My dad got me the most embarrassing vehicle possible for my 16th birthday.

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“If you ever lie to me again, I’m not going to say a word. I’m just going to punch you in the jaw as hard as I can.”

Message received. Loud and clear.

For my 16th birthday, my dad got me a pickup truck. Which sounds like a cool story until you realize that it was an old yellow, beat up stick-shift Toyota pickup that he salvaged somehow from one of the many properties he managed. No air conditioner. An old-style push button AM radio. A couple of random dents. In other words, a total piece of junk.

But it was my piece of junk, and I was the only one of my friends that was both old enough to drive and actually had a vehicle to drive.

Less than a week after I got my driver’s license, my buddy and I hatched a brilliant plan. After a church swim party at my house, we decided that we wanted to give two young ladies a ride home. Small problem: the cab of the truck was impossibly tiny—only two people could fit comfortably. If a 3rd person dared to wedge into the middle of the bench seat, their knees would be constantly be playing pinball with the gear shift knob. Four people would never fit in a million years. So I knew there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in Hades that my parents would allow me to take the girls home.

So I didn’t ask.

Instead, we sent the girls off on foot, and I told my parents I was going to take my friend home. As soon as we were all safely around the corner and out of sight, we would pick up the girls, jam them into the impossibly small cab—not a bad thing in our teenage opinions—and drive them home. I’d then drop off my friend, and my parents would never suspect a thing.

A great plan, except one of the girls lived about 15 minutes away in another town… and she wasn’t exactly sure how to get there. We drove around for an extra 20 minutes just trying to locate her house… then I hurried to drop off the other girl, and finally my friend. All told, what should have been a 20 or 25 minute round trip took almost an hour and a half.

When I finally go back home, my dad asked me where I had been for so long. I explained that I had gone to take my friend home, and decided to hang out at his house for a while to play foosball. Never mind that we NEVER hung out at that particular friend’s house—it was the only story I had. The foosball was a nice touch. My dad asked me if I was SURE that that’s where I had been. As casually as I could muster, I smiled and said, “Yes, of course.”

“Then how come,” he wanted to know, “when we called over there to see what was taking so long, his parents said you hadn’t been there?”

Busted.

I tried to lie my way out of it a little more… but I only lasted about 10 seconds before I cracked and spilled the whole story.

My dad was never much of a yeller; his anger was more calm and controlled. In my younger days, this would have been a belt-worthy infraction. I had experienced the belt a half-dozen times as a kid—each and every one of them absolutely earned—but I hadn’t had the belt for at least 5 or 6 years. I wasn’t sure what dad was going to do to me.

To my surprise, he did basically nothing. After expressing his disappointment, he reminded me that we were leaving on a 10-day vacation early the next morning, and suggested that we put this discussion on hold and discuss it after we got back. You know, so it wouldn’t ruin everybody’s vacation.

For the next 10 days, my dad never mentioned the lying incident one single time. He treated me like the trustworthy son he had always known me to be. Never a hint of anger or an ounce of disappointment was registered in his voice.

The day we got back we unloaded the car and did a few chores around the house. We made dinner and watched some TV. Dad never said a word. I started to believe he had forgotten. It wasn’t like my dad to forget things… but apparently he had.

When I got up to go to bed, he asked me to come talk to him. You already know what he said next: “If you ever lie to me again, I’m not going to say a word. I’m just going to punch you in the jaw as hard as I can.”

Message received. Loud and clear.

He then laid down the punishment: One full month with no driving except to work and church, and I was forbidden from buying another car for at least one year. All the money I had saved up to buy a car would have to stay saved up. The embarrassing yellow truck was to be my vehicular identity for the next 12 months.

Since that day, I have lied to my dad precisely zero times. Good to his word, my face is still intact.

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There are a lot of sad stories out there about people who grew up with no dads or crappy dads. And I have seen first-hand the trauma that it has caused in grown men’s lives. I’ve had a front row seat as I watched full-grown adults who had been abandoned by their fathers at a young age fall into deep depressions, leave their wives and children, self-sabotage their own businesses, become addicted to drugs, and anything else you can imagine.

No dad or a bad dad doesn’t always result in disaster. But it exponentially increases the odds.

And I’m proud to say, I cannot relate.

I have truly been blessed with one of the all-time greatest dads. My dad is smart, funny, entrepreneurial, rich, healthy, fiercely loyal… and a spiritual giant despite standing maybe 5’ 7”. He’s been a perfect role model of a father, husband, boss, and business owner. He never spoiled me, but he always treated me fairly and with utmost respect.

And I learned just about everything important that I know from him.

But funny thing, he rarely lectured me on success of any kind. He mostly led by example—and by giving me good books to read.

And today, on this Father’s day weekend, I’d like to share some of the wisdom I learned from my hero, Curtis Harshaw.

It’s Okay To Be Rich

When I was about 16-years old, my dad had one of the very few “sit down and let’s talk about something important” moments with me. He started with a simple question:

“How much money do you think you need to make when you’re an adult?”

I was making $2.25 an hour plus tips delivering pizza in that embarrassing yellow truck at the time. I had no concept of how much money adults needed to make.

I gave an honest answer: “I don’t know.”

Dad: Do you want to get married someday?

Me: I guess so.

Dad: Do you want to have a house for your wife?

Me: Yes.

Dad: Do you and your wife want to drive cars?

Me: Yes.

Dad: Do you want to have kids?

Me: Uh, I think we already had that talk.

Dad: Do you want to buy them clothes? And food? And send them to college?

Me: Yea.

Dad: Do you want to have insurance? And electricity? And gas? And nice things?

Me: Sure.

Dad: Then the bare minimum you need to make as an adult to do all of that is $100,000 per year. When you factor in taxes and tithing paid to the church, it’s almost impossible to get by on less than $100,000 a year if you want to have any kind of lifestyle at all.

I had honestly never thought about it. When he listed out all those expenses like that, it opened my eyes to a much bigger world of responsibility than I ever realized existed. A much bigger world of responsibility than just about any teenager realizes exists.

Then he asked me the clincher: “How many hours a week to you want to work when you are adult?”

Me: I dunno. Like 40? Or is it 50? I honestly didn’t know the answer.

Dad: You need to work about 40 to 50 hours a week. And here’s what you need to know. During that 40 or 50 hours a week that you work, you can do something that will make you rich, or you can do something that won’t make you rich. Either way, you are going to put in the 40 or 50 hours a week. I suggest you figure something out that will make you rich.

From that day forward, all I could think about was trying to find something that paid a lot of money in 40 hours. What a great lesson.

The Value Of Doing Your Own Thing

My dad grew up as a farmer’s son in the plains of Kansas. Like the “get up at 4:30 so you can milk the cows” kind of farmer. And he didn’t really enjoy it. My dad’s capacity for work is, in my experience, just about limitless. But he wanted to work with his mind, not his hands. He knew to achieve that, his hands would do the work that would buy him a chance to work with his mind.

So he worked his way through high school, and decided to escape the farm by becoming an engineer. He paid his own way through college working at a factory, and if you believe his version of the story, he made straight A’s despite working ungodly hours and being tormented by sadistic professors with names like “Dr. Brilliant.”

Upon graduation, he moved his young wife and only son (not me) to Texas to take an engineering job in the defense industry. This was at the height of the Vietnam War era, and his skill of designing bombing systems for military aircraft was in high demand. He was good at what he did, and they paid him a lot of money even though he was such a recent graduate.

He was making money using his brains instead of his brawn. Finally.

One day after a couple years on the job, a guy handed him a book called “How I Made A Million Dollars In Real Estate.” He devoured the entire book in a weekend and decided to quit his job before he clocked back in on Monday morning. Within the year he was out of the aerospace industry and working on his first million in real estate.

I had no idea at the time, but it was a bumpy road.

I remember as a kid looking at his letterhead; it said “Wilson-Harshaw Real Estate.” I didn’t know who Wilson was (his partner), or what real estate meant, but I knew my dad owned the company. In my 5-year old mind, I assumed that all companies were roughly the same, so my dad’s “Wilson-Harshaw” must be on par with General Motors, Mobil Oil, and Montgomery Wards, right?

How cool was that!?

As the years past, the message was clear, even though it was never formally spoken: Owning your own business is the way to go.

His real estate empire ebbed and flowed over the years, and he started other ventures on the side, including an employee leasing company and an office supply company.

Over the years, I worked for him in several capacities. Picking up trash for a dollar an hour on Saturday mornings at one of his mobile home parks. Summer jobs as a teenager working in his office. Maintenance work on properties (which I HATED).

One day in the mid 1980’s, we were driving toward our home and we passed a mobile home park. It was a running joke that any time we passed mobile home parks, we stopped to drive through them. But this one was close to our home, and we had already driven through it many times before. This time we drove right past, and my dad mentioned that they had developed this park, and had just recently sold it.

And he had made nearly a million dollars.

Message received. Loud and clear.

You Have To Be Smart

When my dad drove me up to college in 1987, he repeated his mantra at least 20 times: You have to study three hours outside of class for every one hour in class.

I was dumb enough to believe him, and managed to get a 3.9 GPA my freshman year.

But reading and studying was nothing new to me. Growing up, anything less than an A or a B on a report card was unacceptable. I don’t actually know what would have happened if I would have brought home a C because I was too scared to find out.

But it wasn’t just school smarts. My dad taught me the uncommon practice of self-education.

He used to listen to tapes in his car, then he’d find excuses to drive me all over the place so I could listen to them with him. One time he bought a memory course and taught me how to memorize lists of 100 things as we drove around looking at mobile home parks. He gave me a copy of “Think and Grow Rich” when I was 15. He introduced me to Tony Robbins’ book “Unlimited Power” when I was 16 years old. We discussed NLP and walking on fire. Stuff I’m sure very few teenagers were learning from their dads.

Just about every time I walked in my house at night, I would find my dad in a recliner reading a book. Frequently it was the scriptures. He never once said “hey look, I’m reading over here.” He just did it.

On my 21st birthday I returned home from Taiwan after serving a 2-year mission for the Mormon church. Instead of an “actual” birthday gift, he handed me a stack of paperback reports and case full of tapes. “You might be interested in this,” he said.

It was Jay Abraham’s marketing course “Your Marketing Genius At Work”.

I found out a few days later that he had paid $5,000 for them.

I devoured them. I loved them. I became a marketing guy because of them.

Message received. Loud and clear.

You Are Paid What You’re Worth

When I graduated from college in 1993, the job market wasn’t exactly robust. I discovered that the going rate for a business major was about $32,000 to $36,000 a year—if you could find a job. And I couldn’t.

I had started several businesses on the side during college—mostly having to do with exporting things to Taiwan where I had made some contacts while I served there as a missionary. But none of those businesses flourished. Meanwhile I read every Jay Abraham report and listened to every Jay Abraham tape 20 times over.

Then I moved back to Texas and took a job in my dad’s VERY small office supply company. It was laughably small—3 other guys, and me. I was to figure out the marketing—you know, like I had learned from Jay Abraham.

My dad is a famous tightwad. He squeezes every penny out of every situation. He offered to pay me $2,000 a month plus benefits… and promised me that if and when the business became profitable, he would share those profits with me at a rate of 10%. Month after month, the small business chugged along at a virtual break-even. No profits were shared.

One day my dad took me to lunch—he even paid. The entire time I was trying to muster the courage to ask him for a raise. After all, I was married and had a kid of my own, and money was tight on the meager $2,000 a month wage he was paying. I chickened out all through lunch, and for the entire ride back to the office. Sensing that I was losing my window of opportunity, I finally asked the question as we walked from the car to the office:

Me: Dad, I was thinking… I really need to make more money than I am right now.

Dad: Oh? How much do you think you need to make?

Me: (encouraged) Well, if I could get an extra $500 a month, that would make a huge difference.

Dad: Okay. Well, all you need to do is get the business to where it is making an extra $5,000 a month, and you’ll have that extra $500.

Me: (Message received. Loud and clear.)

But the business was doomed—the guy running it, Chris, ended up stealing all the customers and leaving a few months later. To add insult to injury, Chris had withdrawn the $300 daily limit from the ATM with the company Discover card for several consecutive days prior to his departure.

I couldn’t believe it.

My dad took it all in stride.

“Even the most hardened criminals in Huntsville (Texas state penitentiary) have justified their actions in their minds,” he told me. “They have convinced themselves that they are innocent. That’s just how life works.”

I had no idea at the time, but that lesson would serve me well at least 5 or 6 times in my career when people—often trusted friends and employees—stole from me without provocation. Once to the tune of millions of dollars. That story is next.

But still, the business was dead, and it was time for me to start my own thing.

Don’t Get Too Big For Your Britches

The S&L crisis of the late 1980’s wiped out the state of Texas’ economy in a real and depressing way. Many real estate fortunes that were built on leveraged money evaporated when the market crashed. Many people went to prison because of shady loans and sketchy deals.

But not my dad.

He was prudent enough to grow his business at a sustainable rate. He’d been through one real estate bust in the 1970’s, and he had a good memory.

When the economy collapsed in the mid-80s, his fortunes suffered because nobody was renting apartments and mobile homes. And when nobody’s renting, you can’t cover your notes. And when you can’t cover you notes, you lose properties.

And in real estate, properties are wealth.

He took a crushing body blow. And I never knew anything about it. Sure, he sold his season tickets to the Dallas Mavericks—but I was leaving for college anyway. If he was stressed out about it—and I’m sure he was—he never mentioned a word to me. I happily served as a missionary for 2 years in Taiwan while he was working his way out of a mess he had no control over.

Fast forward to 1994. His business had recovered, and his new employee leasing business was a cash cow. But the tiny office supply company had crashed and burned, and I was unemployed after a short 9-month career.

Except I was already making more than that measly $2,000 a month in my own marketing consulting business. I had started it with a friend who then became my business partner. By the end of 1995, I had tripled my income to something like $6,000 a month.

The years 1996 and 1997 brought even more growth. We added bigger clients who paid us larger sums of money. By the end of those years, I was pulling in a six-figure income.

In 1998 we met a game-changing client. A client that we were able to participate in profits with. We helped them grow from $2 million in revenue to the mid-$20 millions in a little over a year. By summer 1999, our little business was cash flowing over $150,000 a month. And we weren’t stupid, either—we each took a $50,000 a month salary, and saved $50,000 into a “war chest” that we would invest in other ventures later.

Later turned out to be the year 2000. The business that was paying us so much money was poorly run, and eventually imploded on itself. No matter. We took our sizable savings and started a whole new venture, Y2Marketing. This was a company where we would recruit, train, and support marketing consultants all over the country.

After a slow start, we started to make real progress in 2001. Each person we recruited would pay us a $35,000 licensing fee, plus 10% royalties on consulting dollars they earned. I was sitting in a training room on Tuesday, September 11, 2001 when the towers fell. In that room were 27 new recruits–$945,000 worth—who I was training to make money as a consultant.

Post-9-11 was actually a boom time for us. We recruited literally HUNDREDS of “wantrepreneurs,” men and women who had always WANTED to own their own business, but never had the guts to take the plunge. In the wake of the terrorist attacks, we discovered that people took more of a “now or never” approach to life, and our business peaked out at $23 million in sales in 2002. Granted, we had a TON of expenses, but we were making money.

That’s the year I decided to build a big new house for my big young family.

My dad had caught wind through the rumor mill that mine and my partners’ heads were starting to get a little big on our shoulders. He and my mom invited my wife and me to dinner one night at Applebee’s. As we sat, he quizzed me about my new house I was building. It became apparent that this was a big house and it would be expensive to build.

He finally asked the question that nobody dared speak: “So, this is probably a seven-figure house, then?”

Me: Yep. Seven figures.

Dad: Are you sure that’s something you can afford?

Me: Yes, quite sure.

Dad: Just remember, business runs in cycles. It never stays good indefinitely. Something always happens that changes things. Sometimes it’s out of your control—like the economy, or legislation. Sometimes it’s poor decision making. You just never know.

Me: I hear you, and I understand. But I think we’ve got this.

Dad: Okay. Just wanted to make sure.

Message NOT received. At all.

I won’t go into the details here—that’s a really long story, even compared to this one—but by mid-2003, the business had started to falter.

By the end of 2003, the business was in freefall.

By mid-2004, we were losing a half a million dollars a month.

In August 2004, my partner left, tried to steal the assets of the business, and left me holding a $3 million debt in my hand.

Message received. Loud and clear.

You’re Never Alone

Stupidly, I had tried to manage the collapse of my business all by myself. Pride will kill you that way.

My wife had found out that we had essentially lost everything only as it was happening. I had foolishly thought I could turn the business around, and funded the losses out of my own personal savings until nearly all of it was gone. She cried when they repossessed my Hummer. Not because she liked that car—she hated it—but because it was emblematic of our financial black hole.

Not knowing what to do or how to proceed, I sat wide awake one night at 3 am. The thought was so crystal clear that it was practically an audible voice: Call your dad.

Sheepishly, reluctantly the next morning, the defeated hero tucked his tail between his legs and called his dad for help.

And oh boy, did he help.

Dad jumped in and got right to work. He personally called and negotiated with over 100 vendors that we owed money to. Some of them—memorably the AmEx guy—were obnoxious to the point of unbelief. My dad knew these ropes. He’d famously told a guy who threatened to “repossess his kids” in the real estate bust of the 1970s that he would surely die trying.

He sat me down and talked to me.

Dad: What do you want to do?

Me: I want to repay my creditors. I don’t want to file bankruptcy. I owe the money.

Dad: That is right. I can help you.

Me: But I owe so much money. There’s no way I can do it.

Dad: You only owe them money. As long as you communicate with your creditors and keep them informed of your progress, they will work with you. I know they are scary. But remember this: They can’t eat you. I can help you get through this.

Me: (Message received. Loud and clear.)

My dad worked tirelessly for months to negotiate with those creditors. He warned me that it might take years to get through this. He was right. It took a giant loan and all of my free cash flow for about 4 years to satisfy the creditors.

Eleven years later, my business is healthy once again, but I am still paying off the loan. And I feel proud that I have handled the situation with honor. Just like my dad would have.

Message Received. Loud and clear.

© 2015 – 2016, Rich Harshaw. All rights reserved.