Ken Rusk – Digging Your Way to Blue-Collar Cash

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Episode transcript below:

00:04 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Hello Ken, welcome to the How’d it Happen podcast.

00:12 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Thanks, mike, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.

00:16 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
I’m very glad you’re here because I love well, I loved your book which is blue collar cash. You can see it here, everybody, and I love your message, like I can love what that’s all about, especially while I listen to Mike Rowe a lot and you remind me of Mike Rowe Like he’s always talking about this kind of stuff, except I think Mike Rowe did go to college, so I think there’s like a difference in background and you’ll learn more about that as we dig more into Ken’s story. So let me tell you a little bit about Ken to get you started.

00:49
Ken Rusk is a bestselling author of blue collar cash Love your work, secure your future and find happiness for life. He’s an entrepreneur and a blue collar advocate, showing that there’s no degree required for comfort, peace and freedom. He is a blue collar construction business entrepreneur who has launched multiple successful endeavors over the last 30 years. For the first many of those years his young working life he dug ditches for a basement repair company in northern Ohio. I suppose that was because water was coming into the basement. One of those yeah, that’s correct.

01:27
Okay, all right. And over the years he dug his way to a good life, which I love, one shovel of dirt at a time, and now he is teaching others to do the same. Ken has extensive experience in hiring, training and developing first time job seekers, particularly those without college degrees. He lives in Toledo, ohio, where he runs Rusk Industries, which specializes in various forms of construction. So, ken, I start every show with a simple question, and that is how did it happen for you?

02:01 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, again, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. I suppose that I guess I’ve been accused of being a blue collar entrepreneur, and the way that happened was very simple when I was 15 in my high school. My high school property shared a fence with an industrial park and we used to cut through a hole in the fence to go through the industrial park and go hang out at the carry out at the end of the street after school. And it was interesting because the more that I did that, the more I kind of got in tune with some of these businesses and what they were all about lots of energy, lots of people milling about, lots of like grown up talk of toys. You know the things you use when you’re a kid, but for real, in real life. And you know it was time I mean I needed.

02:46
I had a couple of really part-time jobs before that, but I wanted my first kind of full-time job where I could buy my first new used car, I take my girlfriend out for pizza or go bowling with my buddies, whatever. And so one day I went into one of these businesses and I said what do you guys do here? And they said we basically dig ditches. And I knew somebody that had worked there. So I said, well, I’m wholly qualified for that. And so, yeah, I started digging ditches with them in the summertime, fixing old, wet, smelly basements, and in the wintertime, when I was in school, still, I’d go work in the office after school. So it was really convenient for me and it was a great way to learn both sides of the business, which ended up happening. I ended up learning the production side and the whole sales and marketing side.

03:30
So when it came time for me to decide was I going to college or was I going to graduate and go to work, what was I going to do?

03:37
They approached me and said, hey, before we make that decision, we are going to start opening franchises around the Midwest and we want you to do it, we want you to help us do that. So, mike, I literally lived out of a suitcase, going to Chicago and Columbus and Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and all over the place, setting up these new businesses literally from scratch. I mean, we had to build out the buildings and then we had to put the office furniture in and get the phone equipment and then hire the people, get them started and then move on. And I did that for four years or so and got tired of living out of a suitcase, and then I ended up moving to where I am now, which is Sylvania, ohio, just outside of Toledo, on the west end of Lake Erie, and started my own company. We opened with six people back in 1986, which is, I guess, 38 years now and now I think we have like two or 300 and we’re involved in some other construction stuff too. It’s been a heck of a ride.

04:37 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And Ken, was there anything else that went into your selection of going to the basement repair company, except that you knew someone who worked there? So were you looking at other places and did you apply at other places? Or was this just? You were drawn to it somehow, whether through this associate or through what they were doing, or whatever?

05:04 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Yeah, I had worked for a bakery, I worked at a bowling alley, I had my own paper route. I mean, I had done lots of different things. I was in landscaping and in this particular case I knew that I could control a lot of things. I could control the amount of input I was willing to put in, which is a direct result of the amount of output that you get out of that, and the quality of that output. And then I could control my day, my schedule, my time. I could control how much work I did. I could control how much financial gain I got out of that.

05:34
So for me there was a whole lot of I can build the life that I want for myself with and through this company, because they were very go forward and they were a very hustling type company. There was a lot of energy and lots of goal setting. You lived by the goals that you made and it was just a good environment for me to thrive in, because I love the competition, I love to be outside and all that kind of worked for me.

06:07 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And when you were off living out of the suitcase for those four or five years, you were how old when you started that you were quite young. I was 18 and a half yeah 18 and a half, so you couldn’t even rent a car, or maybe you could in those days at 18 and a half.

06:23 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Yeah, you could back then.

06:25 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So tell me what that was like. I feel like that could be well. First of all, it could be a really big boost to your ego, like hey, these people think that I can do this. But I think it could also be kind of daunting, and you’re probably dealing with lots of people who are older than you. So I’m just kind of thinking like how you approached it and how you felt about.

06:49 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, the good news there is, I knew, and this kind of taught me visualization from the very beginning, mike. So I knew what I wanted this place to look like because I needed to emulate what we were doing in Cleveland where I grew up. So when you begin with the end in mind, it’s kind of a cheat sheet, if you will. You know what I mean. It’s kind of a guideline, and I heard somebody say one time that I’ve never built a battleship before. But if I did, I guess the first thing I would do is hire a ship architect. And then you repeat that over and over. I never built the battleship before. But if I did, next I’d probably have to find a steel supplier.

07:32
Okay, and if you keep repeating that over and over and over, after 10 or 15 of these you’re on your way to building the battleship. You’re getting an electrical system and a weapon system and then you’re getting propulsion system and just common sense. So yeah, I mean I have to tell you it was daunting, for back then I was probably 130 pounds and five foot eight. It was daunting to stand up to a 260 pound, six foot two, union carpenter or a plumber in Chicago. But yeah, I knew what it looked like and I said this is what it needs to look like, so it has to be like this. And it was kind of in my mind, mike, it was kind of the best college I could ever get, because it was live and die by the sword of getting it done, getting the result and again starting with the end in mind and just figuring out how to make it happen.

08:28 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And tell me about your parents, Ken. When you were making these decisions in high school and then out of high school, were they supportive or they unsupportive, indifferent, how are they?

08:43 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Yeah, that’s a great question. So my father was a successful guy. He started to become pretty successful around this same time. He had worked as a grocery store produce manager with five boys under the age of nine you know what I mean and making $14,000 a year trying to feed all of us. That wasn’t easy to do. But as he grew within his own company, he didn’t go to college either and he always thought that he should have. But it worked out okay because he got promoted and got promoted and then pretty soon he bought into a food brokerage company and pretty soon he bought his partners out and then, about the same time that I was making this decision, he was starting to do pretty well.

09:27
So he said, listen, you got two ways to do this. You can go to school and see if that works for you, as long as you have a job that you’re thinking about when you come out of there. I mean you don’t just go to college and say I’m just going to go for four years and then whatever happens happens. Or he said, this could be pretty good college. I mean, how many times do you get the chance to go open four or five businesses on someone else’s dime and get them up and running and then move on to the next one, and those businesses, I’m proud to say, are all still up and running and vibrant today.

10:01
So to me it was about as college as college can get. My mom was, you know, she was trying to keep five boys happy and you know one of the things that they always said is we’re going to provide for you everything that we can Obviously food, clothing, shelter, as much fun as we can do but if you want something more than that, you’re going to have to go out and find a way to pay for it. If you want a new, whatever a new, the best baseball mid out there, or a new bicycle or whatever you want to do, you had to go get beyond what they were willing to do or could do at the time. Yeah, and go and go get it yourself, and I think that was part of the training as well.

10:43 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And you mentioned the visualization skill that you had or developed at a young age. I’m wondering that seems like something that most people take a little bit longer outs, I’d say outside of athletics, let’s say, because some people can visualize what they want to become as athletes at a young age, but in terms of career and thinking into the future, like that, it seems like a skill that not too many people at that age have. I mean, I don’t know if you see it that way, but I’m curious your take on it and where it came from for you, if you can track it.

11:21 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, I can tell you what. What I just mentioned was part of it. You know, my father told me when I was 13 I was a pretty good baseball player and I wanted to buy it. I remember I wanted to buy an aluminum bat that was like the latest, coolest baseball bat and and he said, well, go find a way to get it, see what you want, go look, research this thing. And back then there was no computers to go research, so you had to go to the store and look at them, right, and then go see it, see what it looks like, and then go make your money and go buy one. So it’s it started there. And but I have to tell you I said this earlier this morning on another podcast I was on.

12:06
So I remember things in English class like past participles and adjectives and, you know, conjunct it or whatever. I mean conjugated verbs and whatever right, why did we learn any of that stuff? I mean, I understand we needed to learn how to add an ed for past tense to make it want or wanted, but we were able to go into all the technical aspects of identifying all those things and why they happened and how they were invented and what, why they came to be. I think we could have cut a lot of that stuff out and just taught people other things like how to be independent, how to think for yourself, how to problem solve, how to be visualization people, because everyone of us does it. I mean, we get out of bed in the morning and we go to put our clothes on. That’s a visualization. What do I want myself to look like today? You go downstairs and you create a meal. What do I want that meal to look like? I start with ingredients and I create a meal. Why do we leave it at those basics? I think schools could do a lot better at teaching people how to be less dependent on society and more independent by simply teaching them.

13:11
This is what your life should could look like. Figure out what that is, plug it in and then let’s let’s build a path for you to at least start thinking about how to go get those things. So I think every one of us has that computer in our brain that that creates visualizations. I mean we do it on a constant basis. We just don’t take it the next step as it relates to our future, because so many times we live in this reactive mode. It’s cold outside. There’s snow on the ground. I better put my winter coat on. I’m reacting to that, okay. And instead of pro acting which is okay what’s my next year going to look like? Two, three years, five years, 10 years? What do I want these different aspects of my life to look like? What’s a vision board for me? How can I build that and look at it twice a day and and have the power of the brain take me there.

14:05 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah that’s.

14:06 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
That’s the thing. I think that that’s kind of missing.

14:09 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And I think I’m glad you went there because you’re right, the ability to visualize is probably something that we all have. The ability to execute or move toward the visualization is a different story, 100% correct, yeah. And speaking about independence, so how do you teach somebody to be independent? How? How? Because you sort of think to yourself, well, is that a taught thing or is that a instinctual thing, like you’re either got, you know, is it a, is it a you got it or you don’t got it thing, or is it something different?

14:50 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
No, no, and so I usually start out by saying this who knows what your favorite color is, what you do? Who knows what your favorite car is? You do, you. Who knows what you? If you could go create a house, what would it look like? Who knows that? But you, only you do. What’s your favorite dog or cat? What color? What would you name it? What’s if you had 100 bucks to give away? What would you do with it? Who can answer that question? But you? Nobody can. I mean, what’s your favorite sport? What’s your favorite hobby? What’s your favorite generosity moment, your spiritual moment, your health moment? What was your vacation look like if you could design it the way you wanted?

15:25
We all know these things for ourselves, and yet we choose to hand that future off to other people and listen to what they have to say. Okay, we choose to put too much stock in what everybody else’s opinion is about what our future should look like. I mean, if you truly know those things, then why not get them down on pieces? I don’t care if you take a poster board and a box of crayons. I actually do that with my people here. Let’s draw out what you want your life to look like, the only as you can see it, because if you said to somebody else, here’s my blank sheet and some crayons, can you draw my future for me? They have no, absolutely no idea how to do that Right. They might have some opinions, but building independence is nothing more than building the confidence in somebody to get them to understand. Well, you know what? I guess I am the only one that knows these things. Why am I relying on everybody else for those things to manifest themselves? I can certainly start that process. And oh, by the way, once you have that drawn out, the process of visualization is such and I believe it I learned this from Jerick Robbins, tony Robbins son. I learned this from him.

16:40
It’s amazing, you know, they say, the law of attraction and what your brain sees it achieves, and all that kind of stuff. Well, there’s a science behind it, mike, and that is this the more you stare at something that you want in your life crystal clear, colorful, concise the more these neurotransmitters fire back and forth in your brain, to the point where they become one constant thought. Once that happens, your brain actually thinks it already owns that thing. So then it sets your body in motion to go get that thing in things like awareness of opportunities, getting out of bed and going, getting it, entrepreneurism, all those kinds of things. Initiative, faith, courage, humility all the characteristics I talk about in blue collar cash. So why not use the power of that and allow your brain to work for you in a way that nobody else, or very few people, actually do, because they’re just waiting to react to something or for someone else to tell them how to live?

17:37 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Right yeah, as you were going through those things, I was thinking eyes open. That’s what I call eyes open. So if you want something and your eyes are open to it, the likelihood that you’re going to find it is a heck of a lot bigger than you expecting it to be delivered to you somehow.

17:59 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, there was a very interesting study, mike, by University of Virginia, or actually Virginia Tech I think it was, and they basically took 100 people and they said okay, how many of you have crystal clear, precise, concise, vivid, colorful goals running around in your head? Only 20 people of the 80 said that they had that kind of clarity. So they dismissed the 80, they kept the 20, and they said, okay, of the 20, how many of you have those written down in any way, shape or form? Only four people said that they had those things written down. So then they said, okay, of the four of you, how many of you have them posted somewhere in your house that you see them more than once a day? One person, okay.

18:49
So they followed those people for 10 years and that one person earned nine times more money than the rest of them in the next 10 years. So what’s amazing is you don’t need a degree for this, you don’t need any training for this, you don’t need to go sit in some seminar. I mean, this is something you can go, find a quiet space in your house and do this afternoon for free and get good at it, and there goes your life, right there.

19:18 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, like you said, with a poster board of crowns or with a sticky note and a pen.

19:25 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Yeah.

19:25 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And you can post this. This whole independence thing has me thinking who knows better than you what you want? Who knows who can answer the questions about you best? Obviously, that’s you. So the question is well, why is it? If that’s true, why is it that so many people struggle with actually getting what they want? And so I’m thinking and I’d love to hear your opinion on this so it’s not enough to know the answers to the questions you’re asking yourself. You have to be aware and accept that you are responsible for delivering those things to you as well. Is that something you agree with, or how do you think about that?

20:08 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
It’s 100% right. I’ll give you this example. A lot of people have well meaning intentions. Okay, like, I researched the word someday. Now you will never hear me use that word. Okay, I challenge anyone out there to find me using that word. And the reason is is because, when I looked up the definition, the definition is at some point in the future, which is not yet determined. So hear me out for a second. You know what I’m going to start. I’m going to start working out someday, okay, so what you’re telling me is you’re going to work out at some point in the future which is not yet determined.

20:47
How many people would laugh at you if you said it that way I’m gonna clean out the basement at some point in the future that is not yet determined. Right? Many people would even take you seriously. So people, they have this launching off point, this justification point, this. Almost I’m satisfying myself by saying, yeah, someday I’m gonna do that. Oh for sure, you know, someday I’m gonna do that. And that’s where it all begins. If you lose that word from your vocabulary and change it to today, today I’m gonna clean out the basement. Or today I’m gonna put on my calendar that next Saturday morning at nine o’clock. I’m gonna clean out that basement. Now you’re doing something completely different, and all I can tell you is people actually think that when they use the word someday, they’re actually setting a goal, when actually they’re un-setting a goal. They’re doing the furthest thing from setting a goal. They’re stating a good intention.

21:44 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And I’ll bet they’re also fooling themselves into thinking that by saying someday, they’re doing more than most. Absolutely, that’s 100% correct, it really is.

21:55 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
So it’s like the old saying in the bar free drinks tomorrow. Well, you never get to drink cause it’s never tomorrow when you’re there, right? So it literally is an awareness of somebody saying you know what? I have to drop that word from my vocabulary because it’s not only not helping me, it’s discerbing me. And so that’s where it all begins. Because, you’re right, it’s not enough to know it, it’s enough to say I’m gonna act upon it.

22:25
And then there’s some steps involved there. The first step is congratulations, You’re now one of those 1% thinkers, at least because you’re actually taking the time to do this. And then you know the goals have to be clear. When I said clear, concise, colorful, I meant it Meaning I have to have a brochure of this thing, whatever it is, a clear, colorful brochure that I can see, okay. And then I gotta know the price of this thing. I have to chop that price into, however many years it’s gonna take me to get it. I need to get that money into my bank account every Friday that I can’t touch, I can’t see, I can’t access. And then I have to share that goal with somebody else so that they know that I’m accountable to them or to the world for doing this, which is what we do here.

23:15
I have 50 goals on the board right outside that door that people have all perfectly orchestrated, mechanically, sound and in play, and they’re there for the doing, okay, Not for the observing. For the doing and that’s what separates most people is that very first step. I don’t care, you know, take your goals away from if and turn them into when goals, okay. I don’t care if it takes you three years to get something. That’s 156 steps in weeks, every Friday. Yeah, as long as you’re on the path to doing it, you can say well, I took the hardest step in the world. Number one the other 155 steps. I just have to breathe and I’m gonna get there.

24:00 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Right, and it’s funny because so many people that set big goals or don’t set big goals don’t do it because they’re afraid that the first step has to lead to the accomplishment of the goal, as opposed to the first step being just that the first step and the second step and then the third step, and then you may have to take a step back or to the side because you’ve discovered something along the way that wasn’t what you thought it was gonna be, and but yeah, when you think about A to Z, you think, oh, I’ll never get to Z, so I might as well not even get to B.

24:36 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
I had a gal in my office. She was walking down the hallway this is the funniest thing. She’s walking down the hallway. She’s in my book, by the way. I talk about her in blue color cash. So she says wow, that’s really nice that you do that goal board for your people. You know, someday I’m gonna get on that board. And I said, and the person I was staying there talking to looked at her and said you did not just say that. So she said well, I have to think about what I wanna do. And I said okay, come in tomorrow and I wanna know what you’re gonna do.

25:07
She came in the next day. She said I’ve always felt bad that I never paid my father off for a car that he bought me $2,500 car and someday I wanna pay him back. And I said, okay, well, let’s start that right now. I think that’s $48 a week for a year. And she goes. I said can you do that? She said I will find a way to do that. Well, we put it up on the board.

25:31
January 1, kiera paid my dad back $2,500, $48 a week for 52 weeks, signed, dated. She signed it, I signed it, completion date New Year’s Eve. And a month goes by and she goes wow, I only have 11 more months. That was like a breeze. It was four Fridays, you know, and then two months, and then a quarter and then half year and people are high-fiving her because she’s halfway through. And then she comes to me, she goes that was the fastest year of my life.

26:02
I don’t even remember putting the goal up on the board. It was like yesterday. And $2,500 later she paid her dad off. He was he flipped out because he didn’t think he was ever getting this money back. And then now she’s got the confidence to, she’s bought and paid for a wedding, she’s bought her first and her second house already, she has a new car and she’s got two beautiful kids. And she’s into this goal-oriented, like goal-crushing type of mentality. And I didn’t do anything. All I did was turn on a light switch and she did the rest of it. So it’s so powerful and yet people don’t know how to do it and it just kills me. This is why I’m trying to spread the word.

26:41 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, and I think I’d be curious. It sounds like you probably think this too, but I think that helping someone become a goal setter and goal achiever is one of the most powerful things you can do to help another human being. Like what you just described with her. You basically pushed her to create a habit that she then liked the outcome of that habit and then she perpetuated that habit, and that habit has to, happens to be setting and achieving goals which she otherwise may not have ever done, because she didn’t have that push or that encouragement or whatever. What do you think?

27:23 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, that’s exactly right. And the other thing is, let’s take that a step further. Like I’m a business, okay, I have 200 people here now, right? So if I can get as many of those as possible, if I can get a hundred of them to be rowing in that same direction, like Kiera did, I always tell them I can’t get what I want for myself, nor can my company get what it wants or needs, until all of you get what you need first. And it’s true because businesses are linear creatures. You got your input, you’ve got the work, you’ve got the output. The owner’s always at the output side. Hopefully there’s profit left, and then he or she makes some money.

28:03
So the way I see this is I need you to work for yourself first and work for me or this company second, because if all of you are out there winning, guess what’s gonna happen? This company is gonna grow crazy and it works. You just have to kind of. You kind of have to absolve yourself of the fact that I gotta let go of this thing called ego. I mean me boss, you employee. I gotta let go of that.

28:31
I have to allow the entrepreneurial spirit to grow within the company. Allow these people to win for themselves first and me second, or the company second. Because when that happens, that concerted effort will take you and your company to levels you couldn’t even imagine. And it’s happened here, and that’s kind of a business point of doing this. I love helping people. I would help care as if I just saw them on the street doing to do this, but as a group of individuals working here as a company. My job now is to walk around and just high five people and say great job on hitting that goal, great job setting that goal up, great job, you’re almost there. It’s the best thing in the world.

29:12 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So do you mind if I dig in a little bit more on goals, because this is to me a very fascinating your take on this. So, first off, you said you’ve got these 50 goals outside your office. Most people, most organizations, can’t handle more than a couple of goals a quarter. Let’s say that’s conventional wisdom, right, that they can’t handle that and that someone else’s goals can’t be your goals. In other words, you can’t inflict a goal on somebody. There has to be some they have to buy into whatever that goal is. Now. So two questions. One, do you agree with that? And if not, either way, tell me why? And two, how do you actually implement the 50? How does it work?

30:06 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Okay. So the word buy-in is interesting, because if I asked you to draw the word buy-in, you’d have to say how am I gonna draw that? Well, what that really means to me is they realize that that goal is going to help not only themselves but the company. And how is it going to help them? It’s going to help to make their life better. Well, how’s gonna help to make their life better? Well, it’s gonna help them to gain the things they want for themselves, that they see for their future. That’s buy-in. Okay.

30:35
Now the 50 goals I’m talking about on the board are all people’s individual goals. Kira wants to pay off her dad, he wants to pay it on his visa, this guy wants to learn Spanish, this guy wants to go to England to visit his aunt, or she wants to go. So there’s all these individual goals going on. But they all know that the best way to get all those goals is to buy in, if you will, to the company’s overarching goal and and, and so we’re both winning at the same time, everybody’s winning at the same time, and so they will win as individuals, and then, if the company hits these higher plateaus, they’ll also share in part of that higher plateaus, so they win twice, they get their individual thing and they get a nice bonus for hitting the overarching goal. Okay, so now you’ve got the power of all these visionaries running around your hallways. It’s just ridiculous how strong that is and how much energy there is in making and making those things happen.

31:36 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, I like how you tie that together too, because someone that’s doing something for themselves that also benefits the larger, or sees the connection to the benefit to the larger organization, like there’s a lot of not only confidence building, but there’s a lot of what I’m gonna try and think of here.

32:03 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
It’s almost cohesive at that point.

32:04 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s kind of like you get used to the reward too, so it’s kind of like oh, confidence, I like the reward, I’m gonna do more of that so I can get more of that.

32:13 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Right, yeah, I like that. They do call it an addiction, and you know it’s the best kind of addiction because you know the fun part about getting goals that are one, two, three, five years long, mike, is the fact that there is nothing better and more fun in this world than anticipation of something.

32:31
Yeah, and especially of something good. You know, I use it now all the time. You know, here I am in January, there’s snow everywhere, it’s freezing outside, and I know that I’m going to go to Florida in March or April, right, and I think about that. So I’m planning a plane ticket. Okay, I’m gonna go to the beach, I’m gonna get my towel, my sandals, I’m gonna get my copper tone suntan lotion that I just that smells so good. I’m gonna get, you know, my drink, my music, my umbrella, whatever my bathing suit. I can, I can feel, touch and almost taste all those things, right? Well, that’s an anticipatory reaction. I mean, you’re anticipating the coolness of your vacation and I think, all deep down, we all know how to do that, right? So all I’m asking everyone to do is to apply that same, that same powerful form of anticipation to all the other things in their life and and allow those things to come in.

33:24 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, and one more thing on goal, or at least one more thing. That how do you think about, like you hear? I hear I’ve heard people say that goals have to be, you know, like the smart thing. Right, they have to be specific, they have to be measurable, they have to have a time set to them, that kind of thing. But one of that smart thing is they have to be achievable, in other words, they have to be realistic, do you? I’m kind of on the fence about that. Sometimes I think it depends on the person as to whether the goal appears to be realistic or not, because I think there are some people who are sort of stymied by goals that they don’t believe to be realistic, but then there are other people who are like, totally energized about a goal that everybody else thinks is not achievable. How do you come down on that, ken?

34:18 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
So I’ll tell you about one of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made when it comes to goal setting as a corporation. We sat around the table and I had probably 10 or so people all entrepreneurial thinkers around me and I said you know, this is our current level of revenue. I want to get to the next level of revenue. I don’t know what that is, but I’m gonna. I’m thinking of a number in my head that I’d like to get to, and if we do, then I’m gonna share in a piece of all of that increase with all of you. Okay, so once you know it, we went around the room, we gave each other a little piece of paper and everyone had a pen and they wrote down their revenue number. Wouldn’t you know, mike, that every one of their revenue numbers was at least a million dollars higher than mine?

35:02 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, so be careful.

35:05 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Be careful that you are not your own ceiling is what is the is the story of the lesson there. Now, if they have a hand in designing the goal, they’ll own it right. If you just like you said, if you just cast upon them a goal that they don’t believe in, that doesn’t do anybody any good right. But, moreover, if you can connect that goal that they have designed as an overarching goal for the company and they’re they’re individually connected to it in some individual way through the goal board and what they have and they want to do, then now you’re on to something there. Now you’ve got the power of all that collective energy to make this thing happen for yourself.

35:48
The. The problem comes in is when people they don’t put enough effort into their goal and they don’t really believe it, even if they set it up. You know, like, like, I have a guy that says, oh, I want to be taller. Okay, you know that’s not really a goal. I mean, you get it, I understand you want to be taller, but that’s not really a goal, that’s a wish, it’s a wish a dream or a hope right, and so it’s all about.

36:17
It’s all about the clarity of the path to getting this goal. It’s all about setting it out far enough that they know they can do it for sure, and then connecting it to this bigger group. And then get out of the way, man, because it’s going to be fun. How do you?

36:35 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
feel about starting a goal with the words I will or we will. If it’s an individual or collective goal, do you think there’s power to adding those, those two words to the front, or do you think it doesn’t matter?

36:52 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
if the path is clear enough, it doesn’t. I mean a lot of times you’ll have them say I am, I am going to London in a year and I’m gonna do it by this. So you’ll hear, you’ll see that, though, right down the board, I am okay, which is kind of like I will or we will, but as long as the steps are there, I don’t care what the precursor is, it’s, it’s the, it’s the 52 weeks times 48 bucks or whatever that mechanism is. That has to be clear, because once that’s clear, the fact that you say I will, it doesn’t matter, because when you’re, when you’re saying I will do something, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re trying to become resolute to it. Right a minute, you can say I will all you want. But if the path isn’t there, is that gonna stick?

37:45 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
yeah, yeah, okay, all right, that’s fair enough. So, blue-collar cash you started with the business with six people. You said, after four or five years with this other company, so that’s like a giant step to now you’re the book, now you’re the. You got everything on the line yourself, six people. Now you have 200 plus and your book, blue-collar cash, is a lot about. Hey, you don’t need. You don’t necessarily need a college degree in order to be successful. You are an obvious example of that. I’m curious for you before we dig into the book. For you, there’s two things. One is how have you continued your education as an entrepreneur, business owner, leader, maybe outside of? I’m assuming that you continue to educate yourself, right, because you don’t go from running a company with six people to 200 and not evolve as a not not evolve as a leader entrepreneur, business owner. And then, second, you mentioned overarching goal a couple times and I wondered what is your overarching goal?

38:59 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
so sorry to combine two big questions together, but we could just take them one at a time the first one is I continue to look at what the industry is doing and make myself aware of the opportunities that lie within the industry. And I do know one thing you know I know my lane, I know the construction lanes, so I’m gonna, I’m gonna, become aware of what’s going on out there. We’ve added to products and services to our business over time. Those products and services bring an additional revenue to the main contract that we used to start with. So, yeah, you just make yourself aware of, you know how we, how are we gonna get to that next revenue level? Are we gonna sell more? Are we gonna spend less? Are we gonna do both? What more? What services can we add to our offering which will bring that additional revenues in? And so, yeah, you make yourself aware within the industry of the things that are out there and you add those things to it.

39:57
But I can also say that having these goals get bigger and bigger, and bigger and bigger, and and having these people that surround me working intrapreneurially, their goals get bigger and bigger. That that’s that, to me, is the overarching part, because, if I, my goal is to provide a vehicle that everybody here can drive to make their life exactly how they want it to be. Okay, I built this company. There’s four walls, there’s a lot of moving parts and everybody in here has a path for them, for their betterment, that they can follow, and all I do is turn the car on every morning and then they just drive it around. Yeah, so it literally is. It’s like an honor for me to walk the hallways and literally high five people that are trying to make things happen for themselves. It’s, it’s the most fun you can be as a boss, I guess is that the is.

40:57 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
By the way, that was a beautiful thing that you said there is that the most Consequential, impactful thing that you can be doing now, at you know, at this stage, is supporting other people, yeah, in the pursuit of there and your goals, or is there something more?

41:22 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, I can tell you this right before I got on with you, I was literally chopping up cucumbers and we were baking cookies and making chicken and we were making Parmesan and we were making salad and stuff for the local Ronald McDonald house and I took six or seven people with me. Okay, you make this huge meal, cook for 35 people, you box it all up and then you disappear and the parents that are staying there, that have kids across the street in the hospital, that are suffering, they come home at night and they eat this meal and it’s a home cooked meal and they don’t know who did it. We’re not looking for credit, we just go do it, and so giving back to me is just, it’s a ginormous bad word, but it’s a ginormous opportunity. Now I’ve been doing it for a very long time. We don’t just write checks and put them in the mail and call ourselves cool.

42:13
You know, sure, we use time, talent and treasure so gathering the people around us and going and doing all these different projects. We support probably 10 different charities a year and most of them we actually get involved in doing something. So I would tell you this it’s incumbent upon all of us to share the gifts that we have and to whom much is given, much is expected. You’ve read that before. So to teach other people how to give back in ways that they might not either learn how or know how or could afford to on their own is ridiculously cool. Yes, it is so much fun, and not only do they enjoy it, but then they come, they go home and they tell their families what they did and they feel proud for what they’ve done and they feel like, wow, this company is a really cool place to be.

43:04 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And you, to whom much is given, much is expected I believe that’s Tony Robbins says that all the time you had mentioned his son, tony Robbins wrote a blurb for your book. How do you, how are you acquainted with, with Tony Robbins and his son and his organization, and how? What have you learned from one another?

43:27 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
So Tony Robbins, he, he, he started a company called Fountain Life. Yeah, fountain Life is a is kind of a go forward. If you remember us talking about reactions to pro actions, fountain Life is to proactive health care, as normal hospitals are to reactive health care. Okay, so I’m a member of that club and I knew that he had started it, so I just started emailing him back and forth and we talked about a little bit about you know what our thinking was and what what my project was, because I was more specific to blue collar than what he does and he loved it and he just said hey, I’m happy to write this for you, and that was really, really cool.

44:12
So, okay, yeah, he’s he’s obviously a very successful guy. His son’s really cool too, so yeah, it’s fun.

44:20 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, yeah, he started that with Peter D Mantis and some other Exactly.

44:25 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Yeah, george Shapiro, peter D Mantis, and there’s a couple other gentlemen Bill Cap and a couple other gentlemen but very great people, very great forward thinkers. These, these guys are going to live to 120. And I believe, hopefully, I’m going to join them.

44:40 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So yeah well, find the disease before the disease finds you, and then you can do something about it, Hopefully 100% correct, it’s right. Yeah, so so the book itself. What I mean I? Why now? Why? Why this book? Why now, what’s what’s? I mean, you didn’t have to do this right, you got all this stuff going on, but, but you did it. Well, how come?

45:08 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
So I’m a dad. I have a 26 soon to be 27 year old daughter who just had her first grandchild and being a congratulations.

45:17
Thank you. Being a parent is by far the best thing you can do with your life, there’s no doubt. I would say this. When she was 12, she got a really serious illness and you remember reading about in the book and I would just remember, you know this was five years of horror for her mother and I am for her, obviously and I just remember sitting in office rooms and doctors offices and oncology offices and ultrasound offices and all these things. I just remember thinking what can I tell Nicole? That is the meaning of life. You know what? What can I get? What can I impart upon her that she should be chasing, if she’s going to chase anything at all?

46:02
And the words comfort, peace and freedom just kept coming back to me. Mike, I couldn’t get, I couldn’t get him on my head. I mean, for six months I could not lose these three words and I always saw them in like this triangle of inter support, where they’re connected to each other and they support each other. So I started writing about well, maybe that’s what it is, maybe we should be chasing comfort, peace and freedom, as only we know it. Okay, I’m not going to tell you that you need to be a rap star, you need to have 15 cars and a McMansion and a mega yacht and airplanes and all this stuff to be cool, to have a great life. I’m not going to tell you that because everyone has their own level, their own Nirvana, their own vision of what they want their life to look like. If I could live like that, that would be really, really cool and it goes back to that vision board.

46:48
So I said I’m going to write about that and so I started writing a letter to her actually, and 10 or 11,000 words later maybe 12, you know my wife’s look at me and she says you know you do all this coaching at work and before I, before I get any further, I’ve never went to college, I’ve never studied coaching, I don’t have any letters after my name, I have no therapy, I’ve none of that. All I do is help people to try to see six weeks, six months, six years, six whatever ahead of them and what they could look like. And I’ve done that so much that she said you know you might want to get what you do beyond the four walls of your company. I think you have a book here and, to her credit, I never set out to write a book.

47:33 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Started as a letter. Started as a letter to your daughter is a letter to my daughter.

47:36 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
And then pretty soon I started writing about all my friends that overcame unbelievable obstacles to be successful blue color entrepreneurs. And 80,000 words later and you know, a bunch of pens and legal pads full words, and I started literally Googling editors in New York and found a buddy, mine, kevin Anderson. He had a whole bunch of like ghost writers and editors that worked for him and they took what I did and cleaned it up, and then they found me an agent, and then they found me a social media group. And I don’t I don’t know any of this stuff. Okay, I’m just a guy that digs ditches right. So pretty soon I had six or seven publishing houses bidding on this thing and you know, boom, there it went. It became pretty popular it. Unfortunately I released it during Kobe, which wasn’t the best, but they released it a year later and became a best seller and I’m just holy blessing grateful for it.

48:37 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
What’s happened in your life since you’ve released the book and since it’s become a best seller that you weren’t anticipating?

48:45 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
That is a really great question. First off, everyone wants you to write another one, right, and I’ve actually started doing that, which is pretty cool. But I think I think what was neat was I didn’t expect that there would be three different readers. So the first reader is someone 15 to 25. We just want to see what what their life is going to be and they’re starting out and they want to try to figure that out. The second reader was someone and I’ve had a lot of these, mike where they said I went to college I’m now selling medical supplies that have a cubicle on the 15 floor, some building. I didn’t understand it. I was a plumber through college or plumbers assistant. I loved being with people and I quit my job. I went back to being a plumber. I’ve never been so happy, so I’ve had some like retro people come back into this and do great things. And then the third reader was corporations who decided to make this a book club for their members.

49:44 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Oh yeah.

49:46 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
And they would buy you know 50 or whatever books and they would sit down and they would say hey, we’re going to read a chapter a week and every two or three weeks we’re going to meet on it. We’re going to build this entrepreneurial glue, we’re going to glue these people together and come up with the overarching goal and we’re going to go get it. And so, yeah, the fact that I had three diverse readers was pretty neat.

50:09 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
And you talk about you know this not only the opportunities for blue collar, but the crisis. You, the crisis in the American work workforce. So for people who don’t have an understanding of what you mean by that, what is? What is the crisis?

50:30 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
So it’s a perfect storm of three things. So when I was in high school, I could walk down the hallways and I could see a guy changing a transmission on a Mustang to my left, to the right. I could see a guy in another room milling a table leg for a dining room table. I could go down the hallway and watch an electrician work. I could go over here and watch someone cutting hair, doing nails. I could go over there and watch somebody baking something. It was shop class and everybody had it in high school. That’s where millions of kids learned how cool it was to be a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a welder, whatever, hairdresser, whatever. Well, they took those classes out of high school and they replaced them with computers, which I guess we needed to all learn computers. But why did we have to kick the other one out? Why couldn’t we have had both right? So that’s problem number one. The second part of this perfect storm is the fact that when I was younger, we would grab lumber and some hammer and some nails and we’d go build a tree for it right, climate tree, build a tree for it. And you’d pass and you’d fail. You’d do good things and bad. You’d fix things, you’d repair things and we dug, we dug, played in ponds and creeks and we rode our bikes and made jumps and we did, you know, fix our own stuff and whatever, right? Well, now you’ve got kids sitting around on these screens playing Minecraft, which I don’t mind. Minecraft, that’s fine, but that’s not the same thing as going out and doing it with your own two hands, right? So you’ve got these kids that don’t know how to use a rake, a shovel, a broom and don’t know how to use any of these basic tools with which they’re gonna need for the rest of their life If they ever want to plant a flower or tree, or bush or landscape their front yard. So it’s sad that that’s the second part of the problem.

52:17
The third part of the problem is colleges are really good at shaming parents and thinking, if you don’t send your kid my way, he or she will be a loser for the rest of their life. They’re really good at doing that and, before I go any further, I’m not an anti-college guy. If you’re gonna operate on my shoulder so I can get back out on the golf course, I want you to know everything there is to know about a knife before you come at me with it, okay, I get it, but absent that teacher, architect, engineer, finance guy, I mean things where you need that knowledge and there’s a specific job waiting for you when you’re done. Just going to college because someone shamed you into sending your kid there and spending 80 grand, and then they come out and now they have 80 grand in debt and they can’t even get a job to pay for it, or the job they get is paying a lot less than they thought it would. That’s a mistake and colleges are really really.

53:16
There’s a book out there said college is a scam. I’m not gonna go as far as to say it’s a scam, but it is ill fit for 50% of the population. And the reason I say that is because, if you look today, 177 million people are considered full employment in the US. 77 million of those people do something with their hands to this very day, to this moment. So why are we trying to shame people into thinking 100% of our kids need a college degree? That part is a scam. So take it for what it is.

53:53
And I wrote an open letter to parents. It’s on my website and I said guys, ladies and gentlemen, I get it. You birthed your child, you coddled them, you clothed them, you fed them, you sheltered them. You’re trying to teach them basic things that you know and you think that the only way you can walk this earth is to say my kid has a college degree and therefore I’m a successful parent. That is just patently untrue. It’s never been true, it isn’t true now and it’s certainly gonna be less true as we move forward. So all this builds up, mike, to the fact that nobody’s going into these trades. And because of that, for every 10 electricians that retire, only four or five are coming online. What does that tell you? Supply and demand 101, econ class ninth grade, where supply is low and demand is high, that’s where the money goes. So if you’re willing to not be shamed, if you’re willing to buck the system, get into a trade. You’re gonna make a fortune. Because no one’s willing to do it. Yeah, two things.

55:05 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
What you said. Nobody knows how to do. Most people don’t know how to do anything anymore. Two that’s gonna accelerate because AI is gonna do more and more, and more and more for you. Three I guess four things. Three AI is never gonna dig a ditch. Ai is never going to Right plant a tree Never gonna wire, a house never gonna do any of those things, and four blue collar is gonna rule the world when it comes to wage acceleration and entrepreneurship. In my opinion, So-.

55:39 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
I heard a stat the other day on Joe Rogan’s podcast and the guy was saying if you started an electrician business today in Austin, Texas, it will most certainly be worth $5 million in five years.

55:53 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Yeah, Think about that, yeah, think about that. That’s yeah. Think about that, yeah, think about that. Really, people think about that.

56:04 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, and this is one of the things I tell parents I said you know, construction jobs right now just cross 30 bucks an hour. Okay, pretty much entry level, right? So that’s 75 grand a year times four years is $300,000, right, you could pay 50 or 60 or 70,000 a year for college and four years later that’s 200 or 300,000 on the negative side of your asset base because you borrowed that money. That’s a $500,000 swing, yeah, huge. So I’m not saying don’t do it, I’m just saying at least think about that before you just blindly follow the crowd and dump your kid into a life’s worth of debt that studies show only 30% of college degrees are ever used ever.

56:55
Ever, so it’s really interesting how that’s come to light.

57:02 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
So there’s three things I wanna end on as we’re bumping up against our time here. First of all, thank you for writing the book. Well, thank you for including appendix two, which is successful people without college degrees. That is an eye-opening appendix. Yes, so that is. I mean Abraham Lincoln, andrew Carnegie, james Cameron, henry Ford, david Geffen I mean the list goes on and on and on of Michael Dell, I mean. Well, mark Zuckerberg, I mean you can include all these people. So thank you for including that in the book.

57:41
This is one of my most memorable lines from the book. I underlined it when I read it. It’s in the very beginning, ken, and it says remember these two things as you read along One, I believe everyone has the ability to be the person they were meant to be. That is extremely powerful. And two, no one is in charge of your success, your comfort, peace and freedom, except you. Let’s dig in and get started. That is a great way to start a book. So I thank you for putting those two in there. I underlined that and I’m like that is so good Comfort, peace and freedom. I love that comfort, peace and freedom. So thank you for that. And then the last thing you said you don’t have any initials behind your name, next to your name, so I’m gonna add some. I just thought I’m gonna add PDS pretty darn successful. Or you can put smart One or the other, but I think both of those apply to you and I thank you very much for coming on the podcast today.

58:43
Thank you for writing your book, luke Collar Cash. Pick it up, people, you are going to love it. It’s a Wall Street Journal bestseller, sure. It’s an Amazon bestseller in multiple categories as well. What do you want people to do, ken? Do you want them to connect with you on your website? How do you? Where do you wanna direct people to? Wanna learn more about you?

59:04 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Well, a couple of things. So I wanna make sure that the book that I wrote I heard this the other day and I thought it was funny, so I stole it from the gentleman I wanna make sure that my book is a self-help book, not a shelf-help book, meaning. So many times people read books and I ask them what did you get out of that book? Well, it was a good book. How did it change your life? I don’t know, but I mean it was a good book. So I built a course around it. It’s eight sessions, 45 minutes a session.

59:34
It’s all about visualization teaching your mind to think differently when you take this course. You can take it in a weekend or eight days or eight weeks, whatever you wanna do. I’m forcing you to create a vision board for yourself. Okay, I’m gonna teach you how to do it along the way and how to clear your mind so you can clearly do this. You will think differently about your life that afternoon, not in a month or a year or whatever. You will think differently about who you are the minute you start this course, because I get right out of the chutes saying what’s it look like, man? How do you want this to look? And this is how you begin the process. So you know the book’s 25 bucks. You get a free copy of the book. With the course it’s like I said, it’s a hundred and seventy nine dollars.

01:00:20
I typically donate most of my revenue from the course to charities anyway, because the rest of my life is pretty good and I really didn’t do this to make money. So you can find all that stuff at kenruskcom. You can also follow me at Kenrusk official and all the social media stuff. I have a team that helps me do that because I can do the talking but I can’t do the engineering part. So that’s, I get young people to help me do that and it’s so much fun. So, yeah, you can follow me in both those places. And then I also started a foundation where I can give this material away free to Gold Star families. Or you know people that are in the military that are out of the reach of the government services at this point but still want some clarity, because we got to trim some of that military suicide thing that’s going on. We got to really knock that down and that’s part of my mission to do that as well.

01:01:14 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
Okay, awesome. Is there anything else that I should have asked you, ken, that I didn’t, then you would like to leave us with?

01:01:20 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
Not at all. Just remember this you and only you. Okay, I need everyone to write down you and only you, and then you can finish the sentence with whatever you want. You and only you knows your favorite color. You and only you knows your favorite house. You and only you knows your favorite way to live. You and only you know what your nirvana is. You and only you knows what makes you comfortable, comfortable, peaceful and free. And so trust yourself. Write those words down and trust yourself. Start living your life today.

01:01:49 – Mike Malatesta (Host)
You and only you. You heard it, ken. Thank you very much for writing the book. Thank you for coming on the podcast and sharing your story with us.

01:01:55 – Ken Rusk (Guest)
You’re welcome, mike. I appreciate it, thanks.