Episode 1459: Interview with Richard Walsh About Why Your Created a Job, Not a Business

[00:00:00] Scott Maderer: Thanks for joining us on episode 1459 of the Inspired Stewardship Podcast.

[00:00:07] Richard Walsh: I'm Richard Walsh. I challenge you to invest in yourself, invest in others, develop your influence and impact the world by using your time, your talent, your treasures to live out your calling. Having the ability to start with the end in mind is key.

[00:00:23] And one way to be inspired to do that is to listen to this, the Inspired Stewardship Podcast with my friend, Scott Mader. I look back, I'm like, man, how did you even actually make it that far? You know what that added to? Because I had clients, Scott, literally multi billionaires, owned multiple professional sports teams, things like that, right? Giving me advice. And what do I say? What do they know?

[00:00:52] Scott Maderer: Welcome and thank you for joining us on the Inspired Stewardship Podcast. If you truly desire to become the [00:01:00] person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent, and your treasures for your true calling. In the Inspired Stewardship Podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world.

[00:01:18] In today's podcast episode, I interview Richard Walsh. Richard shares with you how he failed and discovered that he went about business all the wrong ways. I also asked Richard to share what you need to do to make sure your own business isn't just a job. And Richard also shares with you the key messages of his book, Escape the Owner Prison.

[00:01:40] I've got a new book coming out. Called Inspired Living, assembling the puzzle of your call by mastering your time, your talent, and your treasures. You can find out more about it and sign up for getting more information over@inspiredstewardship.com. Inspired Living. That's inspired [00:02:00] stewardship.com.

[00:02:01] Inspired living. Richard Walsh is the CEO of Sharpen the Spear Coaching. Richard is a 30 year seasoned entrepreneur. He's the bestselling author of Escape the Owner Prison, the Contractor's New Way to Scale, regain control, and Fast Track Growth while Loving Life. A speaker and a podcast host. He's a husband and father of six children, a US Marine, a champion boxer, a black belt, and an internationally recognized steel sculptor.

[00:02:31] His expertise lies in combining both the strategic and the tactical. He's able to deliver immediate, problem solving results, along with strategic, long term implementation of systematization and scalability. With over 30 years in business himself, Richard has embraced time compression, sharing the secrets and strategies that bring rapid and lasting results to the companies he works with. Welcome to the show, Richard!

[00:02:56] Richard Walsh: Hey, Scott, how are you?

[00:02:58] Scott Maderer: I am doing [00:03:00] good this morning. It is a bright, shiny day here, and it looks like it's raining where you're at. So you could send some of the rain over this way. We would appreciate it. We need it. That would that would be helpful. So I've shared a little bit in the intro of some of the things that you've done and the book that you've got and some of those things.

[00:03:19] But I always think of introductions as the Instagram photos of our life. We just show, part of the frame. We definitely don't show the full picture. Would you talk a little bit more about your journey and what brought you to focusing on helping businesses in this way and putting this message out to business owners?

[00:03:40] Richard Walsh: Yeah. So it's a long and storied time. Okay. And I'll make it quick, but got out of the U. S. Marine Corps in 1987. I had to get a job because you need to make money. So I decided to make money swinging a pickaxe, digging trench to lay cable for 5 an hour in Tucson, Arizona. So you basically, you can dig [00:04:00] about two inches at a time with that.

[00:04:01] We had to go 18 inches deep and it's like a hundred degrees out. Lovely time. So I'm like, wow, this is quite the future I have in front of me here. I didn't think anything was worse than the Marine Corps from that standpoint, the sitter, so I was like, okay, but then I got a side gig.

[00:04:14] Someone asked me if I could help them and they wanted me to move granite. So they in down in there instead of grass, they do granite, three quarter inch granite. So if they go I said, yeah, I can do that, man. I work hard all day. They had 35 tons of it that had to be brought to the backyard.

[00:04:26] So I said, okay. So I use like my last 85 bucks seriously, bought a wheelbarrow and a shovel. And I showed up and I did it. I got it done in about 10 hours. It was hot, sweaty. I loved it. Got done. And then they came out to pay me and Scott, they gave me 1, 000 in cash and I'm looking at that 1, 000 and I'm thinking I did basically the same thing yesterday for 50 bucks and it changed my life.

[00:04:51] I was now going to be self employed for the rest of my life. I'm never working for someone again. I can do this all day, every day. If [00:05:00] you're going to pay me a thousand dollars, this will be awesome. I'll be fit, I'll be tan, and I'm going to make a lot of money. So that really started the whole entrepreneurial journey.

[00:05:08] Ended up getting into landscaping. Then sooner, soon after that, I was into custom water features. So I built waterfalls, ponds, added steel sculpture to that. I became an internationally recognized steel sculptor, won awards, huge. world class projects. Again, same thing with my water features. That was one of the best in the nation.

[00:05:25] Did really well. Scaled that. It was going awesome. Got married and had six kids and they were all like under four years old and 08, 09 hit and it really hurt. And my business in one day, one day specifically started on November 5th of 2008. I lost a half million dollars in a day. It was right after the election.

[00:05:46] Everyone was canceling contracts. No one was spending money. If you remember back in the way that people were just terrified. And that was the start of the fall off the cliff. Okay. We milked through part of 09 and just like it was not going to work. It [00:06:00] was going to be done now at the same time. I'm thinking like, okay, here I am.

[00:06:05] Am I going to make it? I've done this for so long. Am I done anyways, and I'm trying to figure this out, but there was no recovery there. I was about to lose my house. I lost everything, but I woke up and I realized, I have six children, and at night when I get home, finally, working all the time and come back, they all attack me and they love me and they want to be with me.

[00:06:23] And then in the morning I leave early. And one time my son was chasing me down the driveway in my pickup truck. He's crying. Cause I'm leaving. And I'm looking at the rearview mirror and I'm like, dang, this is what am I doing? What am I driving right here? This is all like collapsing. I'm still trying to go and hold up the building, so to speak.

[00:06:39] I'm like, this is nuts. I go, my kids don't care what I drive, really where we live, what I do. None of that mattered to them. It was about like me being around them, seeing me and being with me. I'm like, if I stay on this trajectory of business first, I'm going to ruin my children's lives.

[00:06:58] their relationships, their [00:07:00] marriages, right? Everything's going to be sacrificed on the altar of business and they'll never have balance. They'll never have any kind of real relationship. So that was my epiphany that really caused me to close the doors. It was over anyways, but I sped it up. I wasn't going to drag it out until I'm dead.

[00:07:14] Dead. It's just let's get out of here. This is done and finished. I lost everything, relocated, had to start over. So on that point, I'm like, okay, how do I do this again? Because I'm unemployable. Remember 50, 000 I'm unemployable. Okay. So I have to do this again in a different way, not the same business, completely different.

[00:07:32] And how do I do that? Raise my children, be around. I don't want to be a stay at home dad, right? But I want them to be able to see me. I want to, when I want to go home, I want to go home. I want to pop in for lunch. I want to pop in for lunch. I want that kind of freedom. So I figured all that out.

[00:07:46] I connected all the dots of all the many things I did wrong in my business. Because Scott, I don't blame the 08, 09 collapse. That was just another indicator. The final indicator that had a lot of holes in the bucket. [00:08:00] Okay. I ignored a lot of things because to me, and when I teach a lot of people making money in business is the easiest thing you can do.

[00:08:08] All right. Everything else that's hard. So with that, I connected those dots. I fixed it. I started over, but I built it the right way this time. It was awesome. We've homeschooled our kids all the way through in the high school and everything. And it's just been awesome. Done a couple of businesses since then wrote a bestselling book called escape the owner prison.

[00:08:28] I started helping other entrepreneurs. Cause how'd you do that? So I started mentoring them and then went from the mentor position into the coach position. And it birthed all the coaching. I've been doing it for quite a while now. And brings us up to today. And here we are.

[00:08:40] Scott Maderer: When you go back in time a little bit I think A lot of owners, a lot of business people, they get in that and it can even happen in a W 2, corporate job where you start looking at everything as the, this is the only thing I can do. This is the only way [00:09:00] I can make money.

[00:09:00] You even said it a little bit yourself when you said, in terms of I'm unemployable and I get why you said that, but at the same time, no, you probably could have found someone to have hired you if you really wanted to, that really wasn't what you wanted. Why do you think we fall into that that feeling of, what I'm doing now is all I can ever do, so to speak.

[00:09:19] Richard Walsh: I, I think Scott is identity. I think our work becomes our identity. As men. Okay. I can speak for men cause I'm a man. Okay. That's easy. It's really easy to get our identity in our work because it's accomplishment, man. It's effort. It seems like you can see change, right? You can accomplish things and do things and get credit and all that kind of stuff.

[00:09:40] But cause I truly was that. That's another thing I realized. Always had my company shirt on, hat. Every car, every truck is wrapped, right? It's all that. It's all promotion. It's if it wasn't me, I am the best at what I do. I run the business. I opened the door. No one, I do the sculpture work. I'm [00:10:00] right there.

[00:10:00] You see the pattern. Okay. It's a bad way to think it's really bad way to think. Okay. So I tell my kids don't do what I did. Do what I do now. I like, so I think that identity, what I realized too, once I shut it down and collapse, I literally had a bonfire in the backyard, burned all my uniforms, even new ones, right out of the plastic, polo shirts, all this stuff, I burned them all.

[00:10:21] I said, I am never doing this again. I sold every welder I had. I sold all my equipment. I'm never doing this again. I am an all or nothing guy. I I am 100 percent or nothing. And that was like this, this what would you call it? Demonstration of I'm done and I never went back to it.

[00:10:37] Scott Maderer: You were burning the boats.

[00:10:38] Richard Walsh: Yeah,

[00:10:38] Scott Maderer: exactly.

[00:10:39] Richard Walsh: And then people like, and now I will say and I owned everything, all my equipment, everything else, I sold it all. And now in retrospect, maybe that wasn't the best idea because I could still use it and do things. And my wife would definitely say it was the wrong idea.

[00:10:54] But that's how I operate. Because that's my incentive, right? So I did that. [00:11:00] Yeah, very much that. I think it's identity. I truly think it is. I think we get so wrapped into it that now we have to go change our identity. Think about that effort. That's why we don't just go find another thing or start something new. But once I overcame that Scott, it was like, Oh, I can do anything I want now.

[00:11:16] Scott Maderer: It's just, yeah, that it is part of that. And I would let me ask you another related idea and bounce this off of you and see what you think. I'd like to hear your reaction to it. I think to beyond identity or wrapped into that answer of identity.

[00:11:33] One of the things that happens is we confuse our purpose. What we're supposed to be doing with our assignment, which is, how is it playing out in this particular role at this particular moment? The deeper drive that we have to do things to to be meaningful.

[00:11:49] Like you said, we wrap our identity up in that because we find meaning there. We find identity there. We confuse the career the assignment with the calling or the purpose or the passion [00:12:00] behind it.

[00:12:01] Richard Walsh: Yeah, I think that is really insightful. That's very good. Okay. I like that. I like that analogy.

[00:12:08] I think that's spot on that. It is an assignment. All assignments are temporary, right? You get them done and you move on to the next assignment. And this was a 20 year assignment. And now it was done. It was finished. It's time to go on the next assignment. So I really liked that. I liked that. It

[00:12:26] Scott Maderer: doesn't make it easy to let go of it.

[00:12:30] I'm not saying it's easy, but it does, that frame does help me go, Oh, okay. That assignment's over. Let me move on to the next thing.

[00:12:36] Richard Walsh: Yeah. Change doesn't come easy for anybody. Whether you're an employee, an owner, kid, an athlete, you can't put football anymore with a dirty diaper, still, so it's all that.

[00:12:46] And I think it's important. Here's the thing that I love to do now as a coach and working with businesses, that kind of insight, like you just spoke about, and I'm speaking about like sharing that and helping these people realize this early. Scott, I [00:13:00] did not accept any help for 20 years. Okay. I was a prideful.

[00:13:06] Egotist who I will do it. I'll do it on my own. Anyone's help. I'm a Marine. I did dip my shoulder a little lower, push a little harder, get through this. Yes. It'll take twice as long as twice as hard, but I will succeed. And man, what just. It's moronic. He just say, I look back, I'm like, man, how did you even actually make it that far?

[00:13:29] You know what that is? Because I had clients, it's got literally multi billionaires, own multiple professional sports teams, things like that. Giving me advice. And what do I say? What do they know? They don't build water features. They just have that they just and I'm like and I look back and of course everything they said was true and right and I'm just an idiot and but you just look back and he's still makes me smile if you can see me right now I'm smiling because I love those people for that because I'm [00:14:00] still in it an intimidating dude.

[00:14:01] So like they would give me the advice, but they wouldn't press.

[00:14:04] Scott Maderer: But

[00:14:05] Richard Walsh: I also think they're wise enough to know he either gets it or he doesn't. And right now he doesn't

[00:14:10] Scott Maderer: at some point, it's they're not listening anyway. So why am I wasting air?

[00:14:13] Richard Walsh: That's right. But they're just wonderful people.

[00:14:16] And now I share the story because now I'm that guy sharing with other people and trying to help them and coach them right now, they're in a position where I can actually, let me tell you what I did. What happened to me, I see the same, the same pattern coming your way. So let's correct that, so it makes it good.

[00:14:32] Scott Maderer: One of the things too, that, like I work with a lot of people that are coaches and help them launch their own coaching business. And one of the things that I've told people is the truth is you don't want to talk people into coaching because if you talk them into coaching. You now have to talk them into everything else.

[00:14:51] You want them to come to you when they're ready for coaching, because then, and it's the same thing. You weren't really ready for that advice at that point in time. So [00:15:00] exactly. They related it on deaf ears, yeah.

[00:15:02] Richard Walsh: You know what they say people need it, but they got to want it.

[00:15:04] Scott Maderer: They got to want, they don't want

[00:15:05] Richard Walsh: it. Everybody needs it. Yeah. I, everything, and, but you gotta want it.

[00:15:11] Scott Maderer: So one of the things I like to highlight is our connection between our faith walk, our faith journey and our life journey and how that, 'cause I think another place where our identity and our beliefs and our behaviors get tied together is that feedback loop between those things.

[00:15:26] Would you share a little bit about how your faith journey has gone as you went through all of this and how it affected what you went through and vice versa?

[00:15:33] Richard Walsh: Yeah, it's, it's actually a really cool part of it. So again, all this time working, everything else, I'm getting married. I guess we had six, six more children.

[00:15:42] I guess they all start off small, don't they? But they were small. I don't know. My son,

[00:15:46] Scott Maderer: my son was 11, 11 pounds, five ounces at birth. So he's never been small.

[00:15:51] Richard Walsh: None of ours are that big but yeah. So while we have all that, we're going, everything collapses. I'm struggling through all this stuff now at this time.

[00:15:58] So late all night, I'm [00:16:00] a. What I call a Cino Christian in name only. Okay, so go to church do my thing, but I don't know Jesus I don't know any of this stuff, right? So so we continue I get through this We relocate start doing that stuff start, you know We'll go to a new church new things and I start wondering like I was gonna show this like what is this being saved stuff?

[00:16:21] And they're talking about that. So I, email the pastor and I'm talking to him and I find out what it really means, okay, except Christ and all this stuff. So I'm like, wow, that's really interesting. I've been going to these big churches and they never mentioned that. I've been sending these sermons every Sunday and there's never an altar call.

[00:16:36] There's no one ever talking about this. Like it's the key element of being a Christian. For me. So I realized that and that was a big life changer, of course. And that really changed my trajectory on what I was doing because I ended up with that, the piece that surpasses understanding. So for me, that was like, Oh, okay, now I got that.

[00:16:54] And we talk about identity. Now I had an identity and that was in Christ. for me. Okay. [00:17:00] So okay. And you never leave you or forsake you. So that's never going to change. So I can keep that. Businesses come and go, people in my life come and go, but this does not. So it really changed. I started thinking about it and I spent a lot of time in the word.

[00:17:12] So I'm reading through the Bible a lot and I'm seeing all these really cool principles, business principles and things that I operated by already. So whatever my family influence was coming up, I did things for the majority of the right way, but I'm like, Oh, this is actually, there's actually a.

[00:17:27] There's actually, someone's done this before, someone being God, right? He lays it all out for you. You operate this way and the blessings are within these boundaries. So that was really cool. And that really helped guide me writing my book, coaching programs, how I work with business owners and things like that.

[00:17:42] And raising my children, that influence working with people at church. So I'm very involved in all that stuff. And I think honestly, Scott, that I'm not going to say word saved me. It didn't save me, but man, it changed my, the trajectory of what I wanted to do, how I wanted to help people.

[00:17:58] I had a different reason. Now [00:18:00] it wasn't so they could make more money easier. It wasn't that it wasn't there. There was a, there was purpose and there was impact. I wanted the business to have understood the effect of a person and what you can have on someone. And as a business owner, If you have five people 50 or 250, you can, and you can impact the change in that, which then goes home to their families that then goes in the community. So I'm like, wow, that's purpose. So all of that, it really, it came from my biblical perspective. I ended up homeschooling our kids all the way through, right? I went through high school and everything. So we did all that as well. So I could give them a biblical worldview. And we based everything on that.

[00:18:38] So all that really strengthened me, Scott, and just, it changed who I am. So I am not who I was that first thing, praise God. Okay. Because man, what what absolute misery that would be. So that's really where that came in for me. And it is, it was a big

[00:18:53] Scott Maderer: deal. So let's talk a little bit about the book, escape the owner prison.

[00:18:58] Why [00:19:00] did you want to put that book out into the world?

[00:19:04] Richard Walsh: What I did when people started to ask me to help them. And I started looking at what people do. I'm like, I'm seeing the patterns. Why does, why is everyone doing what I did? What's going to happen. Like you're all doing exactly what I did the same thing.

[00:19:18] So what I say it's, they start a business and it's all very hard work. There's no getting, I haven't figured out how to not have it be hard work when you begin. So your first two years, you're going to wear a lot of hats. You can do a lot of work. You can do all the work, all that. But then what happens is next thing, 10 years has gone by.

[00:19:33] You've repeated the first two, five times. And that's why you don't scale. And that's why you don't have freedom. And then you're still trying to make payroll next Friday. And you're doing all the same stuff, right? Because you haven't learned, grown, or understood delegation, elimination, automation, things like that.

[00:19:47] So I'm like seeing this, I'm going, okay, and I like to write. I'm like, I'm going to write a book. I'm gonna write a book and I'll tell them what they should be doing and what to avoid and everything else. And I'll weave my story in there. So they know it really [00:20:00] happened to me. And this is what you can avoid if you read this now.

[00:20:03] And that's really why I wrote it. And the most challenging thing, and I wrote it very quickly. It was in me. So it was like three weeks. I had an editor and she would edit chapter by chapter, and just for a caveat, the hardest thing of the entire book. Was the title and the subtitle I had 27 working titles got 27 escaped you in a prison was number 28 I'm like, those are the way that I got this one.

[00:20:30] Then the subtitle was another, The Contractor's New Way to Scale, Regain Control and Fast Track Growth While Loving Life. Even harder than the main title. Okay. But we did it. But then I got it to people in the reading, they're like, this is me. This is what I'm going to go. I know. I see this like everybody, anyone's in like the million to 10 million range gross revenue.

[00:20:50] They all are suffering from a part of this or all of it. So I'm like, man, if I could help people compress that time and avoid this stuff, skip the costing [00:21:00] mistakes, the bad decisions, right? Stuff like that man, that could really alter people and their business. They could do more good.

[00:21:07] 10 years when you're raising a family is a long time. That's a long time not to be involved with your family. So I'm like, how can I save them from that? Cause a lot of entrepreneurs, some are single, some are just married, but a lot of them have young children and they're doing this thing. So they've taken that risk and they want to succeed for their kids and do all that, but they don't know how they just know they'll work harder.

[00:21:27] It's that hustle and grind nonsense, and they get sucked into that and caught on the hamster wheel. And that's what happened. So the whole goal of the book was to help people see that now. Yeah, there are a lot of great pointers in there, but like any book, if you can get someone who knows it and can coach you and take you that direction, that's what we want, right?

[00:21:45] We just don't go out and play football on the team. We get coached by multiple coaches, right? So we can do it, so that's that was the impetus behind it all.

[00:21:53] Scott Maderer: So when you mentioned you, you started seeing patterns, you started seeing things that people. Are doing wrong the [00:22:00] trap part of the, owner prison or the prison part, what what are some of the ways that we end up doing that, falling into the way where the business is taking up all of our time, all of our energy, all of our emotion, and yet.

[00:22:15] We're not scaling. We're not growing. We're not, hitting the goals that we want to go. What is that trap that people fall into it?

[00:22:22] Richard Walsh: I can make it really simple. It's lack of exit strategy. So you don't have a plan. That's what it really is. You didn't do the business. You're making money. I'm going to go.

[00:22:36] I'm a carpenter. I'm going to go do carpenter things. People are going to hire me, like me, I got 1, 000 for shoveling the ground instead of 5 an hour or 50, right? I'll go do that because I'm strong and I can push a wheelbarrow. Okay. That's good for a little while But then what now I got four guy need four guys to push wheelbarrows.

[00:22:54] Oh now I have a business now I got to take care of them. I have to do this, right? So they get caught into that [00:23:00] and but you don't know where you're going with It's a couple of simple questions the one you always ask yourself. How much is enough? If I want to start a business so I can have freedom and make a lot of money a lot of money is not a number, right?

[00:23:14] We need a number. How much is enough, right? And there's a whole process to go through that. When do I want to be done with this? Is it 10 years, five years, two years, 25 years handed down to my kids, and don't hold your breath on that one, giving it to your kids. They usually want to do something else. So if you don't plan the fail to plan, you plan to fail that whole thing, right? But the exit strategy, it gets even bigger than that, right? You start with that because now, cause you, you start with the end in mind, you reverse engineer how do I get there? So it's going to look like this, right?

[00:23:47] Come all the way back. So what that does, it gives you the plan of when you're going to need your first employee and your second, right? And you're third. So instead of wearing nine hats at each point, you take a head off, give it to someone else. Next point, [00:24:00] take the head off, give it to someone else. That's what you're doing.

[00:24:02] That's when you begin the freedom part, right? You start to delegate. And there's a whole thing. We talk about that and doing that properly, but here it is, same thing like, okay, you're doing really well, making a lot of money. And I'll just use a simple rounded example. Let's say. You're killing it.

[00:24:16] You have an exit strategy for 10 years. You want to sell for 10 million. You're bringing home a million a year in salary for yourself, from active business income. Okay. And let's say you get the 10 years. And you actually get that 10 million. What are you not going to have after you sell a million dollars a year in salary?

[00:24:35] So you just lost a million dollars a year in salary. So what do you do? With an exit strategy, you can go, okay, I'll be making that. How about, cause you shouldn't have to live on a million dollars a year. If you do, we might have to talk about other things, right? But you can take that money and use it to acquire assets that are going to generate income for you, right?

[00:24:54] Your passive income to replace the million. So if I could have 83, 000 a month by the 10 year [00:25:00] mark. So when I do sell my 10 million, I get that. Now I leave, I still have a million dollars a year coming in passively. Or if I decide to move the goalposts, cause I'm having such a good time at the 10 year mark.

[00:25:12] Things are going great. I'm making money. Great. I can stop taking the salary and put it all directly into asset allocation right now. I can really exponentially grow my assets, my passive income, right? So you plan this. You have a purpose. You have a place for your money to go. Every dollar that's brought into the company has a place to go.

[00:25:30] It's called Parkinson's law. If you don't have a plan for every dollar, whatever there isn't a plan for will evaporate. It'll just be gone. If I gave you a hundred dollars, Scott said, Scott, you're a good dude, man. Here's a hundred bucks. Oh, you take your wife out, have a little lunch, do this, go buy something, we'll get something for the kids and then five days later, the hundred's gone and you won't even miss it, right?

[00:25:50] It doesn't matter. Yeah, I got some things. That's evaporation, right? There was no purpose for that. So that's how you, this makes you think. So the exit strategy actually becomes [00:26:00] an incredible business filter for you too, because you're going to get a lot of opportunity. That's going to come your way.

[00:26:05] Distractions, shiny object syndrome. Hey, you can make money if you do this, cause you're doing well. So they think people think you can do well in everything, but you're really focused on the main thing. So all you do is say, okay, let me take a look at that. Does it get me closer to my exit or does it detract from it?

[00:26:21] If it detracts from it, I give it a hard note. If it gets me closer, okay, let's do this. So it becomes a really good way to measure these outside influences and opportunities to help keep you laser focused on that exit. And the last point on having an exit strategy is you build a business to sell. You have it self running, you systemize, you have the processes, you have the right people.

[00:26:44] They have defined lanes that they're operating in. They don't need you. You can leave for a month and not call, come back. And the business hasn't burned down. Okay. Everything is good. And that's what we want, right? So just that exit strategy, it's just multi facets of [00:27:00] success built into it because you have to do certain things to make it happen.

[00:27:04] Scott Maderer: When you think about that, when. Early on you mentioned, as you're building and as you're scaling and you're passing those hats off, from, okay, now I've got somebody that can wear this hat. How often do you hear, but nobody can do that as good as I can, as the answer to passing that hat off.

[00:27:26] Richard Walsh: I probably hear it all the time because that's what it is, right? And they can't do it as good as me. My customers will not be happy because they hire me. I do this, I'm the best this, I'm the best that, okay, I do this the best. The reality is, if I have someone on the team who does it 95% as good as me, or 97%, I assure you, your customers will not know the difference.

[00:27:52] For one thing, that's the first thing I say. So if a guy can be 95% as good as you, you can spot let him do it. You can get him [00:28:00] to the a hundred percent, couldn't you? I said, you can't leverage yourself. Yeah, you think that's it. It's not it. And I'll give you an example from my business. So I built custom water features.

[00:28:08] I'm an artist, right? I placed the rock. I make it. It's, it looks like it's been there before the house when I'm done and everything else. Once I'm like, okay, guys, you got to knock this one out. The homeowner should be home later. I painted on the ground, point the waterfall this way towards the deck, blah, blah, and they go.

[00:28:21] And I come back at the end of the day, it's finished, right? It's running. The homeowner comes out as I'm coming around the back. And she goes, it's amazing. I've never seen anything so beautiful my whole life. And I just went. I'm free. They don't need me. She doesn't. And I back and look and go, why would I put a rock there?

[00:28:39] I would have tweaked that a little bit. I don't care to them. It's the most beautiful thing they've ever seen. And that was another epiphany moment. Oh, these guys don't need me. They need me for 20 minutes in the morning. I just saved like eight hours a day, every day I'm like, this is awesome.

[00:28:55] You have to be able to accept that. And when we go in and coach people, Scott, I'm [00:29:00] a, what's the term? I would say I'm a little assertive and forceful in making them assume that they got to show them, you got to let them know you have to, but you also have to give them a replacement.

[00:29:11] What does that mean? Because an owner, our goal as a business owner, everyone's goal should be, you should be focusing on only the 5 percent in the business that only you can do. The vision, the growth strategies, things like that. Everything else should be handled because anyone can do that. Remember you are the highest paid employee on the staff.

[00:29:32] And not what you think

[00:29:33] Scott Maderer: well or should be should be,

[00:29:35] Richard Walsh: but even what I do in these, I do seminars and ask what do you think you're worth per hour? I ask all these owners, right? 10 in the room, a hundred dollars an hour, $150 an hour. I'm like, okay we gotta, I'm like, we gotta talk. I say, you kidding me?

[00:29:48] I'm gonna tell you how much you're worth. Just I'll give you a number. It's $1,500 an hour. Now, would you pay someone $1,500 an hour to clean the toilets, to sweep the floor? Okay, to [00:30:00] drive a truck? Would you pay? No. Okay. Then why are you doing it? Because that is what you're worth. When you look at what you do, if you had to replace you, that's the number you're going to pay some, right?

[00:30:11] And granted, they might be this scale, that scale doesn't matter. The idea is you have to have that mindset because how can you lead a company when you think you're only worth a hundred bucks an hour? You can't have the vision because you don't value yourself enough. So we had to put it in perspective and it changes things when they realize that.

[00:30:30] And then you show them, okay, do this with this. Okay. Build this out. Give us a, isn't that nice. You just save six hours a week. Wow. So now I take you from 60, 70 hours a week down to 20 hours a week in six months. You're like, that's amazing. Yeah. That's because you thought you had to do it and you don't.

[00:30:49] And it's beautiful. And no one has said boo about it. They're all good. Your people love working. Your customers love the end result. Everybody's happy.

[00:30:57] Scott Maderer: In fact, sometimes they're happier. [00:31:00]

[00:31:01] Richard Walsh: Yeah, that's definitely right. Scott, because I always wanted to hire people who know a lot more than me.

[00:31:05] Scott Maderer: All right.

[00:31:06] Richard Walsh: I don't want. Someone in my accounting department to be, to know less than I do about counting.

[00:31:13] Scott Maderer: Could you help me out with this math problem? Cause I'm not sure

[00:31:15] Richard Walsh: if that was the case, I'd definitely say you got the wrong guy.

[00:31:21] Scott Maderer: And I need to fire you and hire somebody else because we got a problem.

[00:31:26] Richard Walsh: I'll give them a hundred bucks and say, get out of the office. I'll save money.

[00:31:31] Scott Maderer: Yeah. It, I think too, that So and I'm sure you've seen it too. I've seen folks that have, million dollar a year revenue, 2 million a year revenue, and haven't paid themselves for two years.

[00:31:43] Richard Walsh: Yeah. It's

[00:31:45] Scott Maderer: it's wait, why is everyone else's paid and you're not, what's wrong with this picture?

[00:31:48] Richard Walsh: Or they say my accountant told me I shouldn't make money the first three years. I'm like fire your account. Okay. Like I'm making money. Okay. If taxes, what I have to pay. Two things on that. [00:32:00] First, that means I'm making money. There's no such thing

[00:32:02] Scott Maderer: as a hundred percent tax rate.

[00:32:03] Richard Walsh: That's right. But the second thing is get someone in for tax strategy and someone who can help you keep as much as possible legally possible.

[00:32:11] Right? Don't, I don't want some guy telling me I'm not supposed to make money for three years and I get it, they want you to buy, go buy, at the end of the year, you're buying like three trucks and a trailer and what, so you can hide. I'm like I don't need that right now. Yeah, but you got to use this money.

[00:32:24] They got to give it away to the government. Okay. We need to talk about strategy.

[00:32:27] Scott Maderer: Let me spend 30, 000 on trucks. So I don't spend 10, 000 of the government. Exactly. It's

[00:32:34] Richard Walsh: just

[00:32:35] My wife will kill you. Okay. Forget about what I'll do. My wife's going to kill you if I do that. Okay.

[00:32:41] Scott Maderer: Yeah but but that is, I've seen that too, where the accountant's basically telling them, cause if you do the math.

[00:32:47] It, if their tax rate is 30%, I spend I spend a hundred thousand dollars to save 30, 000. That's not good math.

[00:32:55] Richard Walsh: Yeah it's a broken system, but you have to just be smart. That's what [00:33:00] strategy is about. So tax strategy is, it doesn't start on, it doesn't start on April 15th.

[00:33:06] It starts the year before and you put everything in place and you keep building and reallocating and doing things like that. And you get someone who's good at that. Now you're keeping more of what you make because we just, it's just a sieve. But that's

[00:33:20] Scott Maderer: different, but that's different than I do all of this stuff.

[00:33:24] So I don't pay taxes. It's the motivation is different. One of the, one of those is what can I do that's smart and legal and, ethical and moral and whatever else you want to, flame but it's. But that allows me to maximize the money that's coming in versus, I think that's part of the problem too.

[00:33:42] Sometimes people are looking for ways to quote, unquote, take advantage of the system as opposed to no let's maximize it, but do it the right way.

[00:33:49] Richard Walsh: Cause you know, when they talk about corporate loopholes, I go it's a neat little term. I think the IRS came up with, but it's actually legal.

[00:33:58] Scott Maderer: It's following the rule. [00:34:00]

[00:34:00] Richard Walsh: It's not a loophole. It's just, you found it in 70, 000 pages of the tax code. So it's not a loophole. So that's the big, misnomer that people have on that. And if you got the right person who can say that, so you can prosper more so you can help more people. I guarantee you and I can do better helping people than the government.

[00:34:19] So let us as entrepreneurs build and help people, let us, generate that let's hire more people to work for us to give them opportunity and income and everything else. Let's go into the community and help that way with our excess things like that. That's what I like.

[00:34:35] Scott Maderer: And small business owners are, just right off the bat, the number one employer, actually, everyone always thinks of the big companies and it's oh no.

[00:34:42] There are more people that work for mom and pops by orders of magnitude than there are that work for fortune 500s.

[00:34:49] Richard Walsh: Yeah. There's 32 million small businesses in the U. S.

[00:34:53] Scott Maderer: And so even if all of them were employing five people, it, which, They're not all employing five [00:35:00] people. Some are employing more than that, but even if they were all employing five people, that's a lot of people

[00:35:05] Richard Walsh: because I, the technical small business standard is 499 employees.

[00:35:11] You're still a small business until you hit 500. Under 500. Yeah. Have you ever managed 500 people ? They

[00:35:18] Scott Maderer: don't seem small. I managed 120, so that's the biggest team I've ever imagine. But it's

[00:35:23] Richard Walsh: was that, wasn't that a joy?

[00:35:25] Scott Maderer: Yeah.

[00:35:25] Richard Walsh: So

[00:35:25] Scott Maderer: And even there, the only way you can manage that many is by putting systems and processes and people in place that can do it.

[00:35:31] 'cause you can't do it all by yourself, that's for sure. Exactly. So I've got a few questions that I like to ask all of my guests, but before I go there and ask you, there's, is there anything else about the book or the work you do that, that you'd like to make sure the listeners here?

[00:35:44] Richard Walsh: Yeah, Scott, I think my, my, the, I've started a movement and it's to help 10, 000 business owners create more freedom, profit, and impact in their business.

[00:35:52] So everything we've talked about enables you to do that. I just want people to grab a hold of the Think about freedom. [00:36:00] Your business needs to serve you, not you serve the business. Just try to put that in perspective and look at your day as an entrepreneur. What are you doing really? What are you doing every single day?

[00:36:11] Like really dial. And I have my clients do this, go through that calendar, all accounted for time and we break it down. Is it something you have to do? Could it be delegated, all that kind of stuff. So automate, delegate, eliminate those three things. Automate whatever you can, and there's, you can do a lot easier today in that realm.

[00:36:30] Delegate, but delegate properly, right? Have something they're going into. Don't just tell them what to do and expect them to figure out because no employee wants to figure it out. And then eliminate is of course, inefficiencies, redundancies, costs. But you know what the most important thing to eliminate is?

[00:36:46] You, as the owner. Eliminate you from all these positions. Eliminate you and let them do their work. That's probably the biggest thing I want people to grab ahold of.

[00:36:56] Scott Maderer: So my brand is Inspired Stewardship, and I run things through that [00:37:00] lens of stewardship. And yet that's one of those words that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

[00:37:05] So when you hear the word stewardship, what does that word mean to you?

[00:37:10] Richard Walsh: Stewardship to me is actually responsibility. Are you a good steward of your money? Are you responsible with your money? Are you a good steward of your family? Are you leading them properly? Spending the time with them? Are you teaching them?

[00:37:24] Are you showing them how to be a man or how to be a woman? For me, it's are they, am I a good steward of biblical principles of what God's given me to do in my tools? That's what stewardship is to me.

[00:37:36] Scott Maderer: So this is my favorite question that I love to ask everybody. Imagine for a minute that I could invent this magic machine.

[00:37:43] And with the power of that machine, I was able to pluck you from where you are today and transport you into the future. Maybe 150, maybe 250 years, but through the power of this machine, you were able to look back and see your entire life, see all of the [00:38:00] connections, all of the relationships, all of the ripples, all of the impacts you've left behind.

[00:38:04] What impact do you hope you've left in the world?

[00:38:08] Richard Walsh: No, Scott, I think it'd be a twofold thing because they do cross over, but from a business standpoint, what I would really like in the legacy I'm trying to create from that aspect is that those 10, 000 business or whatever numbers be affects those millions of people.

[00:38:23] I'd love to see business done differently. We've been trapped in the industrial revolution age for 120 years and that feral, what I call a feral system and I'd love to see that gone where now everyone working is, and I don't mean this as some socialistic equality, everyone dances. Everyone has value, but everyone has different abilities, right?

[00:38:42] They're not, they're equal in value, not equal in abilities, but I'd love to see businesses like we're building them now where people are improving, not only competency and what they do, but as people. So they can take that home and it affects more than just the work because he spent so much time at work.

[00:38:56] So when 120 said, wow, they really followed that path. They don't [00:39:00] do that. Time for dollars only work more, get less. I love to see that eliminated. And then parallel to that. would be what I've done with my family now that legacy continues on for generations. Their love of God, the way they raise their family, how they understand, God's principles, they stay inside them, work them.

[00:39:19] And that's spread throughout their families and their kids and grandkids and great grandkids and that whole thing. So those are probably the two things I'd love to see from a legacy standpoint, if it was 200 years from now.

[00:39:30] Scott Maderer: That's

[00:39:31] Richard Walsh: awesome.

[00:39:32] Scott Maderer: So what's on the roadmap? What's on the agenda as you continue on this journey?

[00:39:38] Richard Walsh: Getting to that 10, 000 number and then having to start over because I'm never done. Okay. I'm never done. I'd like to reach that goal and then see the effect and then start to compound that as well. So I'm not a retirement guy. I am going to work until I check out. Okay. And that's and I, my favorite term I heard a number of years ago, and I can only credit the [00:40:00] Trump because I heard him say it.

[00:40:01] He goes, retire. Yeah, I'm going to retire. I'm going to put four new tires on. I'm going to retire and head back down the road. And I'm like, I like that. Say that's me. I just put a new set of hides on. Let's go. Let's keep going. There's so much to do. Scott in life. If you're breathing, man, you're in the fight.

[00:40:19] And that's just what I, and I'm like, I can't, whatever, I'm not going to go golf and sit around and do whatever people when they retire do, because that's like death to me. The future for me is to continue to influence and inspire people and create these incredible things that are able to make people do business better, treat their people better, elevate their people and make all this happen as a movement.

[00:40:40] That's what I really want to do.

[00:40:42] Scott Maderer: Awesome. So you can find out more about Richard over on his site at sharpen the spear coaching. com. Of course, I'll have a link to that over the show notes as well. So you can find it there. Richard, is there anything else you'd like to share with the listeners?

[00:40:58] Richard Walsh: I'd probably just say, if you're really [00:41:00] looking to see where your business is right now, I do that. I can actually have an assessment that you can take and see exactly where your business is right now and all the 12 different areas of your business. So that's simply sharpen and spare coaching.

[00:41:10] com. Shoot me an email, book a call. Love to talk to you. I am into business. I talk all the time. People talk about being passionate. I'm a little passionate and we'll have a good conversation.

[00:41:23] Scott Maderer: Awesome. Thanks so much for

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