In The Thick of It

Don't be afraid to get uncomfortable.

Let the fear motivate you.

And when you look back and on the rock

and chair, when you're in your 90s, what do

you want that legacy to look like?

Hopefully, you left everything on the field.

Welcome to In the Thick of It.

I'm your host, Scott Hollrah.

In this episode, I have

an insightful conversation with Joe Higgins.

Joe is the epitome of the term serial entrepreneur.

He has founded multiple businesses in

industries ranging from wireless phones to

hair salons to trash collection.

Over his decades long career, joe takes us

on a journey, beginning with his childhood on

a Wisconsin farm to his latest venture, Ethos

Logos Publishing, a home and charter school curriculum

based on classical education principles.

With wisdom gained from his ventures over the

years, Joe explains how he ties everything together

with a sense of mission and purpose.

Today, he emphasizes the importance of

understanding your skills, finding problems to

solve, taking smart risks, learning from

failures, and leaving a positive legacy.

Today, I'm thrilled to have Joe Higgins on the

podcast, connected with Joe a couple months back.

And as he kind of started walking me through

his background and the things that led him here

to where he is today, it just hit me.

You are the entrepreneur of entrepreneurs.

You have started so many different things, and

I'm really eager to get into that, but

let's just start with a couple of things.

So, you're in Patagonia, Arizona.

I live in Tucson as my primary, and then

we have a small ranch down in Patagonia, about

15, 20 miles away from the border with Mexico.

Raise a couple of longhorns down there. Okay.

How hot is it right now?

Tucson is a little cooler than phoenix,

and patagonia is cooler than that.

But here in Tucson today, probably about 108, 107.

But we get this real dry, like

a blow dryer hitting you where?

Texas or Florida. You get that humidity.

So it's a dry heat.

They keep saying, yeah, well, when

it's 108, it doesn't really matter.

It's hot.

So I'd like to always start kind of at the beginning.

So, where did you grow up, and what

was it like growing up in your home? Cool.

So I'm originally from Wisconsin, a

small farming community about 20 miles

from Minneapolis over on the border.

And it was the perfect childhood.

We grew up a bunch of cousins and aunts and uncles

and raising farms, raising cattle, beef cattle, which is why I'm

kind of back in it as I've gotten older, because I

missed that time in my life, I think.

And it was idyllic.

We came home when it got dark and ate

and we had forts and plays and going.

It was just this wild, amazing childhood, which I think

was great for an entrepreneur because you were kind of

on your own and kind of determining your own destiny.

Most of my aunts, uncles, grandpa were

all in their own kind of businesses.

So that was modeled for me as a

child, and it's not surprising that that's the

way I ended up in my career choice. Yeah. Big family.

Small family.

I have a sister who's three years younger than myself.

She's a CEO of a corporation out in

Georgia, but extended cousins and aunts and uncles.

And that was my social group, my

family group that I grew up in.

So you mentioned the ranch was ranching.

Is that what your family income was derived from? Yeah.

So they did back before you went to

the supermarket and bought everything in one spot.

They had the butcher shop, and

they raised their cattle out there.

So my grandfather was a butcher, my dad was a butcher,

a couple of uncles, and it was just part of us

growing up, people from the small town would come out, drive

a mile or so out and buy their meats and cheeses,

and that was just what we knew.

It was real community based, and I really missed

that in life as we've gotten busier about.

So what was school like for you? Did pretty well.

Didn't really work that hard at it.

Kind of I was a last minute crammer guy.

Got through college and grade school,

high school, all that way.

Went to Catholic schools when I moved out

to Arizona, graduated from a Catholic high school,

then went on to the U of A.

I started bartending for a little bit,

and that was a crazy detour.

It took me seven years to graduate college, and I

don't have a doctorate, as they say in Tommy Boy.

I was having a lot of fun and helped

me become a better kind of salesperson, help refine

my ability to deal with people, communicate with people.

And I didn't really realize it at the time,

but when you look back in the scope of

your life, I probably learned more on my bartending

business than I did than I did in college.

Isn't that funny? Yeah.

Did you do it at all?

Did you ever bartend? Waiter?

No, I didn't.

But when I was in college, I was involved

in tons and tons of things on campus, a

lot of different organizations, and some had leadership roles.

And I learned way more outside the

classroom than I learned in the classroom.

And my guess is kind of looking at the college

experience through my kids eyes, it's not gotten better.

Yeah.

I highly recommend you fill your life with

stuff as you're young, that's for sure.

How old are your kids? I have two.

One's just graduated grad school from ASU,

which is up in Phoenix, and she's

a speech pathologist, got her first job.

And I have a son who's a junior at

the University of Arizona down here in Tucson.

So both good kids kind of

followed through the same Catholic schools.

I'm on the board of a Catholic high school

that I graduated from my kids went to.

So lots of lineage and lots

of history, and it's been great.

Our family really kind of identifies with

our faith and identifies with Tucson.

And how old were you when you moved to Tucson?

So I came out to Tucson when I was

in second grade, and every summer we would go

back and get to live on the farm.

So as soon as school was out,

we were back there till about just

started high school, little after high school.

Then I got involved in sports and football and things

and couldn't but couldn't have asked for a better.

In fact, my daughter asked me one time when she was

21 a couple of years back, she says, hey, what would

you do different if you were my age or what you

wish you could have done as a father?

What would you have done different?

I said, I mean, I wish you

could have grown up like I did.

That free play, creative, no rules, no boundaries.

Of course, when we grew up, there was

no screen time, so TV was a rarity.

It was just going out and figuring it out.

That was beautiful.

So college, what did you study?

So I went in and I started originally in

some form of business, deviated a little bit, ended

up with a degree in political science and economics

and literally sat down with the guidance counselor and

I said, look, if I don't figure a way

out of this place, I'll never graduate.

So we kind of created that model.

So was not real dedicated.

When I was in college, I was to what I wanted to do.

Always an entrepreneur.

I think I started my first

business when I was like, 17.

Sold some Lambs and things when I was really

young and really got the bug for it.

So I always knew that was the path.

And I went to high school with a

bunch of other guys that were dads were

doctors and lawyers and accountants and professionals.

And I just knew that wasn't my path, my plan.

And it wasn't really until I kind of got out

and started doing my thing until I stumbled across Robert

Kiyosaki and Rich Dad, Poor dad, where I read this

book and I'm like, well, that's what I was doing.

That was me and that's who spoke to me.

And it was never that

path of doctor, lawyer, professional.

It was always the road less taken, which,

having been an entrepreneur yourself, you know that

you know how that journey is.

It's a crazy one, but I

wouldn't change it for the world.

That's a great book, and it's probably been 20 years since

I've read it, but that's one that I think that will

stand the test of time and would do a lot of

people a lot of good to read it, can't recommend it

enough, and he has a whole series of them.

I'm trying to as we'll get a little further in here.

We're talking about schools and the Dave Ramsay model, which

is save and don't have death and pay off.

And then you have the Kiyosaki model, which is

build assets in yourself and create income generating assets.

So it's two lines of thinking, and some

work great for others and others don't.

So it depends on who you

are and what your disposition is.

But for me, it was always, don't fence me

in and give me that wide open spot and

I'll do my best to make it work.

So you talked about your first business at the

age of 17, selling, I think you said, Lambs.

How long did that last?

How did you find your way into that?

Yeah, when I was really little, in four H and whatnot,

I bought and sold a Lamb, and my grandfather gave me

68 one dollars bills, and I have a super eight video

of me playing with them and put them on the table.

So that was kind of when I got the bite.

My first actual business was out in San Diego.

I had in high school, worked for a dry cleaner.

So I learned that business when I moved to San Diego.

I found a local dry cleaner and I said, look,

I'll build a route and get clients and customers.

If you'll do the work, I'll build you

a new business, and we split the revenue.

That was my first kind of business.

Did that for a couple, two, three years,

moved back to Arizona, and then just a

whole series of other things started.

The first one back, the kind of the real formal

business where I had employees and stores and all those

kind of things was in the cell phone world.

And this was, if you remember, back when

there was two cell phone carriers, and then

there became Sprint and T Mobile and Verizon.

Then there's like seven.

We became a dealer for them, started selling out of the

trunk of my car, had an experience in business to business

sales and got so busy and did so well, we opened

a store and then another store and another store.

Before you knew it, we had about

80 salespeople and about twelve retail locations

between New Mexico and Arizona.

I think a lot of this conversation we're

going to have today is timing and luck.

The harder you work, the luckier you are.

And there's been so many of my business opportunities

that I stumble into that I just got really

lucky and right place, right time, and knew how

to drive through the opportunity and do it.

So that was definitely one of them.

So talk to me about selling cell phones

out of the trunk of your car.

So while I was bartending, I got a job at Cellular

One, and then I moved into their outside sales division.

So they kind of taught me the ropes of

sales, cold calling, business to business b to B,

rose up to be the top salesman in the

country for them and kind of learned it.

And all the while I was looking at, okay, what I'm

doing here for this income I can do over here and

kind of have an unending or unlimited set of income.

And that's what kind of moved me.

Remember when I went to start that business?

Kind of been planning towards it, lining up

the dealerships and kind of planning my exit.

Saved up a little money, like I had five, six

grand and had a new baby and a new mortgage.

And the week I was quitting, I broke out

in hives on the whole half of my face

because of stress and nerves and all that pressure.

But talk about getting out there and getting at

it is having all those pressures behind you.

There was no way but to make it.

I could not fail and just kind of did

the same thing I was doing, but for myself.

Found some unique markets.

There's a big produce industry down in southern Arizona

called Nogalis where the produce crosses from Mexico.

Worked down there for quite some time.

Found some success.

Got together with a group of produce guys

that really liked me and kept referring me.

And just little after little grew and doubled and

grew and doubled and opened a retail store.

And that went great.

And I ended up hiring these other salespeople

from other carriers that like myself, I spoke

their language, I knew what was their hot

points, created little businesses for them.

And that's how we had the

ad business to business folks.

Opened up the next retail store.

The Next store started helping my

employees become owners, if you will.

Kind of set them up in business, let them

open their own store and franchise model, kind of

a franchise model before, franchise more of a distributor.

And as our sales increased, I went back to my carriers

and got more money and so I could pay them more.

A couple of them had residual income that I kept

at our top end, but really helped probably four or

five of my key people get into business themselves.

So I would say that's a pattern we'll talk about a

lot is like, how do we help others be successful?

And then of course, it blesses us backwards.

Little by little, we ended up being one of

the top dealers in the country for Nextel.

Kept T Mobile certain quarters, certain

months, cricket as they'd come through.

We became a major player in that distribution,

but you could kind of see as we're

doing it that it would become a commodity.

If you looked at Pagers at the time,

they were hot and then nobody wanted them.

So I kind of looked around the corner

and thought, this isn't going to last forever.

So what next?

So that was our wireless experience.

Kids worked there, my wife was there, partner.

It was just a beautiful family business.

And what time frame was that that

you had the cell phone business?

This would have been 98 to

2006, 2005, something like that.

So pre iPhone, this was big old brick

Nokia phone with a detachable battery and the

little Star Trek tax that would tip. Yeah.

Remember those back that day startack was cool.

If you had a were you were right. Right.

So it was an amazing, you know,

sponsoring golf tournaments and we're buying a

ton of media in our local market.

So all the perks that come with

that trips were winning around the world.

I mean, as the first business that

was a real business or a formal

business, couldn't have asked for something better.

Just blessed beyond belief.

So let's maybe camp on that one for just a minute.

What was that moment when you realized that you

were going to go do this on your own?

What was that spark?

And a question I always love getting answers to is

when you came home and told your wife what you

were wanting to do, what was her response?

I think we might have talked about

this earlier when we first met.

Well, half the success of an

entrepreneur is marrying the right person.

And my wife, I could not have asked for a better wife.

I mean, I can't tell you how many times

I've come home and said, hey, we bought a

garbage business or I'm in the cell phone world

or I'm in the haircut, whatever else I'm doing.

And she's just been supportive and right

by my side the whole time.

In fact, in most of our cash businesses,

it was always a family member in the

back of the house that was touching money

and touching cash because I've heard so many

nightmare stories of getting embezzled from and whatnot.

So it was great.

Gave her the flexibility to be a mom and to raise our kids

and not be in a kind of a structured nine to five.

And I always been a family business.

I remember deciding to branch out.

One kind of thing about me and I'd imagine

many, many entrepreneurs, I'm not a big rule guy

just drives me nuts when I see stupid rules.

We'll talk about that more.

So in the corporate environment as you're

seeing people less competent getting brought above

you because they've been longer or whatnot.

I just never handled that well.

So as I become a leader of more people,

I always kind of ran a really hard meritocracy.

It wasn't about kissing butt

or you've been here longer.

It was if you're good, you're going to

get the football was always my approach.

So was a motivator for me to

get out of that corporate world.

The other thing is unlimited income.

I mean, I like the ability to eat what you kill and

you can go as big as you want to go and work

as hard as you want to work and you're not limited.

I know when I was in outside sales and sales

every year, they would change the comp as soon as

I'd figured out and start really running it, there'd be

a new comp plan and they would take away money.

So I thought, heck with that.

So those are two big motivators all through my

life that as I get into politics and as

I did, other businesses don't fence me in.

I think that's to be an entrepreneur and to do this

for a living, you have to work on your skill sets.

You have to be comfortable.

You have to understand risk.

You have to know that you may not have a paycheck and

you're the last one paid, but you also have to be a

little crazy in the point where, don't tell me what to do.

I'm not going to follow that path.

I'm going to take a harder one.

So the no rules mentality, I think there's a

lot of people that feel that same way.

Do you consider yourself a patient? Didn't you know?

I learned that through this work and in fact, I

got heavily into the medical world right around Obamacare.

And I had started up a few businesses

and I was running a large doctor practice.

That taught me patience.

It's just so complicated, so detailed.

I would find in my other businesses, I'd kind of master

them, kind of figure them out, and then I'd be on

to the next one because I love the creative process.

So I'd bring in folks and

make sure the operations are tight. But I wasn't.

The day to day medical really kicked

my butt because it was so complicated.

Then I moved to politics, ran for office

and whatnot, but that was another one.

It's like playing chess on five dimensions.

So it's not just a market you

got to figure out and competitors.

It's where's the stress points and

what's happening and it's human nature.

I mean, those two industries taught me patience.

How about you?

Because that's a great question.

I do not consider myself a very patient person.

And we'll just leave it at that. Totally.

So we'll go back to the cell

phone business for just a minute.

So I think you said around 506 is.

When you got out of that how

did you get out of that business?

Did you sell that?

Did you wind it down?

What did that look like?

So our model was smaller markets.

So we had locations and heavy

presence in Tucson, a million population.

But we would go to the cities

around us with 100,000 or 50,000 population.

I could buy media cheaper to make a bigger impact.

We could own a market for a lot less.

And I was setting up like, not franchises, but

licensing agreements with people that we'd put in business.

So that was my model.

But you could slowly see the sales churning.

You could see the carriers opening their own

stores and looking down the road you could

just see it becoming a commodity.

And I always thought one day you'd go push

a button on a machine and you outskirts your

phone, which is about where we're there.

So I knew it would end.

A couple of my outer markets made it longer.

So I went out looking for the next thing

and I kind of went through my experience role.

I said I didn't want it to be anything

with food or liquor or booze or anything like

that because it's a perishable and nothing wrong with

those businesses, but they're super intense.

I mean, you got to live it, you got

to own it, you got to be there.

No, I didn't want that.

I wanted something that was consumable that you would come

back to over and over and over so you could

build up a client base and build a model and

a brand that you could roll out for a while.

I looked at things like gas.

I looked at different things.

I actually ended up in the haircut business.

And I theorized that I went to the same lady

to get my haircut for the last 20 years.

Wherever she was, I'd follow.

And I looked at the marketplace and you had

all these fast casual haircut spots, great click, super

cuts, famous fantastic Sam's, or these chains.

But if I made something that was dedicated directly

to men, which most men go to those, and

if I included the kids so father son, father

daughter could come and get a haircut experience, that

I thought I had a business model.

So did a bunch of research, spent a lot of time

digging in, found someone out in Texas that owned nine or

ten great clips, a friend of a friend, and I flew

out there, kind of talked to him about the bigs, what

worked, what didn't work, what he learned.

One thing as an entrepreneur I will say

is you've got to know your homework.

You've got to really spend time before you

make the leap to understand every variable.

And the best way to do that

is find people in that business.

So I am a nut when it comes to

understanding what I'm getting into because it's my money

and if it doesn't work, it's my tail.

So the cell phone business, it kind of seems

like you just kind of found yourself there.

It was a natural progression, natural extension of

what you had been doing as an employee.

Most of the entrepreneurs that we have as guests

on the podcast, I'm going to say that 90

plus percent of them more or less found themselves

in their area kind of by accident.

You were very intentional in how

you went about the haircut thing.

You didn't just find yourself there

like you very intentionally went there.

What were the other kinds of businesses that

met the criteria that repeat business and the

other components that you talked about?

Well, any kind of service business,

I think would be an air

conditioning service, plumbing service, those things.

I just didn't have those skills.

Do you cut hair?

I didn't do that either. Didn't learn.

But I owned a trash company. We'll talk about that.

But I ended up learning how to drive a trash

truck because I figured I better know how to drive

these big things if someone calls it sick.

But in the haircut business, I wanted something

that I could scale up as well.

So I wanted something that I could spend the

time in, build the market, build the brand and

scale it and run around the country.

So something that was franchisable was important to me.

I looked around at that category of franchises.

There's a ton of food franchises and

whatnot, but that particular category, there was

nothing really new at the time.

And I started at about the same time that Sports Clip

started out in Texas, which is now pretty big chain.

Our name was Sports Buzz, and it was sports themed

and hardwood floors and lockers and staff was in uniforms.

So I wanted something that I could put

the energy in, build a brand, have a

repeat business systematize, and then franchise.

So nothing really fit that from what I looked at.

So that's why I picked it.

And it's interesting you went into it with the mindset

of, I want to have the ability to franchise it.

You didn't want to go buy into a franchise and

go set up a bunch of great clips or whatever.

You wanted to create it from the ground up.

Yes, because the real wealth and

the real success is the franchiseor.

So there are franchisees that do well.

Ten units, 15 units, 20 units.

But the real money in my mind and the

real opportunity was being the guy at the top.

Remember, I'd just done that with the cell phone world.

And because of the volume I was doing, I

was able to go back to my carriers and

negotiate better pricing so I could make my piece

and then still pay my undergroup more.

I had residual income with a couple of carriers.

So every day I'd wake up at the beginning

of the month and there'd be a nice check

from the work we'd done in the past.

So I was trying to get to that

point where there would be residual income.

We create a brand maybe 810 years later with a

multiple units, the brand could be sold and the income

stream could be sold for a rather large multiple.

I've always kind of had in the back of

my mind, I'm a real goal guy, and write

down and visions and statements is $20 million.

That's always been my target.

And the way I like to equate it is I'm

the jockey, and I'm looking for that perfect horse.

And I'll find that horse and we'll train the horse,

and we'll have the bloodline and we'll go, and if

everything's great, I'm on that horse and we're loving it.

But if I don't see that horse winning in Kentucky

Derby or getting me to that ultimate goal in my

dream, then I'm looking for the next horse.

So cell phones was awesome, and it taught me a ton.

In fact, each business teaches you so much.

That one, I knew I wasn't going to get me

there, so I thought, okay, what can do it next?

And that's why the franchise or model

made so much more sense to me. I miscalculated.

So there's a reason why I'm not in it today.

But that's everything.

So out of college, you had your

dry cleaning business, you had the cell

phone business, you had the haircut business.

How old were you when you started the haircut business?

Early 30s.

Yeah, I was probably 29, 30, something like that.

30, 31 somewhere in there.

Three businesses before the age of 30.

Yeah, we had built a total of nine

of the franchise or the haircut stores.

I owned five of them and I

brought partners in on the other four.

So the cell phone business was kind of waning.

We still had locations and the haircut was taking off.

So it's always this constant looking around

the corner, how's the business performing?

What's the future look like? What's cash flow?

How do I reinvest cash flow?

I mean, as we continue this

conversation, there's a lot of that.

So I'll be running two or three things at a time.

I was just going to say, I didn't

realize that the cell phone business and the

haircut business, actually, there was an overlap.

Yeah, quite a big one.

I think I had four or five stores

from my twelve in cell phones, and I

probably had four or five haircut stores.

Cell phones continue to drop.

Haircuts started going up.

So I think as a business

person, it's a delicate balance.

Am I putting all my energy into what I

have, or is the market just tapped out?

And am I just at a point where I

can't get what I need to get out of

this and I need to look for something else?

And no better time to start something or find a

new job when you have one, but no better time

to start something when you have some cash flow from

one business that can help subsidize the next.

And you in the cell phone business.

We're buying a ton of media through co op.

So I'm in the middle of radio, TV, outdoor.

We have advertising agencies.

So all that transfers now to the new

business where I'm developing a brand and hiring

models and creating images and logos.

So it was just like this

perfect synergy between the two.

The fact that you were able to get a business off

the ground and I'll add a market that you didn't really

know a whole lot about and have this other entity.

Running.

You must have had really good people around you.

That's the key. Systems and people.

And we'll have this conversation over and over and over.

Right.

So amazing people that saw the vision, and I think it

was four that I owned, or five that I owned of

haircut, and nine or four that I franchised or licensed.

I'm giving people equity.

I'm giving them ownership so they're

as committed as I am.

So as we're building a brand,

we're distributing the cost of advertising.

It's a team commitment.

It's not just me sitting at the top trying to

own them all and run them all and kill myself.

So that's been a model for me all along.

How do I empower others?

Because most of these people that I'm helping get into

business always in the back of their mind think, gosh,

I'd love to own my own business one day, but

just never could do it, never could pull that trigger

or figure out how to get there.

So what I'm doing is just kind of handing

it over and saying, okay, here's how it works.

I'm here the whole way.

We're going to do a certain

way and collegial and we'll listen.

If they have a different idea, let's

try it and see if it works.

If it works, we'll run it through all the other stores.

So a lot of that was going on.

It wasn't super formal yet, like a typical

franchise, where it was like, here's what we

do every day and don't deviate. It was a lot.

We're figuring it out on the fly as we're building.

So what type of locations work, how do

couponing work to bring in new clients?

Database marketing.

We stumbled on the kid thing.

We really didn't kind of anticipate it

being as successful as it was.

So in each of our locations, stores, we'd have

a cartoon area and a little boxed area, toys.

We had a little car that you'd sit in that

became the big driver of the business because no one

in the market was doing kids at the time.

Cutting hairs with kids is really difficult.

Less of stylists, don't like it.

So if you can mix it in, it's a better fit.

And the family experience coming in

was the mix, was the thing.

So I would say a lot of learning, a

lot of figuring it out on the fly.

Lots of great people that made partners or that I

brought into the operations and then systems behind the scenes,

that we understood marketing because we did it so well

in the haircut business or in the cell phone business

because it was part of our co op dollars.

We got money from our carriers.

So that transferred into every other

business I've ever owned since. Right.

So I understood branding, I understood marketing.

I really learned how that works.

As you were talking about coupon systems and hiring

models and database marketing and on and on and

on I think a lot of people, when they

think about a business, they know, hey, these are

the kind of core areas of a business.

You've got finance and accounting, you've

got marketing, you've got sales.

But there were a lot of layers to that.

Did you have a robust business plan day one and you

knew all these different things that you had to do?

Or did you kind of get into it and then realize, oh,

I need to hire a photographer and go do a photo shoot?

Well, my thing was always, brand, I wanted you to walk

into one of our locations, whatever business, and we'll talk about

this in other things I do, I want you to walk

in and go, this is a national company.

They've thought through the details, from artwork to how

we answer the phone, to jingles on our ads,

to the way our uniforms looked, even to the

point where my stylists would decorate their areas with

kids stuff and their personal stuff.

I'd always kind of pull that back and

say, let's keep this a little more professional.

Covered up tattoos a lot of times because we

want to make it more of a family place.

The models we hired were

not quite hooters looking girls.

They were more girl next door attractive, so that mom wouldn't

be afraid to let dad go get a haircut there.

So we really thought through all that.

And as I got further in my business

career, I started doing more focus groups.

I started bringing stakeholders together, interested in my product,

in my field, and asking questions, videotaping, and trying

to refine that over and over and over.

So I'm a real nut about image.

What's your presentation to the world?

The last thing I wanted to be is a local look. Local.

But I learned that through the cell phone.

When we opened the cell phone business, we put a logo.

It was called gotta go wireless.

Did a bunch of marketing.

It wasn't really hitting.

It was a crowded marketplace.

My advertising agency said, let's brand with you guys.

My partner and I had a gentleman who was his name was

Ricky, and he was Hispanic, and I was the white guy.

So all of a sudden, we started branding

ourselves to the market and billboards and whatnot,

and we became like the car dealers do.

They're they're the ones on the front

face because people identify with faces.

So all of our clients all of a sudden started

seeing one of the two of us, and they could

identify with one of the two of us, and they

had a higher identification with our brand.

So when I went to the haircut business, I thought,

all right, we got to do that again, but let's

find girl next door look, when I went to the

trash business, I did a cartoon guy.

I tried to brand my experience through a story, right?

So you're going to put upon that picture

of us on the billboard of story.

Good guys, bad guys. I like them. I don't like them.

Or the girl next door, cute girls.

Not to the point where I wouldn't

let my husband go in there.

But there's a brand that we've established.

So again, that's trial and error.

That's hiring good people, having a good

marketing company and agency, getting out of

the way and listening to them.

I mean, professionals that know it more than I do,

and it's being able to let go and watch.

Lots of data metrics. Right.

So how's it working?

Before we buy the next set of ads or the

next campaign, what kind of responses are we getting?

A lot of that.

As you were talking about building the brand and the

consistency and so forth, the details I asked you earlier

if you would describe yourself as a patient person.

I'm going to ask you a different P.

Are you a particular person?

Anything that's facing the client?

Yes, I am a nut about it.

I'm just obsessed about it.

I ended up getting in the school business.

I piped in scents.

You have those like, casinos do it so that when

you walk in, you get a smell of something.

I had classical music going, waxed the floors.

Every business I own, I'm super careful

about uniforms, logo integrity, clean windows.

What's the experience that that client is coming into.

And I'm not about it as a client,

as a patient, or as a consumer.

When you go out to eat, you look at

the bathroom at the restaurant, all those little things.

I can tell if an owner has attention to detail

based on how the staff greets me when I walk

in the door, based on the cleanliness of their place.

I'm a nut about it. Are you?

It sounds like this resonates. It's funny.

If you were to ask a lot of the people

on my team, it's got particular the facial expressions you

would get would just tell the whole story.

And I've had to warn people in the

interview process for certain roles and very particular.

So the billboards real quick.

Did you get recognized around town?

I was in a kind of a high

volume meat market bar for a while.

It's a country bar before apps and dating apps.

So I had a big circle from that.

Very involved in rotaries.

Yeah, we got really recognized for all that stuff.

Yeah, it was like the icing

a whole new level of people.

Do people interrupt you at dinner or things like that?

No, not that.

But they would recognize you or

feel like they know you. Right.

So there's a comfort level, which

is what we wanted to achieve.

Just that opportunity to say, yeah, we're normal

people, and yeah, that was part of it.

You talked about rich dad, poor dad earlier.

I take it you're a reader.

I see a lot of books on your shelf,

and we'll talk about what you're doing today, which

education, obviously, reading is a big part of it.

I gather you're an avid reader.

Have you read or did you read the Emyth?

Yeah, emyth revisited and both yeah.

The lady who makes the great cupcakes, and

then she finds out she's running a business.

So very different skills, I

think, is where you're going. Right.

And when you talked about going into the haircut business

with the intent of it being something that you could

franchise, he kind of talks about that in the book,

that you need to go into the business with a

mindset of what does this look like at scale?

What does it look like when we've

got two locations, 20 locations, 1000 locations?

And I think a lot of people have

to get started and do things for a

little bit before they get to that mentality.

But you had that from day one. Yes.

So I was kind of an OD kid.

I remember reading Entrepreneur and Ink Magazine when I

was 1213 14, 1516, cutting out articles, putting them

in folders based on how they do it.

This one failed and didn't make it.

How did they turn it around?

I mean, I was researching this field and what I'm

doing from the moment I could start reading, because I

knew this was where I wanted to be.

And that's why I told you, do your research.

But I had been devouring how to's stories, what did

work, what didn't work, what industries, what things for a

long time, in fact, I came across one of those

old things, and we're talking 1213 years old, and organizing

them so that I could say, okay, here's the turnarounds,

how they worked, and here's ideas.

I couldn't organize my room at

age twelve, let alone proactively.

Go read business magazines and clip articles.

So the haircut business, how far into the haircut business

did you fully get out of the cell phone business?

I think I'd had five or six locations by that

time when I had one cell phone left way out.

It's called Sierra Vista.

An outer market was still doing well.

And all the while, as I'm building the haircut business,

knowing I want to take it to a scalable level,

I'm systematizing as much as I possibly can.

Training manuals, cash handling manuals,

site location marketing, everything.

I'm trying to get ready for the franchise move.

I start getting offering circulars from around the open source

that are out there, and I start reading them.

I start writing my own contract, and they're good.

300 page contracts to then give it to

a lawyer to bless it and move forward.

I find that in my state of Arizona,

there's two franchise groups that have started here

and that are still based here.

One of them is called Alpha Graphics.

Ever heard of them?

It's a print shop, right?

The other is called Stone Cold Creamer, which is

around the country, and it's based out of Phoenix.

So as I'm getting closer, closer, and I'm doing

my due diligence and I'm opening and building and

things are moving, I got on the phone and

called up the CEO of cold Stone Creamery.

Out of the blue, I thought, see if I can

get in front of this guy and have a conversation.

He takes my call, I schedule an appointment up in

Phoenix with him, and we spend the day together.

And he could not have been more gracious.

And he went through what it's like to

be a franchiseor, what the pitfalls were, what

the positives were, on and on.

At that conversation, he said to me, joe, if you're

going to be a franchise or get ready to litigate.

He said, now that we're at this point and

we're this big, it seems like we're doing a

ton of litigation in the franchise world.

Franchisees, I'm setting you up in business.

Love you for the first three to five years.

After that, they're like, why are we paying this idiot

5% of my fees or 10% of my fees?

Because they've figured out the model, and they're on their

own people trying to take his brand around the world,

and he'd have to sue in foreign court.

So he just basically said to me, get ready

to litigate, because that's what we are now at.

So they're supplying and they're opening and

they're bringing on franchisees, but there's a

lot of laws around franchises and whatnot.

And it really changed my entire outlook at

the process because two things, there wasn't enough

revenue per unit to make enough and litigate

and do everything I needed to do.

It's like if you own a McDonald's,

they're doing a million gross a year.

My stores are doing about 20,000, 25,000 gross.

So for me to take my piece and do what I needed

to do would have been really tricky to get to that.

Remember riding the horse, and I'm

on my path, number one.

Number two, the staff in a

haircut world is not super professional.

Lots of fights, lots of cat fights, lots

of girls that don't get along together. Really? Yeah.

Just a different vibe of staff.

And I looked at those two things, enough revenue to justify

where I wanted to go, and that and I thought, I

can't see myself doing this for the next 2025 years.

So I got off that horse, brought in some

managers that have been running my stores, made them

owners, started getting out of it, and it kept

going for a number of years.

In fact, there's still two or three open here in

Tucson that I'm no longer a part of, but those

managers are now running them, and they're continuing on.

I'm part of their story of owning.

It's a great business for a person that cuts hair

and that knows the industry and can make a good

living plus a little bit at a location.

So wound that business down knowing that I

was going to wind it down, found the

next one and started growing another one.

But this CEO of Coldstone, this is such an ironic story,

did me a huge solid, changed my life, opened a door

to me and let me see something I never would.

I could have been down that road

ten years before I figured that out.

It turns out his name was Doug Ducey.

Doug Ducey goes on to run for

treasurer of Arizona, then becomes our governor.

So fast forward five, six years.

I'm doing a talk radio show every morning.

I'm kind of the conservative Republican

talk radio guy for a partner.

I get a call from Doug Ducey's scheduler.

He wants to come on the show.

So I get him on the show and I said, Doug,

I don't know if you remember me or not, but you

did me an amazing solid by opening your door.

You were busy, you didn't have to do this.

Let me help you get elected down here

and let's see what we can do.

He goes on to become the governor and he's

amazing story, but that's a story of someone who

opened their door and took the call and helped

the next guy get through the process.

So hopefully everybody listening is emulating that I am

totally anytime I can mentor anybody who wants to

start a business and all the experience I've got,

I'll sit with them, explain what it's like, what

to look out for, but how ironic that whole

little journey was with me and Doug Ducey.

Did he remember? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

So a couple things in there that really stuck out.

One, I think that there are at least as

many people that are willing to open their door

as their people aren't willing to open their door.

And I think that's a great piece of advice.

If there is somebody out there that you want

to emulate, reach out, worst thing they're going to

do is say no, sorry, I can't.

But I'm willing to bet that if you come to them

and here's my story and here's what I'm looking for.

And obviously you weren't competing.

You weren't selling ice cream, you're selling haircuts.

I think that people are very willing to help and

that's kind of the spirit behind this whole podcast is

we want to encourage and educate, help other entrepreneurs to

not make the mistakes that we've made.

And this is a way of doing

it in mass versus one on one.

But I totally think awesome and aim high, right?

I mean, this guy had 500 I don't

know how many locations they had, but they're

a massive national brand, international brand.

He took the phone call and I'm like,

all right, let's spend some time together.

He's very gracious about it and very

candid, which I am too, with people.

I never say, I don't like your idea.

I never try to kill it because in this

world we do this entrepreneur world, there are naysayers

around every stone and if I listen to them,

I would be sitting under a table every day.

Got to be passionate and committed.

So I'll never discourage someone, but I will just tell

them to think about this or call that or look

at here, look at this one, or call me back

in a month and let's see where you've come.

I always throw the tennis ball back to them, right.

I'm not going to do it for you, but here's some stuff.

Call me back if you need help.

And if they call, I keep going. Let's just keep moving.

So you've talked about mentoring.

Have you had mentors yourself?

Oh, yeah, I think everybody should and

I'm sure I hope everybody does.

Yeah, no, I've got men in my prayer group that

are older and established and very wise in that world.

I've got business people.

In fact, there was a kind of a stage where I'm

rising up into CEO levels and I've got a lot of

good things going and I thought, I need a mentor.

So I tried to find someone bigger and higher

up than me and that had a bigger organization.

Called him out of the blue, kind of knew

him cursory and said, hey, let's have breakfast.

And we'd become close friends.

Just to keep me in check and just to be a

sounding board and just to each my prayer group guys are

hitting me a different direction and the large CEO guys another.

But it's good for me to constantly pinging

that back, like, why am I doing it?

What's the purpose?

Am I just chasing money now or

how am I serving my community?

All those things.

So, yeah, no, I think you're

never done having a mentor, hopefully.

So, haircut business, you decide, time

to get out of there.

What did you do after that?

So I'm buying advertising on bus shelters and it works

exceptionally well for all my businesses because I can geolocate

around a location in a crowded market with a lot

of stuff bombarding you from the airwaves.

Outdoor is consistent.

And there I would put out an aframe in front of

my stores, my haircut stores, and I would get a 30%

bump in traffic, which that's how I got into politics, which

is another deviation, but we'll get back to that.

So remember that one.

But I started buying these bus shelter ads.

The company that had the contract for the

bus shelters also had to pick up the

garbage and clean the wash on it.

They're telling me what they're paying per

month and they're complaining about the process.

And I looked at the number and I looked

at the labor and I looked at the equipment.

I says, well, why don't you

let me take the contract over?

So I took over a trash contract and

we ended up driving all night with two

crews, picking up garbage, taking to the landfill.

And then I'm looking at my equipment, which

is pretty expensive, and I said, what else

can I do with this stuff?

So I started building a route and I ended up with about

twelve trucks and we ran 20 hours a day and we had

roll offs and we got into all kinds of different things.

Again, consumable right.

So I had a client every month

that would pay me on time.

The trick with that business is

it's all commodity, it's price.

You can't be an artesian garbage collector, right?

Are you the lower price guy and

do you show up every week?

That was my two big things.

So I just built and built and built and built

and would make a little money and buy another truck

and buy no truck and make a little money.

And at the peak we were doing pretty well in sales.

I thought my exit might be waste management or

one of the big guys coming in, buying you

out because that was kind of the better.

As soon as you get to a certain size, they would

like, all right, I'm going to take you because you're the

low price guy and I can raise my prices.

That didn't happen. 2008.

Recession started to hit.

Fuel started to really creep up

there and climb up there.

The capital market seized up, so

I couldn't keep buying new trucks.

So my older trucks got more

and more repairs were happening.

My mechanics were making more money than I

was because it was just keeping them going.

And slowly but surely that business went away as well.

So real quick, 2008, you got out of the cell phone

business in 506 and there was the haircut in there too.

So did you have all three of those going at

the same I think I might have had one store

in cell phones still plug in, and then I had

the haircut and trash for a while. Wow.

So the haircut and the trash, did

they start right about the same time?

The haircut first, then trash.

I bought into the trash business. Wow.

So right around when I got the conversation with Doug Ducey,

I'm like, all right, time to look for next one.

Get on the next horse.

And the trash had a lot of positives to it.

Capital is the key, and I always

had a hard time as an entrepreneur.

You will find this as well, getting banks to say yes.

So most of my capital comes from my

houses or prior businesses or credit cards.

The trash business was the first time that I had

banks say yes on purchasing equipment and it was a

local credit union and they're amazing through the process because

they knew me and they knew the history.

So had that going.

Then while those two were kind of humming,

haircuts were just I was handing them off

to managers and I had less responsibility.

I developed a retail center with a friend

of mine, a small commercial real estate development.

Never done that.

And so I had those two pretty heavy moving haircuts.

Now were on its own with managers running

them and I had a small piece coming

off the top but nothing too crazy.

How much did a garbage truck cost in 2008?

Well this is good. They're about new.

They're a quarter million bucks.

I was buying them used from municipalities

around the country because they usually take

care of them pretty well.

So anywhere between 50 62,030 I had roll

off trucks, we had a roll off contract

picking up for the City of Tucson.

I mean, it's a logistical thing and I think in

the end when I look back I was under capitalized.

If you're going to really do that business

well, you come in and buy all new

and you just go hard and you build.

A friend of mine did it in the rolloff world and

sold his big company a bunch of money to Waste Management.

But he had a ton of capital to back him.

Been I've never been good at raising money

with friends and I've never brought in partners.

It's always been my own.

So I've never been able to scale that way.

I'm not comfortable OPM other

people's money, just not me.

You mentioned City of Tucson was a customer.

Were you primarily selling to municipalities?

No, it was mainly retail

or residential HOAs communities.

Read hit 100 houses at once.

So while I'm in the business because I don't

know a darn thing about trash, there's a City

of Tucson small business or a trash commission.

I get appointed to the trash commission.

I figured if I'm in that room I will learn how

the real people do it and how the real market works.

So I'm on this thing for a couple of years

learning and I learned that you can't have old equipment.

You've got to constantly be recycling.

A contract comes up to do some work for the

City of Tucson and I bid on it, open bid.

I was up against the big guys.

I win the contract.

So if I hadn't been on that committee to learn

and to get out there and to understand my business

more, I would never would have gotten the contract.

Contract changed our life.

We ended up picking up roll off recyclable bins,

those big 40 foot construction but full of recycling.

Did that all over Tucson's seven

days a week or something crazy.

And then when 2008 hit the

Chinese quit taking all the recyclables.

Remember that period of time because we'd

consume everything, put it in a ship,

send it back to them for recycles.

They shut that off after 2008 downturn.

So they canceled the contract and I lost that.

And that's when the business really started.

Fuel was going up pretty high.

I couldn't get capital markets to buy new equipment.

Lost that big contract and it was time to get out.

I ended up selling that business just basically

for asset value to a competitor and let

him, a small guy, do it.

Something that struck me in the cell phone business.

I think it was both B to B and B to C.

It sounded like it started B to B,

and you got on B to C.

Obviously, the haircut world is B to C.

Now you're B to M, business to municipality.

That's got to be a whole different world

dealing with government than businesses and consumers.

Totally.

You know the game.

And now in my latest business, it's all government.

So you talk about patience, you

talk about frustration at following rules.

It just drives me bonkers, but just keep plugging.

But municipality, any kind of

government contracting, it's crazy.

And it's gotten worse in the last ten years.

Talk about government efficiency.

I mean, that one drives me nuts.

So trash business, get out for asset value.

What next?

You mentioned the retail development. Yeah.

So I developed this retail center, put a couple

of my businesses in and rent it out. It works great.

It's amazing.

Did it with a friend from high school, and

when 2008 hit, one by one, the small businesses

start moving out of a retail center.

So at the time, I had cash

flow from things, and it was working.

But then as everything started sliding, ended up

having to give that back to the bank.

So took a little hit on that.

So that was my first foray into development.

And I love and I give so much

attention and appreciation to those developers out there

that do this for a living.

Because there's a million variables

that you don't understand.

And if you've learned anything about how I tend to ride

my horses and do my thing, I want to know the

variables and I want to be able to control them.

And it's my cat.

When you're in the real estate game, it's capital

markets, it's zoning and municipalities, it's time value.

I mean, don't look envious on that developer who's

really, really rich because, man, they got their lifeline.

So I learned that world, which comes

back and helps me down the road.

But I really understood development, and

I said, that's not for me. Too risky. I'm a kind of guy.

I don't know about you, but I go to Vegas.

I don't gamble, so my whole life is

a gamble, but I don't live that way.

I want to know the variables.

I want to know everything going in and out.

I'm not a big Vegas fan.

Yeah, I work too hard for right.

And the house wins.

I never win. Right.

So the real estate development, that

was a buy and hold. Yeah.

My partner from high school had

the land, couldn't develop it.

We went to a bank, got it

funded, filled it, put on a shelf.

This was going to be like the

years from now when the tenants. Paid down.

This is just an extra chunk of money.

And then when eight hit and everything started

moving out, it became a cash drain.

So what I thought would be one thing turned

into be a real albatross and a real problem,

which, again, turned me off to being development.

I've owned some rental houses.

I didn't like that either.

So I'm just not a real estate.

Me personally, I'm not set for that.

But there's so many people in real estate that

couldn't imagine 150 employees and operations and opening door.

I mean, to each their own.

I just learned that wasn't mine.

You've had a lot of challenges with these businesses.

Were you discouraged along the way?

Man, I don't do it for money.

I love what I do.

No, I love the hunt.

I love the creative process of it.

And it wasn't until gosh, I'd say in the

last six, seven years, where I found mission and

purpose, which is American K Twelve education, which takes

all these skills and bundles them into a bowl

and says it's super important.

I mean, if we're going to fix this country,

it's going to come through our K Twelve system.

And I may never see the end of it.

It might be a 35 year effort,

but that's the fix for the country.

So when I stopped chasing businesses and money

and just I'm going to build, and I

found business and money and things and mission

and focus, it's a whole different ballgame.

If you're looking at a business, if you

can tie in something that's important to your

society, your family or your community, to your

skill set as a business person, look out.

So that's where I'm at now.

But all these things that I did that we're

talking through taught me something, and we're able to.

And I think it's God preparing me and teaching me

for each step of the way of what's coming.

Because as I got into this last thing,

we're going to talk about super complicated, unbelievably

difficult, pulls on all these experiences.

Pollocked everything.

So no way I could pull off what I pulled off

if I hadn't had a trash company and a haircut business

and a cell phone business and all that other stuff.

So after I got out of the building

and the garbage business, I had run for

office right around that time, 2008.

And what was the office?

Board of Supervisors, countywide race.

There's five soups.

I challenged an incumbent Republican in the primary, and

that was an offshoot of I kind of had

that moment of making money and working, and I

kind of said, is this it?

So I started plugging into my community, started in Rotary,

and worked my way up into the Catholic world.

Catholic Community Services, which is a big social

service agency, adoption and dentists and healthcare and

immigration, catholic school boards, just a lot of

things Catholic, because that was my way to

give back to my faith.

And after about seven years on this big, huge

fix the poor, save the poor, help the poor

board, we're raising money, we're doing all kinds of

stuff, and we'd have these end of year meetings.

And we helped 100,000 people this year, and the

next year was 120, the next year was 150.

And it was like kept getting bigger.

And I'm like, man, we're working our tail off

here and it's getting bigger, it's not getting better.

So it became crystal clear to me that was a

policy and it was the way our community was run.

So I said, well, let me get in and run.

And I ran for office, took

all my marketing background, right?

So I had vehicles wrapped and I had banners and

billboards and knocked and walked and did all the work.

Ended up losing, which in hindsight, thank God,

because that opened up other doors for me.

But from that experience, I interviewed with another friend

who's become a real close friend on a radio

show, and he was offered the opportunity to do

the morning drive time on this talk radio section.

He called me up, said, you want to do it together?

So we had a seven year run on

a morning radio show called Wake Up Tucson.

And it was amazing because our mission was always, how

do we make this place more small business friendly?

We held the elected officials to task.

Used to drive me nuts when they would be on the

campaign trail and say, yeah, we're here for small business.

We love small business.

They get elected, then they ignore you.

So our job was to hold them accountable.

We interviewed restaurant tours, national authors, U. S.

Senator McCain, and we were in the middle of it,

day to day, play by play, 3 hours every morning.

And that taught me the flow of politics.

And when I mentioned to patience,

that was the final patient step.

Because politics is chess on five dimensions.

Everybody's got an oxbian gourd or something they want and how

do you get there and how do you pull strings?

It's unbelievably important in my business career

because I will say, from when I

started being entrepreneur to today, it's so

regulated and political and politics based.

Whether it's rent seekers or large players in the

industry that want to keep you out or whatever,

we are heavily, heavily in this bureaucratic melees.

So that experience on air and meeting people

that run this country taught me a lot,

then became important to me down the road.

Morning drive.

What time did you have to be at the radio station?

So I'd get up about 330.

We were on air at six, so six to nine every day.

It was so fast because then I would

go out and do my work, right?

So that was just the morning when

I woke up and did my thing.

But unbelievable experience, man.

I just can't tell you what I learned and who I met.

It was fun.

I had a co host that we just laughed.

It was like this, like we're sitting having a

conversation, and, oh, by the way, there's, I don't

know, thousands of people listening every morning, and I

am just meeting and getting fed and devouring every

article that would pop up in the news.

And it was an amazing experience.

I imagine that you wake up at 330, have that

cup of coffee, take a shower, but then you're going

through the newspaper, you're looking for what's developing right now,

and you're coming in with fresh topics every day. Yeah.

Prepping for the interviews.

We're going to have it'd, be an author, you name it.

What was happening? We did a lot.

We were hyper local because you had

so many folks doing Fox News and

all the other stuff nationally syndicated.

Our focus was on really local.

So you had to weave a story.

You had to explain the boogeyman, and you had

to explain the good guys, and you had to

know we got the point where people would call

us like a little small business owner that was

getting a permit to open an ice cream store.

So he goes and gets his plans approved, and

they say, Why do you have two bathrooms?

You're not big enough. You only need one.

So he redoes his plans, builds this thing,

spectre comes out, says, Where's your two bathrooms?

You only have one in here. You need two.

He never opened.

His wife said we're done.

Those stories were getting untold because we come

from that world as small business people.

We knew exactly what it meant to their

life and their future and their family.

So we would get on the air and just beat

the heck out of these stories till there was change,

until people understood, look, 90% of the people in my

market, probably yours too, are small business, which is under

500 employees, according to the national.

So let's be their voice.

Let's hold accountable these municipalities to let them

experience what it's like in our world.

I mean, it's brutal.

You're the last one paid.

You got your entire life on the line.

Let's make it easier on you. How's that sound?

Just a little bit easier.

That was our mission of the show.

You said you did it for seven years. Seven years.

Do you miss it? No.

It got to be a tired, worn out shoe.

You're still having the same

conversations over and over? A little bit.

I tried to get to move towards

more of a podcast, long form.

Let's take bigger issues.

Let's open up some podcasts.

Were just starting at the time, and I devour podcasts.

I love a good three hour interview. Just love it.

So that's where I wanted to go with it.

So here's an interesting aside as you gobble.

These stories over seven years, foreign policy, economics, border

issues, small business, health care, you name it, patterns

started to emerge and my model was to put

them in a PowerPoint and I'd have them broken

down by 40 different patterns and it was 22.

And then finally I got it down to twelve.

And I wrote a book called The Twelve Arguments why America Is

on the Wrong Track and the One Way to Fix It.

Each argument stood on its own, and each argument

was tested through personal experience as a business owner

and my life, historical references and just stats and

facts like where we're going as a country.

So I write this book, put the first chapter

and intro on my blog website, get busy.

I got running charter schools and other things, and

the one solution that I reference is the schools.

So I'm working my solution and I get a phone

call from a gentleman out of Wisconsin, where I'm from.

He's 90, he's in the Rotary, small business guy.

And he goes, Where's your book?

I said, Well, I got busy and it's outlines

there and I've got a half, it done.

And he goes, Look, I'm too old to fix what's coming.

You need to finish the book and get

that done and get that out there.

So if that wasn't the call from God back to me,

he's a business guy, rotary 90, me when I'm 90 to

be part of that solution and get that done.

I did finish the book, and right when I was getting

it edited to be published, I thought I looked around the

marketplace and I said, what am I going to really add

to this discussion that's going on right now?

And all this will do is take away

from what I'm trying to achieve, which is

the policy stuff in K Twelve education.

So it's sitting on a shelf, all done.

But each of the arguments banking and debt, the

decay of the family, just goes on and on.

I mean, we could have a whole podcast

on those, but I think we're on a

wrong path and I think it's our generation.

I'm a Gen X that's going to have to get

in there and roll burst things and figure it out.

So you referenced a minute ago you were

on air from six to 09:00 A.m., and

then after that you went to your job.

Is that where you were working in the charter schools?

No.

So development out of the trash, ran for

office, end up doing the radio show.

I go over and I start helping a friend of

mine, a doctor friend of mine, run his practice.

He's got three physicians in his world, spent

seven, eight years with him, and we ended

up building it to 14 providers.

He owned a high complexity blood lab, medical lab.

I went over and turned that around,

took that over and got that humming.

Really got deep into American healthcare.

I did a podcast on this and I ran

bills at the state legislature and I looked for

entrepreneurial edges within American Healthcare, and there aren't many.

And this is just right around Obamacare 2010.

So doors are getting shut everywhere,

and opportunities are going away.

Essentially, what Obamacare did was nationalized

our healthcare system through insurance companies.

So super frustrating.

That's why you asked me earlier about

patients in that industry, in that business.

It taught me patients, nothing more complicated.

And I've done a ton of different

businesses as we're talking, than American Healthcare.

We are coming up on our annual benefits renewal, and

I'm already just bracing myself for what that's going to

mean, and pages and pages of stuff I don't understand.

Nobody's happy, right?

Doctors aren't happy anymore.

Patients aren't happy anymore. It's ridiculous.

Yeah, it's ridiculous.

It's 20% of the economy, though.

So that's why I was in it.

Like, we talk about this opportunity,

right, going towards 20 million.

What bigger than American healthcare?

So I had started up here's a great

two businesses that I came up with.

One when a patient would come in

and see a doctor, and they'd say,

hey, you're pre diabetic, you're hypertension.

We're going to put you in all these medications.

Or if you lose 20 pounds or

40 pounds, you could avoid this.

Then they'd send them off, and then

six months later, they're back in.

They haven't lost the 2040 pounds.

So I created a medical weight loss business inside

of a doctor practice so the doc could say,

well, hey, go talk to Sally Sue in room

20, and she'll help you through this process.

So I created a medical weight loss business that looked

at sleep and hormone therapy and calorie restriction and tried

to get to the root of your psychological issues that

would then be a franchise model that could go sit

inside of other doctor practices around the country.

Also came up with an idea of, all right,

so you know how Priceline revolutionized hotels, right?

So hotel room is a perishable inventory that

by the end of booking time, it's useless.

So what Priceline did is says, let's create an opaque

market so you can maintain your price at the front

desk, but you can sell that hotel room for less.

So I thought, let's do that for

medicine and dental and plastic surgery.

Go around to MRI companies and say, hey,

MRI company, you have a $2 million machine

that's sitting there unused on Tuesday at 02:00.

How low can we create this virtual market

to find clients that would go into it?

Back in the day, you

had high deductible policies, right?

So you as patient gave a care because you were paying.

So you would call around a little bit and

say, okay, it's three grand here and 500 here.

Go to the 500.

So the model was, I create this

virtual marketplace, test it in Arizona, and

then send it all over the country.

Go have folks come in.

I make a percentage of the buy between.

So when obamacare finally kicked in.

They got rid of all those high

deductible policies, totally eroded that marketplace.

So now you have to go where

your insurance company tells you to go.

So the ability to do a free market inside

of healthcare went away, so that business went away.

So there's two that I kind of worked on.

Third one is I was drawing blood for

different labs and getting paid for that.

So I had twelve employees between phoenix and

tucson inside of medical practices, bringing in ancillary

revenues for these doctor practices to go.

So it was very complicated business, very frustrating business,

and I am so glad I'm out of it.

So you were working for a medical practice, am I right?

This is the first time in decades that you've had a w.

Two couldn't have been a better dude.

We're really close friends, so it wasn't like a boss.

And he just let me go, and we

grew it, and he made money with it.

And then I was trying to find extra businesses outside of

him or around him, or like a bolt on businesses that

would work here, and then I could take elsewhere.

So I always had that entrepreneur eye, doing

the radio show, winding my other businesses down.

So, yeah, first time I'd been employed in a long time,

and I thought, that too, like, can I do this?

Can I go and work for somebody or be with somebody?

Turns out he was the perfect person to do it.

He's a very dear friend.

Still sounds like it was the

no rules environment that you needed. Totally.

Yeah, totally.

And by then, I'd been losing my buildings, and eight

was hitting, and trash was when nothing was working.

So it gave me some stability, and it let

me say, okay, let's figure this industry out.

It gives you some time to learn.

Again, amazingly important time.

But I ran bills at the legislature.

I got involved policy stuff, started a podcast on

healthcare solutions, and it was just sad to see.

In fact, as I'm talking with these doctors, these medical

doctors have been practicing for 40 years, and they're old

and great, and they're amazing at their craft.

And I'll say, okay, hey, obamacare is making

us click this box, or you click this

box about, does the person own a gun?

Or whatever the stupid rule was at the time.

You remember?

All those were coming at us to, like, insane.

I remember dr.

Mahali said, he looked at me, he goes, are you stupid?

I said, no, I'm not stupid.

He says, I'm not clicking that box.

I said, well, there's about ten boxes

we're clicking for you behind the scenes.

This is one you have to click because

you're a medical professional, and if you don't

click it, you're not going to get paid.

So what my job was during this takeover of medicine is

to crush the dreams of these doctors, of what their profession

used to be and was and will never be again.

The young guys that came into it were ready for it.

They're ready for the electronic medical records.

But the old guys love to talk to

a patient when you walk in the door.

So I got to experience working with a professional.

So when I jump over to

work with teachers, it's the opposite.

So now I'm saying to them, hey, you've

been shackled in your public schools about taking

this test and doing it this way.

And I'm here to tell you I'm going

to do that behind the scenes for you.

I want you to be in a magical teacher.

I want you to use your profession to impact the kids.

So I got to see this contrast between taking

away from a professional and giving to a professional

and how beautiful that was, which if I hadn't

done if I haven't done the takeaway, I wouldn't

understand the beauty of giving it back.

So another little shorter side.

But again, God prepared me each step.

Man so you did the medical thing for a few years

and from there, is that when you got into charter schools?

Yeah.

So I interview this author on my show.

We would do that quite often. His name is Dr.

Kevin Lehman.

He wrote 50 books on marriage and family.

His most famous and kind of his early

first one was Birth Order, where you are

in your family and how you turned out.

Like, I'm a firstborn, so I'm pretty prepared. Yep.

Same babies are your salespeople.

I mean, just it's from Alfred

Adler who created the idea.

And then Kevin took that and kind

of made a story of it.

He was on Oprah and Fox News and kind of high profile.

And we became really close friends.

I remember saying he has a story where he self deprecates

himself, like he was a mess up all through school.

And he did a 180.

I remember like the second or third interview, I've got

five minutes left on the air before we go.

Hard break and we're off.

And I said, Kevin, Dr.

Lehman, you talk about this mess up

you were and you did a 180. What happened?

And he proceeded to tell me that he found

Christ and his wife took him to church.

So I'm like, well, there's more to

this guy than meets the eye.

So went and had breakfast with

him, became very close friends.

He mentored me as a dad and as a boss.

And we came really close.

And at breakfast one day he said, we're having

this conversation about America and what's going on.

He says, I wish I'd get my books into schools.

And I said, have you ever heard of a charter school?

And that's how that started.

And one thing led to another.

We wrote our first charter to

the state of Arizona in 2014.

We got approved we got funded on a brand new campus.

I think it was twelve or $15 million.

Again, a development background that I didn't think I

would need or use or do ever again.

And we opened up our doors on 2015 to 500 kids.

The next year we opened up to 1000.

The next year, 2000, next year, almost 4000.

Absolutely hit it. Doubled.

I mean, as an entrepreneur, as you do

this for a long time and things just

hit, you just know they're hitting right.

And you're just like, please, let's not mess this up.

And I was trying to figure out, why is this

working and what our model is, is classical education.

And classical education started with back in

Socrates, he had the Lyceum, so we're

talking old school, but it's based on

the classical liberal arts, great classic literature.

Values and virtues are super, super important.

As we read about the literature, history is the art.

And parents were just ready for that.

All this goofy stuff at schools that's going on,

it was free, so it's not a private school.

So you're getting that private

school experience for free.

Brand new campus, state of the art security, professional

teachers, the scent as you walk in the front

door, the music playing, the waxed floors.

I mean, we just showed up different

marketing company, did all of our branding.

Tagline Media in Tucson with Deb Weisel, did

all the branding, all the know, had Dr.

Lehman front and center.

We website presence, color, mean,

we just did it, right?

And it worked at every turn.

So that's how I went from haircuts, cell

phones, radio, ultimately Chargers, but again, mission, right?

So I've done all these amazing businesses,

but this is the one that's like,

all right, this is your forever home.

I'm not looking for the next one.

I'm looking for how do I

make this one big and important?

And so that leads into ethos. Logos.

Greek, latin.

Yeah, Greek.

Ethics and logic.

The third is pathos. Ethos Logos. Pathos.

Pathos is the faith beast.

So as I started the CEO spot at Lehman,

I'm thinking, we have got to systematize, right?

That's my business background.

And we had a growth strategy that was pretty moving.

So I thought, we got to get this figured

out, because got that at one point we had

125 new teachers coming in the door every year.

How do you train them, how do you hire them?

What are they going to do when they walk in the door?

And how do they understand our culture?

And all those things that I had

learned in the past came to fruition.

So I embarked upon, since, what, 2015 till now,

this journey of systematizing, every aspect of running an

American school, classical ed, and what is now.

There is a publishing company called Ethos Logos

where I have hundreds of products that all

line up, and they're all specific to teachers.

We wrote a book about how it works.

There's a whole digital suite.

So should we have a COVID event again, we

can not miss a beat and be right online.

Or if I open a new school, which I'm working

on in North Carolina right now, day one, all those

teachers know exactly where they're going and what they're doing.

I know how to run the lunch program.

I know how to build the campus, wax the floor.

Everything is systematized, which is unique

to what a business does.

American public schools are so not there. Right.

And that's the unique piece we bring to the table.

So you're a publishing company.

Is there a consulting aspect to it, too?

Like, do you come in and help

actually coach them getting off the ground?

Or is it more just, hey,

here's the resource, go do this?

There's five things we do.

First is help those nonprofit boards, whatever their

states are at, to write the charter application,

get approved by their local municipality.

We work on the finance and the construction.

I don't do either of those things, but I've

worked with six, 7810 different groups that I bring

to that board, so make sure they don't make

the mistakes I made with financing.

And just to put in perspective, the group

that I ran, I think we had $80

million in bond, finance against construction.

And we've done seven campuses.

We're on our number eigth.

About 7000 kids now come to our schools. K eight.

So I've done that.

The big one is teacher professional development,

hiring, training, giving them that profession back.

Then it's curriculum, english, writing, history, math, kind

of scope and sequence to make sure that

we do well in this day tests and

the teachers know what they're doing every day.

And the final one, the one that's probably

the most important and why parents are picking

us, is character education, values and virtues.

Basically, Catholic schools have been

doing it for 100 years.

Private schools using the Bible in the

public sector, you can't do that.

So I've embarked upon I got

my master's degree in this field.

I've embarked upon writing.

I wrote a book on character ed, how to embed that

into a school to be effective and to be impactful.

If you get that part right, education works great too.

Kids love to come to school and they

feel welcomed and a part of it.

So you can just take these two.

We can help you develop. And I leave.

I mean, there's all kinds of things.

My goal is, how do I open

more classical charter schools around the country?

It can be a charter.

It can be a private that wants to convert.

It can be a group of parents that want

to a church that wants to open a private.

Whatever denomination in the big

market lately is home school.

As all this craziness is happening around the

country, lots of parents don't have choices.

So they're literally just jumping out and

saying, I'm going to do it myself.

And what I have is something to help them

make sure that they're on path to do that.

Because as we've built this for our teachers to come

in day one and know right what to do for

each subject, it now applies to the homeschool family too.

So think of me like Microsoft has an

operating system, but then they have Word, Excel

and Publisher and all the different pieces.

So you can do the whole shebang, or you can just say,

I like your English and I can help you with that.

So I'm betting big.

That what America needs and what families want,

because I've seen it in the marketplace, is

character based, old school, classical liberal arts education.

So that's what gets me up every day.

That's where I spend my time.

Got a team of teachers that are building.

I've got professional development folks, I've got

operation people that are all ready.

I've worked in about six different states.

I will tell you, the politics

of this has gotten really hairy.

Your state of Texas, I've applied four

times with different groups, all turned down,

and that was never the case before.

So about 2018, the regulatory group came in and

really made it hard to open these things.

Slowed the industry down big time.

But you've got vouchers that have been popping up

where they're funding the students instead of the systems.

So then all of a sudden now there's

an opportunity to take this operational structure.

In voucher states, there's about ten of those.

So the entrepreneur always finds a way.

You can keep putting those bureaucratic blocks or the

market, whatever you want, in front of me.

We're going to find a way around it. That's what we do.

And we just keep attacking and keep pushing because

it's right, because it's what this country needs.

How many people do you have in

the organization working with you right now?

I've got four in the leadership and I've

got about six in contract building out content.

You said that you're in your sweet spot.

You're getting to use all of the things that you've

learned over the years, and it's tied to Mission.

So I know you're not going to go start

another business unless it's somehow directly related to this.

What is next?

I've been asked to do CEO stuff or

take on things, and if it doesn't fit

this narrow band, I'm really saying no.

So I don't know, man.

It's been a long five years of

trying to get this to happen.

And so just to give you an example, first

seven charters that I wrote all got approved, 107%.

Last 14, I've gotten one approved, and

it's just gotten so incredibly complicated.

And we talk about that

frustration and rules and bureaucracy.

The industry has successfully been shut

down by whoever you want to

call them, teachers unions, bureaucracies, existing

school districts, competitors, rent seeking, whatever.

They've done a good job.

And when you talk to architects and lenders that are in.

This space.

They all feel the same thing.

Existing charters that are operating can expand.

But anybody new entrant into the

market is just being blocked.

And it's going to give, because when you poll both

Democrats and Republicans, you're in the 68% to 75%.

They want school choice, right?

So you got the voters pressuring, you got many of

these red states, you got elected officials like, yeah, we're

doing charters, but when the two of them find out

there's no more capacity coming and it's being blocked in

the bureaucracy, something's going to break.

And I think you're seeing these

vouchers being one of the breaks.

The Supreme Court did a decision a couple of years back

that said you could fund the parent, not a Catholic school

or private school, but you give it to the parent, then

they could go where they want to go.

That opened the market.

So there's always a way.

Health care, I mentioned to you, is about 20%

of the market as far as GDP and size.

Education is probably the next biggest.

So it's super, super important.

And we're starting to have some real hard looks

at what we're teaching in the classroom, how we're

teaching in the classroom, what the end product is.

Are we trying to build factory workers

today or do we want critical thinkers?

What role do these stupid phones have in lives?

And what's that doing to our kids brains?

And how do we get them to think

about the good, the true and the beautiful?

Who instills morals and values?

And what does that look like?

How does school complement what's happening

at home, a church or community?

I see us pulled at the seams at every turn.

I wrote a book about it.

Twelve Arguments Why America Is on the Wrong Track.

So I've identified the problem.

The fix is not easy.

It's long and it's a slog.

And whether you're whatever business you're in listening, keep doing

it, but keep an eye towards that because what market

are you going to have if we don't fix this

place, if we don't have the country that I grew

up in, that I love and that you love and,

you know, there for the next generation.

So for me, there's no more important spot to spin.

Earlier you talked about how a lot of people

have ideas, but they don't move past the idea.

You phrased it a little bit different, but

I think it was something in that vein.

Why do you think that is?

I think it comes when you're really young

and are you told you can do anything?

Or are you told, oh, don't be careful?

I think it goes way back that far.

So that's where it starts.

I think it's a muscle.

So the more you do it, the more confidence you get and

the more ability you have, the more you can do it.

I think it's like any profession, you've got

to have mistakes and you to learn and

you got to research and read.

Okay, I'm not going to do that again.

Or I think it's being able to get outside your

comfort zone and ask and talk and meet and mentor

and research and find someone that you can just say,

hey, I'm looking to do a retail center.

What should I look out for?

All right, well, make sure where's the market at with

the cap rate, how much cash you got in all

those different things that people have done it before you.

But I think the start of it is I can

do anything versus, oh, man, what if it doesn't work?

And maybe it's not me.

And that's the root of it.

And I think that starts

when you're really, really young.

Let me ask you that question. That's a good question.

What do you think? I think it's fear.

And I think you, in a way, kind of alluded to that.

I think it's fear.

I think it's fear of failure.

And I think that that fear of

failure has two components to it.

One, and I think probably the overarching is the financial

aspect of the fear of failure, and the second is

the emotional, social aspect of the fear of failure.

Nobody wants to go to their high school

reunion and tell people about their failed ventures.

Right.

You want to go back and be a success, and

you want to have the financial success with it.

And I think that most people that take the risk

have found a way to get over the fear.

Yeah, it's either it was probably motivated it was

for me, like, I've got to make payroll.

Like, what am I going to do?

I got a mortgage and a young

kid let's go, or it's paralyzed. You see the point?

You don't do it. That's good stuff.

But I've helped so many people through these stories

of opening what I opened and handing it to

them, that once they're in it, they love it.

They just love it.

But they just could never make that first step.

So being a part of that journey for them and

being a part of that story for them is beautiful.

And we're still friends to this point.

We all like each other.

The true test of this is, and I've had 14 or

15 partnerships in my background, is when you're making money, it's

easy, but when you're not, how are you doing?

Are you sticking through it?

And those that have, have become my dearest friends, when

we've lost money and it's really, really tough and we're

struggling with our families and we're still talking today, that's

character your story is so different from all of the

guests that we've had up to this.

.1 of the things that we see with a lot of

our guests is they start doing things and eventually it grows.

And they hire people that take on some of

their responsibilities and they go do these other things.

Sounds like you've always kind of had enough people around you

that you were able to kind of divide the labor.

Today, what are the things that

you enjoy doing the most?

And what are the things you enjoy the least?

Great question.

Well, I like it all and that's the

reason I do what I do, right?

I love marketing, I love cleaning the toilets.

I love every aspect of it

because it's so mentally challenging.

I am not someone you could put in that

box and say, okay, your job is HR today.

I love the variety of it.

I've come to really love building and creating

people and encouraging people and getting them to

be better and better at what they do.

Back to that, taking away the autonomy of

the doctors and giving it to the teachers.

Some of my top leaders were low thirty s,

twenty eight s, thirty two s that are leading

major organizations that they never would get a chance

to just because they were so good.

Then there's other issues, right?

They're maybe not ready ego wise or mentality wise.

We have to come around them.

But I love that part of

process of building through people.

I'm in the people business.

All my businesses have been in the people business.

So that's super important.

And it was always my job to go the

furthest, do the most, be there first, let them

see that, to set the tone, what we expect.

We've fired a lot of people. That's part of it too.

And usually there's a lot of warnings and a lot

of conversations and we're trying to come around, but sometimes

it's just, look, you're not a fit here.

Then I look at why did I hire you

and where did it go wrong or whatnot?

So that's part of it.

But I've gotten the point as you get big.

I mean, we had 550 employees and

we had a lot of moving parts.

You have to lead through people understanding their

job to the very nuance of it, right?

So I did the janitor contract for a semester with

a couple of guys so I could learn that process.

So now when I go into school, first place I

go is a special ed department because that's such a

difficult and I want every manager and every principal in

my school to see that's important to me because that's

an important part of our business.

And the second is the janitors and

the people that clean the floors.

And I'll make note of, hey, this

looks great, did an amazing job.

So it's the little things like that.

It's leading through people and setting example and

they'll look forward to looking back on any

and all of your ventures, including Ethos today.

Is there anything you would go back and do different?

Not one thing.

Not one thing? No.

How about you?

I would have embraced the growth earlier and hired

sooner and probably been a little bit more aggressive.

I'm not unhappy with the way that things have

turned out at all, but if I were going

to change something, that would be it. Yeah.

How about getting over your skis and cash?

Running out of cash?

I mean, that's always the game, right?

It's like throttling your car.

Got to get it right there. Perfect.

With hindsight, you can say that, but at the time, what

made you not do that is probably the better question.

Yeah, I definitely had that fear of failure

and really the financial aspect of it.

And when I left my old firm,

I jumped off a cliff financially.

I mean, I didn't have a project lined up.

I wasn't taking customers.

I wouldn't do that ethically anyway,

but I wasn't taking customers.

So I literally fell off a

cliff financially and started from nothing.

And it was great when the money finally started coming in

and then the work picked up, and at a point, it

was like, I clearly can't do this all by myself.

I had to get over.

You said this multiple times.

You get paid last when you're the owner.

And that's my mentality, too. Right.

And so the idea of, okay, now I have to put

food on somebody else's table, the responsibility of that right?

It's a big 1000%, because it's no longer just

you against the world or you and your family.

It's like so when you start making those, like, the look

back question on that investment, you think, man, if I mess

this up, I could wreck not just me, but others.

Nobody understands it till you do it.

Making my first hire was one of the

hardest decisions I've made in this business.

And we share a faith background.

And one of my prayers was, if this

doesn't work, don't let it harm them.

If it's going to harm anybody, let it

harm me, but don't let this harm them.

And thankfully, it's worked out pretty good.

Nobody knows it until you do it, right?

No one knows how lonely and

how hard, but how rewarding.

I mean, I wouldn't change a thing.

Love the journey, man.

Hopefully, it sounds like you do, too.

That's why you're doing this show,

trying to tell these stories.

It's good work.

One of the things I learned early on was

that when you're on your own, the good days

are better and the bad days are worse.

And that speaks to that loneliness you mentioned.

Well, getting into the home stretch here, you

mentioned you've got people that you mentor.

Is there a consistent piece of advice that

you find yourself giving over and over?

I stumbled across this brahman theory of, I deal

with men a lot, not so much women.

But there's four stages in a man's life

you're getting poured into by your society.

So you're young and you're going to school,

and you're getting all your effort, right.

When you get to be about 18 to 25 maybe 30.

Your job is to look attractive to the mate and get

the career and be the guy that gets the girl.

This stage is the midlife crisis, right?

So about 45, you've built your career and

you're moving and you kind of have that

existential crisis like, what am I doing?

What's this for?

Why am I here?

So me telling this guy when I was 25 or

27 to slow down and take care of your family

and don't work so hard, like, yeah, right, but if

I get a 45 year old that's still chasing this

stuff, I start having a much different conversation.

How's it working for you? Is that it? Is it just money?

Is it just how's your faith life?

How's your relationship with your friends?

How's taking time for yourself?

It's knowing who I'm mentoring at

those periods of time, isn't it?

Because I've been there.

I'm sure you've been there.

Most of us have right now.

It's helped me now find partners, because if you're 60

and you're still trading in the wife and getting the

car and getting the new, it's like we got to

have a conversation about I don't want to get too

close to you because you're going to be 80 and

doing that same stupid stuff.

But let's have a deep like, where are you going?

And let's line it all up and let's go

where we want to go together consistently, but I'm

only going to let you so far in. Does that make sense?

A little bit, but those four stages really made sense to

me because I lived a man when I was here.

I was a whole different mood than when I'm

here and I have people in my life know,

knock me on the head sometimes and go, hey,

dummy, it's not about money and business.

Slow down, do this, go find some balance so it's

be a mentor, understand where your people are and have

people that hold you accountable to those four.

And I always work towards this.

We all need that person or multiple people in our lives

that can say, hey, dummy, what are you doing here?

Well, Joe, is there anything that you would hope

to cover that we haven't got to yet? No, man.

It's a very thorough interview.

I didn't plan on going this deep into all these

little subsections and you bring back so many memories and

so many things wouldn't change it for the world.

I highly encourage anyone out there that's looking

at this career choice to do it.

Don't be afraid to get uncomfortable.

Let the fear motivate you.

And when you look back and on the rock

and chair, when you're in your 90s, what do

you want that legacy to look like?

Hopefully you left everything on the field.

Great way to end it, joe, thanks so much. Thank you.

Appreciate it.

That was Joe Higgins, founder and

CEO of Ethos Logos Publishing.

To learn more about his

latest venture, visit ethoslogos.org.

If you or a founder you know would like

to be a guest on In the Thick of

it, email us at intro@founderstory.us.