Skillful at Work with Curt Beck, Ph.D.
The Skillful at Work Podcast offers an engaging discussion about living wisely in the workplace, encouraging and equipping Christians to live out their faith at work.
If you want to be encouraged and equipped to live your life of faith more effectively in the workplace, the Skillful at Work Podcast is for you.
Skillful at Work with Curt Beck, Ph.D.
Wayne Boesiger
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Wayne talks about how he shows grace and kindness when doing business. He encourages us to do the right thing - Philippians 4:13.
Wayne discusses priorities in life, be humble and always be reading. Some of his favorite books include:
1. Atomic Habits by James Clear
2. How to win Friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie
3. The Success Principles by Jack Canfield
4. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
One of the quotes from Wayne was to "learn to laugh at yourself."
If you want to be encouraged and equipped to live your life of faith more effectively in the workplace, the Skillful at Work Podcast is for you.
Welcome to the Skillful at Work Podcast, where we explore living out our faith in the workplace. I am your host, Dr. Kurt Beck, a professor of management and a leadership coach. Join me in my next conversation as I talk with Christians skillfully living out their faith at work for examples, resources, and practical tips that will encourage and equip us to honor God at work. Today we are talking with Wayne Boziger. Wayne, tell us a little about yourself.
SPEAKER_00Well, hi, thanks for having me on, Kurt. My name is Wayne Boziger, and I am out of Lincoln, Nebraska. I originally went to uh Norris High School, lived on a farm just outside of Cortland, and uh became a Husker. The second I moved up here, I have a Husker all my life, but I have been in Lincoln now since I was 18 years old. Met my wife in college. Corey and I have been married 30 years this year. I have two wonderful daughters, uh Carissa, who is a speech pathologist now, and a wonderful mom of two kids, and married a great guy named Riley. And my youngest daughter, Kira, has a she doesn't do exactly what we do, but she's in the social media marketing space as well. She started her own business straight out of college. Extremely proud of her. Uh, and she's doing great. And her boyfriend uh lives in Germany that they met playing tennis. He played tennis on the tennis team here at the University of Nebraska. I have two granddaughters, uh Wyatt, who is two, and Merritt, who is going to be five months this month. Oh my god, congratulations. Oh, yeah, it's great. Uh being a granddad's greatest thing ever. Oh, and you know, and I'm the one, I spoil them rotten, and they know it. Uh they come to me uh when they need a break. Uh it's just they're we have a lot of fun. I started out out of college as a Christian a cappella singer in a group called Soul Support. And that's really where I learned well, brief story. Uh, I learned in college I was gonna be a horrible teacher. Uh and and um quick story. So I I got into music. I was late enough in my teaching career that I actually student taught for an extended amount of time with one getting my endorsement K through six. Along the way, um, I'm a huge sports fan, as you you and I have already discussed, you know, off the off the air. And there was this kid who I was teaching a song called Jack Wagon's Wheel. Why I don't know to this day. This kid knew I loved boxing, and Razor Ruddick and Mike Tyson were fighting that night. And he said, uh, he kept saying, I bet I bet Razor Ruddick wins. I bet Razor Rudd, you know, he kept egging me on. I finally take a $20 bill out of my pocket and I said, I bet 20 bucks Mike Tyson beats Razor Ruddick. Now I understand my cooperating teacher is in the corner over here. She you can see this look of pale shock that I actually bet a kid. Later in the semester, I got got in a car accident, and we had to negotiate uh for grades because I my car accident was I was gonna have to withdraw that semester because it was a pretty bad car accident and I had physical therapy and stuff. So I got to calling her. She's the sweetest lady ever. Uh, and and she thought what I said was really cute. I said, I got an A in methods, I got a I got an F, I'm sure, in practicum. So if I promise never to teach in the state of Nebraska, will you give me a C plus? I can walk out of the class, and she did just that. So that's a story from a long time ago. Well, anyway, soul support got going, and we knew that we were gonna do something probably pretty special. And I ended up uh uh taking a bunch of business classes and fell in love with I I I just knew how to sell, I loved selling, I loved specifically the sales and marketing process, but I also loved econ and everything else with it, except accounting. Not like that. So my first real uh experience in building businesses was building this group, and we had gotten a bunch of gigs. Uh, I was fortunate enough. My brother wrote the music and I wrote the music for it. I was fortunate enough to sing with four guys who could sing way better than me. I was lucky. Um, I was the what you call the blend guy. Don't give him a solo, just make sure you can hit the notes. That was me. And and so, but what I did do was we got uh a gig to John Maxwell's old church out in San Diego and got invited to sing in the Phoenix Sun Stadium for an international youth conference. Wow. So we were getting these gigs, and we but we weren't enough to support eight families. Now understand I'm a whopping 25 going on 26 when this all started, but we had already been singing for four or five years. So I quit my job at Lincoln Benefit, cut my pay in half, and what I did was we didn't have any internet back then to speak of. I bought two sets of lists, had four yellow pads, one for each time zone of the country, and organized a sales process, got a really set, really nice press kit, and over the next six months I co-called 3,000 churches, fairs, colleges. And out of that, we built two years worth of tours. Wow. Lord did a lot of it. Some of the doors were open. I mean, I can't take credit for it. I mean, singing Pepperdine, singing Liberty University were the first independent group ever to sing there for their spiritual emphasis week. But anyway, that's how I learned that A, that I loved selling, and B, I loved creating businesses. That went great until I started seizuring on tour. That's if I'm running that car accident in college. I had a scar on my brain, and touring is as exhausting as everyone says it is. We were out on the road sometimes 12, 14 weeks at a shot. I had several seizures. All of us had kids at the same time, and we didn't like New York. We didn't like LA. And we, you know, called it a career. Um, God gave us a couple signs in Warren Wearsby. I'd had enough seizures that Warren was our spiritual advisor. Warren took me to lunch and said, You're either gonna quit or God's gonna kill you, and I don't know which it's gonna be. And he was very, you know, how you know, if you remember Warren Wearsby, knew him at all. He could deliver in a way that was not quite as blunt as the way I said it, but it was perfectly to the point. Right, right. So um, skip forward a few years in 2005. Uh I uh I sold insurance. Uh, you know, I worked at an insurance company college, uh, needed to feed a family, so I started uh selling insurance. I was good at it, but I hated every minute of it. And I was out at an MDRT conference and I met a guy, his name was literally Dave Smith, and he was from Tennessee. You put a gun in my head, I have no idea where this guy's at now. And Dave and I were watching a baseball game, uh having a beer together, and and he said, You look miserable. I said, Dude, I'm doing what I can for my family, but I hate it. And I said, I know other people are born for this, I'm not. So he said, he taught me what he was really doing, which was helping, this is pre-Obamacare by several years. He's helping low-income people get their medications for free. And what that meant was at that time there were all these foundation programs, tons of them. And the typical patient who needed uh our help would be someone who's like, say, a bipolar or schizophrenic, someone with just a lot of medications and a lot of paperwork could overwhelm them. So they would pay a fee of $39 or $49 a month, and we would save them typically $545, $550 a month, which is very significant. And the income requirements, while somewhat restrictive, were higher than you would think because the drugs were so expensive. And so for some odd reason, I decided to learn SEO and PPC instead of just going get referrals from doctors, which would have been way easier. I mean, and that would have more common sense. By the way, there's a common theme in here, I don't always have a lot of common sense. Uh and so, but I knew SEO and PPC was very statistical. And in college, out of all my business classes, statistics was the one that I I just under I just get statistics. I don't know why, but I just do. And so um I learned SEO and PPC back when it was a wild, wild west. Uh, we started our company before YouTube existed, started our company before Facebook existed, and right at the beginning, Yahoo was still bigger than Google. That's how old I am. Is lots of salt in this hair now for a reason. And and so we started it. Well, at that time, I was the only company around within six hours that was doing SEO or PPC. I mean, there's nobody, you know, nearest nearest person I knew of at the time was in Minneapolis and one in Dallas. There's not even anyone in Kansas City. So what had happened was word got out this is how I was getting my clients because we got 200 clients in under 90 days. So we had um we had a hundred thousand dollar a year business built in about 80 days. Now that's gross not net because there was a lot of expense that went with this business, but it was still great.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00Well, I started getting calls uh from businesses, from ad agencies, uh in this case, one case the state of Nebraska. And so I had started doing SEO and PPC for a whole bunch of clients around here and throughout the Midwest. And eventually I got full-time in the trucking, in the trucking business. Uh, we still trucking is still the bulk of our business, but we now also do so what we do, what we've done now, fast-forward today is we do digital lead generation. We generate real-time leads um for trucking companies for class A drivers and some diesel techs, but we also kind of expanded now where we do uh lead generation for medical staffing companies, medical recruiters. And voila, this lovely mug is still doing the same thing today, all these years later. Nothing has changed. The way we do it has changed. We now do a lot of Facebook, but we also do a lot of Google as well. And um, for all this talk about AI, it's great. We use it as tools. I don't really see that overtaking everything tomorrow. It's kind of funny, it still has its limitations. And what's most interesting, Kurt, and this is kind of how that dovetails to what I'm still passionate about for these years. You know what people really want now because of all the technology? They want great service from people and they want people who care. The ironic thing about it, there's more opportunities. And I tell this to young people, and I tell this to my kids. If you're willing to talk to people and sell yourself a little bit, you have more opportunities than ever. Because most people don't want to do that anymore. They want to make a hundred thousand dollars a year and put in 50 bucks worth of work.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_00Just like just like me. I want as as much as I talk about music, I would I would much rather have been an athlete, but uh genetics said otherwise from from from birth. And so you gotta work hard in this life, and you but you gotta sell yourself. So that's that's me in a nutshell.
SPEAKER_01Excellent. So you've you've said you've uh been running this business for about 22 years.
SPEAKER_00Entering my 22nd year next year. So in year 21 right now.
SPEAKER_01Awesome. Well, uh, Wayne, talk to us about uh some of your experiences of living out your faith in the workplace.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, uh to me, uh, you know, uh first of all, a couple things about me. I mean, you know, I view all of us as hopelessly flawed sinners. And so when I sit there and say that every last thing I've done over 22 years has been exactly 100% A-grade perfect and I've never sinned, uh, no. No, I've I've been known to blow my stack on occasion. I can be a, you know, arrogance is is it I can be fairly arrogant. Uh God has decided over the last several years to smack me down quite a bit, and he's been f really phenomenal at it, and it's made me a better person for it. I just try to, what I try to do is do the best of my ability, do the right thing. And when I say do the right thing, it sounds so, you know, it sounds so abstract and just generic, but really it is kind of the right thing to do. I mean, you know, Philippians is you know 4.13, which is very obviously very popular, which I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. And I take heart in that, in the fact that whether we are prospering or we're in poverty, that Christ is ultimately the person that we draw from. And and so that that to me, as far as examples in the workplace goes, even if someone is firing us, you know, as you know, if you teach your kids anything in business, nothing is forever. I try to handle that with grace and try to make sure that more than anything else, the relationship stays intact, even if they're firing us. One of the reasons is at the end of this life, no one is asking about how much money they made, no one is asking about what they did. It's the relationships with your family and your friends. And a lot of my friends are co-worker or people who I used to work with that are still friends and we don't do business together anymore. I guess to me, there's not enough of that in the world in social media. There is a tremendous amount of I gotta get you for this, I gotta get you for that, instead of living out our faith in grace and kindness. Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Absolutely. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, particularly if as we think about uh, you know, this next generation young people going into the workplace. What are some challenges you think that they should be prepared to face as uh people of faith in the workplace today?
SPEAKER_00Well, right now, okay, so I'm gonna definitely show I have more salt and pepper in my hair. Everything is way too politically correct. And what I mean by that is you are expected to walk a tightrope with your faith and yet putting up with or you're supposed to not only put up but accept some things that are inherently counter to our faith. And the question is, how do you do that? Because again, we go back to what I said in our last question. How can you do that in such a way where you're a showing grace and kindness, but yet being willing to disagree tactfully on some of these things that they are facing? Our young kids are facing stuff that we never had to. I mean, some of the things I I still don't get. I am I simply don't understand it. I don't pretend to and don't want to. But yet at the same time, how do you walk that in such a way where they don't end up, A, they don't end up getting fired for simply living out their faith? That's a very real thing that happens. And on the other hand, how do you have the ability as a young person who's still spiritually maturing themselves? Of course, we do that all our lives, how do you do that where you can actually live out your faith where maybe that person you're disagreeing with, you and them can actually have a conversation? And even if you never agree, never agree, that you you are kind of a lifeline and a friend to them. See, that's the that's that's one of the biggest things I see, Kurt, is social media, which is ironic because this is all I do for a living. I'm on it all the time, but I see a coarsening on I so I have a bunch of friends. We're all, you know, I'm I'm what you would consider center right, you know, there's no question I'm conservative. I wouldn't say I'm far, far right. I would say I'm definitely you know conservative. And then you have people in center, you have people in the in the in the center left. And where are the people it's those of us those three things I just described are overwhelmingly the majority of this country, but yet all we hear from are the far left and far right. How do you navigate that in a business situation? You know, be and because it I mean, they'll stalk you, they'll find, hey, you like this tweet from eight years ago when you were 14, uh, it's time for you to leave. I mean, you know, I did that does that answer your question? I think that's one of the biggest things. I think the other big thing is kids now, not all kids. I think I I had a kid for who instance who used to work for me, and CJ and I have stayed incredibly close, partially because his dad's my best friend. But he worked for me for a number of years, and he said, I got more out of Friday night, Friday afternoon beers with you than I did college. Because I would go in and just tell him, you know, and that was when UNL was just starting the entrepreneur program. Now you've got a great, they've got a great thing going up there, and any and what you're doing is great because it gives kids have to be taught competition. It seems like to me, I mean, to me, business is not always nice. You asked about earlier where the the hardest thing is when you're I've I've been in this couple situations over the years where I think about it to this day, I can't, I don't understand how we got fired, but we did. And you have to learn to not take that so personally. Everything now is so personal, and you have to accept the fact that once in a while you're the one who's screwed up and you're gonna have to take ownership for that. And that's the other thing I see is everybody's right 100% of the time, and there's not there's not a lot of discourse. And going back to the other thing I said, by the way, I suck all the oxygen out of the room, I talk way too much. If I am, tell me to stop. Uh but but I get rolling on stuff like this because the other thing I think about is I go back to people who want to be business owners but don't want to sell. I don't get it. Sorry. At the beginning, everyone has to get to a certain point before they don't have to sell anymore, but you're selling. And and the other thing, everybody wants to be a micro influencer, social influencer. Uh they want to influence the kitchen floor, whatever they want to influence. And if you want to build a real business with real relationships with real businesses who want to give you real money, uh you got to put yourself out there.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Let me uh talk about the question about the book of Proverbs, one of my favorite books in the Bible. And we one of the one of the things we talk about in our some of our business courses is the you know the Proverbs 11:1, which is this idea that God is disgusted by the uh dishonest business practices, the different weights and measures. Talk to me a little bit about how uh you've had to demonstrate honesty in the workplace or encourage others to demonstrate honesty in the workplace.
SPEAKER_00Well, one of them is is to making sure that we practice what we preach every day. And what I mean by that is whether finances are lean or finances are bountiful, if you made a promise to somebody, you got to spend uh a portion of money. Now, you know, for the heart, what I call heart spend. In other words, there are a lot of marketing companies who will they have different business models than say we do, where they have a lot more slack in that rope. If we don't spend a certain amount of money on Facebook and Google, our clients notice it almost instantly. And and so it and the our you know, I always tell people clients don't care, the clients care about you. They don't care about your problems, they don't care about cash flow, they don't care about the fact that businesses owe you a bunch of money. You still gotta figure out a way to make it happen. Fortunately, we've we're good enough at what we do that our cost per lead is way under the national average. I think one of the things that I've learned over the years, I've not always been the best at to so I I when I read this question the first time, I thought, well, this is an interesting question. And the reason is I don't think most people want to be inherently dishonest. I think even I I don't think I really don't believe that. Um, I really do believe that sometimes when you talk about dishonesty, it breaks down to okay, have have you been organized enough? And I've I've run in a couple business situations where we're doing multiple types of campaigns at the same time, but our clients only focused on the one expense, but then focus on the SEO. SEO is a lot like planting corn. If you want the benefits of it, you gotta spend the money now. But if I wasn't good enough at explaining that, then I end up losing as a client and I look like a fool. And I I you can probably tell by now I can look like a fool sometimes. But I think what you're talking about with this honesty and what the Bible's talking about is just flat out saying you did something and you didn't do it. And in in business, and it's someone who and someone who I really respected, he's passed away now, telling me one time if you're successful in business, you'll be sued three times in thirty years, or you're gonna have three incidents that are gonna change your life. By the way, he's correct. Um and in one of those, I was stupid enough not to do. A quick background check on this person, it would have saved my wife a lot of money. We got we got schnookered bad. And that was that was 20-something years ago. That was way, it was before this business. And there I wasn't being honest enough with myself to notice the red flag, black flag, X flag. I mean, there were there were science. This is bad. And so at the end of the day, I was being dishonest with myself. By the way, that's the hardest part about Proverbs. About the whole book is that it's a it's a mirror. Um, I've written several songs out of it, and I've gotten so much out of it, in some ways, it's it's a mirror of like what you're doing wrong as well as what as well as what the world's doing wrong. So what we've tried to do as of as we've evolved over the years is just we have set formulas in place and we have to stick with those formulas. We still make a healthy profit. We're not we're certainly not dying. But during the last three years, Kurt, uh, the freight went through the worst freight recession in the history of freight. I don't know what else to describe it. I mean, and so those of us who had been in freight for a long time, but not say the truly old timers, we got to experience something that we'll probably never get to experience again. And that tested you. And no matter how you slice it, you're gonna probably in something like that, you're gonna fail a day or two. If you do, then you make it right, and you just do your best to move on and realize that God is I I felt like coming out of it, God made me a better businessman. I mean, there were there, it was like a perfect swarm, and I think that's your test, you know.
SPEAKER_01And talk a little bit more about that. What was the what did you learn coming out of that?
SPEAKER_00Uh, first of all, uh one of the things it did was it prioritized my life. I I I have a much better priority. So at the same time that happened, we became grandparents, we were finishing paying off school. I mean, you name it, it it was uh, I felt like uh, you know, if you're old enough to remember Muhammad Ali and he played ropa dope, where he was playing ropa dope, but he was really getting pounded pretty good, and it showed in later life that rope a dope maybe wasn't the best strategy. Yeah, I played rope dope. And and and so what it brought out to me, I think all of us, if you have success, you get in your mid 40s and you realize, well, I got a long time left, or what you think's a long time, and you get arrogant, you get prideful, you want to be the biggest and the best. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, uh, I'm a big history buff of uh uh I love biographies. You know, Colonel Sanders is the one that always comes to mind. You know, it didn't even really get started until he was 62 when he realized his first social security check wasn't gonna cut it, and then he proceeded to fail for like three years and he retired a multi-billionaire. But he didn't he didn't shoot to being a multi-billionaire, he just wanted to make sure he could pay his bills and make chicken for a living. I mean, really, that's what it was. So uh when I went through that, it was like being brought through a fire that everyone was going through. So, first the first thing was learn to really, I improved my relationships with my true friends in trucking. Some of them were clients, but some of them were people I just met along the way. And I thought, well, I could as well get something out of this while I'm getting my butt kicked. And and that uh, you know, I I became much I have much better relationships now with people that I'll have relationships uh even after I retire. I would say number two was Bible is re is replete with verses and situations where someone got really arrogant, a Samson be one, and uh, you know, eventually that arrogance, you're gonna get you're gonna get crushed. And um I made life a lot harder on myself by being so arrogant. But out of that, the positive, which is always number three, is I feel like I'm a much better business person. Kind of went back to the roots. Um, we've made our business much simpler. I to take advantage of the technologies available to us. My systems manager never left my side when he could have. We're now entering our 17th, almost 18th year together. My wife is now my sales manager, and she's way better than anyone else ever had. Sorry if anyone's listening to that who just worked for me. And what that's brought an interesting dynamic because on the one, she thinks completely the exact opposite of me. And so I'll tell I'll take a process, I'll teach it to her, and then she'll make the process 80 times better. You remember those old commercials where B ASF, we don't invent anything, we make the product better. Yeah, that's her. Uh awesome. Yeah, well, it's awesome. And in a marriage, it's brought us closer at the same time. There are days where I think she wants to kill me, and she should, uh, because I don't I'm sometimes very stubborn. Um, and so, but on the I now view life as I've always had a problem with retirement in general. Um, biblically, I still have yet to find the verse that actually says we're supposed to retire and golf the rest of our life. Um couldn't agree with that. Let me know if you find that verse.
SPEAKER_01I've never found it, so no.
SPEAKER_00And so I feel like now it like I'm even though I'm deaf, my body definitely tells me I'm 55 some days, I'm on fire. I just I look forward to it. Freight has come out, we're roaring, and now I feel like I can take advantage of all the mistakes I've made. Well, I'm gonna continue to make them, but it's the ones up to this point. And what's interesting about it, Kurt, as I'm sure you've read these stats, you know, our highest earning power as business owners doesn't even start till we're 55. It's 55 to 75. And what's really interesting is the actual highest is when you're 65 to 70. And I'm convinced more than ever, it's because we make so many stupid mistakes along the way that eventually you've eliminated probably at least 75% of them. And so dishonesty to me, uh, it's it's a two-edged sword. Are you being dishonest with yourself? Are you being dishonest with others? The answer is yes to both. And I think that I think that we're ironically enough, so in LinkedIn, I'll round it out with this in 2023 and 2024, when the world was literally just crashing around us in freight, and I was fortunate enough to have some outside clients. That's really kind of what helped us. But what was interesting is I always loved it on LinkedIn. We said, 2023 is the best year ever. And I just wanted to sit there, you're such a liar. I mean, just stop. It's okay if you want to tell yourself this, but you're telling yourself a lie. So the dishonesty to me is is really a double-edged sword. Are you being honest with yourself and you're being honest with others? And I think the actual biggest problem is when you're not being completely honest with yourself. And I know that may be a little bit different take than what you were looking for, but I think ironically enough, one goes hand in hand with the other. It's you know, you talked about Charlie and I, we both have had situations in your lives where what happened here? And you have to take a step back and look at that stuff.
SPEAKER_01Well, no, I I think it's it's a slightly different take, but it most importantly, it's it's still they're still connected. I think you're I mean, I I just agree with this idea that they are connected, that if you're gonna be dis if you're dishonest with yourself, it's awful hard to be honest in your day-to-day practices in business and in life. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And so I just think that's just uh I don't know. That that that's just my my take on it.
SPEAKER_01Uh no, that's awesome. Let me tell let me shift gears and talk about if you had a young person come up to you today and and uh just said, Wayne, what are some practical tips you have for me to help live out my faith at work and and how would that look? What would that conversation how would that go?
SPEAKER_00The first thing would be your practical tip to how live that out is to limit your social media exposure. And what I mean by that is TikTok and all of these things, there's lots of great things on them. I sound like I'm bashing it considering it's what I you know it's the world I live in. But I think that uh you can keep a much more open, much more intelligent mind and you can examine things more honestly when you're not being influenced by stuff that's meant to influence you one way or the other. I think it's fiction. I think you have a hard enough time. One of the things that we do is we live in this information age that kind of goes back to this previous thing we were talking about. You get so much thrown at you every single day as a business owner or in sales that if you're not careful about the information overload, you will make mistakes that uh seem to be dishonest when actually what it is, your brain is just fried, it's just it's just out there. Another thing would be, and this is gonna jump into something else that maybe you were planning on talking about. So I read four books every year to start the year. Okay. During 2023 and 2024, I had a lot of time in my hands, so I finished these books in a hurry. Now it's taking me a while. The first book I read is Atomic Habits, tremendous book. You know, it it allows you to change your life in increments. And that to me, that's a really um that's a great thing that if you can just change one habit at a time daily, that can really help you. The second book I read, which I consider to be the sales bible, which is how how to win friends and influence people by Carnegie. What I like about that book is you have two ears and one mouth. That's the core message of that book. And by the way, you can tell I don't practice that every day. Talk about being dishonest with yourself. I have about eight mouths to one ear uh most days. The third book is The Success Principles by Jack Canfield. You know, by the way, some of these books, you know, the last two I name, are gonna have some stuff in there that if you're a Christian, you know, there's some things in there that you may not agree with. But what it does is it forces you to get your mind right. And you can you can empirically disagree with some of the stuff in the book, but at least you're reading and at least you're having honest conversations with yourself. The fourth one is the one that probably would be the most, I don't want to say controversial, but Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. I get a lot out of that book. I also know there's some stuff in there that as a Christian, I'm just like, yeah, I don't think so, but I still get a lot out. Uh it's not like I'm a theologian, but you, you know, it doesn't take a rocket science to realize one or two of those chapters are a little new agey, even for me. Uh, you know, I'm just I'm just not a new age guy. But those, the the point is always be reading, always be reading biographies. I've read biographies on just about every major business and historical person I can get my hands on, and I know I've only touched a hundredth or a thousandth of what I could have read. I I guess those are the things that I see. So when I talk to young people, another practical tip, which again about living out your faith, would be the Bible talks about us um, you know, we're supposed to work hard. You're we're not supposed to, you know, in essence, steal from our masters. And that means when you're there to work, you work hard, you give it your best effort 100% of the time, even if if it's on, even if you disagree with what's being said by your boss, do it. Learn from it. I I'm a I'm kind of a pragmatist when it comes to this stuff. I so my brother is a great lyricist. Like he was a tremendous, you know, he's kind of funny because he's now the uh executive director for the oil and gas commission in the state of Nebraska. All of us, when we got done singing, decided we wanted to make money. Uh and but Todd is a tremendous thoughtful lyricist, except for one song that I wrote about my grandma dying. Virtually everything I did was me interpreting other people's lyrics, whether it's the Bibles or hymns. And the reason for that is I I hope in this discussion, you've had people who are much more thoughtful than me. Uh, Brian Clark, I mean Charlie Cologne. I view, I come things from a little bit differently. It's kind of a more of a pragmatic. I mean, so when when you say what practical tips can I give, it's kind of a combination of okay, what can you do live out your faith in a practical way? You know, obviously, you know, we can talk about the the basics, you know. Hey, look, if they're going to a Friday afternoon strip club, skip, you know. I mean, you know, those are just those things that are so common sense as a Christian. I'm more interested in how you can navigate through this 21st century. And I don't have an easy answer for some of it. I wish I did, but again, those are meant for people much wiser than I did did that answer in a way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're you're absolutely you're you're providing those practical tips. I mean, the idea of you know, prioritizing your life, uh understanding this issue of humility, the re reading, what what are you bringing in? What are you putting into your mind? I mean, it's it's gonna be a huge influence on how you view the world by just what you're bringing into your into yourself.
SPEAKER_00And I did think of one other that is both practical and spiritual. So when I was younger and I was building businesses, I would use this phrase called strategizing. And that phrase would be used as a cover to sit there and have four-hour lunches, um, where you're half your strategizing was really talking about football and everything else. But in the other half was legitimately that. When you're a young family person, I would say that I turned, I think I'm a great dad, and I know I'm a great grandfather, and I and but I would say when my kids were young, I stole some time from them, especially when they were really young. You get so invested in building and building a business, and you don't have that that lens that you do now when you're 55 and saying, yeah, the time's gone. I'm never gonna have that again. And it doesn't mean as a father, and if you're the provide primary breadwinner, here's another thing: you're gonna miss some of your kids' stuff. This whole thing where everybody's there for every one of these that's such garbage. I mean, you know, uh friend of mine, he that friend uh talked about earlier, he had another phrase, I'll never forget it. Wayne, clerk hours, clerk pay, executive hours, executive pay. If you want to have a good life, be right below the executive. Don't don't go over that. As business owners, we have a tendency to push, push, push, push, push, especially if we're good at what we do. I'm looking at this picture right now of me holding Kira and Chris or there, I've got them in my arms when they were uh smaller, you know, they were they were young kids. And I look at that picture sometimes and I just think, at least I got that. By a time our kids were you'd say in in uh the upper elementary and middle school, I'd gotten it. I I I would say that that in high school and junior high, I'd I hardly missed anything. Um that to me, I think is another thing where it's there is a work-life balance, but don't expect to make $200,000 a year and work 38.5 hours a week. That's fiction.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think you're you're you're absolutely on point. This it's it's a balance, and you have to prioritize uh and understand the realities of those decisions you're making.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and the other thing too is have fun in life, laugh a lot. I think that's one thing I've always done. I like laughing. I I don't take things too seriously. I'm incredibly sarcastic. I mean, you know, you you and learn to laugh at yourself a little bit. Sometimes I think you know, my wife says sometimes I she feels like I put myself down a little too much. But those are the things that break down barriers. If if I've been bald since I was 20. And literally, by the time I met her, I was already had a chromome for the most part, you know, and I wanted to be a basketball player, and I mean, I had to shoot up to make five eight as a senior, you know, and have fun with that stuff because it's what breaks down barriers. It's you don't have to be putting yourself down all the time, but you also don't have to take yourself so seriously. And I can always tell when I'm doing that, and I just think that's silly. Uh, you know, and I I and I think we take ourselves so seriously in this society now, and it's just have fun. I mean, you want to make friends of your workplace, you know, don't act like you're perfect. It's all right.
SPEAKER_01Well, Wayne, I've appreciated our our conversation today. I'm very grateful for your time. And uh there's been a lot of things we've covered, and and a lot of it on how to be effective at running a business and how to do it still as a person of faith. And so again, I am I am certainly grateful for your time today.
SPEAKER_00Well, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on here. Uh, Kurt, like I said, I saw the roster of people who've been on here before me, and you you've had a lot lot wiser men than me, Gung and Dan. I appreciate it very much.
SPEAKER_01I appreciate it, and it it it's all is this these multiple perspectives, and I'm hoping that particularly young people uh that are listening will be able to learn and glean from and be able to learn from our our uh mistakes or from our wisdom that we've gained over the over time.
SPEAKER_00Well, maybe they've made mistakes. I'm perfect, actually. So maybe I've made mistakes, and I understand that you're not I've made more than any anybody else you can imagine. So thank you so much for thank you. Appreciate it. Appreciate it, buddy. Have a good one.
SPEAKER_01Join us next time on the Skillful at Work Podcast as we interview Christians about living wisely in the workplace and serving as the salt and light at work. If you want to be encouraged and equipped to live your life of faith more effectively in the workplace, the Skillful at Work Podcast is for you.