BraveMen S4E156: Michael Rasa-Down to UP

Welcome to Brave Men, the podcast that helps you on your journey through life wisdom and courage for the journey. I'm fired up today to have a great friend on Michael Rossa and a moment you'll hear from. It is a powerful, powerful story. In fact, it's when you're going to want to send to somebody else to share and make sure you subscribe, make sure you go down in there, whatever you're on Spotify, Apple, wherever you're at, click the subscribe button. That helps us and the algorithms that get the more people. I know the algorithms are from hell, but hey, you know, it's it's where we're at. So and thanks for being with us. Christian Men's network is the sponsor of the Brave Men podcast. You can find tools for discipling men in over 40 languages on cmn dot men. CMN Christian men's network, cmn dot men. It's Brave Men with Paul Lewis Cole. My name is Paul Lewis Cole and I've been married over 50 years and and it's because of people like Michael and Debbie Rossa who inspired us on the way. Not that you were there that long ago. You were having me. Yeah, but thanks for being a brave man. Michael Rossa, a remarkable story out of your home, right? Michael at 14 years of age. Yeah, I was kicked out big Italian family in these coast and got kicked out at 14 dropped out of high school and everyone back. 17 and a half go into the US Army. Correct. Came out of the US Army with with medals and expert in rifle and expert in grenades. If there's anything about going into business, you need to be an expert at its grenades. And then for the next 10 years, faithfully, you begin to do sales, right? Yes. And I say faithfully because sometimes people want to hear the end story of where you ended. That without the effort of what it took to get there. And so you faithfully executed things, grew up in a couple of different companies and then launched out on your own with Rossa Florian. It's great to have you here, man. Thank you. I appreciate being on the show. Thank you very much. Yeah, excited to talk about the ups and downs of following Christ and trying to be a good husband and a good father and a good entrepreneur and a good business leader. I, you know, there you go. You wrapped it all up. But I think the ups and downs is a statement in that sense, Michael, because there are no mountain tops without the valleys. And there are ups and downs and there are things where we kind of tend to think, get myopic and we think, man, I'm in the middle of this valley. I'll never get out. And you're in the middle of a valley, 14, 15 years of age. And if you will, started going the right direction. But we were sitting in your plane. Here's what I want to hit this thing and we can come back to some of this background. We're sitting in your plane, you're a pilot, your wife, Debbie. And if she listens to this, just what I'd be known, you actually said to me, you said, and Debbie's actually the better of the two pilots. You actually said, you know, and so he's a badass. That's for sure. Yeah, but you're both pilots and so we're sitting in your plane. We're flying and I said, you know, Michael, where this thing start with your business and and the blessing that's on your life and you begin to tell me the most remarkable story about the upbringing. And then you mentioned how as you started your own business, you discovered something to begin to help you scale. I think that's going to help a lot of men, not just in business, but in all of their life. Tell me about that. Yeah. So yeah, we were, I think we're at 45,000 feet in our Honda jet at the time. And when you ask me how we how to like get here, yeah, I quickly sped up through the childhood and the sales getting into sales and spending 10 years and then deciding to start my own organization and like any of us who are in business or who want to be in business, we oftentimes are scared to death and we don't know what it is that we're doing, but we have maybe the courage to step out. And so I did. And as I was trying to grow this business, which it basically we sell and install carpet to apartments, very simple, right? It's not, it's not a complicated business. We sell to an apartment manager. They they'll they'll call 10 or 15 orders in a month for when somebody moves out anyhow. You've got competition. In other words, there's a lot of other people who yeah, there's yeah, if anybody, if any of us on the call works anything and around multifamily apartment communities anywhere throughout the world, if you've got let's just say a 100 or 400 unit project or community, that site staff has to make sure that when people move out and on average, there's a 10% turnover. So if you've got 300 units, you've got 30 people per month moving out, that releases are expiring. And so those folks move out, then they have to go in with their maintenance team and repain and reclean and get the unit ready to release again. Okay. So if we if any of us on the call owned an apartment community, we would want number one, it to stay occupied, right? It's not going to do us any good if the units are empty. So the onsite people have to constantly replace the flooring and new cabinets and new paint or tops and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So there's a lot of competition and the onsite people who run that apartment community, they will do business with who they like and trust and who can do it faster and better and quicker and more professionally at a competitive rate. So and who returns their phone calls. Yeah, of course, right. And so that was our that was our that's the space and quickly grew the company and quickly, you know, grew it to 2030, 40, 50 people and and as I was building it, I realized that we have to have system we have to have a way to scale it. So I came across this book and this book is called the E myth and the E myth stands for the entrepreneurial myth. And I'm not a big reader, especially at that season in my life. Yeah, you were busy. But when I got this book, I read it in like three days and I was totally on fire, totally, totally, totally on fire from what the book had taught me and basically Michael Gerber, the author of the email, he did this study of all small and mid-sized entrepreneur led organizations throughout the planet. And what he discovered was that everyone who starts their own business, they started whether they know it or not, they start their business for two reasons. One reason is they want financial freedom and the second reason is they want time freedom. Okay. What he discovered through his studies is about 98.6% of every entrepreneur that's out there are slaves to those two very things. Oh, wow. There's slaves, they work 12 to 16 hours, six days a week, and they're freaked out about the money. So as a entrepreneur, they ended up actually creating a system that is diametrically opposed to what their goal was. Yeah, exactly. And so what the E myth book talks about is they identified, Michael Gerber identified, what are the commonalities and the specific winning best practices of those, the remaining 98.6 from 100, the 1.4% or 2% of the businesses and entrepreneurs that have built the business and you know, you have a really good business when you can lead your business for six months or more and the business does as good or better while you're out of it. That's when you know you have a business. Yeah. Anybody can start a company and have a job, but you know you have a really good business when you don't have to work in the business to make the business work. And most of the entrepreneurs can't do that. Well, 90% of us could do it and can't do it because we all adopt this false persona belief. Are you ready? Here it is. Are you ready? Yeah. If I want the job done right, I gotta do it myself or if I could just find that one guy that I gotta find though, that one special dude or dude Ed, if I could find that one person, oh my gosh, that would change everything. I hired that exceptional person. Yeah, I gotta, you know, I just so hard to find good people. Well, you know what? You're right. It is hard to find good people. You know why? Because the world isn't filled with extraordinary people. The world is filled with ordinary, hardworking, good men and women. The world is not filled with Elon Musk since Steve Jobs and Azos right there. The world is filled with guys like us. So what the Emmith did for me was, is it taught me that you can take a task that I do that I felt I was the only one that could do. And if I could identify the two or three or four tools I need to do that task and then I wrote down the steps and I created a system on how I did that task. If I could identify a system of four or five or six steps system for that one task and then if I could identify all the tasks that I do on a weekly monthly basis and create a set of systems for each one of those tasks, then I could take that system and I could teach it to an ordinary hardworking man or woman. And the chances of them achieving 70 to 85% success of each one of those tasks that I was achieving 100% on, the chances of them getting it right 70 to 85% have just exponentially skyrocketed. Wow. And so I'm happy if I could get someone to do what I do at 80% of what I can do it because there's nobody that can do what Paul co-do, what Paul Cole does. There's no one that can do what specifically how I do what I do. And there's no one that can do what any one of your listeners are listening with John Mary, Susan Paul, David, there's nothing you are uniquely made by Jesus and you have gifts that no one else can do. So for us to say I want someone I want to hire somebody and they need to do it exactly the way I do it or I'm going to have to do it myself. You've got to change your thinking thinking because that's limiting. That's limiting in it. Well, I'll allow you to scale. That was Ray Crock, 1952, when he built a system, making hamburgers where each patty is turned at exactly the same time. Yeah, it's just a system. It's a specific system. So when I read this book, I was so generous. I went out and got a copy for every one of our senior leaders who were not of them at the time. Okay, okay, let me show you right there just real quick because this is the thing that that knocked me out. It's one thing to read a book where Michael Gerber had a, if you will, an epiphany. It's one thing to read it. It's another thing to do it. It's another thing to actually build a system. I want everybody to listen to this because this is a thing Michael that knocked me out when I was listening to you and I've told this story probably 30 or 40 times in different conversations with different people. Well, it's changed. It changed our business and I haven't even shared with you Paul the latest. Okay, it's changed our business and it's a good thing on the latest. Okay, so tell us exactly what you're doing. When I read the book so on fire, I was like, okay, I have to teach this to our, our nine senior leaders and I bought nine books. I bought nine highlighters and nine pens and but I'm all together on our, and said, we're meeting every, every Wednesday we're going to meet from this point forward. Here's this book. I said, open it up, put your name in it. I said, we're going to meet every week for two hours. Next week, when we come, I said, uh, uh, well, let me back up. I said, open up the book, put your name in it and I said, I want you to write the following dates next to each chapter and they're like, okay, and the first date for the first chapter was next Wednesday. The second date for the second chapter was the following Wednesday and so forth for the 13 for the 13 chapters in the book. So for the next 13 weeks, I said, okay, guys, here's the deal. Between now and next week, I want you to read chapter one and everybody started hearing a little mumbling and moaning and I said, hey, shut up. I don't want to hear you. This is, this is your army training kicked in. I'm like, you know, shut up. You're here to do a job. Okay, we love you and we want to help you, but you got to stop moaning. Okay, I want you to read chapter one. You see the highlighter? I want you to highlight three things. Just three things. They can be, they could be three words. It could be three sentences. It could be three paragraphs, but in that chapter one, highlight three things that juice you, that roll your socks up, that put the hair on the back of your neck, standing straight up, that just twinge is you. Good or bad? Okay, but something that causes you to get like, huh, what the heck? Highlight. Okay, next week, we get together. I said, okay, Paul, stand up. You're first. Tell everybody three things, Paul. What's the, what's the page number of the first thing you highlighted? Well, I'm on page six. Everybody turned to page six. I waited intentionally. Everybody turned to page six. They turned to page six. I said, Paul, what you highlighted? Was it in the middle? The top, the top middle or the bottom portion of page six? You'd say page six middle. Great. Everybody look in the middle of page six. Paul read what you highlighted and you'd read it. And I'd ask everybody to follow along. And when you were done reading it, I said, okay, now close the book. Paul, I want you to put your hand. Raise your right hand. This is, it's kind of quirky. I did this just for the first meeting after that. I got the gist. I said, raise your right hand. Put your right hand over your heart. I'm like, what are you doing? I said, put your hand over your heart. And Paul did and I said, Paul, you just ran us what you highlighted. Your hands over your heart. Now tell us from your heart, man. Why did you highlight that? Wow. I did that juice you. Wow. And it was amazing. What unfolded. Think about this. We went around the room three times. Wow. Once a week for the entire book. We went on to do six more books later. But that book that time together, if when you say to somebody, what did you highlight? And then you asked them from your heart, what does that mean to you? All of a sudden, they start to tell you a story about their grandmother who raised them and they start getting vulnerable and they start to tear up and they start to have memories about their family of origin and about how their grandmother shaped them when they were eight years old and how it changed the way that they look at what's happening in your business at that moment. We ended up growing like so close together as a team and learning things about each other that you would not never ever have known had that not been something that we forced each other upon. Well, we got to chapter 10. I was so on fire, Paul. I called Michael Gerber's office in the Bay Area of San Francisco and I said, hey, do you guys put on any weekend conferences or breakout sessions or do you do anything to kind of drive home the principles of this book? Because this is really good material. And they're like, yes, we do. And I said, great. So I booked a four day weekend in San Francisco two months after we finished the 13th chapter of the book. And we took everybody out there to go through this program to inscribe and etch into the CD of our brains. How do we identify what needs to be converted from a frustration in your business to a written system? And then when we came back from that, we now every one of us knew how to identify the key frustrations in your department or in your business to then write those down to then categorize those. So what I did was as I asked all nine people after we got back from that weekend, I said, okay, now everyone knows how to identify their key frustrations in their department and what's outside their department that come across your desk. So everything that comes across your desk that creates a key frustration for you, I said, I want you to give me two lists. Next week, bring me back two lists, all the frustrations that we're going to eventually create a system for that are in your control and all the frustrations that are not in your control that are coming from somebody else. So the next week, I had 18 lists. I took all 18, gave them to one of my better Excel. And I said, go lock yourself in the room and I want you to take every one of these items that are on these 18 pages and I want you to put them into one of six different buckets, accounts receivable, sales, customer service, inventory, operations, warehouse. And essentially, it was the six heads of our senior leadership team that were there. And they categorized all these and then I came back and I said, okay, the next week, I looked at them and studied them and I reprinted them out by their categories and came back the next week and gave each one of the owners their new reshuffled list. And I said, okay, guys, I've done the math. It's going to take us nine and a half months to meet once a week and kick out two key frustrations and convert them to two written systems. So each one of you pick a key. I don't care you each have your own list. You're going to work your way through the whole list. I don't care what which one you pick, but pick two because next week, Sam and Susan, you're going first. And so for the next nine and a half months, we went through this process and at the end of the very first meeting, when the first two people presented their first two key frustrations and they gave us their written system, their job was to read through what their steps were and what the system consisted of. And I instructed the other seven people in the room. Your job is to poke, prod and criticize them with professionalism, love and courtesy, but criticize them, poke them and tell them what you think holds they missed or the areas that they're thinking of. And then the author and owner of that system, your job is to take what makes sense to you back when you leave today. And next week before the new two people start their system frustrations, key frustrations, convert it to systems, then before we do that, we're going to have the previous week to people give their final, you'll each have five minutes to give your final little presentation on what the, and when they gave us their final, we all signed off on it, we stamped it, and we put it into a six inch giant three ring binder that had six, seven tabs, AR, AP, sales, customer service, interiors, operations, right? And so unbeknownst to us, we didn't start out thinking this way, but nine and a half months later, we had this massive, franchise menu. Wow. We didn't think about that. We were just trying to solve the day and day out challenges. And I was trying to build a business so that I could go away for two or three weeks or two or three months and not have to be in the business. I wanted to shift the pendulum of working in it 95% and working on it 5% to where I'm working in it, I'm working in it 5% and I'm working on it 95%. Yeah, yeah, becoming an order versus an operator. And so that led us and that gave us the confidence after we were done with that process a year later, and I want to see the 10 months later, that gave us the confidence to then go open up Houston and go up in San Antonio and go up in Austin and go up in Corpus Christi and go open up Tulsa and go up East Texas and Central Texas and the Valley and College Station and Oklahoma City. It gave us the confidence to go open up these new locations because when we hired someone new, their job description was in this three-ring binder, a binder. Hey, okay, that's the thing that got me fired up. Now, because here's my other application to any pastor, any father of a family, anybody listening to this right now, all of this is applicable where you are. You know why? Because it's called discipleship. It's called discipleship. This is what that is. It's discipleship. And if you're in a church, whatever, now let me just add one thing, then I'm going to come back to a different question, Michael. You had to be vulnerable. You had to be vulnerable to the frustration of your warehouse guy is that Michael Rossis would walk through the warehouse and change what somebody was doing all day long. I can't say how many times I would be in full blown tears, sharing my heart, talking about how frustrated I was because I failed because I failed. Like I feel that I failed so many times. And so we would share that regularly, which opens up. It creates a safe environment, a safe platform, and it creates a stage, the setting, or a better way to put it, a culture. It creates a safe culture for people to be okay with not being okay. You have to be okay with not being okay, because none of us are okay. We're all screwed up. Everyone of us. And we have to be okay with the fact that we're not okay. And it's okay to fail. Like we want our people to fail often. Let me say that again. We want our people. We want our team members. We want people to fail. What we don't want is for people to fail on the same exact thing over and over because then you're teaching us, you're unteachable, you're uncoachable, and we have to release you to the wild. But if you create an aroma, and a stage, and a platform where it's safe to risk, it's safe to step out and take a chance, and it's okay when you fall, and we celebrate that. Let's pull the best practices on failures. Let's pull some of that information and spread the love. That's how we have grown exponentially. You know, that reminds me of that book, Advantage, that Lencioni wrote, talked about the advantage of the great companies' love. And I think it shocked a lot of the business world when he wrote that because he reduced it down to what you and I know is the operating system of the universe as it got us long. Now, the other thing that you did as I reflected on our conversation after being in that plane with you was, and by the way, the one major reason that my wife was okay with me being in that plane with you, is that particular plane that you have has its own parachute? Negative. No, that's my brother's plane. Oh, it's not a jet. Honigent has two good solid engines, but the one that my brother has, which is a serious has the parachute. And that's a mystery. It's a lie to my wife to get on the plane. Sorry about that, Ben. That's funny, Ben. But here's what you did. You created a culture of servanthood. Yeah. You created a culture of serving each other because when you, when the criticism, you know, when you talked about three things, respect, love, and in a way, no, would you criticize each other in a way that was loving, kind. And so criticism is no or criticism. Criticism in our world is critical. Yeah. Yeah. You've got to give it a try. You've created an atmosphere of love, an atmosphere of servanthood, but Jesus taught more than he taught anything else was serving others. What he exemplified by this life is that in the Bible says Jesus, he didn't come to Lord his position over anyone. He came to serve. And it's why he's called the son of Ben. And he was a servant leader. And that's where we get it wrong so often. And with your family and with a, you've got three daughters and with our with our families too often, what men tend to think is if I'm going to lead, I'm going to tell everybody what to do. Yeah. If I'm going to lead, I'm going to dominate the atmosphere. And that really is a very selfish background and place to move from. So you created this atmosphere of that. And it did you well. And God blessed this thing. And how do you, how do you do this? Michael, I want to just ask you a question on this with your business. Where did you come into faith in Christ? Where did that happen? And how did you actually apply that as a business person? Too often we think they're somewhat silos, separate from each other. Where did that come from? You really want to know? Yeah, we're on a podcast. Well, let me try to make it a short version here. We, I started the company in 94 had no Jesus, no Christ. 2001 found Jesus. Why you might ask is because I was a workaholic forever. And while I had no Jesus, I had a full fledged adulterous affair and lied to everybody about it. With one of my employees that I hired. And she was married. And she had a daughter. And I had two daughters and our friends who were not godly told us, you guys belong together and you should just get divorced and your spouses will get over it. You can't get over it. They're really young. The kids will get over it. And we believed them. And we did it. And we spent forward. And we brought Jesus into our lives, not only into our lives, but our kids lives, our spouses lives. And we all, like within the 12 month period, all four of us as adults brought Christ into our hearts. And we all repented. We all, Debbie and I went to both of our spouses and confessed everything and confessed everything to our children. And we have been pushing closer to Jesus ever since. Since that happened, we realized we didn't own our business and that he was blessing us with the opportunity to run this business. And so we decided to give it over to God. And we began running the business based on Biblical principles. We hired our first two chaplains and our second two chaplains. And today we've got 22 on staff chaplains that serve our people in a way. Come on. Wait a minute. You have 22 on staff chaplains. We do. We have about, yeah, we've got, we've got about about 200 plus W2 employees and about 499 subcontractors. So about 650 people on the payroll. And we have 11 locations. And we have a male and a female chaplain that serve each one of 11 locations. That's the 22. And what those chaplains do is is they provide, they come in, you know, they would come in every, every two, three times a week. And they would just check, check base with you. Hey, Paul, how's it going? Yeah. You're believe or not. How's it going? And so with that, we offer hospital visits, jail visits, funeral services and wedding services, all free to our employees and their extended families, all of their extended families, Christian counseling, grief counseling, financial counseling, well, average counseling, pre-marriage counseling, all free to our employees. When we first found the Lord, we, we literally, my wife and I got up on stage, we had a massive meeting in, it was that cross-timbered church up in flower mount. We had a big, we had a big meeting with 160 people to be and I sat on two stools for three hours and cried our eyes out. We shared with everyone our sin. We shared, we did a full disclosure to all of our employees, not only to our spouses and our children, but to all of our employees. And we shared with them, like we were literally weeping like a baby girl and a baby eye. I'm not joking. It's true story. And it just moved us. It just, and now we do an annual event called Cast the Vision. We bring everybody together once a year. We've given out hundreds of eyeballs and I mean, we just talk about the Lord regularly and it's a struggle. It's a struggle as an entrepreneur and a business leader and a husband and a father. It's a struggle knowing all the sin I've got and all the junk I've got and all the mistakes I've made and all the past decisions, poor crappy decisions that I've made. It's a struggle to believe at times how much Jesus loves me. And I share that because I guarantee there were listeners out there going, oh my story. Well, you're right. I don't know your story, but my name's so pretty. Like I've screwed things up. The blessing is God, you know, in Romans 828, right? He makes all things come together for those who believe in him, right? And who love him. And today, today, like 25 years later, all three of my daughters, 30 are our daughters are 30, 36, 34, 33, all three are married to solid, strong believers. All three live in the Metroplex. We have six grandchildren. My wife and I are jet pilots. We've been very blessed. We just, I mean, two days ago, I just flew my ex-wife and did an angel flight with her and one of my daughters for her best childhood friend, out of Tulsa, who has cancer. We did an angel flight and transported her from Tulsa to MD Anderson down in Houston. And then back and then three days later, back from MD Anderson, back to Tulsa, just, and this is just how we do life now. Yeah. We just were constantly trying to give and to say, thank you, Jesus, while I'm, while I still, at times, struggle. I struggle. Of course, we do. You know, it's not easy. Yeah, it's part of being human. It's part of being human. But the fact is, is that those decisions are based on an identity and the identity that you have, Michael, in you, is that you, you've defined yourself as a follower of Jesus Christ. You've defined yourself based on who Jesus said you are, that you're an overcomer, a conqueror, talk about Romans. Hey, you're, you're a victorious one. You're a champion. That's who I am. So I'm not defined by the things I struggle with. I'm defined by the fact I'm a passionate pursuer of the pleasure of God's presence. And that's what defines me. So now no weapon formed against me will prosper. The same spirit to raise Jesus from the dead lives in me. So if you're meeting with your family, if you're, if you're trying to guide your family, if you're trying to guard your daughter, if you're trying to build your business, if you're trying to be the best, if you're trying to move from being the guy driving the forklift to the guy being the manager of the warehouse, serving others, loving God, serving others, and knowing that your definition is not based on your mistakes, but based on his grace. That's right. That's that's the core right there. Let me ask it. Let's go back. I want to, I want to just particular jump into one thing on that, Michael. What was the tipping point when you accepted Jesus Christ? What was that point? Because I know you can go to that moment. What was the motivating factor? Where were you? Well, there wasn't one specific thing. There were about a dozen that happened in the short span of about 90 days. Debbie and I were in a really bad place because we had my wife. We had just gotten married and just think about it. We just got married on the basis of mistrust, right? We entered into a, it was terrible. So right after we got married, we thought things were going to be glorious and there were everything but glorious. Like we fought every minute of every day. It was harm. Somebody said to me, a really close mentor coach who stole close mentor coach to me today, he was saying to me consistently for the year leading up to, hey, if you got a church home, every now and then he'd say that to me and I didn't know what that meant and I ignored him. And one day after a holy fight with Debbie and I were in, he asked me again and I, men who are listening have, how would you define rage? I'll tell you how I define rage. Rage is when you do anything. When you lose your brain, right? You get into your amygdala, you lose your mind and you start saying and acting and things that you wake up the next day and say, wow, who was that? I really regret acting that way. That's where I was at when this guy asked me again after I just had a fight with Debbie and he asked me again, hey, if you got a church home, I lost it. I went into a rage and I started yelling and hitting it with colorful, faithful words and basically I said, his name is Craig. I said, Craig, why are you asking me that question? I don't even know what a church home means. Why are you asking that? Why? And he said, oh, he put his hand in my shoulder and he said, Michael, I'm only asking you that to ask if you have a place where you go to church and I'd quickly like brush his hand off my shoulder and said, what the heck is church got to do with squat? Where's God fit in to any of this? Like, what's God got to do with any of this? It's about me. It's about me. That's how I felt. Remember I was kicked out at a young age. I was in survival mode. I was abandoned. So my whole life was about me, money, and success. For me, it was about me, money, and success. Yeah, Maslow's hierarchy was Ross's hierarchy. Yeah. No, it was just me, me, me, money, money, money, success, success, success. Oh, yeah. By the way, I was married and I had kids. They were down on the totem pole. Guess who was even on the register? God. Yeah. So after that, after he, you know, after I yelled at him and we had this interchange, he said, really, you know, and I told him like, because I said, what's God got to do with this? Of course, I was yelling. He'd just looked at me calmly and very collectively and he said, well, he said, I have a question for you. And I said, what is it? He said, how's your marriage doing? I fell to my knees and just literally started crying. Well, I went home and just shared everything with my wife and I was just bawling. And so from that point, we said, I said, you know what? I think we need to go check out some churches. We're here. You know, there's a lot of churches in this city. Let's go check some out. And so we went and found one that we liked and we started going. And then the pastor, like, there were like, it was a big mega church. If I told you the name, you know, exactly who it is. And the pastor, I would hide in the back because I could come in late. Nobody knows there. I could leave early. Nobody knew I left. You know, it was one of those incognito things. And the pastor started speaking directly to me. Well, now I know it was the Holy Spirit. Now I know it was Jesus just just just beginning the sanctification process in my heart. And, and he said, like he said one day, he said, Jesus, if you ask him to come into your heart, he will come in and set up camp. And he sets a tent up in your heart. And it's a permanent campsite. And he never leaves. And I was like, what, what does that even mean? I can never, what does that even mean? And I began to look at that and I began to listen. I began to start reading the Bible. And I told my wife about two months and I said, we need to join a home team. And they had this church have like a lot of small groups. Yeah, small groups. So we went to one of the small group connection deals where you get connected and one of the small groups. There were no small groups in our town. And we live right here in this big Metroplex, but they had them all over the Metroplex, but there was not one in our little city. I was like, are you kidding me? I said, the Debbie, I said, let's just, let's just, I said, let's become a home team leader and let's start our own, let's start our own home team here in this town under this church is umbrella. And Debbie looked at me and said, what in the world do we know about the Bible? I said, not a dang thing. I said, but that's going to force us to read it. At least we'll be forced to read it. Now we get at least no over teaching. And that's what we did. We started a group team, grew into 12 12 people, six couples, led it for three years. And we began just growing exponentially. And so many things happened in the first 90 days from the time Craig challenged us to go look for a church in those first 90 days. I mean, that's like three more podcasts of what happened, but basically got up one of our cars. And there was all this stuff that happened that it was just there's no explanation. Other than there is a God, his name is Jesus. And he will listen when you talk to him, he will not always answer your prayer the way you want, but he listens and he answers and he answers in a fatherly, lovingly way, just like I will do to my daughters that sometimes they don't understand why I'm answering their question the way I'm answering it or I'm responding the way I'm responding is not they don't understand that. They're significantly younger than I am. They don't have the experience and they can't see the further down the road of the vision I have. That's exactly how Jesus is. We don't live in his realm. We don't see what he sees. And he loves us and he wants us the best for us. And at times it pisses me off. Yeah. I want to know now. I'm like, I want to know now, but I know through experience, I just know for a fact. He's awesome. He's awesome. He's just awesome. You know, God is, you know, Jesus framed it for us when he said, pray this way, our father. And so he is the father who's always there. The father always loves us. The father who never gives up on us. The father who is passionately in love with us. The father who desires our best. The father who wants us to live the best life that we're supposed to live. You know, I define, you know, you've been very successful, Michael Tuckett, Michael Ross of R-A-S-A, Ross of Flores and an amazing story, Michael. But the beauty of this story is that Jesus Christ captured your heart and you decided to go after him. And that made all the difference, made the difference in your family and your marriage. You guys wouldn't be together. It's changed. It's changed my entire relationship with my wife. It's changed my relationship with my ex-wife. It's changed the relationship with Debbie and her ex-husband. It's changed the relationship with our children. It's changed relationship with our grandchildren or son-in-laws. It's just how we look at everything now is just a difference. But it is your filter. So how you do business, how you manage family, everything is filtered through your faith in Christ. That's right. You know, it doesn't make it perfect. Let's clarify that a little after. Okay. It ain't perfect. We're still screwed up individual people. But now we know why. Yeah, we know there's hope. We can't hold it. Now we know the answer, even if we don't necessarily day to day do it. But there's one thing you said. I want to finish on this for our guys listening. You're listening to Brave Men, an outreach of the Christian Minnes Network, cmm.men. I'm Paul Cole. I've been with my great friend Michael Rossa. We met through James Kraft. James and Terry Kraft, you serve on their board and help them lead that ministry called Life on Plugged. Life on Plugged.com. And it's a great ministry that reaches a lot of people. James has spoken at Lion's Roar or yearly conference. And in fact, when Blaine Bartel got sick this year, you jumped in with James on one of the sessions at Lion's Roar this last year. And I heard so many great things about it. I want to come back to one thing. This friend of yours, this buddy, put a hand on your shoulder. And he didn't condemn you. He didn't say, hey, you screwed this up. Hey, you're an idiot. It's a simple phrase. And we can find these different phrases. But his was, do you have a church home? What a, in a sense, a non-threatening, simple phrase. And then it was, yeah, I'm fine. You go, well, then tell me about your marriage. I am. You know, I can't tell you how many times a man has come up to me and we're chitchatting whatever. And he's untouched. And we start talking about something. He goes, well, my son, this or that, and it'll tell me about your son. What's the deal? And all of a sudden, man, it's off into, I don't know how he ended up here. I don't know what's going on with this. As do you mind if I pray with you over your son, you know, 98% of the people in the world will let you pray with him. Yeah, yeah. Let's pray. Doesn't matter who we're praying to. We're praying for that man's son. And so these opportunities are there. But that man, talk about a tipping point. That was the full crime point I was looking for, Michael, is that that friend Craig who put a hand on your shoulder, touch, intimacy, brotherhood. Hey, and something nonthreatening in a sense, you have a church home. And now you guys have you and your wife have supported you do, you do flights that help people with their ministry with missions with the angel flight you did the other day. I hear when when we're chatting, you do those all the time and you've helped so many people with their ministries have been very active in your local church. And so Michael, thanks for being on Brave Men. This, you know, it's what when I, my whole thing about how you scaled your business, I've got, and I know you did this with your family. I've got friends who do that same thing with their family. Here's who we are. Here's what we do. Here's how we handle conflict on our family. We're going to get together and we're going to pray together first. We're not just going to scream and yell. We're actually going to bring it someplace. And that's how you guide guard and govern as a dad. Michael, and as a business leader, and as if you're a supervisor, a manager, if you're in any kind of a, of any kind of a leadership role whatsoever, same thing as apropos with your department, your business, you're, I mean, if you're a church leader, I mean, we get people together regularly and talk about who, whoo. So let me just, there's another website, rossarevelations.com, rossarevelations.com, or go to YouTube, rassarevelations.com, or go, or go to YouTube, rossarevelations, YouTube channel. I've got about 200, five to eight minute little videos on there. They're all titled and different things about serving, building teams and building organizations and so forth. I got a great interview on there with Tony Romo, Tony Dungee, and Emmett Smith, each one of them for like 40 minutes asking them about Jesus. How are you teaching Jesus to your kids? What are you doing about Jesus? It's really cool. I mean, great, great, great interview with these three men. But the point is, is that we talk about regularly, if you're a supervisor, a manager, a leader, get your people together and say, Hey, this is who we are. This is what we believe in. This is what we stand for. But more importantly, this isn't what we believe in over here. And this is not what we stand for over here. This is what we stand for. This isn't what we stand for. This is what we believe in. This isn't what we believe in. Right or wrong or indifferent, you got to declare it because you have to declare it. The father, the husband, the leader, the pastor, the youth pastor, whatever wherever you're at, you got to declare this is what I believe in. And this is what I don't believe in. This is what I will tolerate. This is what I won't tolerate. This is how we want to serve our youth ministry people. This is how we want to serve the guys and girls. This is how we want to serve our clients. This is how we want to serve our team members. This is how we don't want to serve them. You know, what you're speaking about is you built the culture, culture of your family, the culture of your business. Let me, let me give us a definition. Culture is what you accept as normal and what you reject as unacceptable. This is in a book I'm writing right now. Culture is what you accept as normal and what you reject as unacceptable. The foundation of culture is the accepted behavioral habits of the leaders, which means your family, your business is going to reflect the DNA of your heart. Where your spirit is, you're going to see it in your employees. You're going to see it in your family. You're going to see it in your church. Michael Ross of the thanks, man, Ross of revelations.com. And we'll put that in the show notes. Man, there's so much more to cover. And I'm really fired up. I can't wait to have us hear the reports of some of the guys who watched the videos. Thanks for being on Brave Men today, Michael. You're a blessing, bro. Thank you for having me. Yeah. And I now got to repent to my wife until there wasn't a parachute. But you're a great pilot. So we'll go with that one. Love you, bro. Thanks for being on Brave Men. You've just experienced Brave Men with Paul Lewis Cole. Paul is president of the Christian Men's Network. Connect with Paul at cmn.man or write to him at Paul at cmn.man.