Ken Rusk: Unlocking Success Without a Suit

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Mick Hunt: It just seems to me that the more you give, the more you are blessed with. And I don't know why that is, but it just is. And I'm not saying that you should give so you can get more. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is the more you do, the more you seem to be blessed. And maybe that's somebody, maybe that's the big man upstairs saying, you know what? That person is a generous person. I'm going to allow him or her to have more so they give more.

Mick Hunt: Welcome to Mick Unplugged, the number one podcast for self-improvement, leadership, and relentless growth. No fluff, no filters, just hard-hitting truths, unstoppable strategies, and the mindset shifts that separate the best from the rest. Ready to break limits? Let's go!

Mick Hunt: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Mick Unplugged. And today's guest went from digging ditches to building dreams, proving you don't need a suit and tie to earn a seven-figure life. He's a champion of blue-collar grit, financial freedom, and purpose-driven living. He's reshaping how we define success in America. Get ready for the bold, the grounded, the visionary, the impactful, the blue-collar goat himself, Mr. Ken Rusk. Ken, how you doing today, brother?

Ken Rusk: Great, Mick. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

Mick Hunt: I appreciate you, man. The work that you're doing for Americans, man, goes beyond compare. I just want to personally thank you for the voice and impact that you are giving Americans, man. Really mean that.

Ken Rusk: Well, yeah, you know, again, I really appreciate you having me on to help just kind of spread the word. You know, I mean, it's one of those things where, you know, you look back on what you wish you would have known when you were younger. And then you start to say, well, I've got this ability now to help share this information. I wish someone would have shared it with me. So, yeah, I'm happy to do it. I'm glad you're having me on to help that as well.

Mick Hunt: Absolutely, man. Absolutely. You know, Mick Unplugged. I like to ask people about their because, right? That thing that's deeper than your why. And I feel like, Ken, you have an amazing because, right? So if I were to ask you, man, what's your purpose? What's that deeper reason why behind the why of what you do? What's Ken Rusk's because?

Ken Rusk: You know, great question. So when my daughter was 12, she got really sick. And that started a lot of the things that I'm doing today, because I started thinking about what was important in life. You know, what should I tell her about what she should be chasing in life? Right. Yeah. And it's just one of those things where as I was working through her medical issues and she's fine now, but it was a pretty scary five years for her mother and her and I. And I just remember one gentleman coming up to me and he gave me a lot of resources to help. I mean, he gave me a plane to fly around the country to get her treated. He gave me all kinds of things. And I asked him why he did that because I didn't know him that well. He was a friend of a friend. And one of the things that he said to me is you'll learn as you become older, as you become more successful and you're grateful and you're humble. You learn that to whom much is given, much is expected. And that to me was all of it. I mean, I never forgot that. And I was always a giver. I was always a charity guy, but I put it on turbo after that. And yeah, I mean I've collected all the things I want to collect in my life I've been able to achieve all those things and that's great but to turn around and grab somebody and say hey I've made it to the top of the mountain I'm going to turn around and grab you by the arm and help pull you up and maybe shorten your learning curve to success I think that's incumbent upon all of us to do that.

Mick Hunt: Amazing, man. Amazing. And Ken, I've been a huge follower and fan of yours. I know your story a little bit. I love going back to you at 18, right? You had a decision. You had two options. For the listeners and viewers, let's walk through that a little bit, man. So at 18, you can go to college or you can do something else. Let's talk about that.

Ken Rusk: Well, even earlier than that, when I was 15, I decided that I needed to make some money to buy my first used car and take my girlfriend out for pizza or go bowling with my buddies, whatever. So I signed up with a ditch digging company that was right next to my high school. And I thought I was qualified to do that. I can go dig ditches, right? So I did that in the summertime. And in the wintertime, I worked in the office. Well, what happened there is I got kind of a good feel for the front and the back of the house, as you would say, right? I got a good feel for how the whole thing ran. And so when I came to be 18 years old, they said, look, you can go to college. I would do your thing, whatever you want to do. But just so you know, we have this position here where we want to send you around the country to open these businesses for new owners from scratch. And I mean, literally from scratch, Mick. I had to walk in and I had to design the inside of the building and have people put the walls up and put the plugs here and the phone lines there and everything. So it was pretty cool. And I spent, you know, four months, five months in Columbus and then in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh and Chicago just starting these companies. And then I moved on. So at some point I was like, OK, I can't live out of a suitcase anymore. You know, I wanted I'd gotten married and that kind of thing. So I moved to Toledo, Ohio in 1986 and opened the territory here, started with six people. And I think we have over 200 today. So it's been it's been a hell of a ride.

Mick Hunt: Man, so at 18, you had a lot of wisdom, man. Like, I'll say some of that was just being 18 and it's like, oh, I can do this. That's cool. But I like to think that you had a lot of wisdom at that age. Like, what was going through your mind having those opportunities, but more importantly, knowing that at 18 you were also making an impact?

Ken Rusk: Well, the thing for me was, you know, I read one time and I put this in my book, by the way, I read one time that, you know, I've never built a skyscraper before. But if I did, I guess the first thing I would do is start with buying some land. Right. Logical. I never built a skyscraper before. But if I did, I guess I would then find an architect to draw me some plans. And if you keep doing that, if you keep saying, I've never done this before, but if I did, you start to imagine the process that you would have gone through. And pretty soon, if you ask yourself that 10 or 15 times, you will have already built the skyscraper. So for me, it was kind of, you know, the only thing I knew was what it looked like where I was, where I had grown up working, you know, the home office. I knew what it looked like. I knew what it sounded like. I knew what the flow felt like. I knew, you know, where things needed to be. So I just tried to copy that over and over and over and begin with the end in mind, like they say, you know, in Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Right. And yeah, it just became something that I followed that path because it's all I knew and it worked out pretty well.

Mick Hunt: I love it, man. And you brought up the book. So let's let's transition and segue there. Blue Collar Cash. An amazing book. It one that has been a quick reader for me and I given it to some family and friends that I have as well too. But you talk about three words in that book, right? Comfort, peace, and freedom. What do those three words mean to you? And what should the folks that go pick up a copy of this book, what should they be thinking about when they hear comfort, peace, and freedom?

Ken Rusk: Well, first off, that to me is a way of life. I mean, it's something that when Nicole was ill, I just kept, when I was writing letters to her about what should she be chasing and what was life all about, those three words, I just couldn't get rid of them. I mean, they were like yellow Volkswagens driving down the highway. I could not stop seeing them, right? So I knew there was something there. And I almost devised, like in my mind, they're like a triangle, like they're independent upon each other for their very existence, comfort, peace, and freedom. And so I figured that was a great place to start because everybody has their own nirvana inside their head. They just don't know how to get it out there sometimes. And why aren't we teaching people how to use the visual side of their brain, which is the proactive side, instead of the reactive side that we all do all day long. We react to the weather. We react to the temperature. We react to the conditions. We react to what our friends say. We react to what our parents do. We react to what's in the news, we react to all these things all day long. And it's almost tiring because we never give ourselves the chance to proact, which is, you know what, if I could sit down in a quiet room and just get out some pencils and crayons and a big poster board, what would I draw my life to look like? I mean, what would I want my life, my world to be? And it's in for everybody, it's different. So as long as those pictures give you a sense of comfort, peace, and freedom, no matter what it is. I mean, if you want to chase 15 cars and a McMansion, fine. If you want to have a house out in the country, fine. If you want to live in the city, in a condo or in an apartment, awesome. But just find a way to make that visual enough that the creative side, the visual side of your mind kicks in to push you to make those things happen for yourself. Because you're ultimately in control of all that, no matter what anybody tells you, Mick, you and only you know all those things that are running around in your mind and how you want to live. So stop listening to other people. Trust yourself and put it out there.

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Mick Hunt: Dude, like that is so amazing. It's almost and for the listeners and viewers, I promise this was not scripted at all. It's almost like we prepped for this because the next thing I was going to talk about that I love in the book is you talking about visualizing your life, right? And using that vision, mind mapping, and that vision mapping. And for me, it's something that I correlate to my clients. So a lot of the leaders that I coach, the leaders that I develop, the entrepreneurs that I help with branding, the very first question that I ask them is this project that you're working on or this quarter or this year, what does success look like for you? And really not just tell me the words like, oh, we'll have, you know, $20 million of revenue or this project will be complete when this thing is implemented, whatever that thing is. Like I say, no, like truly visualize conceptually everything that it looks and feels like and write that down or draw that out, because just getting to an end point shouldn't be success. Right? Like talk to the listeners and viewers about the power of that, because you and I are totally in sync on visualization. A lot of people, again, they just go to, oh, well, in 90 days, this needs to happen or in 12 months, this needs to happen. But they don't know what the it looks like. So talk to us about that, man, the power of that.

Ken Rusk: Well, you know, there's things like color, there's clarity, there's conciseness, there's detail, there's everything. There's, there's horsepower and there's dimensions and there's, you know, flavor and taste and touch and smell and all those things that your senses use other than your eyes to create visions. And so if those visions just swim around in your head, they're going to do you no good because they're in, they stay in dreamland. They stay in wish and hopeland. They never get to what I call the timed pathway process where you're actually putting it on a map to make something happen. You're putting it on a pathway to make it happen. And the cool thing about this is, and this is something that I just learned a few years back when I was writing the book, you know, when you think of something and you visualize it clearly and you put it down on paper, you've done this, this mechanical transfer from your brain to the physicality, to the paper. And what happens then, and I heard this from Tony Robbins and his son, which is really cool. You have these neurotransmitters. I mean, people call it reticular activating systems, but to put it simple, you have these little electrons in your brain that fire these images back and forth when they live inside your head. When you put those down on paper, that image, instead of bouncing back and forth, becomes one solid electric current. And this is science, okay? And then what happens is your body, your brain says, well, I must already own that thing. And because I don't, I need to find a way to go get it. So now you have this whole other person that you didn't even know existed. It's like Ken, and then the other Ken. And that other Ken is silently pushing you towards getting that thing that you've been thinking so hard about. I'm thinking to myself, if I can double my output just by visualizing, why wouldn't I want to do that? It's free. We all have the software already downloaded in our heads. We just have to be taught how to use it. And it's no different, Mick, than dreaming of a vacation in complete detail. Well, if you can do that, and we're all good at that, why can't we visualize every part of our life? Our business goals, our personal goals, our health, our spiritual, our sport, our hobby, our activities, our dog, our cat, what color, what would you name it? I mean, all the things, you know, your house, your cars, everything. Why can't we visualize pathways to all those things like we do a vacation? It's a simple process. We already know it. We just have to get out there and start using it.

Mick Hunt: Dude, totally in sync with you there. One of the things that I do when I work with like Fortune 500, 1,000 companies, and if we're working on a 90-day project or plan, and I got this from professional sports and college sports, I say, okay, in 90 days, how are we going to celebrate the win? And most companies don't think about it, right? They don't think about how we're going to celebrate the win. It's just, no, that's part of the job. No, it is not part of the job. If you want to build a winning culture, you better celebrate a win. I don't care how small or how big it is. And so then that becomes a fun thing to draw out how we're going to celebrate the win. And then I say, OK, let's practice that. And they're like, what do you mean? I'm like, Jim Valvano, Dean Smith, Coach K, practice cutting down nets, right? So that their team understood this is what we are going to do right. Bill Belichick, Doc Rivers, Phil Jackson, practice the championship parade right. They took their teams on the streets that the parades are going to be on so that they could visualize that. And when leaders hear that, they're like, oh crap. And to your point, that version of you that's waiting in 90 days or six months, they're waiting for you to get there. They've already seen it. So now your brain has something that it can program and say, okay, if we do X, Y, and Z, this is a win. I don't think people and forget Fortune 1000, Fortune 500 leaders, the the blue-collar workers and leaders, right? Celebrate wins. How important for you, Ken, is it to celebrate wins again, regardless of how small or how big they are? But we need that in life. My personal opinion, we need to celebrate wins in life.

Ken Rusk: Well, first off, you know, to be able to anticipate something is a very powerful mechanism. You know, you anticipate going to Christmas dinner with your family or you anticipate a vacation or you anticipate you ordered something and you're anticipating it coming in. Those are very powerful emotions. And, you know, instead of reacting to the world, we need to anticipate more. That's that's absolutely for sure. How important is it to us? Well, just on the other side of that door behind me, there is a large glass board. It's a black glass board. It's huge. It's like eight by eight feet. And I have these colorful markers that people go out and they write their anticipations on this board through timed pathways. OK, I want to go. You know, it's January 1st. I want to see my relatives in Scotland. It's going to cost me two thousand dollars. I'm going to save twenty dollars a week for two years and then I'm going to go. And yet the begin date and date. And they write these things down. And this board is covered with these goals. They're timed pathways. There's 50 of them on there at any one time. And the cool thing is, Mick, as people walk around the hallways, they high five each other because they see, wow, you're getting close to going to Scotland. You're getting close to buying that new car. You're getting close to paying off your credit card. You're getting close to putting that new deck on the back of your house. It's like this whole mutual kind of like collective celebration as these things march down their timed pathways. And I got to tell you, man, as an entrepreneur, a business owner, a manager, whatever you are, when you can get your corporate goals aligned completely and firmly on the same track as people's individual timed pathways. Man, look out because that's where the synergy happens. That's where the momentum comes from. You are going to drive your company way further than you can drive it yourself with a method like that. We use it here every day. Been using it for a very long time. And it's a very powerful thing.

Mick Hunt: I love it, man. I love it. Ken, I want to segue into to you and the blue-collar world, because I think I think there's a misconception a little bit. Right. Like I talk to people all the time and you could have a 2,500 person organization or company, a 5,000 person organization or company, and immediately people think employee size, when you get to a certain number, oh, that's white collar. And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What the company does is definitely blue collar, right? You could have a one person white collar type of organization, right? And so I would love for you to dispel the myth and maybe define or explain in your words, blue collar and what that means to you?

Ken Rusk: Well, the simplest form of blue collar, white collar is way back in the day when you were a professional, when you were an accountant or a lawyer or a doctor, when you wore your suit around town, you had these big, thick, uncomfortable plastic collars that you would put on top of your suit. And that, you know, dignified you as somebody that was of higher education. Okay, fine. If you were a blue collar worker, you were typically wearing blue jeans or what they call dungarees, or they would call them Levi's. And you had a blue shirt and blue pants. And that's where the word blue collar came from. There's literally a blue shirt. So that's where the origin of it comes from. But when I think of it, you know, the one thing that people don't recognize blue collar versus white collars, when you when you check the happiness ratios, 65% of people that are blue collar people are happy with their careers versus 30 to 38, 35 to 38% of white collar people who happy with their careers. And the reason is when you're a blue collar person, you are in control. You're in control of your input and therefore you're in control of your output, the quality of that output, the rate of that output. You're in control of your day, your time, your schedule. And most often you're in control of your financial gain, which means you're in control of that picture that we were drawing earlier. Okay. And so there's a whole lot there that people don't recognize. There's a lot of unsung hero pieces and parts to being a blue collar worker. And the best part now is. My marathon isn't about time. It's about my 26 friends with intellectual disabilities I'm dedicating each mile to. I'm Joseph. I'm running my first Bank of America Chicago Marathon for Special Olympics Illinois to help give my friends a place to shine. Join Bank of America in supporting Joseph's cause. Give if you can at bofa.com slash support Joseph. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America. References to charitable organizations is not an endorsement by Bank of America Corporation. Raise the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. When they talk about the money you could make, you know, they had that old study where they said you make more money if you go to college. The problem with that study was, and I looked at it very hard, the study on the blue collar side included every job. part-time jobs, newspapers, babysitting, all those kinds of things. So that dragged the numbers down. If you take those out and you put skilled tradespeople against white collar, it's a completely different story. And yeah, when I see people out there, one of the things that they ask me is, there's this stigma towards blue collar. And I said, well, that's kind of created. That's created by colleges. It's created by corporate, the corporate America. You need to come to us or else. That's never been true. It's certainly not true now. And the one reason that you don't hear the rebuttal from the other side is people just don't ask us. You know, nobody asks us how we're doing on the blue collar side. They always ask the corporate world because they feel like that's where the information will come from. And corporate's fine. If you're comfortable there, that's great. But when you find out what some of these blue collar entrepreneurs are making, you will be shocked at how successful these people are. And, you know, I've been doing my best to try to bring the balance back to that because, you know, Econ 101 says where supply is low and demand is high, that's where the money goes. And that's what you're seeing on the blue collar side right now. So I'm just trying to bring my message to that side and say, you know, no matter what, start with the vision you want your life to look like and then understand that you can get there either blue or white, whatever color you want to be.

Mick Hunt: No, I totally agree, man. And one of the things that I find in blue collar world, right, because, you know, I grew up the grandson of a farmer, right? Sharecropper is when you love what you do. And you do it daily and you're passionate about it, it's not a job, right? It's not work. It's you're living your passion. And oh, by the way, I can make a great living from this passion that I have. And you talk about that in your book, right? Like you've got to love what you do or it is a job and jobs come and go. So talk to us about that.

Ken Rusk: Right. And I don't care if it's blue collar, white collar. If you don't love what you do, it's a job. I think I think loving what you do is needs to be translated a little bit because if loving what you do means what you doing is gaining the picture that you have in your mind of what your life is going to look like then that what it is I mean in my mind, you know, ditch digging was number 99 out of a list of 100 things that I wanted to do, but I knew that it could give me the ability to create my life the way I wanted it because of the financial side and the control that I had. You know, I wanted to be a race car driver early on. Well, now because I've worked so hard, I've bought some cars and I can race, you know, on the weekends part time with my buddies and do that kind of thing at a local track and whatever. So I've scratched that itch, if you will. All I'm saying is that loving what you're doing needs to be defined in am I creating something cool with my hands? Am I doing something that matters? And also, is that work bringing me the life that I've dreamed about? Yeah. Okay. Am I progressing along the pathway? To what I want my life to look like. Because I can tell you, I mean, I had a guy build an outdoor kitchen in my yard, in my backyard about four or five years ago. I mean, this guy shows up on a Monday morning with his brand new pickup truck. He's got his jeans and his work boots on. He's got an Ozzy Osbourne t-shirt on. He's listening to Led Zeppelin. He's got his big mug of coffee. He's got his buddies. And they're just laughing and having a great time building this outdoor kitchen. And oh, by the way, the guy made multiple six figures a year in this, owning this company. So those are the gems that are out there. And there's thousands of them that where people are trying to retire and they can't because nobody wants these companies. So there's so much opportunity for people out there who would go be a mentee to that person for a while and then either buy their company or start their own. Opportunities are insane right now to do that kind of thing.

Mick Hunt: Yeah. And speaking of mentees and mentorship, I know that that is a pillar, a core value for you are, right? The power of mentorship. And you coach countless young people on financial discipline. For the viewers and listeners, what's one mistake that you see people making that can be corrected? And you don't have to limit it to one. What are mistakes? There's a very powerful one. If you think about the time, let's say you're 21 years old and you want to retire at 63. That's 42 years. Well, guess what? That also happens to coincide with six times seven equals 42. Okay. Why that? Well, the number seven is the rule that it takes for you to double your money every seven years, right? So you have six opportunities to double your money between 21 and 63. If you wait until you're 28 to start saving, you have just blown the most powerful double in all of those six doubles. The reason I say that is because you will pay for it on the back end, the very last double, which is the one that takes your wealth from 500,000 to a million. Okay. In the beginning, the doubles are small. In the end, the doubles are massive. But if you wait and you miss that first one, you're going to be paying for it dearly because the guy standing next to you that didn't do that, he's going to have twice the funding that you're going to have at the end. And you're going to be like, oh, my God, it was only 50 bucks a week. Why did I wait so long to do that? I could have saved that money and I could have had this huge, you know, in this 401k, the company would have matched my money and it would have been just awesome. So that's just one mistake that people make is they think saving is something for when I'm an adult, when I'm, you know, when I'm older, when I'm making a bunch of money. The most powerful money that you will ever save is the youngest money you'll ever save, which is from 21 on.

Mick Hunt: I love it, man. I love it. What are some other financial tips or financial strategies you can share with us today?

Ken Rusk: Well, I think another one is, and it aligns with the first one, and that is you've heard people say, pay yourself first, right? So I think there's another one to pay yourself first before you pay your bills and also pay some sort of a foundation or a cause that's near and dear to you. And I'll tell you why we do a lot of giving around here. We do it with not just with money. We do it with time, talent and treasure, which means we get people together to go do things. Yeah. And all I will tell you, Mick, and I can't prove this. I don't know karma. I don't know that, you know, the great Lord above. I don't know how any of this stuff works. But it just seems to me that the more you give, the more you are blessed with. And I don't know why that is, but it just is. And I'm not saying that you should give so you can get more. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is the more you do, the more you seem to be blessed. And maybe that's somebody, maybe that's the big man upstairs saying, you know what? That person is a generous person. I'm going to allow him or her to have more. So they give more. I don't know what it is. But we definitely focus on that here. We do a lot of giving. And the good Lord just seems to take care of us each and every year. And that's a great thing.

Mick Hunt: Amen to that, brother. Amen to that. So Ken, where can people follow, find you, and more importantly, purchase this book?

Ken Rusk: Well, if you go to kenrusk.com, you'll see the book. I also built a course. It's a simple eight session course. It's a mini course. It's not expensive compared to most of them out there, which are thousands of dollars. And the reason I did it is because I was so tired of people with all these books on their shelf. And I would say, tell me about that one. What did you read? Oh yeah, I read that great book. How did it change your life? I don't know, but I read it. Okay. Well, I didn't want that to happen. So I built this really simple course that teaches you how to visualize. That's all it does. It teaches you how to use that side of your brain, the proactive side. And I donate most of the money that I get from