I'm Young, I'm Dumb, and I Need Help

About six months after Cara and I started Zinger Rentals, we landed our first job. It was small, but it was something. Then a second job, also small.

And then… nothing.

Our two light towers came back and sat in the yard. I'd look out at them, and they'd look back at me, and I swear they were saying the same thing every day.

There's something you don't know.

One day it finally landed on me. There's something I don't know!

I realize how obvious that sounds. But sitting there, broke, with two idle towers and a pile of credit card debt, it hit me like a revelation. Other people were succeeding in business, and I wasn't. They hadn't all been born rich. Some of them had started out every bit as clueless as me. Somewhere along the way they'd learned something I hadn't.

I didn't need a breakthrough. I needed information.

So I made a decision that changed the direction of our company.

I picked out three men in my area — successful men, genuinely rich men — and I

called them and asked them to teach me.

Not to pray for me. Not to disciple me. I honestly did not care whether they were Christians. I wasn't after a sermon. I was after practical, hard-earned knowledge from men who had already figured out what I clearly hadn't.

And I didn't dress it up. I told them the truth. Here's the exact thing I said to all three:

"Hello, sir. My name is Steve, and I just started my first business. I'm young, I'm dumb, I don't know what I'm doing, and I need help. Would you give me twenty minutes to pick your brain about business?"

All three said yes.

I want you to sit with that for a second, because I think this is where most people stop. We assume successful men are too busy, or too guarded, or that we'd be wasting their time. So we never ask. And then we wonder why we're still staring at two idle light towers a decade later.

Humility is not a nice quality to have. It's a door.

Their names were Dale, Moe, and Wes. I've called them my three wise men ever since, and every one of them gave me something different.

Dale owned a construction company. Solid, grounded, blunt. I told him what I was trying to do and he started firing off practical ideas — places to go, people to call, actual names. At one point he said, "When you talk to Terry, tell him I sent you."

I wrote as fast as my hand would go. For the first time, I had action steps instead of vague prayers for breakthrough. Dale taught me that wisdom usually isn't a mystical download. It's sitting in somebody who's already walked the road you're on.

Moe was another animal entirely. People said he owned half the town and they weren't far off — properties, leases, several businesses. If Dale was a strategist, Moe was a dreamer. He talked about vision and goals and declarations, and he told me to set monthly income targets and say them out loud. He told me to fill my ears with teaching and go to conferences and think a great deal bigger than I was thinking.

Mostly he told me to quit seeing myself as a washed-up preacher and start telling the man in the mirror he was a businessman.

I walked out of Moe's feeling like I'd swallowed a bolt of lightning.

Wes ran an oilfield rental company three hours north. I figured he wouldn't see me as competition, so I asked. He offered me an hour over breakfast and ended up giving me half a day.

He was a gold mine. He taught me to read oilfield maps, which I couldn't do. He showed me the websites that track rig locations and handed me his own login so I wouldn't have to pay the eight-hundred-dollar subscription. He told me how to find the rigs, what to say to the consultants, and — just as valuable — what not to say.

He also told me to keep newspapers in the truck. A lot of those men live in shacks out in the bush for weeks at a stretch and never get to town. A newspaper costs a couple of dollars and says I thought about you.

And then his tone changed, and he gave me some advice that shaped what kind of businessman I'd become.

"Don't ever bribe a customer. Ever! If you pay for work, you'll attract greasy, dirty customers for life, and you'll be stuck with them."

That got tested. More than once, I was offered contracts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if I'd just give the consultant the right gift or put a thousand bucks in a brown envelope. Every single time, Wes's voice came up in my head. And every single time I said no.

Wes didn't just teach me how to sell. He taught me how to stand.

Here's the part that actually mattered, though, and it's the part most people skip.

I went home with pages of notes, and I did not put them in a drawer.

I turned them into a to-do list. Every call I was supposed to make, every person I was supposed to visit, every practice they'd told me to adopt — written down and checked off one at a time.

Within weeks, both towers were working. So I bought a third, bigger than the others and renting for more. It went out. So I bought another. Then another.

Wisdom you write down and don't act on is just a nicer class of ignorance.

Around this same time I found myself pulled into the book of Proverbs, which reads like it was written for people in business.

Without consultation, plans are frustrated, But with many counselors they succeed. — Proverbs 15:22

Listen to counsel and accept discipline, That you may be wise the rest of your days. — Proverbs 19:20

By wisdom a house is built, And by understanding it is established. — Proverbs 24:3

Between Dale, Moe, Wes, and Solomon, God had me surrounded — practical wisdom, inspirational wisdom, and divine wisdom, all coming at once.

Now I need to tell you the other half of this, because I don't want to sell you something.

During all of that, I was still drinking in the garage every night. My marriage was still a mess. I was still smoking. I did not have it together, not by any measure that counts.

Wisdom got my business off the ground. It did not make me a good man.

Those are two different projects, and God was running them on two different timelines, and it would be years before He got around to the second one. So if you take one thing from this, don't take the idea that a few good meetings will fix your life. They won't. They'll fix your ignorance, and that's worth a great deal, and it isn't the same thing.

But here's what I'd ask you to actually do.

You know somebody. Somebody in your town who's already doing the thing you're trying to do. You've thought about reaching out, and you've talked yourself out of it, because you assumed he was too busy or you'd look foolish.

Look foolish.

My name is ______. I'm just starting out. I don't know what I'm doing, and I need help. Could you give me twenty minutes?

That's the whole thing. That's all I said.

Three out of three said yes.

This is from my book Dependently Wealthy — the story of how a broke, insecure preacher who knew nothing about business built one anyway. Available in paperback and audio on Amazon.