Everyone wants the overnight success. Almost nobody wants the 40 years it usually takes to get one.

That tension sits at the center of this conversation between Sean Kirby and his father, Mike Kirby, the founder of Performance Financial. Sean set out to record what he jokingly called the 20 year overnight success story. Halfway through, he corrected himself. The real number was 40.

That correction is the whole point.

Time Is the Asset You Cannot Replace

The name of this show is Invest Your Time Wisely, and there is a clock built into the Performance Financial logo on purpose. Mike’s story is the argument for why. You can lose money and make it back. You cannot make back a decade. Every choice Mike made, from cold calling grocery stores at 14 to walking away from a CEO seat at 44, was really a choice about where his hours went.

The lesson is not that hard work pays off. Everyone says that. The lesson is more specific and more uncomfortable. Most of the people who could have reached the top simply stopped showing up before they got there.

You Just Have to Last

Early in his insurance career, Mike asked a 70 year old veteran of the business what it took to succeed. He expected a long list. He got one sentence.

“You just have to last. If you last, you will succeed.”

It sounds almost too simple. It is not. Mike is quick to point out that lasting is hard, and that most businesses fail for reasons that have nothing to do with effort. Some carry a bad business model. Some get passed by a changing world. Many fail because the owner loaded up so much personal financial pressure that the business could not survive a slow season.

Lasting is not passive. It is the result of keeping your overhead low, staying out of debt that forces bad decisions, and refusing to quit during the long middle stretch when nothing looks like it is working.

The Trap of Too Much Too Soon

Here is the part most success stories leave out. Mike got the big job. By 1999 he was chairman and CEO, responsible for thousands of employees across two states. And he describes it bluntly as too much too quick.

The problem was not ambition. The problem was that one person cannot run something that large alone, and he had not had time to build and develop the team underneath him. Speed created a gap that effort alone could not close.

There is a warning here for any business owner chasing fast growth. Scaling faster than you can build trust and develop people is not winning. It is borrowing against a future you have not prepared for.

What He Wrote Down Actually Happened

In 1988, Mike learned goal planning for the first time. The framework he still uses is simple. A dream you write down becomes a goal. A goal you break down becomes a plan. A plan met with action and intelligence becomes success.

His claim about it is striking. Since 1988, doing this exercise every year, he says nothing he has written down has failed to happen.

That is not magic. It is focus. Writing the goal down forces you to aim your time at the things that matter most. As he quotes from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least.

Put People First and the Math Works Out

When Mike started over in 2004, he had one client and a hand drawn business plan. Twenty years later, Performance Financial serves roughly 2,000 clients, and he says most of them came in the last five years.

That is compounding. The first hundred clients, like the first hundred thousand dollars in a retirement account, are the slowest and hardest. After that, momentum does the heavy lifting.

But the engine underneath the compounding is not a sales tactic. It is a single operating rule. Put people first, and the money will show up. Mike treats people first as a leading indicator and revenue as a lagging one. Get the order right, and the results follow.

He applies the same logic to keeping a team. People stay, he argues, when they have opportunity, a good environment, and money, including ownership. Have two of the three and you keep them. Take two away and you start losing them. A business with a retention problem can usually find the cause somewhere in those three words.

Kill the Sacred Cows

There is one more rule worth stealing. Mike calls that is the way we have always done it the six dying words of a business. He credits his son Sean with walking in and challenging the assumptions that had quietly calcified over the years.

The phrase he borrows from an old business book says it best. Sacred cows make the best hamburger. Comfort and habit are not the same as a working system, and the moment a business stops questioning itself is the moment it starts to coast.

The Takeaway

The 40 year overnight success is not a contradiction. It is the truth most people would rather not hear. Build slowly, stay focused, write down where you want to go, put people first, and refuse to quit.

If you are a business owner trying to figure out whether you are in the survival stage or the investment stage, that is exactly the kind of conversation Performance Financial exists to have. Reach out and start the one that matters most.

Transcript

Mike: You’re talking about calling grocery stores to sell cantaloupes? I’m talking about cantaloupes the size of basketballs. I’m not sure I’d ever prayed out loud at that point in my life. So I went to one of my classmates that I knew was a churchgoer. He looked at me and said, you? Why you?

Mike: A year and a half ago, you had two Citation II jets sitting on the tarmac, ready to take you anywhere you needed to go. You are now folding the underwear of a farmer in New Castle, Indiana. And he goes, it’s one thing. You just have to last. If you last, you will succeed.

[Episode Intro]

Sean: Hi, Dad.

Mike: Sean. How are you today?

Sean: I’m great. How are you?

Mike: You know, I’m pretty good.

Sean: Hey, thanks. I just want to say thanks for coming. If you’ve listened to the last couple of episodes of this podcast, you’ve probably heard the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Mike Kirby. We call them Mike-isms in the office. I have a three page doc on Google Docs. I shared it with Heather this morning. She’s only been here since November and she said, I’ve heard him say that. I hear that one a couple of times a day.

Sean: So we brought you on today because I want to talk about the lessons you bestowed upon me, as well as a lot of your background story. Dad, I want to start with how you got here today. I don’t mean how you rode in the shotgun seat next to me. I mean, if you look big picture at your whole life and think about how you’ve invested your time along the way, where did things start?

Sean: One of the coolest stories I’d like to start with is what we talked about yesterday at lunch. Do you remember that conversation? I was listening to a podcast on my way back from a coffee date, and it was talking about how incredibly successful people can often look back at one moment in childhood that shows the impact of where they are professionally now. At lunch yesterday, you were telling a story about something that happened to you as a kid that became a defining moment.

Mike: You’re talking about calling grocery stores to sell cantaloupes? I’m talking about cantaloupes the size of basketballs. It’s really not a huge deal, but it gave me some insight that I had. I would say no fear, more than anything. I wouldn’t say a lot of talent, but just no fear.

Mike: I grew up on a farm. I started pulling weeds in a strawberry patch when I was 12 years old. I was really tan from the waist up because I wore jeans the whole time. Back then they called it a truck patch. We had strawberries, I think three acres of strawberries. We had sweet corn, we had cantaloupes, and we planted 3,300 apple trees. It really was a grain farm, soybeans and corn, but to diversify revenue streams back then, they also included a lot of what they called truck patch. Anywhere from the strawberries to other commodities at the time.

Mike: That’s when I was 12. By the time I was 14, I was very familiar with what we were doing. This is Howe Farms out of Middletown, Indiana. And Dave, the owner, asked me to come in because we had all of these cantaloupes. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Indiana cantaloupes, but they truly can get as big as a basketball. We had hundreds of them, and he realized we weren’t going to get enough people to come to the farm to buy them. We needed to go retail.

Mike: So he said, we’re going to call grocery stores today. I just grabbed the yellow pages and started making cold calls. I can remember being on the phone and I didn’t even care who answered. I said, we’re Howe Farms, we grow cantaloupes as big as basketballs. Next thing you know, they’re saying, yeah, we’ll take this crate, this crate, this crate. I even told them we could bring some over so they could look at them. They said, nope, if they’re local grown, we’ll take them. This was harvest market, not the big chains. I want to say we even sold to Marsh, which was out of Yorktown, Indiana at the time.

Mike: We just had some success. And I thought to myself, this is fairly easy. So if I were to really look back, that’s where my sales career started. I can talk to people, which was a gift I got from my dad, who I think got it from his dad, who was a Jewel Tea truck driver back in the thirties and forties. I’m not saying it’s genetics, but I just didn’t have a fear to do it.

Mike: I think that was the big key. You just say, here’s my product, do you have an interest? And once you get enough no’s out of the way, eventually a yes shows up.

Sean: So dialing for dollars at 14 to grocery stores. One of my favorite parts of your story is that it didn’t really catch up right away. When you were 18, did you go straight to Purdue? You went to school for Ag Econ.

Mike: Yep.

Sean: One of my favorite stories is something that happened at Purdue. At the end, they had you do a public speaking piece. How does that story go?

Mike: It wasn’t at the end of the year. It was graduation. I’d been on campus, and the farm kids were easy to pick out. Probably still are today. We ran around in flannel shirts and seed corn hats. The ag school, much like engineering, much like nursing, you kind of get to know who’s in that school and the leadership of it. This was at the ag graduation. They came to me and said, we’d like for you to give the invocation.

Mike: Now, back then, I will tell you, I was not a very religious guy. There were certainly more qualified individuals in my class. I said, are you sure? They said, yeah, we’d like for you to give the invocation. I’m not sure I’d ever prayed out loud at that point in my life, much less in front of however many people. So I went to one of my classmates that I knew was a churchgoer and said, they’ve asked me to do this. He looked at me and said, you? Why you? I said, I have no idea, but they’ve asked me to do it. I need help.

Mike: So we sat down and we wrote a prayer. I couldn’t tell you what I even said, probably even while I was saying it, that’s how nervous I was. They talk about how if you really get nervous, your knees touch. It’s true. My knees were literally touching while I was up there. One of the proud moments is that my grandmother, my mom, and my dad were all at the graduation. Grandma, who was the most religious person I knew, was like, I can’t believe they’re asking Mike to do this, but get it done. So that was the first time I ever spoke in front of more than four or five people. It was a good experience. It scared the daylights out of me, honestly, but we got through it and we moved on.

Sean: So did you go to school for sales?

Mike: Oh, no.

Sean: What was the original plan?

Mike: What do you want to be when you grow up? A farmer. I wanted to come back and farm. I wanted to do two things. I wanted to coach high school wrestling and I wanted to farm. Anybody that watches this is probably pretty young. Coming out of the seventies into the early eighties, you probably heard of Farm Aid. The reason Farm Aid even started is people were losing farms. Agriculture was on a major decline back then. Between the Federal Land Bank and the PCA, they were land grabbing. Farmers overextended themselves, borrowed too much money, with the PCA and the Federal Land Bank eagerly loaning the money to grow.

Mike: But the bottom line is, farmers can’t control grain prices, and inflation at that time, post Jimmy Carter, was insane. You had interest rates jumping to 13, 14, 16, 18 percent. The farmers were just collapsing. So by the time I got out of school, agriculture wasn’t even on the radar.

Sean: So straight out of school, they ask you to give this invocation, you get your speaking chops, and you go straight into what?

Mike: At that time I went to Hobart, because there were no ag jobs. I did all the welding on the farm, so I went to Hobart, the school of welding in Troy, Ohio. I came back and worked for a company called Anderson Tool and Engineering as a precision welder. About three and a half years into that, I looked around and saw that most of the old welders, no offense to the old welders, were alcoholics, miserable, broke down. At the time I was probably 24, 25 years old, and I said, this is not the path I want to be on.

Mike: Backing up just a little, in 1986 I was approached to coach my high school team, the one I graduated from, Daleville High School, to coach the wrestling team. We had a fair amount of success doing that. A little company out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa called Life Investors was recruiting teacher coaches at the time. They had recruiters come in and approach me about selling life insurance. I said, well, let’s try this. It was usually a part time gig. You’d sell life insurance on the side, what we call a twin career. But I soon realized, this is what I want to do. I want to be in the business world. I want to be an entrepreneur. So that’s when I made the leap and went full time.

Sean: So would you say, you know, I’m naming this episode the 20 year overnight success. At this point, it seems like we’re about 40 years. If we’re looking at 1986, that’s actually 40 years in the rearview. As you look over those 40 years, and as each little moment happens, we live in a society where everybody’s in this instant gratification world. If I’m not successful in my first two years, if I don’t know what I want to be straight out of school, that’s the world we live in. How have each of those small patterns, the sales at 14, the invocation at 20, led to 1986, when you made the leap to go do this sales gig? Maybe you found your spark when you were 14. Talk me through those early years in sales to where you finished that first career.

Mike: To back up just a little, I coached wrestling from 1986 to 1989. I would have still been coaching, but I got approached by Life Investors to take a regional director job, which is basically recruiting other people to sell life insurance. A corporate position. So in 1990, I took a position covering Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and parts of Kentucky. My job was to go in and sell the company to potential salespeople. Because I was a product of it, and I’d had some success, the story was easy. I could say, this is how it changed my life.

Mike: Now, I was still selling the twin career part, because coming full time on commission only was an incredibly difficult thing to do. I think my first 1099 was 14,000 bucks. I lived in a place we called the ranch for 85 dollars a month. In hindsight it was a terrible place to live, but I was on the road all the time. It was good enough. It was a bed. I could come home, get my dry cleaning done, and head out on the road again. So I kept very small overhead personally.

Mike: Then in 1990, jumping into the corporate world, my job was to help them succeed. I would work with people called general agents and I would sell a system. If you follow this sales system, this recruiting system, and this management system, you’re going to succeed, but you have to do it every day. What I found interesting during those periods is that I was actually developing myself, because I was forced to be a public speaker. Each step of the road, I would take pages from books. I listened to cassette tape books all the time. I was on the road about 40 to 45,000 miles a year. What else was I going to do, stare at the road? I was going to learn and listen and start to grow.

Mike: What I found was that I was able to lead people in a direction because they wanted to go. And it all starts in 1988, when I went through a school called Tiger School. You think about all your school years. At least for me, nobody had ever taught me about goal planning. When I went to work with Life Investors, in this first school, they said, we want you to do goal planning. Now we’ve evolved to where we say, if you have a dream, you write it down, it becomes a goal. You break it down, it becomes a plan. Met with action and intelligence, it becomes success.

Mike: I wasn’t smart enough to break it down back then, but we certainly wrote the goals down. I wrote crazy things down. I want a million bucks, all the things I didn’t have. It was more materialistic, but it’s, where do you want to be, what do you want to own, what do you want to achieve, what do you want to learn? By breaking that down, I can tell you in hindsight, and we do these every year now, since 1988, nothing I’ve ever written down hasn’t happened. So it begins with, what’s my dream? If I write it down, it becomes the goal. Then I break it down, and this is all about time. It really focuses your time on the things that matter most.

Mike: One of the books I read back then was The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. In that book there was a statement I’ve used many times since. I stole it. The things that matter most to you must not be at the mercy of the things that matter least. In focusing on the things that matter most, managing my time at that point was work. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have kids. So I was able to 100 percent dedicate my time to achieving what I’d written down as my view of success.

Mike: From 1990 to 1996, that was my job. I traveled and helped individuals. In 1996, apparently somebody in the home office realized I was okay, and they moved me and said, we want you to work with another group. It was Bankers Life out of California, mostly West Coast, some in Atlanta. We want you to take over this group. Now you’re talking about a Midwest Indiana farm kid who flew to Los Angeles literally on an overnight deal. They handed me airplane tickets and said, you’re going to be in Las Vegas tomorrow for a meeting, then you’re going to tour the whole West Coast for the next two weeks.

Mike: I might as well have been flown to a foreign country. I had no idea about the culture these people were in. A lot of diversity. In fact, I think the very first meeting I was at, I was the only native born American. They were from Armenia, Iran, Israel. It was just crazy to me. Did I make mistakes from a Midwest perspective? From a West Coast culture, they corrected me. We don’t say guys and gals. Little things, back in the nineties. I was like, I’m not in Kansas anymore.

Mike: So in 1996, by then your sister had arrived, you had arrived, and I was gone. I was literally committed to building businesses back then. I wasn’t balancing my time very well. Work was demanding my time. By 1999, the company had done quite well. They asked me if I would be chairman and CEO. So I took over Life Investors. In 2000, they gave me Western Reserve Life. I can look back now and say it was too much too quick.

Sean: Yeah.

Mike: The reason it was too much is that no one person can run it. I think we had 3,600 employees in Cedar Rapids and 3,800 employees in St. Petersburg, Florida. At that point, it’s all about your team, your assistant coaches. I just didn’t have time to really develop assistant coaches. There was a lot of old culture there. They don’t give you that job because things are going perfect. One person cannot do all that themselves. So I had to start to build a staff. A lot of that is trust, and changing or modifying the culture is a long runway. That takes a long time. I did that until 2004. In 2004, I tendered my resignation. I basically told them, my kids don’t know who I am. I’m traveling 50 weeks a year, and I want to go spend time with the kids. So we resigned, picked you guys up, and moved you to Indiana.

Sean: I’ve heard that story now over two or three episodes where we’ve gone through your backstory. I think that was probably the most detailed you’ve been about it. Every time, I appreciate it, because now that we’re 20 years into this new adventure with Performance Financial, 40 years ago you were just like me. You were a kid, driven, hungry, just trying to figure it out.

Mike: And broke.

Sean: And broke.

Mike: Which I tell people all the time. Some of the most fun times I can think of are when I had no money. No responsibilities and no money, I’m okay with that. When you have a lot of responsibilities and no money, life gets a lot harder.

Sean: To hear that now, as you go back and listen to that story, you can find those moments of, that was too much too soon. You broke off on your own. You started your own advisory practice in 2004. We moved back here. You started with zero clients.

Mike: Not one. Well, not true. I believe Grandma still had a life insurance policy from maybe 1986 or 1987.

Sean: So you came back with one client, and maybe some assets on the balance sheet from prior work, but you’re starting from scratch. So this 20 year success is really a 40 year success. The conversation I want to have today, given that backstory, is that there are a lot of people who would have phoned it in after those first 20 years.

Mike: A lot of people did. From 1986 to 2004, if I look at the ascension of my opportunity to run the insurance company, there’s a fair amount of attrition that moved me up. I just didn’t quit. A lot of guys said, I don’t want to do this anymore, so they peeled off. I don’t want to say I was the last man standing, but it was one of those situations where my track record, and my goal, were never to be the president and CEO. My goal was always to build the best possible people I could with the responsibilities I had. It just so happened that the timing of the exiting CEO and my ascension crossed, and they believed I could do it.

Mike: Did I have doubts? At the time you have fear. What if I fail? But what was failure? We’re not closing the company. We’re not going to make jugular mistakes that make the company go away. It’s just that maybe I wasn’t as prepared as I needed to be. So a lot of my focus at that time was, I was reading two books a week on the airplanes. I was traveling 300,000 miles a year. So I was reading constantly, building hopefully a base of insight. I subscribed to CEO magazines, things like that. Where were the trends? There were a lot of moving parts. But I never lost focus on the people. Put people first and the rest of it takes care of itself.

Mike: Will things break? Business is messy. We talk about it all the time, and it doesn’t get cleaned up no matter who the head coach is. It’s just messy. How you manage the mess is what matters. If you always treat people with dignity, you’ll figure it out. Sometimes it costs the company to do that. Sometimes it doesn’t. But in the end, if you always put people first, the results are the final judge.

Sean: There are like 11 Mike-isms in that last little bit. I love it. What did it feel like, because again, I was eight years old, to go from the mountaintop, president, CEO, you’ve achieved all these goals, to start over? Any of my Charterpoint fans out there, we’ve been going through our lead pastor’s sabbatical, and this last message was a lot about the Sabbath and taking a rest. So what did it feel like to go from the top of the food chain with 7,000 people underneath you to one man, one show, in a new town, starting fresh?

Mike: Well, God has a great way of humbling the ego. Along the way we started buying laundromats. This is a great, not humiliating, but certainly humbling story. We bought our first laundromat in Pendleton, and for tax reasons I bought one in New Castle. These were full service laundromats when we first bought them, meaning there was a drop off, what they call fluff and fold, and then the vending side.

Mike: One particular story is in New Castle. The week I bought New Castle, they had six employees, and it’s a vending machine business. The reason they lost so much money was those six employees. So I didn’t carry any employees forward. We basically started from scratch. I went over to check on it the very first week, and this old farmer pulls up. He’s got his clothes and he lays them up on the counter and says, I’m here to drop off my laundry. I said, well, I’m the new owner, we’re not going to do that anymore. He says, well, I need somebody to do my laundry. I said, I’ll tell you what, I’ll do your laundry this one time, because you didn’t know.

Mike: And as I’m folding the underwear of a farmer, a voice in my head went, you know, a year and a half ago, you had two Citation II jets sitting on the tarmac, ready to take you anywhere you needed to go. Now look where the Lord has put you. You are now folding the underwear of a farmer in New Castle, Indiana. And all I could do was smile. I thought, okay, this is where it goes. We’re starting over.

Sean: Goodness gracious. So you came back with a plan. I’ve seen the old school layout of what you thought this would be. If you go back to that scratch pad you started with, your 40 year old self, what did you write down, and then what has it turned into over that time?

Mike: I’ll go from 2004. I resigned in January. They asked me to stay for two months during the transition. We bought a house sight unseen in Pendleton, Indiana. We moved in April. I was blessed, because as I traveled the country, I saw business models I really believed would work. They involved property casualty insurance, they involved tax, they involved other things to gather assets under management.

Mike: We knew we wanted to be an advisor. I had passed my Series 7, I’d done all the work to be licensed. But what I soon realized is, you don’t just go knock on doors and say, can I manage your money? We had to have other ancillary businesses, in a hub and spoke concept, that would drive people to get things done that they needed done, so we could have the conversation about the things they should be doing.

Mike: So I sat down and drew it all out. Again, the goal on paper, the dream and then the goal. It always started with financial services in the middle, which is asset management. Then I went, okay, how do we get into the P and C business? How do we get into this business? When I first came back, I was selling life insurance just like I did 20 years earlier, and was doing pretty well at it. I think the first month we did 10 grand, which, remember, my first full year I made 14,000. So clearly something had changed.

Mike: We hadn’t entered the other businesses yet, but the vision was still there. I get my first life insurance client, second, third, fourth. But I was already having the conversation about assets under management. I remember the ball diamond in Pendleton is really how we engaged the community. Not only did I buy the laundromat, which had been there since 1960, and people were already asking, who’s this guy from Iowa buying our laundromat, because it’s a community laundromat and they believe in that, but now we get to know everybody at the ball diamond. Through casual conversations, oh, this is what I do, this is what I do.

Mike: Not a hard sell by any means, just throwing it out there. One of the people we got to know pretty well was in a car accident and got a settlement of a hundred thousand. They brought that hundred thousand to me, and we did full financial planning. I thought, man, these people are trusting me with a hundred thousand dollars. I really need to do a great job. In hindsight, that same person, we did a 40 or 50 dollar a month life insurance policy for 450,000. Sadly, two years later, he passed away. And now there’s 450,000 for the family. The kids are the same age as you. You know who I’m talking about. The wife worked at a salon cutting hair. This was a huge, life changing amount of money.

Mike: So we had to really manage that. It was the first time I went, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing. If you play it out over that two, three, four year period of us being here, this is why we do it. I’m happy to say she has way more than the 450,000 now. She put both kids through school. She’s received a monthly income for 20 plus years. We’ve used that as the model as we work forward with clients today.

Mike: I don’t know how many clients we have now, 2,000 roughly. So clearly the word’s out. A, we survived, we’re still in business. And B, we’re doing the absolute best job we can for every client, putting their interests first.

Sean: Hearing that story, starting with the humble beginnings, when you think about time, relationships, faith, and money, everything compounds. It feels like, of the 2,000 we have today, the majority are in the last five years. You think about how compound interest works. It’s a slow but gradual piece, and the next thing you know, once you hit a million dollars in your account, now it’s that much easier to get to two. That game of double.

Mike: I talk to people, especially young people, about starting your 401k. The first hundred thousand is the toughest. It seems like it takes forever. But if you think about it in terms of client acquisition, you’ve got to start with one, and you just keep at it, keep at it, keep at it. People ask, we give a lot of free advice away, and they say, well, do I owe you anything? I say, we build our business one of three ways. One, you pay me. Two, a referral. And three, don’t be afraid to come back for these other things we do. You may not need it today, but there are other things we do.

Mike: We were blessed coming out of the CEO position that I wasn’t strapped broke. I was able to reinvest in the business, and over time we’re getting our money back from that investment. Now, the theme of this is invest your time wisely. One thing we did correctly, as I look back, is we didn’t put all of our eggs in one basket. At the time the laundromat came up for sale, I was really looking for our office, which is right next door. I was looking for the real estate, not so much a laundromat. But when I stepped away from that, I said, well, does anybody still use a laundromat? That was my first question. Then I realized, after we bought it, it is a staple in the community. The referrals we get out of that laundromat sometimes just amaze me. It also diversified income streams. Now, 20 years later, the building’s paid for, the laundromat’s paid for, and we’re reinvesting in it, updating equipment. It’s somewhat surprising even to me how well it worked. When you’re 20 years earlier, you’re going, I hope it works. Now you look back and go, that bet worked. So sometimes you’ve just got to take a risk and say, I believe this is going to work.

Sean: Sometimes it’s luck. What’s the phrase you use about luck?

Mike: It’s when opportunity meets preparedness.

Sean: Would you say, if you look back, you were lucky, or do you think two books a week for 20 years was really the driver of that compound interest you’re starting to see in success today?

Mike: I’m not a big believer in luck, unless you’re doing scratch offs, which I don’t do. I do like pull tabs. That, to me, is entertainment. If I want entertainment, I’ll spend it somewhere else. But the thing I would say is that statistically, in what we learned through observation or study, the time we spent doing that allowed us to make the least amount of mistakes. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve started things that just didn’t make sense. What I learned about our business world is, when I dabble, it’s generally going to fail. So you’re either going to jump all in or stay away from it. It doesn’t mean you don’t stick your toe in the water first, but dabbling, businesses that you’re really not paying a lot of attention to, that you’re not waking up every day going, I’m going to make sure this works, that’s costing me money.

Mike: So we really stay focused. But if you look at how diversified we are today, we couldn’t do this without the 10 people on staff, the three people in the auto business, Steph and what she’s doing. Part of the job is to attract and keep good people, not just as clients, but people on board who are part of the mission, who believe in what you’re doing. That’s where we talk about opportunity, environment, and money.

Mike: I learned this early on. Opportunity, environment, and money are what motivate people. Opportunity to grow personally and professionally. An environment that’s fun, motivating, challenging you to be better today than you were yesterday. And money. There are two types of money. The money you make and spend, which pays our bills, and the money you get to keep. Ownership is a big part of that. If you can build an environment where people believe there’s more opportunity tomorrow than there is today, and that there’s more money to be made plus ownership, you won’t lose anybody. Have any two of those, you’ll keep them. Take any two away, and you’re going to start to lose people.

Mike: If you have an attrition problem in your business today, just look at opportunity, environment, money. All the money in the world, if the environment is toxic, or the opportunity is, this is the highest you’re ever going to get, you’re still going to lose people. So have any two, they’ll stay. Have only one, and they’re going to be looking.

Sean: I think, at least in our business and a lot of people’s businesses, your people, especially if you go back to your story from when you were running insurance companies, you weren’t focused on the insurance company, you were focused on the people. Your people are your biggest investment. That’s my favorite part as a coach. I think that stems all the way back to you. I was raised to pretty much be you when I grew up, whether I knew it or not, and it’s a blessing. I catch myself saying it all the time. Going through being 22 years old coaching 18 year old kids, to two years ago coaching 15 year old girls, by the way, that’s a totally different experience. If you haven’t coached both high school girls and high school boys sports, totally different dynamics. All of that has helped me professionally. And now, as a dad, how do you invest in these little tiny people to let them make their own long term decisions and hopefully get the best?

Mike: The part I had to learn early on is, who am I to be telling somebody else what they should be doing? That’s where I had to focus on systems first. I’m not telling you that what I’m telling you will work. What I’m telling you is, if you follow the system, it will work. My job is to help you implement the system, inspect what you expect, and then, if it’s broke, how do we fix it?

Mike: If you think about raising kids, wrap it all with love, of course, and complete compassion and an unbelievable desire to watch them succeed. It still is a system. And that system is, I can’t do everything for them. If I expect them to grow, pain is a part of that. They will experience pain. If I rush in to fix all the pain, they won’t grow. It’s the same in business. If I rush in to fix the pain for my client, or for my employees, they’re not going to grow.

Mike: Let’s take a client. If they’re overspending, my job is to show them a budget. It’s their job to follow the budget. But you’ve got to go back to the goal planning side, because you said you wanted this most. That takes discipline, to say, I’m willing to follow this budget, so the things I want most aren’t at the mercy of the things I want immediately. That’s a system.

Mike: I think about Ruby, Poppy, Goldie, and Benny. The system is to show them ways to learn to read. Here’s the system to learn to read. Here’s what math is. Those are functional. Then, when you wrap it with love and empathy, the likelihood of all four kids being Phi Beta Kappa, with the same desires, cookie cutter, that isn’t going to happen. So you’re going to have to modify the way you raise each kid, but the system doesn’t change. I may have one, let’s take Ruby, who loves engineering at six years old, because you’ve exposed her to it. Her passion right now is something my brain doesn’t work that way, but her little brain seems to. Then I look at Poppy, and her brain is not even close to the engineer.

Sean: Pinball.

Mike: Very similar to somebody else I know.

Sean: Yeah. But if you think about that, the system of teaching them and loving them is the same. I think it’s patience. So to close this out and wrap this episode, one of my favorite stories is the definition of success you gave me, that some old guy gave you at a conference back in the day. Do you remember this story? I’ll let you close with this last remark.

Mike: It’s really fairly simple. I’m a young guy in the insurance industry. I joined what was called NAIFA back then. I went to my first meeting, and it was about a 70 year old crusty life insurance salesman who gave the talk that day. I’m eager to learn. After the event, I went up to him and said, I just got started in the industry, what does it take to succeed? I was expecting this long, drawn out, here’s what you have to do, boom, boom, boom, ready to take notes. He goes, it’s one thing. You just have to last. If you last, you will succeed. And it stuck with me all these years.

Mike: There are a lot of things to lasting. A lot of things. Most businesses don’t make it. Some of it’s financial. Some of it’s a bad business model, just, you know, selling buggy whips, and today’s environment doesn’t make sense. Some of it’s just the world passing whatever you were doing. Other times, your commitments financially were so heavy on the personal side that you can’t afford to last on the business side, so you’re forced to make decisions. But if you last, and we’ll get into the survival stage of business versus what we’ll call the investment stage, the growth stage, it really boils down to, you’ve just got to last. If you last, then you’re going to be sitting where we’re sitting now, looking back over 40 years and going, it worked. It actually worked.

Sean: And I’m thankful it worked, because without you setting the foundation, putting all that in, I wouldn’t be here today.

Mike: I’m going to give you kudos for this, because once you reach a certain level of success, and I’ll just call it income at this point, you can easily fall back to, my number one word I hate in the English language is lazy. You can slowly get lazy. You don’t realize you’re getting lazy. I don’t have to do that anymore, I don’t have to do that anymore. Where you came in and you went, Dad, why are we doing it this way? The six dying words of a business are, that’s the way we’ve always done it. And sacred cows make the best hamburger. That was a book I read years ago.

Mike: You came in and shot the sacred cows. You learned very quickly that old dogs don’t like new tricks sometimes. But the way you sold it, the way you had to learn to modify the way you sold it, an example, walking in and going, hey, you know that idea you had last week, Dad?

Sean: Which one was that?

Mike: Yep. Make it your idea. It’s always worked, especially when I need the credit card. That was one of those things. I’d seen that trick before, but it was fun to watch you grow into it. I can’t just walk in and go, this is dumb, why are we doing it? I need to walk in and go, hey, I think this is what we need to do, and let me show you why. If I look at how much fun we’ve had over the last few years and how much growth we’ve had, you are a major part of that, because you challenge the norms. That’s been exciting. It gives me confidence that the day I die, or become disabled, and you’re going to take over, this is going to be just fine. The number one thing I’ve got to do with everybody in the office, put people first. The money will show up. Put the people first. Leading indicators.

Sean: Always.

Mike: Always.

Sean: Well, Dad, I love you. This was fun. I think I learned a lot more about you than I had before. So I appreciate your time. You have a lot of layers. Thanks for putting a clock in the logo, and for always making me focus on what I’m not looking for as the most important thing.

Mike: Absolutely.