Training 10,000 People in 60 Countries with Doug Hartman

Welcome to this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm Larry Weddell.

And before we get started, if you.

Want to know exactly how to win again and Again, go to wydellonwinning.comwebinar now to watch something I've put together for you. Now let's get going into this episode.

Of Million Dollar Mastermind. I'm talking with Doug Hartman. Hello, Doug.

Hello, Larry.

Doug is a longtime friend. He's out in Southern California and where he's been for quite a long time. And so thanks for joining us, Doug.

My pleasure.

You have a wealth of experience in not only making things happen, which is what people are interested in. How can I make things happen? How can I get myself going in the direction I feel like I should go in? But he's also spent a lifetime of training other people, and he's got incredible success at it right now in one of his businesses, which is financial services. He's sitting there, a thousand offices, 25,000 agents, and about $19 million earners out of that network. Also, he's got a food services. Doug always has lots of irons in the fire. And he's got his current project. He's got a food service product, you know, and already in a thousand stores and getting ready to go nationwide. And I get the idea that's going to be big. And so Doug knows how to do things. He knows how to communicate success principles. So, Doug, it's a lot of fun to have you on. Are you still living in that? Talk about Southern California. You always had several great lots that you lived on, you were going to build on. And we're going to go over there. Where, where are you living now?

Well, I have, I'm done. I'm downsizing now, Larry. I, I'm a little older. I don't need all the, all the big stuff that we had. It was a lot of fun for a while, but, you know, you had the because of the business that we're in, you know, I didn't feel guilty about buying stuff like that because it kind of, kind of showed people what they could accomplish themselves. And so, you know, I had the limo and the airplane and the office building and all that, but I don't need that anymore. So I the house was ridiculous. It was 10,000 square feet overlooking the ocean in San Juan capistrano. I had 11 bathrooms on three acres. The kids grew up there. It was 20 years. But I got rid of that and got a I live now in Cota de Casa, which is where they film the housewives of Orange County.

Okay.

So it's very comfortable. It's just kind of. I just kind of blend in.

Yeah. Well, I knew there was going to be a story on the living arrangements, because you always live. You always find a way to live well. But, you know, when you started, you started very humbly in your career where you got into Campus Crusade for Christ. And in that. The thing about Campus Crusade for Christmas, they cleverly figured out, we'll just make you in charge of raising your own funds.

Yes.

You had to go out and find people to support you. That had to be. You know, I could never, never understand how that worked. But that had to put you behind the eight ball a little bit. Right from the beginning.

It was a humbling experience.

Yeah. You're like a politician begging for a contribution.

Yeah. But you could only raise so much. They'd only allow you to raise so much. So you had to stay at the poverty level in order to be on staff.

Yeah. What motivated you to take. And how old were you when you made that decision of what captured your imagination or caused you to move in that direction?

Well, in college, I went to Ohio State and joined the fraternity. And I was kind of the wild child, you know, in the fraternity at Ohio State. And Campus Crusade came in and did a, you know, presentation. I prayed and became a Christian, Born Again Christian through their ministry. And I decided I was going to dedicate my life to the same thing. And I met my wife in that particular ministry and we got married and I was going to be there for life. That was my plan. And after a while, I lost my identity with the college student, as you might be able to see here a little bit.

Yeah.

And so I decided to go into business, but I wasn't really qualified to do anything. I graduated at Ohio State in zoology with a minor in chemistry. And there's not much of a market for educated chemist out here, you know, and so I was unemployable. So I got at Crusade.

You had. You were there, what, 10 years? Yes, 10 years on that thing. But you made an impact. What were you doing when you. What position did you rise to inside?

Well, I worked on college campuses for a while with fraternity sororities, athletic teams. We go into classrooms. And I did that for a while, and then I was promoted to a. I worked at University of Illinois, Peoria, Illinois, Western Illinois University. And then I was promoted to the national training director of Campus Crusade. They had 10,000 staff at the time in 60 countries, and I was the trainer, and I was appointed to do that based upon some of the programs that we have put together. And my first rvp, that's where I actually started my own business. I started a swimming pool contracting business. I know that you were in contracting before you got involved, right, In Williams. I was, I was in swimming pool contracting and put in swimming pools and worked, you know, seven days a week and that kind of thing. And then decided I was with a partnership and then I decided my confidence level came up high enough that I decided to go into business for myself. So I sold my business to my partner and got involved in AL Williams way back when.

Aha. Now let me ask you this. Did you, your train, you were director of training for how many people in 50, 60 countries?

10,000? Yeah, mainly I focused on the college campus, but it was worldwide.

And how does that, how do you do something like that or how do you learn how to do something like that? And how do you know if you're doing a good job?

Well, it's like anything, it's in the results and laying out plans. And essentially it was kind of like the early days that we had in this business, Larry. You know, it was a cause oriented type thing. It wasn't really a business. It was more of a movement. And in a movement, as you know, movement only grows as fast as leadership has developed. So basically it's in developing leadership. And the primary ingredient to developing leadership is commitment, sacrifice and dedication. So that it's actually more than knowledge, it's more than just philosophical stuff. It's that you really want to make a difference in people's lives and have an impact. And so we put together training programs to actually, to do that. And then I use those training programs. When I got involved in AL Williams, I did basically the same thing I did when I was with Campus Crusade.

How did, when you look at developing leaders, what was your operating principle? What gave you the right or what gave you the background or the knowledge to say, okay, here's how we're going to develop leaders?

Well, we had the basic. The basic structure was pretty much like it was when, when I was on staff with Campus Crusade. We had opportunity meetings. We called it College Life. It was kind of an evangelistic outreach. And we do that in campus. Probably the student union. We'd have leadership training classes on Saturday. That would be the training that you would have Saturday. In AL Williams. I had, I had an action group. I had, we. I had developed at that time an action group strategy which is, which in Al Williams vernacular would be the inner circle so that you have people that get involved with you that. Because commitment and dedication is really the prerequisite to leadership. You have to have a group where an individual can demonstrate that leadership and demonstrate that commitment. Not everybody is at that point. And so you have an action group strategy for people that go kind of on, above and beyond other individuals.

When you talk about strategy, how people could interpret that is you have inner circle. You've got to establish these things to create. It's like order out of chaos. You know, it's just like as you're marching in the crowd, it's like, who's in charge of the crowd?

You know? Right.

If you want to be one of those, here's how you do it. The inner circle.

And then.

One of the things. It's an aspirational thing. It's an organizational thing in terms of. I always thought that the one thing about having a big organization is everybody's got to be responsible for somebody.

Right.

And it's got to be clear what those responsibilities are. It's not that you have a boss, but there is a chain of responsibility where you're looking out for them and you're helping them perform to their best. And you. You know, it's the kind of thing I wish I had in my business now. I just wish I had someone looking over my shoulder, looking at everything I do and come in and say, oh, you know, that thing you're doing now, that's really not going to work.

Well, you know. You know, Larry, actually, you were a big part of that. I. You were already on. You were already with Al Williams, and you were actually a role model for me, whether you knew that or not. I mean, we'd have your videotapes and so forth out here. And that's really how I learned about a Williams. My upline was in Lubbock, Texas, a thousand miles away.

Wow.

And so he came out about two or three times. So I learned really by trial and error and by individuals like yourself in seeing what you did, and then tried to marry that with some of the things I learned in Campus Crusade.

Well, you're awfully kind to say that. And the thing is that you were learning, you were accumulating a lot of knowledge about mobilizing massive numbers of people and putting teams together. And you had the vantage point of seeing what can happen when you get things lined up. Right. It's one thing to have something that people can get excited about. It's worth pushing, but then it's another thing to be able to get a group of people lined up behind that idea. And I see it now, you know, obviously you didn't need a lot of ideas for me or anybody else. You kind of accumulating those along the way. But your mind has, you know, is, you know, I think a lot of the things that we do all of our life comes from our programming. Early on, we don't even know minds being programmed. And since I came out of construction, I tend to think logically. You know, the foundation in first, what's next. And you got things lined up. You set up the chain of dominoes that are supposed to fall on a certain schedule. And if you leave it to chance, the only thing that's going to happen is bad things. You know, houses don't get built by themselves.

Right, right.

And somebody has to line these things up and then make sure they're actually falling the way they're supposed to fall. And if you're to get bigger, you have to delegate a lot of those steps and train. And so you had this in your mind how to do it, but also the vision of getting big. When did you get the idea of attracted to something big? Was it just something when you got into Campus Crusade for Christ? Because you said you were the, at Ohio State, you said you were known as the wild child in the fraternities, which that has to be quite an honor. I mean, you have to be.

Yeah. Among certain types of people, you have.

To, you had to really do some distinguishing things.

And. I did.

Yeah. To get. Which meant that you probably not thinking about conquering the world when you're in the wild child of Ohio State stage.

No, it was more of that. You're looking for your personal wants and desires. You know, that's what it is. College is like a big playground. Yeah. You know, I, I, I, I really wonder about the value of it at all. You know, it's like you graduate from high school and then you go away for four years to play.

Yeah.

Unsupervised.

There is a value there, but it's hard to put your, it's hard to put a value on it equal to.

The cost, Especially an undergraduate.

Yeah.

You know, if a person's a doctor, an attorney, or something like that, that's different. But general education.

You can question the value of it. You get some problem solving skills, you get some people, relationship skills, you meet some people. But you do get a chance to get a wide variety of options come to you. And in your case, you wound up going in the Campus Crusade for Christ direction, which you never would have stumbled across. Likely to stumble across. And so I think that's, you know, there is a value to it, but you have to wonder about when you're, you're paying what they pay for it now.

Well, the reason I went there, I lived, I lived in Ohio and I had an athletic scholarship.

Okay.

I was, I was wrestling. And so I went, went to Ohio State initially because of that. And then I joined the fraternity after about the first year, decided that's what I wanted, which was, you know, just the opposite of discipline.

Right. And so when, how would the transformation that you went through when you got out, you got your degree, you decided, I'm going to go into this ministry thing. How quickly did the transformation happen with you into kind of a focus, disciplined, solid citizen, thinking about others type thing, Thinking about making your life count rather than enjoy things as much as I possibly can, you know.

Well, it was really, it was really a goal oriented type thing. You know, as I've got older, you know, you pick up management concepts and so forth. And the whole thing is that what your objective is, this is really key, I believe what your, what your objective is, dictates what you do to accomplish it. So if you put it into our business right now's vernacular, it's not your, if your objective is, is sales, then that would cause you to do certain things. If it's recruiting those things that will cause you to do different things. I would submit that the, the objective would be to develop multipliers. And that's really what I did in Campus Crusade is that it was the Great Commission. The Great Commission is take this to take the message of the gospel to the world. The only way that you could get into those kind of numbers is, is through multiplication. And so basically that's what I was born with when I got involved in Campus Crusade. It was multiplication. How do you multiply yourself in a significant way? And so that's what all the training that I did in the Campus Crusade was about. And so when I got into Al Williams, it was the same thing. It was cause oriented. Instead of going out and preaching the gospel to people, it was buy term and invest the difference. But it was a cause oriented thing. That's why the old timers like you and I talk about the Crusade. The crusade is different than just making money. It's out there trying to rectify a wrong, trying to help people out of a situation that they didn't even know were they were in. And so it fit, it fit perfectly into what I wanted to do. I wanted to affect people's lives And Hector once said that our business is like a self improvement course with a compensation package.

Right.

And that's, that's kind of the way I look at it.

Also fantastic.

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