Clay Vaughan: 0:00

This week, we are talking about hiring. We're going to talk about what to do and what not to do. And today I have a special guest, Rob Hughes. Rob runs an amazing marketing agency up in the North and has been doing so through Hughes Integrated for quite some time now. And what he's going to guide us through is actually his approach to hiring. He made some mistakes. He's going to talk us through how he actually ended up in the spot that he did and then how he dug himself out. It is the true story of grit and success that comes through hard work and hustling. And so that's what we're going to be talking about with Rob today. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this next episode of Good Business. Well, I'm your host, Clay Vaughn, and I'm best known as the CEO of Good Agency, a full service marketing agency and production company that helps you market your business and share your story. Now, before we get going with this week's episode, I want to drop a quick note to any business owners listening in. Our show is sponsored by Rocket Fuel CRM, and you should head right over to www.rocketfuel.software so you can learn about the CRM I'm recommending to every small and medium-sized business. As of 2020, there were well over 10,000 web tools and apps designed for businesses like yours, and the problem is you can't afford to spend the time and money learning each one. Rocket Fuel CRM combines nearly every marketing tool out there into one unique system, so check it out at www. rocketfuel.software. You can try it risk-free with a 30-day money-back guarantee today. Alrighty, let's dive right on into this week's episode of Good Business. Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of Good Business. Today, I am so pleased to have Rob Hughes from Hughes Integrated here on the show. Rob, he's become a really good friend, and he's another agency owner. And I'll let him share more as we dive in, but I have no doubt that you're going to get a lot out of this episode. So what we're going to be talking about today is honestly something that most people don't are a little bit too afraid to talk about. And it's about... mistakes that we make in business. And Rob's going to share a little bit about some things that he's learned over the years. And what he's going to find out is I've made similar mistakes as well. And we've grown through them. And those have all turned into just amazing seasons for us on a personal level, but also on a business front. So anyway, I'm excited for you guys to get to know Rob and to hear a bit about what he's got going on. So Rob, thank you for tuning in today. It's a pleasure to have you on.

Rob Hughes: 2:45

Well, Clay, it's an honor to invest this time together. And for those of you listening on the other end of the speaker, thanks for investing this time in yourself as well. I think I do agree. We've all made mistakes, but the key is are you learning from those mistakes as you move forward? And so hopefully a couple of the nuggets that we shared today can help you do just that.

Clay Vaughan: 3:06

I love it. Love it. Thanks, Rob. So what I love to do in these episodes, as you guys know, if you've tuned in previously, I like to get to the meat first and then we'll do a little background. So in other words, we're going to earn your attention. And so we're just going to dive right on in and we're going to talk about what it is that Rob has gone through and what he's learned. I think many business owners can say that staffing and hiring and And especially in the service industry, it is very difficult to do, especially if you are kind of that run and gun entrepreneur who wants to grow quick and show off fancy numbers and all that kind of stuff. I think it's tempting. And as I'm sure you guys will hear, I have fallen into temptation with that before as well. So Rob, I'd love it if you could just kind of share your story about staffing and just about your business in general. I'd love to hear it. And I know the audience would too.

Rob Hughes: 4:05

Yeah. So 20... 2011, I spun out from working a daytime job into creating something that hadn't existed before. It was an executive coaching program with a business partner. And I kind of shared the marketing and sales role for that. And he was the content and curriculum development side of that. We built that company by God's grace to like plus 30 plus states across the U.S. and Ontario, Canada. We had clients that we were working with through that. It was very, very... invested in our coaching business. And in 2017, we were speaking at an event. And a gentleman named Donald Miller gets up on stage and shares the vision behind the ethos of StoryBrand. And when I saw it, it clicked. It just made sense. And in 2017, based on that, we started applying it internally to our coaching practice. And then ultimately, I started having clients asking me for those services on the side. And so it didn't take too long to realize this was actually a tandem business that I had in my hands, but I had that solo practitioner mindset from 2011 all the way to 2017. Then I caught vision from, I think, from the Lord to really scale and build that organization. And in 2019, I started actually taking it seriously to hire on. Actually, excuse me, 2018 was my first hire and 2019 started to add staff into it. And that's where it gets a an ensemble agency. And so today the coaching business has reached its sunset. COVID and the pandemic was kind of the reason behind that. But in that space, the Lord really provided as we built Hughes Integrated as our marketing agency. But going through the growth pains from solo practitioner, kind of do it all freelance yourself to now scaling with a team, you got to ask yourself like, When are you going to add people into the mix? When's the right time to add? What revenue do you need to be able to add? What's your expectation for ROI from that? So wrestling with so many of those questions was really the basis of some of the challenges that we experienced, quite frankly, over the last couple of years. And the brass tacks, it kind of culminates into this, Clay. We overstaffed our business with a revenue that couldn't support where we were at. And we didn't realize the stress that we were causing from that. But it's true. And sometimes, you know, I say it was kind of the year kind of of hitting the rock bottom, if you will. Our sales were higher than they ever been last year, but our fixed costs were also higher than they'd ever been. So we actually had the lowest profitable year as a result of that. But in that space, the mistakes that we made from that, the Lord met us and we came out of it with some key learnings I think could be helpful to any business if they want to run a healthy operation.

Clay Vaughan: 6:45

I love it. I love hearing how God is just like, even in the midst of our mistakes, He still shines through and just continues to guide you along that process. And man, I'd love to dive a little bit deeper if I can. So you said that you kind of flipped it upside down and your revenue was great, but you overstaffed to compensate for that revenue growth. And so at what point did you realize, uh-oh, something's not right?

Rob Hughes: 7:15

Well, it didn't feel right in the moment, but I didn't know how to really put my arms around it. So kind of what led us to that point, rapid growth, lots of new clients coming in, and kind of as a team, we had built this mentality of when a need would present itself, we would just hire somebody to help us solve that, an internal payroll hire. And without really realizing that you really need to be strategically considering what does the recurring revenue look like to support the payroll of that investment, rather than just the fact that you can sell your way out. I'm a sales guy by trade. I think I could just sell my way out of anything, and I can't. I couldn't do that last year. And so we kind of ran ourselves into that predicament. And that was really the kind of the backdrop to 2011 for us. However, in that, In the time of just, I was selling more than we ever had sold before, but I was pulling out of my personal savings to pay for staff members and so on. It just didn't make sense. I felt that huge discontent that something had to change. Ultimately, we ended up right-sizing some of the staff and salaries, but it caused me to never do that again. When we make mistakes, here's one of the first gold nuggets I'd say is you can make a mistake and learn nothing from it if you don't take intentionality to it. We asked ourselves, I asked myself deeply, what was work well from our operation, what was clearly broken and what was confused. And for me, putting handlebars on where does payroll need to be as a percentage of actual recurring revenue? And where's my tolerance that also allows a minimum profitability for the organization, some of our fixed and variable costs to have margin? And then what does payroll need to be? I needed to land on a percentage of payroll, a percentage of revenue for our payroll. And so I hired a professional bookkeeper to come in and to fix the numbers of our business to really help me understand where was the money coming and going. Out of that, we built a metric based on number of retainer clients that were serving as an agent based on the quantity of those retainers at a minimum price point, what is the number of FTEs and full-timers that we could bring on? And so now the team clearly understands if we want to add a full-time seat, here's the quantity of retainers that we need to be serving. And we look at that on our weekly scorecard to know exactly how many clients we're serving on a weekly basis. So it's really given our team handlebars to really assess our numbers in a more intentional and strategic way. And that's just one element of that early kind of course correction that we experienced. Another thing that we built... Any questions on that, Clay?

Clay Vaughan: 9:53

No, no, no. Keep going. Keep going.

Rob Hughes: 9:54

Yeah. Another thing that we built... So that was kind of the first foray is to say, if we can... not think about hiring our next team member based on all of the contracts that are coming in, but instead think about the quantity of in-house W2 team members as a function of quantity of retainers. That was step one. And I found that that gave me a handlebar to kind of course correct. The second thing that we built was a bit more comprehensive because we saw clear alignment for the team. We all understood what that meant. We could be on the same page with it. We were clearly getting traction. The next thing that we did was, is we built a financial health scorecard. So this took, I think there's seven total metrics out of our company finances. The bookkeeper helped me put this together. And we created weighted averages to those metrics that ultimately average up to 1% out of 100 of financial health. That number also goes on our team-wide scorecard. So when the financial health is at an 80% or higher based on all of those variety of weighted metrics, it's in the green and we're all set. If that number drops to 79 or lower, it triggers an issue for us in our weekly meetings as a team. And we discuss the topic of what could we do as a team to course correct that. So creating the series of scoreboards and You know, health scorecards has really been helpful for us as a team to kind of involve others in the financial management of the organization. So I don't just carry the burden of that secretly behind a curtain, but the team understand how they can directly impact that as well. Those have been two big, big, two of, I would say, the three big lessons that we learned out of 2021.

Clay Vaughan: 11:37

Wow. Man, that is huge. And I want to dive deeper into that. I think I kind of went through the same process that you went through last year. I think the year before and COVID kind of was like, all right, well, you got to figure it out. Because in 2019, I was doing an analysis the other day and I figured out I had 39 FTEs in 2019. 39 full-time employees. That's a whole lot of overhead, a whole lot of insurance and all the benefits packages and all that kind of stuff. It was crazy. It was massive. And I mean, we had the broadest spectrum of pays as well. I mean, you had entry-level folks in the 40s and you had senior level executives poached from big companies in the mid six figures. And I mean, we're talking like it just, it was huge payroll expenses and COVID forced us to right size. It was tough. COVID was hard because I mean, it was almost like Here comes the throw. I mean, the spigot was on, the spigot was on, and then somebody just turned it off. And it was like, oh, wow. Yeah, we were not in a good position for COVID because a lot of our contracts had 30-day out clauses. So, I mean, it works great if you can scale up and scale down with contractors, which is kind of how we had originally started. But when you have that many FTEs, ooh, that was tough. And it forced the right sizing. And we sold off different business units. And now we're at nine. So we're at nine FTEs, which is crazy, but we have properly gotten to the point where we can leverage contractors to help with that scaling up and scaling down. And I mean, I'll tell you, because I mean, having gone through it about a year prior to you, it doesn't get any easier, but it's great having those models in place to just kind of say, okay, well, we need to kind of worry now as a team. We need to worry about this. We need to figure it out. And similar to your weighted averages, we introduced something called yellow and red flag in our finance meetings. And so there's a couple different triggers that'll happen on the scorecard. But if any of those triggers kick up, well, we go into yellow flag, which means we instantly start evaluating, okay, What team members are non-essential? What are all of these expenses? Travel gets frozen. All this kind of stuff that is peripheral gets all frozen. And then if we stay in yellow flag for, I think it's two weeks or... Anyway, something along those lines, then we instantly get pushed over into red flag and red flag instigates... right-sizing, it instigates major pay cuts in, or not pay cuts, but expense cuts. And so, I mean, it's, it's tough though. It's tough because you get invested with these people. And man, in 2020, like my heart was just like wrenched from all of the, all of the stuff that we had to go through. So I completely hear you loud and clear.

Rob Hughes: 14:39

And I think if you really love your people, Clay, which I know you do, I certainly do. It's, You have to have objective measures that give you non-emotional feedback and prompt action. Because if it were up to me, I'd hire everybody because I just love everybody, right? I mean, that's just the bottom line of it. You've got to have some objective wisdom that you lean in on. And so for those of you listening, kind of just to give you what's under the hood of our secret recipe of this, lo and behold, I told you that oversizing our payroll to revenue was the biggest issue that caused us financial pain in 2011 or 2021, rather. So. surprise, surprise, the biggest weighted average is metric number one. It's labor cost to real revenue. So that's the first thing. Second thing we watch is profit margin. We have some minimum expectations for profit margin of the work that we perform. And so we want to make sure that stays in a healthy range. Budget versus actual is criteria number three, where we do our best to steward the resources the Lord's entrusted to us. And so we want to have a budget going into each financial month that we look at this. So we've got the budget for the month and then the actual. The fourth item for us is bottom line cash If Dave Ramsey were on the call, he'd call this. the emergency fund. This is the bottom line cash that we've got, the run rate. If revenue cut off entirely, how long would we last with the bottom line cash to cover expenses? Number four for us is income compared to expenses. So income divided by expenses. We want to look at that ratio. The final is total revenue. We want to be sure that it's growing each month. And then the seventh item, and if you've been keeping track with this, the lowest weighted average for us is our quick ratio because we don't have a physical building. We don't have a lot of assets. So this one doesn't really change a ton other than the cash that's in the bank. So assets to liabilities are quick ratio. And that's number seven. We look at each of these on a monthly basis with a monthly financial health scorecard that we've had our bookkeeper fill out for us. And it purely outputs based on those weighted averages, a percentage out of 100. And that's what we report on as a team. It's been so helpful to create the grip and the handlebars to driving this business in a financial healthy way. I'd like to say that we're in the green every single month. By God's grace, the last couple of months have been that way, but it's not always that way. The big issue though that I have as the owner is that when the business starts to go off the train tracks a little bit into like the yellow or red zone, other than having some objective tool to point to, it's on me to convince the team to make a difference. But now with an objective tool to look at, I could say, here's the reason it's off the tracks. How can we create a short-term strategic plan to correct it? So that's why that's the second of three lessons that has been so helpful and been a blessing to us in 2022 that we learned in 2021. Do you want to know that third lesson?

Clay Vaughan: 17:33

I would love to know that third lesson.

Rob Hughes: 17:36

This is the drum roll moment, listeners. This third lesson, I guarantee you, is totally counterintuitive to what you think we're going to talk about. Maybe. It is. The third lesson that I gained from the bottom of the pit with our lowest profitability business, basically, you know, really shuttering in terms of profit last year, highest sales, but lowest profit, kind of in the wrong direction. I learned generosity. Generosity. So in that lowest moment, the Lord clearly in a spiritual retreat, I took a journey of generosity. There's an organization that your listeners can search for. It's called Generous Giving. It's actually an organization. Their whole purpose is to stir conversations around the topic of generosity. So in the lowest profit year, when I was probably as frustrated about my business as I could ever possibly be, I attended this with my wife. In that two-day retreat, the Lord spoke to me clearly that he wanted to change the direction of our business to become a wake of blessing for everybody who linked wagons with it, which includes our clients, our employees, our contractors, of course, us as owners, my wife and I. Anybody who comes in contact with this business, we wanted it to become a wake of blessing for them. And in doing so, direct the glory back to the Lord. So that third lesson of generosity, the Lord spoke clearly to me on that retreat. He wanted to create an intentional generosity plan for our business. Out of that, we've now run it for one full year at this point. We have a 10-10-80 plan for the organization. Of the gross profit, or of the net profit rather, after all expenses come up, the net profit of the organization, a portion of that we... tithe, if you will, to a team giving fund. This is resource pool that the team can vote on to support outside organizations and ministries or causes. Most recently, we adopted a family for this Christmas season, and we use those resources to sponsor that family. There's a grandmother who had a stroke. She's raising five grandchildren between the ages of two and 10. And she can't work. And so we adopted that entire family and supported them with this team generosity fund. So that's the first thing. The second is a team, a fun fund, which the team fund fund then as resources dedicated to be generous to the team themselves for events, whether that the team happy hour, get together a team activity or go to the baseball park or whatever we want to do with that. And the team gets to vote on it to be generous to themselves. The third thing is that team generosity, which me as the owner, I get to choose what I wanna do with the profit that we generate. Sole owner, that's what you get to do. And I choose to take a portion of our profitability and bring it back to the team members as the Lord allows it to happen. Each quarter, we have a whole spreadsheet that we calculate. We offer bonuses to our team out of that. So being generous to ourselves internally and externally has been a big, big lesson that came out of that bottom of the road, if you will. And I wouldn't turn back. By God's grace, this year has been a real elevated profit compared to last year. And I think that we're heading on the right track. I don't know if all three of these things are directly correlated to all But it certainly feels ironic that we changed these three areas over the last year. And the Lord has really found blessing with that in favor for us. We're really grateful.

Clay Vaughan: 21:17

Wow. Wow. Wow. That's so cool that that I mean, and this is not abnormal for God, but when you're forced to kind of rethink your entire strategy and how you. I mean, frankly, live your life. I mean, that's going to affect everything. So I love the three outcomes and I love the surprise ending on that number three there. So what would you say is the kind of root cause? Because I know for me, when I think about what caused me to overstaff and what is honestly still a struggle is when I look at success. And I also, when I look at the end goal, which is I love my family and I want to spend more time with them. I mean, that's one of the perks of having your own business, right? Unless you're stuck working in the business. So naturally I don't want to ever cut people who would make me have to go work more. Right. So, I mean, there's that motivation, which is, Ooh, I don't want to cut that person because then that means I'm going to have to work 10 to 15 hour days again. And I don't want to do that again. Um, or, um, Oh, I really want to make sure that I show off how big my organization is. And man, I'm successful. I'll get respect. And so I think I struggle. And I don't know if this is abnormal or not, but I struggle on the pride front. And I struggle on the front of you know, I built this business. I don't want to, I don't know. I don't want to backtrack. So there's a little bit of fear in there as well. That is, is compelling. I'm being very brutally honest. There's a, there's those two things that are compelling me to make those unhealthy decisions for the organization. And I constantly have to have to check myself against that. What, what do you think yours were? If you don't mind me asking, I know it's a pretty deep question, but...

Rob Hughes: 23:01

I'm an Enneagram three with a two wing, you know, so again, people pleasing, I'd hire everybody if I could, every single person on the planet. Um, And I really like to be that achiever, that driver that appears to be successful. But that is also the downside. That's the dark. That's the kryptonite. As much as it is a superpower for the three, it's also the kryptonite. One thing I'd say, Clay, I'm not perfect. I don't bat 100 on this. But journaling has been a real big thing to help me process some of those compulsions, if you will, of like, I have to hire them. I can't reduce salary, whatever. I can't reduce staff. I can't add staff, whatever the case is. The question I would really encourage somebody to journal on in that space would be who really owns the company? Because if I really get into that headspace of it's mine and I need to do this in a way that makes me successful, I probably am going to feel like my oxygen hose that I've been breathing out of gets crimped when something takes a curve. But if I truly get to that place, and again, I'm not there perfectly, where I fully surrender this, that God truly owns it, then if he decides to reduce the size of his business staff-wise, client-wise, there's a reason he wants me to manage that reduction. And I want to honor him as we reduce the size of his company according to his assignment for us. Or if God wants to increase it, there'll be more clients that come. It'll be the right fit clients, all the different things. Okay, there's some lessons there, but I want to be a good steward as we increase God's company according to his biblical principles. So who owns it is probably the core question

Clay Vaughan: 24:51

Absolutely. Yeah. Stewardship. I love that word. That's something that we constantly bring up when we're talking about the organization. It's just, this is something has to have an open-handed approach. If you're holding on too tight, I mean, when I do, typically bad things happen in the organization, across all the companies, and even in my personal life, when I hold on to things too tightly. And I, as a 2-1 entrepreneur, which for whatever reason, I tend to flip back and forth between a 2-1 and a 1-2, that level of control is such a, to your words, kryptonite. So I love just the fact that we're even bringing that to light because I think a lot of business owners feel, oh man, I can't talk about how small my organization is or how little revenue I have. I mean, really, I don't think anyone cares. I mean, they're all numbers. I think the only person that cares is you. And maybe the people that work for you, but even then they only care for themselves, not for you. So it's like, oh, great story. I mean, we learned this as a story, Brand. It's like, hey, that's a great story. I hope it works out for you. Not one I'm interested in being a part of.

Rob Hughes: 26:04

Yeah, everybody's on their own story. Everybody's a little bit selfish. I mean, everybody has their own focus. I don't want to call them selfish, but yeah, I think that there is some truth that's in there. My biggest struggle is why do I want to grow? Like, why? Why would I want to add clients, add staff? What's the motive that's behind it? And I really like the vision that God has given me is, again, creating that wake of blessing. I may not be the only place my employees ever work, but with God's help, I want to be the best place they've ever worked that steers them to the foot of the cross. And our mission statement as an organization is to lift up Christ in the marketplace by helping small businesses accelerate growth. We know we're in the marketing space. We're working with small for-profit companies. But whether overt or covert, we are evangelists as well for the sake of the kingdom that's out there. And so if we're going to create that generosity message and be abundant blessing for our staff and our team for the season that God's entrusted them to my shepherding, I want to steward that responsibility well.

Clay Vaughan: 27:09

I love that. I love that. There's a book that I read. Gosh. Well, I've been introduced to the Benham brothers for quite a few years now. But Jason and David Benham, they wrote a book called Expert Ownership. And I read it earlier this year. And it stood out to me because they talk about their story of generosity and learning. And they learned from their business mentor. And they actually helped establish their goals, which I adopted as my own, which is my goal and the reason why I want to grow my business. is my goal is to give away a million dollars a month. Like if I can have a business so large that I can help in a healthy way, give away a million dollars a month to gospel outreach towards kingdom expansion towards serving the needy. Oh my gosh. I, I, that would be huge. And I would be like, all right, this is, this is the goal. This is the dream. So I love your, your concept of generosity because I equally have been encouraged in that through the Benham brothers. And, um, so if you haven't read that book, by the way, expert ownership, yeah, absolutely worth the read. Yeah. So, um, so speaking of books, uh, Rob, I know you're a reader and you, you're, you even mentioned it already. You're a journaler too. So, um, what would you say your favorite book is as it relates to the topic that we've talked about today, about staffing and about owning your business and stewarding it well for the Lord's work. What would be kind of the book that you, that has stood out to you as something that's been maybe a catalyst for bringing things to light?

Rob Hughes: 28:47

I'm sure, I don't know how EOS-y you get, you know, in your podcast here, but Gina Whitman's Traction, it's a secular read and but it has given us handlebars on the business. A lot of the scorecard mentality and accountability chart and right people, right seats, all of that I would point back to the EOS worldwide ecosystem of books. How to Be a Great Boss is in there. Of course, Traction is the base camp for it. There's a variety of books I think any leader should read. Rocket Fuel is another great one too about the visionary integrator relationship. What my rhythms look like most days is I wake up I start in the one-year Bible, New Living Translation. And I read a one-day's worth of that, which has some Old, some New Testament, some Psalm, some Proverb in every day's reading. Clay, I can't tell you how many times. I've read that probably north of 10. It might even be close to 10 or 12 years I've done that consecutively. Just kept that as the base of my morning quiet time. But I cannot tell you how many times... I might read something for the 12th time because it's 12 years running, and something new completely relevant to what I'm dealing with jumps out the page, and it's the wisdom that I needed. So that has been the consistent source of wisdom that the Lord has used to speak deeply into my leadership ethos and mentality. I usually read that. I try to journal, and in my journaling, I try to express gratitude to the Lord because there's so much in leadership stress that can really stress you out, and If you turn your mind to gratitude, intentionality, you start seeing reasons to be thankful wherever you are as well. It's kind of like if you buy a Ford Mustang, you start seeing Mustangs everywhere or whatever the case is. There's a psychological term for that. So gratitude is a key piece of that. And then I made a business goal to read five minutes a day in a business book.

Clay Vaughan: 30:39

Wow.

Rob Hughes: 30:39

Now, five minutes sounds like a really weak goal. I'm on Enneagram 3 and I want it to be five hours. But what I find is the psychology of a five-minute reading goal actually turns into 15 or 20. But five minutes isn't intimidating. So some mornings it is just five. So that's a reading discipline and habit I'd encourage any listener to consider. If reading has been a struggle for you to be consistent with, just set a five-minute-a-day goal. What's five minutes? I love it. And right now I'm reading a book, Never Lose a Customer Again, which is all about designing your client experience by Joey Coleman. And it's awesome. I'm loving it.

Clay Vaughan: 31:15

Awesome. That's a good one. Well, so just kind of shifting gears, but along those same lines, I know you and I actually met through the StoryBrand community of agency owners and a lot of great guys in that program. And I feel like Man, StoryBrand's great, but the agency group, that's been a game changer for me. But I guess over the years, you've been in business since 2011 from what you shared earlier. Who has it been that's been pouring into you or maybe that was a catalyst for your growth over the years on a personal level? And why do you think that was such a big thing for you.

Rob Hughes: 31:59

Oh, man. You know, it's always nice to have aspirational avatars that you look up to. Like for me, Clay Vaughn is one of those. So, you know, this is our chance to just be complimentary to one another, right? My business partner in my first business, the coaching company, his name is Paul Anthes. And this is a man, Enneagram One, probably a one with a two wing or nine wing, but he was... I mean, just aspirational. A few years older than I am, so he had life experience to share. He's dedicated his life to mentorship and to speaking wisdom, which is why when we formed a coaching company, it just naturally made sense. He was really the Dave Ramsey, as we used to say, of the brand. So Paul has just been a phenomenal follower of Christ, deeply committed to the scriptures and seeing them lived out in real life application. I really think a lot of my leadership ethos was formed through through our business partnership over the decade that we shared. Another gentleman, his name is George Wolf. He challenged me to go back and get my MBA several years ago. I thought, well, why would I do that? Why would I go and put a master's degree? I've already gone and done whatever I needed to do, but he really pushed me beyond what I thought was my limiting belief to do that. I'm really glad. No, so far, nobody's really talked about that or asked me about it. And that's cool, but it was just one thing for sure. And then one other gentleman, I'll say, And this is another podcast for another time. This guy's name is Bill Johnson. Taught me the gift of presence. Clay, I've been through some crap. I'll bet you've been through some crap. And if you're listening to this, you probably are either in some crap, have recently come out of it, or you're about to head into some. Bill Johnson's a gentleman who recognized some crap I was going through and gifted me with his presence in the mess. Without getting too derailed into the topics of this, he sat with me in some of my darkest moments of my life. He sat in the funeral parlor. He sat on the phone if I needed him to, or he just sat right next to me in a coffee shop. Don't even have to exchange words. He was just physically there offering his confident assurance of presence. And so the Lord really used that experience to teach me deeply about You don't have to have all the right words all the time. You just got to show up and just be there for someone. And so I try to carry, you know, there's all sorts of lessons and so on in life, but those are a few of the big mentors I would point back to as kind of like, you know, real influences that have really shaped me.

Clay Vaughan: 34:36

Beautiful. Beautiful. Well, Rob, thank you so much for your time today. And I know that the, the listeners, everybody tuning in. I'm sure you guys are just as impacted as I am right now. So how can people engage with you? You've got a podcast. You've got an amazing agency. Tell me how or tell everybody here what to do. Yep.

Rob Hughes: 34:58

So Hughes integrated.com spelled H U G H E S integrated.com is our website. Certainly they can reach out there if there's questions and they want to follow up in conversation or on podcast networks, you can search the thrive collective with Rob Hughes, where we interview entrepreneurs, business owners, and leaders, helping them, you know, make more money, avoid cost of mistakes and fully integrate their faith into their life and leadership. But Clay, I just, I tell you what, it's been an honor to serve you and your listeners, your audience through the interview today. And I pray that everyone who's who listens is blessed in something through this conversation.

Clay Vaughan: 35:31

Awesome. Thank you, Rob. All right, everybody. We'll see you guys next week on Good Business. on