Good morning and welcome to the Path to Warren podcast. This is episode twelve, and it is now July 12, 2020. And I wanted to share here with you guys about a small little chapter in my life, but it was one of my first jobs in high school that actually worked for somebody when I was taking a break. I don’t know exactly when it was during high school, but I was driving at the time and I needed some extra side money. I had a hobby of fishing and I had a hobby of hunting, and I love working outdoors. So I found a local place that when I had the lawn service, I would always love to stop in and buy things. And this family owned small hardware store. It was called Sport and Tool Warehouse at the time. It’s now changed owners a couple of times and changed names. But located in Balentine, South Carolina, it wasn’t too far from my house. A very interesting thing happened. I’d get my check and then I would ask them to just cash it. And most of my money. My dad would joke. Most of the money that I made went toward buying more packs of Zoom fishing lures or buying shotgun shells, or buying a new type of buzz bait to go fishing. It never failed. Every time I got paid, most of my paycheck went to buying stuff. I can see now that that was part of my overspending, under earning qualities that I’ve been working drastically on through this Debtors Anonymous program. But I learned so much from working at a local hardware store at such an early age. I was the guy that had to clean the bathrooms. I was the young kid that they would put to scoop out the minnows and capture the crickets for the people that wanted some fishin’ bait. And I also was the guy who would restock the shelves. And I’ll never forget it. That was such a valuable lesson. The boss came behind me one day. He wanted me to go around on the slow days when there weren’t a lot of customers in the store. He wanted me to go around and dust around the product, wipe off the shelves, wipe off the product with a little dusting wand. And what I found was I was putting those, say, shotgun shells. I dust off these boxes of shotgun shells that hadn’t been touched in months, if not years, and dust them off and put them back on the shelves. I was sticking them toward the back end of the shelves and he said, no. He came over my shoulder one day. He said, Everything needs to be pulled to the front. You want to have the photo and the package of the box. You pull everything up to the front. And each product has a different row. Nothing is behind another product. Each product has its own spot at the front of the shelf. And so if you had five of one item, you’d pull them all to the front and you’d line them up real nice and neat so that when someone’s walking along in front of this shelf, everything looks nice and tidy along the shelves. I love that because I use that today. Little things, like when I’m organizing my library, I pull the books to the edge of the shelves. It just makes it look nice and clean and neat. Working at Sport and Tool. Half of the store was filled with sporting good items, hunting and fishing and camping and just general outdoor stuff. And then the other half of the store was the hardware store. I never really grew up working on a construction site. My dad was a mechanical engineer. Still is a mechanical engineer, but there are lots of things that my buddies knew who had fathers that were more of a blue collar worker. There was a lot of things that I didn’t know. Like I did not know the different types of bolts and screws and fasteners. So working at the hardware store, it was quite fascinating because I was just soaking it up. I learned what a carriage bolt was, learned what a Hex head Bolt was, and when do you use different kinds? The first aisle was all full of bulk nails and screws and learned how to weigh those and write them up and put them in little Brown paper Baggies for the customers. It was quite a learning experience. As a young, I think I was 16 or 17. Wasn’t much older than that. I never forget one day I had not done well at school and I had a final exam coming up and I’d gotten in trouble with my parents and they told me I couldn’t work. And I walked into work one day and told the owner. I said, hey, Russell, I’m really sorry. I’m not going to be able to work next week. And he said, what? And I said, yeah, I’m sorry I can’t work next week. I’ve got to study for my final exams. He was upset, but he told me to do what I got to do, and I ended up not having to work or not being able to work. But it also showed me that people relied on me. And if I said I was going to work, I need to work. It also told me I need to do a better job at school so that I don’t have to cram the week before final exams in order to pass them. But I really wasn’t making more than minimum wage at that job. It was quite low, and I don’t even know why I really did it, because I was making so much more cutting grass. If I was cutting the average yard, which was $40 a yard, that was my average. If it would take 30 minutes to mow, edge, weedeat and blow. And if half of that goes to equipment 10% goes to the savings, marketing, and the business development. 40% goes to labor. That’s $16 that I would make in 30 minutes cutting grass. So $32 an hour versus the standard $8 or $7.50 that I was making. at Sport and Tool Warehouse. Nothing like a telltale sign of an under earner right there. Regret that at all. I learned so much. I learned how to pump propane. I learned how to load water into batteries. I also learned very quickly not to carry batteries next to your shirt as you’re carrying car batteries out the next day. I had holes in my shirt. Never forget that. But I learned very quickly that there were kinds of people that come in and just kind of hang out. They were working for another company, working for a landscaping company, and they would come in and just kind of sitting down at the counter. eat a snickers bar and a Mountain Dew burning the clock of the owner, whoever sent them to go get materials. They were not in any kind of hurry in order to get back. I just found it fascinating because here I am as a lawn service owner, I didn’t want to send somebody to get materials and ever know that they were sitting down at a counter, just chilling, just hanging out at a hardware store. But anyway, I ended up spending a bunch of money on a rifle. I bought a Browning. 270, A-Bolt when I worked there, and I know I spent about one $300 on the Browning A-Bolt rifle as a young high school kid, no thoughts of saving the money or knowing that I’ll need it one day for something more expensive. I just blew it on a rifle and I had a Nikon. I think it’s a 9 X 40 scope, a really fancy scope that costs like $500 on top of this rifle. Very wasteful, but I was in the hunting at the time. Today, I just can’t justify going out and spending a half a day or a whole day sitting in the middle of the woods waiting on animals to walk by so I could kill them. Right now, that’s not really a hobby of mine. I might pick it up later in life, but I really love growing businesses and working on myself. I love being out in nature. But the whole idea of hunting and hanging out in the woods is not something that inspires me today. And this goes to show that hobbies change over time. I recently, about two months ago, took my rifle and shotgun to the local pawn shop, and I was able to get $330 cash from the pawn shop because I realized my hobbies have changed. I also worked for a guy one time selling time management software, and he told me if there’s something in your closet or something on your desk or something that you have not touched in six months, you need to get rid of it. And I didn’t really understand that at the time. I was like, Man, let’s get rid of a lot of stuff. It’s good to have these things. I haven’t shot a shotgun or a rifle in years. We’re talking eight years maybe. And the one time I did in those years were with friends that also had guns. So if I didn’t have one, I could have borrowed theirs. Any rate, today it’s more valuable for me to have $300 in cash than to have a shotgun and a rifle to go hunting in the closet today. But the same person that I work with, the time management system. I have not shared about that. In other podcasts where I talked about graduating College and going into the commercial landscaping world, there was a nine month period there from right after I graduated College. There were a few months prior to me graduating. It was leading up to that time where I had a mentor. He good was buddies with my dad. He was a pretty large guy, and he’s kind of a larger than life kind of guy. He was a public speaker. He still is doing public speaking, but he became a mentor of mine. And there were several Saturdays when I was doing pinestraw, as I mentioned before, through my senior year of high school and through College all through College, I had a pine straw business, and this gentleman would order pine straw. I would deliver them to say like 100 bales of pine straw out to his property. He had a Lake house in Chapin. I would sit with him after I would do the work. I come inside, he’d give me something to drink, and I’d sit there on the couch and we would talk business and life. And I thought he was a role model. I asked him one day, I said, how much do you think you need to have in the bank in order to retire? What do you think? He said, I’ll never forget it. He said, I believe if I have $2 million in the Bank, I’ll be okay to retire. I had no idea. What is that number? I had nothing to gauge it off of. I had no way of knowing if that’s too much or not enough or what number to plan on. But I knew that if I didn’t plan on something, that I probably won’t ever get it. So that’s where this idea of saving $2 million came. It was from that gentleman who I ultimately came to work for. So after meeting with him a couple of times, he told me, every great leader has mentors, and I asked him to be my mentor. He agreed, but I believe he had his eyes set on me. To work for him is what it came down to. He offered me a job before I even graduated College. It was the Christmas before the holiday weekend before my senior year, and he offered me to come and work for him. He said he did speaking, but he also had this time management system where it would work with Microsoft Outlook, but it also worked with paper. So this was right about the time in 2006, 2005, 2006, when a lot of people had either a paper calendar or a Microsoft Outlook calendar. And Outlook was pretty popular. It’s been out for several years. It wasn’t like it had just come out, but people were very familiar with Outlook and he had a franchise that was the franchise came from an international company. But I had heard my parents using this time management system all the time. They talked very highly of it. And I actually started using this paper calendar system through high school, really used it a lot, and it helped me a ton. I don’t know how many high school kids were walking around and College kids were walking around with these daytime it wasn’t a day timer, but it was that type of calendaring system with tabs and A-Z tabs and monthly view calendar system. Yeah, I was using that to plan out my pine straw business and my classes and my exams and that kind of thing. It really worked for me. At the time. My brother was adamant on who in the world uses paper. He was the computer guy and thought that everybody ought to throw away the paper calendars and just use the computer. But the paper calendar really worked for me. It was something that I could touch and put in the car, and if somebody called, I could pull it out while they’re on the phone. I mean, it worked for me. I worked over the course of a couple of weekends to try to figure out what he wanted to pay, how we were going to do it. He had these time management seminars where he would teach all the strategies, and he would almost do like teach about rebooting your productivity. And he was pretty good at it. But he would rent out a room at the Summit Club, which is a fancy you had to be a paid member to have access to the Summit Club. It was on the top floor of one of the big buildings on Main Street. I think he prided himself on having that fancy room. That was pretty expensive, but he would normally have about 15 people or so. And I saw him making pretty good money. He would do them about once a month. If he had ten people that paid $545, that’s $5,000. That’s not a bad day’s work. He saw there was opportunity in there for me to sell. So I was making 10% of the sale. So if I sold a $500 class, I’d make $5,400. Excuse me, there was a $545 class. I’d make $54 for people that I signed up. So it was a lot to convince somebody to take off work for a full day and pay $540. $545 was a lot of money to also take off work for the ideal situation was to convince businesses to send their employees there. So what you wanted was the company to pay for it and then give the person the time to go and take the class on company hours. That was the ideal situation. So here I am, fresh out of College. I just started working for him. My job was to take my car with my gas because I was on Commission only. My job was to drive to these large businesses trying to get in the door. He did give me a list of some people to call on that knew him. And that might help get through the door. Some of those worked, some of them didn’t. When I got in there, I believe this is one of the times when I’d heard fake it till you make it. And I heard that growing up, that was about the richest time in my life. When I was selling something. Yeah, I believed in it. Here I was having to wear a tie, a coat, dress pants, nice shoes. I wore cufflinks because I thought it made me. I saw that my boss was wearing cufflinks. And I thought it made me look like I had money. So if I look like I had money, people will listen to me and buy from me because they could trust that I knew what I was doing. It was all a facade. Here I was a broke College graduate wearing cufflinks. What in the world. It just was out of place. He obviously knew that I was still working my pine straw business. It was very clear. I told them that I was just going to do that on the side. I had people in College while I was in College. I had my buddies who would make the deliveries for me. And they would also do the spreading work. And I liked it on the weekends. I was able to work it on the weekends. But what I found was there was a lady in the office who worked for him full time. And she had been there like ten years or so. I don’t know how many years it was, but she had worked for it for a long time. Just he and her in this little office in Chapin, in the middle of a small strip mall. And I think there was something going on there, really, between the two of them. She knew his calendar and would try to schedule appointments for him to speak and things. She wasn’t doing sales by any means, but she was more like coordinating the book, the bookings. And she would be the one that would package the boxes when we sold the paper calendar system or the notepads. Or she’d be the one that would put them in the boxes and put the label on them and the shipping and tracking and put it in the mail just your basic general admin type person well, I believe there was some jealousy going on because she saw me coming in with Cufflinks and she wanted to put me in my place, I guess. But she didn’t like the fact that I had a side business and I was making money doing that as well. I think I made more money selling than she had made in a long, long time. And she could see that I was making money. Something just didn’t click between the two of us. But she started to keep notes on things I was doing wrong. And one of the things I was doing that I probably won’t do again was as I was working for this guy on his computer, on his desktop computer, I would have my Excel spreadsheet of my customer database. And if I saw somebody that was a candidate for the time management training, yeah, I might put them on the Pinestraw Plus database. What’s wrong with that? The contact is a contact. And I thought that it wasn’t like I was stealing his contacts to be pine straw customers. It was just a matter of if it looked like a quality customer. I wanted to make sure I captured that contact and put it into my system well, she came behind me one day and went on my desktop and viewed the history of what I was working on and looking at. And basically it was enough that she could put in the notes that I was working on pine straw stuff when I should have been working on priority management, time management stuff. So I got kind of called out for that nine months in that’s as long as I work for this company, I will never forget. He sent me to Vancouver, Canada, to experience this worldwide training program that they had from corporate. And I was really excited to go to get away. I was a newly married person, and when I got there, this is a place that had general happy hours and things where people could get together and discuss sales well, I was, of course, drinking pretty heavily then. I say, of course, because I graduated College, I was pretty active in our social agricultural fraternity. I graduated from College, so my drinking was pretty ramped up at the time. I sent an email one time on the clock. It wasn’t on the clock. It was one night I wrote an email after I’ve been drinking wine. It was kind of late, but I hit send and there was a couple of paragraphs about something that I thought we should do, something that I was kind of riled up about. I sent an email to those two people, my boss and this admin. And the next day she called me out on it. She said, had you been drinking? Had you been drinking when you wrote that email? And of course, I couldn’t say no. Of course I was drinking at night. That’s what you do, right? So I got called out and since then I’ve never, ever well, let me rephrase that. I’ve tried very hard to not send emails after I had been drinking. But this trip they sent me on, let me tell you, I was quite disgruntled because my boss told me before I left, I’m not going to cover the cost of any alcohol. And I was like, well, how do you as an alcoholic that didn’t know it, that really pissed me off. I mean, it ticked me off royally because I was losing more money. I was spending more money than I was making every day. When I got to Vancouver, not only had I been drinking on the plane ride, of course, but when you get there and it looks like work, this is the justification side of my disease is that after the seminar, for example, there was a happy hour. Oh, everybody come down to a cocktail hour where I was to mingle with other sales reps and hear what they’re doing in their territory to drive sales. Well, what am I going to do? Stand around with water? Stand around with a Sprite? So I was having to buy my drinks on my tab and I just felt like that was so wrong. Here I was in another country doing work for him and trying to grow his business and they wouldn’t cover the cost of my happy hour. It drove me crazy really riled me up so much that I was drinking by myself. I’d go to dinner by myself. I went to this 1 bar that had also served food and they had really nice hamburgers. I was sitting at the bar by myself and I already had one bourbon and Coke. And I told the guy to put the bourbon on. Let’s just call it two. It probably was two bourbons and Coke or bourbon and diet at the time. I told him to go ahead and close out that tab and then start another tab and I put that on my personal card. So I was having to like think that, oh, I could get by with one or two on here by not turning in my itemized receipt. I’ll get by the boss and the Secretary and have him actually cover the cost of at least two drinks. I mean, that ought to be respectable, right? Couldn’t they cover the cost of two drinks? Well, when I got back from that trip, I turned in my expense report and I had the itemized receipt thrown in the trash. All I had attached was the total receipt there so that you could see that it cost $18.50 for a hamburger, hamburger dinner, or whatever the exact total was. I do remember it being close to $20. Well, this lady, the administrative assistant, went and called. She called every receipt, every restaurant that I had turned in a receipt for that looked suspicious. She called and wanted to know if she could have a copy of the itemized receipt. And so, sure enough, she printed off all of these itemized receipts and had circled what they would pay for and what they wouldn’t pay for. And I was stuck with trying to get around the fact that I tried to turn in receipts with alcohol on them. I think I lost a lot of trust. There’s no other thing, nothing else to say on that except what a blow to the ego. Now I had this guy thinking that I was trying to slip alcohol through his Accounting Department. Well, this lady started typing all this up, and before she knew it, I had no idea. But she had created a seven page list of reasons why I should be fired. And she presented that to my boss. One day I came in, he said, we need to talk. And I had to sit down at the conference room table with these two people. And he had this list of seven pages of things that she had written down and caught me on try to get me out of the company. I was ticked, of course, and thought I’d been betrayed and let down and abandoned. I thought she was my buddy, but she wasn’t. So I was fired. But of course I have an ego problem and I didn’t want to be fired. So I said, I’m out of here. I quit. And I kind of slammed my stuff down, grab my items, and I was gone. And I never set foot back in there again. So here I was ticking off a guy that was good buddies with my dad, spiritually in sync with my dad. And then they were both in the Church. This guy sung in the choir. Here I was doing ungodly things to one of my dad’s buddies. I think I had a lot of shame and guilt and remorse tied into all that that really affected me for a while. So I had nothing else to do except my pine straw business full time. But that was when I started looking at this company, Springdale Outdoor, that I ultimately ended up working for who was my best customer at the time. I went to work for them full time. So it’s a little bit about my life and jobs that I went to learn from and work for. So that was right during high school and then right directly after College. And that was my experience in early life working for somebody else. It wasn’t too good. I thought I was supposed to be an entrepreneur. I thought that was what I was made to do. So the rest will unfold. But thanks so much for joining me on this podcast. I hope you have a wonderful day. 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