing? Where's your money flowing to? And I think I run my life a lot that way is like what's the flow? Where am I flowing to?

[00:01:51] You know, from doing devotionals, things like that in the mornings, praying in the mornings, just growth, like general growth. I'm always doing something to grow myself every day, to learn something new, to stretch myself. You know, like last night I ran a mastermind group and I just said, hey, let's just talk about AI tonight. Let's just talk about AI. What's it doing? How's it going?

[00:02:14] Because, you know, I got introduced to AI about two or three years ago and I didn't know anything about it. Like I did not have a clue about what it was. But this guy wanted to build his entire business off of AI and I was coming in to kind of run his business. So I got introduced to it and really dunked deep into it because he was really hardcore into it. Like it was all foreign, all new. Reminded me of the days back when I learned about the internet back in 1998.

[00:02:42] Started programming and it was all new. And I had to pick up all these manuals, read all these books and do all this learning. So it's kind of like that with these guys last night. And we just had a conversation about AI. Most of us rated ourselves on a scale of one to ten, around a five or six. Some of them rated themselves as twos or threes with AI. And that's really how I kind of run my life. Sometimes I can be extremely structured around things because of my engineering background.

[00:03:10] And, you know, so I think there are core principles that I live by, like growth. I call that the 1% better everyday rule. That they kind of help me move forward. So it's always about learning something new. Always about applying what you learn and then moving on. So I'll give you an example, Shaun. You know, when I was doing stock trading back in my 20s, I was doing pretty well. I was doing swing trading, you know, getting in and out of trades about every six to nine months. And I was making 60 to 90% of my money.

[00:03:40] And then I would move on to the next thing. The problem was I just wasn't working with that much money. So I really wasn't making that much. And every trade costs like $50 to make. So you were in and out for $100. And when you're only investing like $500, you're really not making that much money. But that was a general flow. And I learned about that. And then I went to work for Dave Ramsey. And I just started doing what Dave taught. And so I quit trading stocks. So for 15 years while I was with Ramsey, I didn't really learn anything new about money. And so there was no growth.

[00:04:09] It was kind of like stagnant. And so I did learn a lot about business while I was with Dave Ramsey. I just didn't learn a lot about money. And so when I got out from Dave's in 2016, I got into podcasting. And I wrote my book. And then that was everything I knew about money up to that point. And then I started podcasting. And that's where I really started to grow. Because now all of a sudden, I'm talking to all these different millionaires. They're all doing it different ways. But they're all following similar principles. But there's like 20 different ways to invest in real estate. Then you get infinite banking.

[00:04:39] And then you get into stocks. You get a swing trade, day trade, buy and hold. And so I started learning what it really meant to build wealth in all of these different ways. But that's where I did a lot of my financial learning and how to invest. And so I have a very different perspective on investing now than I did back from those years of 2001 to 2016. And that's the growth principle, right? It's the principle of just learning something new and then trying to apply that thing to your life and then move on.

[00:05:07] And so that's really what – if I had to say there was one thing that I did that was right, that was probably it. It's just the learning and the growth and the applying of what I've learned to my life. And then, you know, you mentioned I think I have six kids. And trying to transfer what I've learned to those kids, that's a whole other ballgame. Well, this podcast was really created out of the three things that matter to me, you know, which is business. I really enjoy running businesses.

[00:05:37] I enjoy working with other entrepreneurs, employees, helping level people up, personal finance, so business and finance, and then soul. You know, the reason that we're doing it all, you've got six kids. I'm sure that drives you forward on a daily basis in terms of giving you meaning and the richness to life. So I want to focus on the business aspect, then we'll get into a little bit of finance, personal finance, and then this whole part of your life.

[00:06:05] And for business, when you look back, what do you think were the three biggest levers that really drove growth? Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the biggest things was the degree of innovation that I had built into me. So I'm kind of a new guy. I like to try new things, build new things. So I was, you know, as an engineer, my first year as an engineer, I knew I needed to learn about computers.

[00:06:32] And so I picked up magazines and started learning about computers. I started reading every magazine I could find on computers, read books. I had like 300-page manuals. I'm learning about this stuff. And very quickly, I got put in charge of the computer network at the company and started taking that over. So then all of a sudden, I'm 50% engineer, 50% computer technician. And then I got into the internet and started learning how to build applications, databases, things like that, which carried me over to Dave Ramsey.

[00:06:58] So there was this mindset of learning and innovating new things, which carried me to Dave's. And in the first three months I was at Dave's, they tried to put me in charge of the team. And that didn't work out so well. The people that they put me in charge of kind of rebelled, not necessarily against me, but against the whole thing because of the way it was done. It was very dysfunctional. And so they recanted. And so I was only in leadership for about two weeks.

[00:07:22] But what I realized at that point from a God perspective is that if I felt like God was trying to put me in leadership and I wasn't ready. And if I had been ready, those people would have gladly accepted my leadership. And so that started me on the leadership development train. So for the next 12 months, I actually did aggressively pursue leadership from a training standpoint books. I read every book I could get my hands on.

[00:07:48] Dave actually implemented a course called Entree Leadership where he was teaching us about business and leadership. And so that was a weekly thing he did every Wednesday from 5 o'clock to 6 o'clock, 30 minutes of our time, 30 minutes of his time. And that was huge in helping me develop and grow as a leader.

[00:08:06] And so when you fast forward to the next 12, 18 months in October of 2002, that's when I got put into leadership formally and took over what our Internet team was and what our Internet was doing. So then I hired people to staff that. That eventually became 100 employees. And we were involved in everything in the company. But, you know, that was the path that I was on. It was this personal development, leadership growth mindset that had to be there.

[00:08:35] And then now, you know, it's moved into AI. And then that's also moved into me developing my own personal brand and my own personal teaching. So on finance and business. So that's, you know, how I developed. That's where I think one of the three things. That's one of the three is just the innovation side of things. Just to give you some ideas, early on in the days at Ramsey's, we had to build an Internet ticketing system. So we were doing registrations for an event we had. That technology did not exist.

[00:09:04] You couldn't go get Ticketmaster back then. So we had to build that in-house. We also did online stores. Back then, there weren't very, there were very few options for online stores. We bought one. I think it was like $200. We had to fight for that $200 to be able to buy that store because they didn't understand why we needed to spend $200. And that was the days we were living in. And so we bought that. And then we did, probably the coolest thing I did in that time is we built a, or I built actually, a real estate lead generation system online.

[00:09:34] And that was because the system they wanted to do was basically people were going to sign up, put their information in. They were going to print it out, parse it out in the Excel spreadsheet, and then fax it to the real estate agents. And we said, no, you can't do that. We don't want to do that. We want to have them log in so the data will be online. They will log in and get the data. They will research the data. And that was very foreign. It was all new. None of the real estate agents were doing that back then. And so we built one of the first internet-based real estate lead generation systems online, and that came out in January 2002.

[00:10:04] And then on and on. We did podcasting very early, 2005 to 2006. So very innovative in that decade from 2001 to 2010. I think somewhere along the way we kind of stopped innovating a little bit and just became more operational. The business got bigger. I think one of the bigger things, too, is just team development. That was a big thing. So I learned that from Dave Ramsey. He instituted, you know, as soon as you joined the company, you had to go through his Financial Peace University.

[00:10:32] Then if you wanted to be in leadership, you had to go through Entree Leadership. And then Dave would hand out, I think, what became maybe about eight or ten different books that were required reading for all new employees. And what that showed me is how important development was, personal development was for the staff. And it was a core element of the company as a whole. And so that was a really big deal as the company, just to solidify it.

[00:10:57] And I don't think we really realized it at the time, but it really brought people together with the same mindset from a business perspective. And, you know, everybody had a business core. So a basic business core, which was Dave's Entree Leadership. There was two of those. And then probably the third thing was the importance of strategy and vision. Now, what was interesting about Dave's company while I was there is we immediately started doing vision casting and strategic planning.

[00:11:25] Like that's very something that's very normal for me to do is like, hey, we need to plan out the next year. We need to plan out the next two years, three years, four years, five years. I had five year plans in place for my team, but the rest of the company did not have that. The rest of the company was operating on a one year schedule. And it was very interesting to me that there wasn't more strategic planning going on in the company. But that's just not how the company was wired. It's not how Dave was wired. It was very much a one year at a time thing.

[00:11:52] Up until the last year I was there, we went and did our strategic offsite as a board. We did not start doing those till 2012. And then we actually had a three year financial plan at that point. That was the first three year financial plan that we did was I think is October 2015. And so prior to that, there were no three year, five year plans for the company.

[00:12:15] I think those are three pillars that when you look at what got you here, you can use as leverage to get you to that next level. And you can help others get to that next level, which is to innovate, to look at, OK, well, what's my problem? How do we solve it? Maybe there is a tool that's right in front of me. And that's great. Use it.

[00:12:38] Maybe it needs to be custom built, kind of like what you guys had to work on in the early days of ticketing systems and online attendance and creating profiles. But you have to continue to innovate. The other one that I've always really respected, Dave Ramsey and his methodology has been huge personal accountability. Right. You know, really being able to say, OK, hey, I have to take ownership for who I am. I have to continuously learn and stay educated.

[00:13:07] You can't you can't just stop growing. You get you can't get to a point of where you say, OK, hey, you know, now's the time that I've just learned everything and and I'm going to stay right here rooted in my principles. You have to continue to to keep pushing forward and take personal accountability as you push forward. And that's something that I've always really respected. And it's it's great that you've experienced that.

[00:13:34] But what do you think most entrepreneurs right now, you know, really make more complicated than it has to be? Oh, let me think about that one for a minute. More complicated than it has to be. I think probably just business in general. Like I think a lot of entrepreneurs are because you kind of operate in your giftings. Right.

[00:14:01] So if you're gifted in one area, like for me, for example, I am a builder type entrepreneur. I like to build websites. I like to build content. I like to build. But the reality that doesn't pay the bills. Right. So what I find and if I had to say, hey, what was the one skill that, you know, as an entrepreneur, you should have? It's got to be sales and marketing. So and I think a lot of business owners, when you look at failing businesses, that's one of the things that the owner has an idea.

[00:14:28] They have something that's creative and it's probably a good idea, but they're not sales and marketing driven. So they start these businesses and they work in these businesses. They have a good product, but they don't wake up every day with a scorecard in their mind of going, hey, I got to sell something today. Where am I going to sell this? And I think that's the biggest thing when I see businesses that probably fails because they don't have enough focus on the sales and marketing. Because I don't think a lot of business owners are wired that way and they have to hire it.

[00:14:57] So, you know, this is just a revelation to me just in the last couple of years, like three years to go, hey, I'm a builder guy. Like I'll build stuff all day long. I build technology. I'll build all these different things. But if I don't have anybody selling them, I'm not going to make any money. And so I either have to wear the sales hat or I got to find somebody to wear the sales hat for me. Now, right now I'm having to wear it. So I've got to figure out how to get up every day, work on sales, work on the marketing. But I think that's the part where we say, hey, what do you make more complicated? Business is really just a money-making system.

[00:15:26] Once you understand that, then you go, okay, now how do I go make money? And you have to go sales and marketing is at the top of the chart. You know, once you get the product down, you've got to have a decent product. But once you get the product or service down, then you've got to go sales and market. And then if you could do those two things, you're probably going to be okay. You're probably going to make it to the next level, at least in your business. Now, things get more complicated as you get larger. Right. You need more systems, more sophistication, things like that.

[00:15:52] But at its core, it really comes down to businesses are a money-making system. And so, therefore, you need sales and marketing as a core strategic component of that business if you're going to be, you know, if you're going to make it. Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head.

[00:16:05] One of the things that I find small businesses struggle with and the times that I've struggled over, you know, running our company for over 20 years now is the times where we've gotten too emotional and not executed on the systems. That's been the times that business gets complicated.

[00:16:29] That typically happens, you know, after big investments, new implementations, hiring or firing is a big one. Sometimes you just you start doing things based on emotions, not on on the system that you have in place. And I think that that that's something I look at, you know, organizations that have pretty well oiled machines. They really do a great job at executing.

[00:16:55] I mean, you try to remove the emotions out of the day to day and then work the system. And if that's not working, you go back and rework the system and you start to tweak and get, you know, different iterations. But I'm curious because you've coached and been around leadership and, you know, Ramsey Solutions, such a big organization now. And you were there during some some pivotal times in terms of growth.

[00:17:22] I think what were they they went from a million to 100 million while you were there? From about three million in 2000, I believe, you know, because I didn't have access to those numbers. So I'm just estimating about three million in 2002, 125 million when I left in 2016. Yeah. What do you think leaders get consistently wrong when hiring? Because you saw a lot of scaling happening. And then you also just said, hey, I went into leadership and I was only there a couple couple weeks.

[00:17:51] And we had to retool how we were going to, you know, scale. Yeah. So it's pretty simple. OK, this is what I saw. If you got 20 leaders, probably only about two of those have the talent to actually hire people. So 18 of them are making, you know, bad hires or miss hires or. And the reality is this. And, you know, and this is small business, I think, in general is if you have talented people, they will hire talented people.

[00:18:20] Now, in Dave's organization, we had limited skill sets because Dave was driving the machine, you know, through the radio show. So, you know, he's on the show three hours a day, five days a week advertising that shows everywhere all over the radio. So that's our marketing mechanism. So consequently, we did not have business leaders that were good marketers. They didn't they weren't there because they didn't need to be because Dave was doing it all. So it was it was kind of like a crutch. You know, Dave became a crutch of the organization.

[00:18:50] And so then you've got other business leaders that they might be good at, you know, one or two areas of business. But as a whole, you know, not overall. So, you know, there was a lot of grace in the company as far as making up for shortcomings of business leaders. But, yeah, you saw a lot of people miss hire. I miss hired a couple of people. I had one guy. He was kind of temporary. He was just an intern, came in and worked for half a day and then quit. And I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, this is crazy.

[00:19:19] I had another guy that we hired and I told him, I said, hey, man, is there any time you need off? You know, because once you start, please don't ask for any time off until you hit a certain threshold. Don't ask for any time off. And that guy came in. And I think within a week he asked to be off for a concert because his wife had won Josh Groban tickets and he needed to watch his kid while his wife got backstage passes to Josh Groban.

[00:19:49] And this is it's obviously sticks badly with me because this was like 2005, maybe 2006. So it's still it still hurts a little bit. But, yeah, that guy said, man, please don't ask me to do this. Please don't ask me to do this. So I had to go to my boss, try to get approval. My boss said no. And then I went back, told the guy. So that guy, his wife went to the concert. He came in the next Monday, quit or quit and quit the job and went back to work for his old company. I think they gave him a twenty thousand dollar a year raise or something like that. So to go back. So good for him. He made more money.

[00:20:19] But, you know, that was obviously a mishire on my part because, you know, he just didn't fit the culture. He wasn't as committed, whatever the reason. But but that was one of the biggest things is I don't think I think it takes talent to hire talent. And so when you get a lot of people in leadership, they're just trying to make it, man. They're just trying to get by the day to day. They don't get they don't get any real training in leadership because the company will put them in leadership but not equip them. So they won't get any training.

[00:20:45] Most companies don't have any structure on what good training or hiring for training is training, hiring. So there's a couple of good books I recommend. One is called How to Hire A Players. How to Hire A Players is a good book, good reference material for any leader that's trying to staff their team just to give them a little bit different perspective on what that looks like. And then another book called Who, which is WHO, and it's a plan for organizational hiring. So those are two of the books that kind of shaped what I did when I was doing my staffing.

[00:21:13] Now, we had a really good track record with our team. We did not have a lot of misfires. You know, we hired over, I don't know, 150 people or something like that while we were there. Very few ever left. Very few ever turned over. We had a good track record, but it was a long process. You know, it was like seven steps. There was like seven interviews. And then we would onboard them. You know, I started onboarding people, Sean, even before they started. So I would like try to get them equipped two weeks before they came to the company.

[00:21:40] I gave them a 30-day, 60-day, 90-day plan when they started so that they would be productive in those first 90 days. And we would try to ROI them. So we would try to find ROI on our new team members within 90 days so we could have something to point to, to go, hey, that person produced income and revenue for the company. And that way they would feel beneficial to the company, but also the company would benefit from them.

[00:22:04] I think a lot of organizations may drag employees out for a year before they see any ROI off the employee. In a lot of cases, we try to be very intentional about that, try to get at least something in the first 90 days that we could point to to say, hey, this person's valuable to the organization. But those are a couple of the key points. You know, and then you start to try to delegate some of that staffing to the HR team. And you can only hand off so much to the HR teams. I think some companies try to hand off more than they should.

[00:22:35] You know, there's always the one that kind of is there's somebody. This is one thing that bugs me about common, you know, HR practices and staffing right now is usually there's somebody in that pile of resumes that's a diamond in the rough. The HR team is not going to find that person. It's going to take a leader to look at that and go, hey, this is somebody that's a little bit different, a little bit special. Let me take a shot with this person. And the AI is not going to find that person. The HR team is not going to find that person.

[00:23:04] It's going to be a leader that has intuition and talent to be able to recognize talent. So give you a great example. I won't mention any names here. But I had when I looked at Ramsey's leadership team the other day, I there were like, I don't know, 13 leaders on that team. There were five of them that came through me or came through my downline that were on the top level leadership. So that for me, I'm going, hey, I did pretty good, man. I placed five people on Ramsey's leadership team.

[00:23:34] But I looked at other leaders that were running at my level and they had zero on the Ramsey leadership team. And so when I look at that pedigree to go, hey, that person that was pure to me had no qualified, significant hires in the organization versus where I was. So even at the same level, you'll see different skill sets and the ability to staff and hire staff. I want to drill down on that for a moment.

[00:24:00] I don't want to stay too long on it, but I think from a tactical perspective, what you've mentioned, there's a few areas that I'd like to unpack because you talked about onboarding, you know, a week or two before an individual starts, which I think is paramount. You're setting the tone. You're providing clear expectations. And you're not putting it on the new employee to just show up, show us what you have, and then we'll evaluate. You're really looking at it as a full integration. Hey, you're coming in.

[00:24:30] We know how to operate. We know what success looks like here. And we want to see you succeed and bring your talents and really marry them with what we have. How did you put that system together in terms of the interview process, the onboarding, and then the integration as far as the training?

[00:24:52] Was that a trial and error, or did somebody coach you and say, hey, try this operating system to onboard? Yeah. Well, because of my engineering background, I'm very process-oriented in the first place. So when I looked around the company, the rest of the company was not very process-oriented. So you had a bunch of leaders, which I think is typical. You get some people in your organization that are process-oriented, a lot that are not. So my leadership style is process-oriented. So it's very easy for me to go, hey, I need to have a process here.

[00:25:22] Here's five steps, right? So you got the initial interview. It's usually phone-based. It's 15, 20, 30 minutes. Then you bring them in for a sit-down. You do that. And then you go through these different steps. And it could take two months, three months for somebody to get through our interview process. And it got more cumbersome, I think, as it got down into the HR department. They started adding some different pieces in, so it went longer. We were notorious for having extremely long interview processes, sometimes lasting up to six months,

[00:25:50] which I think is insane, maybe two to three months max. We did hire some people within two weeks, though. So those were kind of like rush jobs. It was just super easy to see that they were a good fit, so we just hired them. So you could fast-track somebody if you saw they've got what we need. Yeah. Yeah, and mainly we tried to hire people that fit the culture, so that mattered. So you can hire for passion. You can't really hire for passion.

[00:26:17] You have to hire for – you can train skills. You can't really train passion, right? So that's really what we're talking about. So we wanted to make sure people were culturally connected with Dave. So usually they had to go through the Financial Peace University or they had to have read Dave's book. If they hadn't read his book or been through Financial Peace University, they were a no-go. So as soon as you find that out, boom, culturally not a fit. So you've got to check those boxes.

[00:26:43] You've got to screen them as best you can for home life a little bit. The way we said is if you have crazy at home, you bring crazy to work. So if you've got a wife or a spouse that's a little off-kilter, well, that's going to affect your workload. It's not going to end well. If I could go back and redo it, redo some things in the organization, like in my organization as it gets bigger, I'm going to have marital counseling as a benefit, company benefit, marriage training.

[00:27:12] So we will have a program that goes, hey, your marriage, if you're working here, we're going to make sure your marriage has the best chance possible of succeeding. 50% of marriages end in divorce. I've got a number of friends right now that are going through divorce. Some of them married 35 years. I don't want that to be my legacy as a business owner. All you've got to do is put a little money aside and go, hey, man, we've got courses, we've got conferences, and we have counseling. So there's no reason your marriage should bust up to the best of our ability.

[00:27:41] It's still going to happen some. But I think just filtering for that. We would have family interviews. That was the last step interview was the family interview. So you would do lunch or dinner with a spouse or the applicant and their spouse. And that was just that final check. Now, what was interesting, and then my wife would come, and then my boss's wife would come. So there would usually be about six people around the table. And there's only one time this happened.

[00:28:08] But my wife came back after one interview, and she said, don't. She said, I just heard the word no. I heard the word don't. Don't do it. Don't hire him. And that particular hire, I think he quit within 90 days. No fault of his. No fault of his. He got an offer to go work from home, and he was driving about an hour to get to work. So he got an offer to work from home and wait for phone calls to come in to ask him to do stuff.

[00:28:36] And then if that didn't happen, then he could go hop in the pool at his house and chill for the whole day. So that was his job. So you got to take that job, right? But my wife came back and said, no, don't hire him. But my boss superseded my call and went ahead and hired him anyway. So my boss made the bad hire, not me in that case. But, yeah, the process, I think, is important. Whatever that process is for whoever. But usually it's going to be a multi-stage process.

[00:29:03] You're going to walk through several stages to get to where you've got to feel like you know the person. I think any time you hire somebody and they don't work out, that's a major failure. It's a major cost on the organization. You know, all the time, your commitment, you put in it, you know, it's probably $20,000 at least in cost to the organization for distraction. So it's better to take a little bit longer, make sure the person's a better fit, and wait for the right person.

[00:29:29] But I think a lot of times good employees have, as you mentioned, a good home life and a marriage or a relationship or someone who feels, you know, fully healthy in their personal life ends up showing up fully healthy in their professional life. And one of the things that I'm curious about is why do you think this money doesn't solve all problems?

[00:29:54] And you talked a little bit about cash flow as being a big conversation point for you, something that you focus on. But why do you think so many people with healthy cash flow, six figures or more, why are they still feeling financially stressed? What do you notice in that area? Yeah, so the biggest things there is people don't have a plan for their money. They don't have a vision for where they're going.

[00:30:20] So they keep just repeating the same cycle over, which is work, spend, work, spend, work, spend. They don't ever have that third gate, which is, hey, I need to build some investment. So what I like to do instead of doing budgeting first, I like to do investing first. So I like to teach the principle of how to multiply your money, which is what I did. As soon as I figured out I was broke at 25, I started reading magazines about money, started learning how to invest, started learning how to multiply my money. What that did, because I had that vision, it actually shaped what my budget looked like.

[00:30:49] So if you do your budget first, you're just going to invest what's left over, which ain't going to be much in most cases. But if you can figure out how to multiply your money, understand that principle, it will reshape how you spend your money, where you go, what you do, all these kinds of things. So that's a big belief that I have, especially when you're teaching kids, because kids don't know. They're a blank slate. So if they learn how to multiply money first, and this is what I'm doing with one of my sons right now, is I'm going, hey, I want you investing 50% of your income that you make. And then you can give 10% and spend the other 40% if you want.

[00:31:18] But I want you to have that principle in your head where you're going, hey, no matter how much money I make, I invest 50%. And I'm like, and if you do that, you will be a millionaire by the time you're age 30. So that's a hardcore principle. But most people I find do not have a vision. So when you look at our educational system, it's rote memory. It's not discernment. It's not dialogue. It's not really, you're not critical. There's no critical thinking.

[00:31:45] So because of that, you're getting into the system and you're learning that system, which is, hey, I go to school. I learn what to do. I do my rote memory. I go home. So you're being programmed. Our school system programs you right now. So the same thing happens with your money. Go to work, spend it. Go to work, spend it. Even if you're investing and you're working with a financial advisor, they're only telling you to invest 15% of your income. That's a terrible number because if you're making $70,000 and you're investing 15%, it's just not going to be much. It's not going to be much money.

[00:32:13] So you need to think more in bigger numbers, bigger terms, because that's going to stretch who you are. It's going to stretch what you're capable of doing. But the vision starts first. Mindset is number one. You've got to shift your mindset. Then you've got to create a vision. And then you've got to put knowledge behind it, which is what I call getting money smart. And then once you put those three things in place, then you can execute. But that's kind of the model that I teach. And it works pretty well. Yeah, I like that.

[00:32:41] I like being a little bit more aggressive financially too. And if someone were making $100,000 a year right now and wanted to become financially free, what would you tell them to do first? Making $100,000 a year and want to be financially free. Well, first I would look at my cash flow, audit my cash flow. Where is it all going? So that's the first thing I would do. And then I would see where I could reposition that. So what you're going to find, I've got four categories that I teach. One is the living money bucket.

[00:33:11] This is my budgeting system. Living money, wealth money, play money, and others money. Those are your four primary buckets. There might be some kind of outlier there. But most people have too little in the wealth money and too much in the living and play money. And so what you want to do is pump up your wealth money and you want to bring down your living money as much as possible and then have a reasonable amount of play money. So once you get your wealth money up, you've got to figure out where to put it.

[00:33:36] So depending on how much disposable income you have in the wealth money, you're going to have different investment opportunities. So you're probably going to start with some mutual funds in a stock market. I actually teach a principle called the new emergency fund, which is the old emergency fund is cash and money market. So three to six months living expenses in cash and money market. What I teach is a new emergency fund, which is a combination of cash, money market, gold, silver, and cryptocurrencies.

[00:34:02] So if you had had three to six months living expenses in that model like in 2017, well, instead of having three to six months living expenses right now, you'd have more like 18 months living expenses because cash, I'm sorry, gold, silver, and crypto have all gone up. They've gone up exponentially. Like, let's see, gold's gone up about 300% since 2017. Cryptocurrency's gone up about 10x since 2017. So, you know, and that's why you want to diversify.

[00:34:32] And they're all current forms of currency. You can convert them across, you know, board to come back to cash if you need to. And then if you get tapped out or something, you have a problem, you're going to spend your cash first. And then you're going to go into your cryptocurrency and your gold and silver last. But you're going to look at that and balance it. But those are some of the things that I would teach. Real estate, a lot of people don't. We're trained to put all of our money in the stock market through 401ks. That's a bad model because you're still locked into one equities market.

[00:35:01] And when the equities are up, that's great. When it's down, it's not so great. And the equities market's been down for 50 of the last 100 years. So that's something to understand. When you look back in the 1920s, it didn't really come back until the 1940s and 50s. And then in the 1970s, the market was down really bad and didn't come back until the 90s. So when you look at that, you've got two big periods of time where the market was down. And if you get caught in one of those big ones, then you're going to be hurting pretty bad.

[00:35:26] So if you're 50 and you have a market issue like we did in the 70s or even in the 20s, then you'll be probably dead by the time the market rebounds. And so that's not a good model. So I like real estate because it's a good hard asset. And there's ways to get into it like a REIT, which is like a mutual fund for real estate, but a real estate investment trust. And it actually returns better than the S&P if you get in the right one. They'll return about 11.5%.

[00:35:54] I think the S&P is like 9.5% or 10%. But those are kind of the things I would do to get started. And then once you start seeing that money accumulate, you're going to want to do more of it. It'll become like a drug. And then you'll be like, oh, how can I put more in? How can I put more in? So I had a friend, a guy named Cordell Frazier. And he grew up in a family that was a no-debt family. So he was 30, I think 37 years old. And he discovered investing at 37.

[00:36:21] He had $75,000 in a savings account. And then he learned about investing. So he got into investing. And now every dollar he gets, he goes and puts it into investments. And so he went over a 10-year period, went from $75,000 in savings account to millionaire by the time he was, I think, 47 or 49. Now he's multimillionaire. But that was what shifted. He was 37 years old when the shift happened.

[00:36:47] Yeah, that will, and a big part of that, like you said, coming from a no-debt background, really having that mindset of, okay, let's have some key core principles, which is diversification. You want to be able to understand that everything is cyclical. And if you have all your eggs in one basket, there's going to be good ups, there's going to be good downs.

[00:37:12] But you want to be able to ride those storms relatively in less choppy waters. And you don't want to have to service all of this debt because you are excited about more of a consumer mindset and satisfying the first thing that you need or want and turn it into a need where you're just buying to buy.

[00:37:35] I was wondering, because you've gone through an evolution, I'm sure, like I have in my personal life, a belief that you had at 30 years old that you no longer believe about money. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that would be debt. It would be debt because when I had my financial awakening, I was 16 grand in debt. So I'm like, debt's my enemy. I don't want debt. And so I paid off all my debt within about 16 months.

[00:38:02] So when I changed my cash flow, I went from spending everything to paying $1,000 a month on my debt. So mainly my car note was $300. So I was paying three car notes a month. So they were about $300. So three car notes a month, and then I was putting about $1,000 into investments, $500 in mutual funds, $500 in the stock market, roughly. And that was my plan, right? So no debt. So when I sold my first house, we paid $62,500 for that house.

[00:38:30] My house, that was only $500 a month. So when I sold that house, I was so anti-debt that I couldn't see any other solution. So when we went and bought the house, I didn't really take much money out of equity when I sold that house. But we sold it. But I should have kept that house. The house is now worth over half a million dollars. And I would rent for probably about $2,000 a month in a prominent area in Nashville. And so I should have kept that house. I should have serviced that debt. I could have done it. I should have done it.

[00:39:00] But I was so anti-debt I didn't want to do it. The next house, we actually had it paid off. So I could have easily put renters in there at $1,500 a month, made $18,000 a year. But we sold it. But I didn't need to sell it. And I should have kept it. And so those are two of my biggest, what I would call my financial mistakes. Next, we bought a couple pieces of real estate in Florida in 2015 and 2016.

[00:39:26] And if I could go back and redo that, instead of paying 100%, I would have paid 50% and bought two. And then put renters in them. So they would have been Airbnb and VRBO renters. And it would have been great. Things would have been awesome. But I didn't do that. So I was just too anti-debt to understand risk and leverage. Now, I would do things very differently. I would do a little bit of leverage. But I wouldn't do as aggressive. Like if I had 10 properties, I wouldn't have all 10 leveraged. I wouldn't do that.

[00:39:56] But I might have five leveraged and five paid off. And that way, keep that one-to-one ratio where the risk is lower. You're managing your risk through having one asset that's free and clear, one asset that's leveraged. And then you can double up on your payments if you want to pay the other one down and just grow my portfolio that way. That's how I would attack it today, which is actually what I'm doing. I actually have two 4,600-square-foot homes, the one I'm living in and the one that I'm rehabbing right now. And the other one's leveraged.

[00:40:25] You've got to have a different – you just have to have the experience in order to kind of feel that. And I think that that's something that as you live life, you stack up some of those – I wouldn't call them losses. They're just more lessons that you go, okay, yeah, I know I feared debt, but I could have used it as leverage. Now I get that. How do I do that responsibly?

[00:40:52] And I think that that's the key is the complete no-debt mindset is great for somebody who's just starting out or can't control themselves and really needs to make sure that they put themselves in a position to start compounding their investments or their capital. But then once you become a little bit more sophisticated – sometimes that happens for time.

[00:41:16] But once your sophistication, your financial intelligence grows, then you start to see how you can use those as levers a little bit differently than you would have in your younger years. Totally get that. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's just wisdom. You just get a little bit wiser. You're taking risks. I've got some friends have 10, 15, 20 properties that are leveraged. Yep. The problem with that is they think the way things are today is the way things will be.

[00:41:44] So like, for example, in 2020 when COVID hit, all of a sudden there's a moratorium on renter payments. And now you go two years with nobody paying rent in your property. What does that happen to the landowner? Well, you get upside down. You get behind. You either got to cash service it somehow. But now if you've got 10 properties and they're all not getting paid, and then all of a sudden the bill comes due, that's a lot of cash flow. So those are the kinds of things. You know, 2008, 2009 real estate crisis was one issue. I knew some people that had eight properties. They lost them all.

[00:42:12] I knew some people that had 80 properties in 2008, 2009 and lost all those. So that's the part of the risk and the leverage, which you've got to have a model that mitigates that risk. And it's got to look for the thing that's not there, right? Like when something shifts, what's my risk overall if something doesn't go according to plan and the model that's happening right now?

[00:42:37] And right now, you know, the U.S. dollar is $40 trillion in debt like our government. So that's – for all essential purposes, our government is bankrupt. So – and so you've got to go, okay, so when that nail drops or that pin drops or whatever, what's that going to look like? How is that going to shift things? And that's the risk we're carrying right now is our government is carrying the risk.

[00:43:02] And then you have what are called bail-in laws where the – when your money's in the bank, it's actually they classified as their money, not your money. So when the banks fail the next time, they're going to be able to take depositor assets to reliquify. And then you become, I think, a shareholder in the bank or something like that. But you will lose your cash. Like that is a law that's on the books. There's some other laws out there that are kind of sketchy too around the stock market. I think it's – I forget what the name is, UCC code or something like that, where the people at the top get paid first.

[00:43:32] So when the collapse happens, everybody at the top. So if you're in the market, you're at risk right now. If you're in – if you've got money in the bank, you're at risk right now. So you'd be better off having your money in a credit union than you would in a banking system. When you look at your ideal week now as you're building your business and, you know, being a committed husband and father, what does an ideal week look like for you today? Yeah. For me, it's got to be getting up early.

[00:44:01] I'm a night owl, so I'll stay up until midnight. But I really shouldn't. I should be in bed by 10. So ideal would be be in bed by 10. Be up probably about 6. I normally get up about 7 because I'm staying up until midnight. So I've got to do better with my schedule. I'm both a morning person and a night owl. It doesn't work when you're doing both together. But that's a big one. Obviously doing some reading. My son just gave me a book for Father's Day, this one right here, Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer. And so I'm reading this with him right now, which was cool.

[00:44:31] I thought it was cool that he gave me a book for Father's Day, so I'm already in it, chapter into it. But reading, reading and learning is a big one. Doing something on YouTube because we have so many other things available at our fingertips right now to learn and grow by. So find a conference to go on. I'm actually registered for an AI conference today, which I'm not doing. But just go through an online conference. I think AI, for example, if you're learning about AI, you find one of these two-day AI conferences.

[00:44:58] And they bring these people on that take 30 minutes a segment to teach you something new about how to use AI. I've done one of those already. It was amazing. There's another one today for that. But doing something to grow yourself. And then you've got to figure out how to be productive. I'm a solopreneur. When you're in a business, your productivity is baked into your day, right? So you're being productive because of somebody's schedule for you. When you're a solopreneur, that's much harder because you have to be in charge of your own schedule.

[00:45:27] And if you're not good with that, then you won't be productive. So I have to watch that and be very careful about how productive I am. What do we get out? And then obviously, time with my wife. She works also. And so when she gets home, being able to spend some time with her. And then six kids. Oh, my gosh. We're all going. The thing is, they're all 14 and older. So they're all going their own different ways. So we find time to spend time together for dinner and hang out.

[00:45:54] And then I'll make a point to go up to my kids' bedrooms and talk to them and things like that at night before they go to bed. I was not the best dad, Sean. I was a terrible father up until about eight years ago. And then I started retooling in 2015 and 2018. And I was a terrible husband, too. So if you had to look at me on a scale of 1 to 10 for a husband, I was like negative 1. And so I had to start trying to fix a bunch of stuff in 2015.

[00:46:22] And then 2018, it got more serious. And I started trying even harder to be a better husband. Now I think I'm doing okay. I don't know. My wife may give me a 6 on a scale of 1 to 10 now. But just being serious with that and then hitting the church, hitting church each week. Just being faithful with your calling and walking out your faith. I was going to ask you about that as we kind of wrap things up here. Because you mentioned, you know, raising a family.

[00:46:52] Maybe being a little lopsided in terms of priorities. I think that happens in all of our lives. You know, we're spending maybe too much time in one area. Focusing on building and creating an opportunity for our kids. And, you know, building something, I think, substantive for our families. You've built businesses. You've raised six children.

[00:47:15] What practical habits have helped you protect your marriage and family now that you've kind of been on this different trajectory, you said, since 2018? What are you doing that you could offer to advise it for others that are either raising a young family and growing a business or just in a maybe a demanding leadership role and still being there for their family? Yeah, I think the biggest thing, man, that I've learned that I would tell somebody today is realize your spouse isn't your enemy.

[00:47:46] So, you know, we do have an enemy. And he has a good plan. And it is very destructive. And to realize that if you fall, like, say, if a man falls to pornography or whatever, you know, or a wife falls to whatever she's falling into because she's trying to medicate, that your wife's not your enemy. Your husband's not your enemy. Your enemy is somebody else. And it's extremely structured, extremely brilliant and extremely good at what it does, which is destroy marriages. So there's 50 percent of marriages end in divorce.

[00:48:15] So what I realized with my wife is that my wife is really a 55-year-old woman in a 14-year-old mindset. And I'm a 55-year-old man with an 18-year-old mindset. And so we have these wounds from our childhood. And that's really where the main problems in marriages come from is the wounds from our childhood, whether it's our parents not giving us validation, whether it's our parents abusing us or, you know, maybe our environment was rough on us.

[00:48:44] Whatever those things are, because I had a great upbringing, man. My lifestyle growing up was awesome. I love my parents. They did a great job. My dad was not a leader. He grew up without a father. So he was trying to figure out what it meant to be a father. I used him as my model. That was not a good idea. You know, I thought I was great because I was doing better than my dad, but my dad was not my standard. You know, I should have looked at a different standard for myself than what my father provided. Nothing against him.

[00:49:10] But once I realized, hey, I'm coming up short as a man, well, that gave me a new standard. Hey, I need to adjust a few things here. Some of the things that I did early, relatively early, was, you know, I have one child that was having some medical, not medical issues, but some hormonal issues. And it caused a lot of friction for me and for my wife and our family. I was very, I mean, I hate to say it, but I was abusive. I was verbally abusive to my daughter.

[00:49:38] When we got a little bit older, I started realizing how bad I had been. I'm like, you know what? I'm just yelling at my children to control them. And that's not good. Like, it's not good to yell at your children. You know, it's just a form of control. I feel like I'm out of control. So therefore, I'm going to yell to control. And I'm like, I'm not, I'm going to stop doing that today. I'm going to stop yelling at my children because it's not healthy. And so I stopped. Now, my wife, it took a little bit longer for her because that was her only mechanism to control the kids.

[00:50:08] She wasn't really great at talking to them, you know, to reason things out, to be, you know, she just had like, it was either on or off. And so I had to talk her through that and go, baby, you're just like, this is not you. Like, you're not, like, you're so gentle. But yet, all of a sudden, you become this beast that's very abrasive. And I'm like, that's not you. Like, that's just you control, that's you trying to exert control in a situation you feel uncontrolled in. And I'm like, you need to change that. Like, it's just part of who you are. So you got to change that. So we started learning what it meant to be better parents through that.

[00:50:37] And, you know, it took a number of years, probably about five or six years to get my daughter to recalibrate from some of the wounds I had given her. She's 21 now and she's wonderful. You know, we still have a few issues here and there, but they're pretty mild compared to what they were. But it took six years of healing to get that in place, you know, and to understand, hey, you know, these kids, my wife included, just have childhood wounds.

[00:51:02] And once you understand that one thing, man, you can really adapt and adjust to people because then you can look at them with mercy and grace and forgiveness and all of these different things. And you can learn to be more gentle with that. And then you also have to learn to be confident in yourself and who you are as a person, as a man. I don't really feel like, Sean, that I was a man and started becoming a man until I was 48 years old. So when I look back in my 30s and my 40s, I'm like, man, I was just a kid.

[00:51:30] Like, I was just a little, like, I was clueless. And then I think at 48, I'm starting to feel like a man. Like, what does it mean to make the right decisions? What does it mean to lead your family? What does it mean to be a good husband? And I think I started at 48. I'm a little better today, but I still got a long way to go. I like the awareness, Tony. I think that anyone who's listening is on the track of really wanting to be a better person. And that's where it starts, right?

[00:51:59] Is that commitment to saying, hey, there's a better future for me available. The people that are in my life, kids or spouse, are on this journey with me. And how can we do this together where we're all growing and it isn't me in this silo? So I love that you're vulnerable enough to share your wins and losses, Tony. I appreciate you spending some time with me, talking a little bit about your story and ultimately

[00:52:25] some of the wins that you've had and being able to pass that along in actionable steps to others listening. So where would you like to have our audience find you and engage with you? Yeah, absolutely. Tonybradshaw.com is my primary website. It's where everything goes on. So you can get access to all my books. If you sign up for my newsletter right now, you'll get access to all three of my books for free. You can download it for free. Read those. That's The Millionaire Choice, 31 Days to Get Money Smart.

[00:52:53] And another book I'm working on called Creating Millionaire Families. So you can download those for free. And then right now we have a community that I've launched, Sean, called the Get Money Smart Community. And we're actually putting courses and there's discussion groups and we have events in there. And if you drop on the website and click on join the Get Money Smart Community, it's going to take you to a page where you send me your email address. And I will personally send you an invitation to this community. And it's free, 100% free. You'll be in it for life for free.

[00:53:23] So take advantage of that. We're going to grow this community into something great. And we will eventually charge for it. But for right now, it's free. I love that. I'll put that link in the show notes. And I appreciate you, Tony. Thanks for sitting down and talking about kind of a wide range of topics. And for everybody else, as always, stay curious.