DJ Rutherford Podcast Transcript
DJ Rutherford joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is DJ Rutherford.
DJ Rutherford is a visionary with a broad business background that is filled with entrepreneurial successes with business roots in business and finance. As an entrepreneur, Mr. Rutherford is known for increasing shareholder value in emerging growth companies, identifying and monetizing market opportunities. From sales manager to entrepreneur, Mr. Rutherford handed in his resignation from a six-figure position at Canseco Finance to start his own business.
At age 27, Mr. Rutherford realized a seven-figure income in his first year as an entrepreneur and hasn’t looked back. From wholesaling real estate to new home construction, and ultimately being an instrumental component to his first economic development transaction in 2004.
Well, good afternoon, DJ. Welcome to the show!
DJ Rutherford: Welcome. Good afternoon. How are you?
Brian Thomas: Awesome. I appreciate you making the time DJ hailing out of LA. I’m in Kansas City, but it’s such a nice time to have a podcast and we’re not too far apart.
So, what I’m going to do DJ is jump right into your first question. So, we can get your story out to the world.
Your career trajectory is remarkable from working at Conseco Finance to becoming a successful entrepreneur with a seven-figure income by age 27. What inspired you to take that initial leap into entrepreneurship and what were some of the key lessons from those early years?
DJ Rutherford: Well, I think the start off, I think I always had the entrepreneurial spirit. It’s just that you were always taught to get an education and get a job and retire type thing.
Right? So, when I was in college, my goal was to be a pre-med, it was to be an obstetrician and 1 of my mentors told me that, you know, he said, you have a bit of a personality. You really don’t want to be a doctor. He was like, by the time you actually finish your, your residency, you’ll be 36 years old.
You’re young enough. You’re charismatic. You are able to really make an impact if you had another choice of career. And so that was the 1st thing that got me started thinking. The 2nd thing was that I was in entertainment and as an entertainer, I always thought that I was going to be a singer and I ended up having children, which made getting a job more important than dancing on stage.
So, I ended up having to get a job after I dropped out of college. Yeah. I began my world in finance. I started at insurance first, got my series six and my 63, my Li Life and Health license, and I worked for Prudential, but then I got fired from Prudential and my landlord felt bad for me and offered me a job at a mortgage company that he knew of, and that’s how I accidentally got into the.
Real estate space. It was really because in 1996 I got fired from my job, . That’s what happened. So, when I started working for Conseco, for Conseco, I actually met a guy who was, I was an originator for Conseco, and then I ended up doing some underwriting for a while, but I ended up going back to origination.
But I had one client, and this guy was killing it. He was making like $43,000 a month. And he just surprised me with his income. And I had a pretty decent income with the commissions that I was getting in this base salary that I was getting. It was, it was a decent living. It was almost a six-figure income for some years, other years.
I think my best year I did 127,000. The year I quit actually was 127,000. And but this guy was making 43 grand a month, every month. And he was like living the dream. And he wasn’t even a really smart guy. He wasn’t a really dynamic guy. He was really quiet. And that really enticed me after I understood what he was doing on my lunch break.
I wrote down my business plan on a napkin at Denny’s, and then I handed in my letter of resignation. The 1st thing I did after I handed in my letter of resignation was, I told my wife when I went home that night. That I quit my job, which is something that I wouldn’t recommend ever, ever, ever doing the 1st lesson that I learned was not to make that mistake.
And then then after that, I spent the money paying the bills. My last few paychecks paying the bills. Getting the office space and getting things going, but as an entrepreneur, I wasn’t prepared. I had sales skills. I had the skills to sell, but I didn’t have the infrastructure that was built in. And I had to learn the hard way that it was the infrastructure that did what it did.
And that was a hard lesson. It took me about six months to really, really, really make an impact. And, but it was in that six-month time period that I was called an idiot, that I was called stupid, that I was called ridiculous for quitting my job. That I ended up being literally successful, because it took me 6 months to really get a 6-figure payday.
And it was amazing because it was almost just as much as it took me to make a year at can see. Co, so that was my first experience, and I didn’t look back from there.
Brian Thomas: Love these stories and DJ, we start out typically with the, the background, the backstory of where people were when they started out on their career, whether it was entrepreneurship or just becoming a, an executive or CEO at a big company.
I really love this. So, you took a leap of faith, obviously I’m sure your wife probably called you one of those names the first night, but I’m sure she looked back and was very proud of you. So, I appreciate the story. And DJ in your new book due to be released in a couple of weeks, “I F..ked Up So You Don’t Have To”, what is the main premise of your book?
DJ Rutherford: Well, basically just that I made a lot of mistakes and business just by doing my learning. I think to be successful in business, you really do get to be kind of stupid. As a quote by Orson Welles, when he was talking about, they talked about how successful he was and how he was breaking new ground in his time.
And they asked him, how did he do it? He literally simply said ignorance. Ignorance is how we did it. I had no idea that we couldn’t that it was so difficult. And I had no idea that it didn’t exist that we created it. I just didn’t know we thought we were figuring it out to solve the problem, but we just didn’t know.
That was the same thing with me. It was just so many things that I tried just because. It felt right at the moment, and I just went for it instead of really thinking about it and really diving in and understanding up front what some of the risks were or what some of the pitfalls may be. And I just ended up learning the hard way.
And I would like to share with as many people as I possibly could, how to avoid some of those pitfalls. Some things seem like common sense, but other things really isn’t that common sense, you hear a lot of books, you read a lot of books, you hear a lot of podcasts, you hear a lot of advice from people, and they tell you a lot of things, but a lot of people don’t tell you a lot of the hard things about running businesses, a lot of the hard things about dealing with people.
And a lot of the mistakes that you actually make, everybody wants to tell you sometimes on how successful they are, but they don’t tell you how hard it was to get there in some cases. And so, I just think my story is unique because I’m used to people always making excuses on the reason why they can’t do something that it prompt me to say, you know, what, you name it.
I’ve been through it. You name it, I’m affected by it, and I still was able to do something about it. And so. I think that’s why I literally started this journey on writing this book was to let people know that you can learn from my mistakes. I made enough of them that you can learn from them, and you can be smart enough to learn from these mistakes.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And, you know, this by now, of course, you probably highlight this in your book, but, you know, without trials and tribulations and obstacles and challenges in your life, you wouldn’t really be as successful as you were without those. And, you know, ignorance, you don’t know a lot when you started out, but you made a go at it and now you can talk about your story, which I think is awesome.
So, thank you. And DJ, you’ve worked with well-known entrepreneurs like Kevin Harrington on integration deals across various platforms. How did this partnership influence your approach to business? And what insights did you gain from collaborating with a well-known business leader?
DJ Rutherford: Well, Kevin Harrington actually was an accident.
Almost. I want to say it was an accident, but because I didn’t seek Kevin’s advice, and I didn’t seek out his partnering when he was in the area. What happened was I was partnering with the guy. And I was investing in his company. I gave him money in his company, and we were doing integration deals, you know, shows on like the Steve Harvey show we did, Ellen, we did Wendy Williams.
We did we had tech Tuesdays on, uh, on good day LA every week in Los Angeles on Tuesdays. And I think it was from Tuesdays and Tuesdays and Thursdays, we were making the transition from just promoting investors and inventors of their products. To actually selling some of their products. So we had a licensing deal with a particular product that we were taking to market.
And lo and behold, uh, my partner on the deal, he actually had a relationship with Kevin Harrington, and he had a relationship with the as seen on TV network and also with a Gunthy Renker to do some product placement on those television shows. So, it ended up just being coincidence. So when we had our meetings, when we finally solidified our partnership, it was a point where I was listening to him and I listened to how he tested every product, how he actually built them as seen on TV brand, how he actually invented the infomercial.
And wildly, his story was similar to mine. He literally just got started and just started doing something because he had an opportunity to sell a particular product, and he just ended up going from there and ended up being the inventor. Of the so-called infomercial because of his tenacity is acumen.
And also, I would say his ignorance, because at the time he didn’t know that he was the first mover in the market, but he had that opportunity, and he ended up building an entire industry. So, I learned a lot from the guy just by simply being around him, the handful of times that we were around him. And then that brand ended up getting bought out by someone else.
But it was just right. Absolutely amazing to spend time with him and his son and to understand how they market and how they put together their products.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. You know, we don’t always get opportunities like that, but when you get to shadow or you get to follow or just be in the shadows or whether you’re the actual protege or assistant to someone like that, it’s just great to get some of those nuggets. So, I really appreciate you sharing that story and some of the things that you did together.
And DJ last question of the afternoon here, as someone who has turned around underperforming businesses across both B2B and B2C sectors, what are the most common reasons companies struggle and what key steps you take to drive a successful turnaround?
DJ Rutherford: Two years ago, that would have been a different story, and I would have had a different answer. But over the last year after my illness last year, I had a near death experience. I ended up with endocarditis. I was in the hospital for almost 6 months last year. I had to have open heart surgery. I had to have valve replacements.
Now I have a pig valve and a cow valve in my heart because I literally put the business first all the time. And I would have normally answered that question with the typical answers, you know, leadership, you know, and clarity and dynamics and all those types of things. You need to be clear about your vision.
But one thing that I noticed while my business was failing while I was in hospital was that purpose is more important than profit. The profit will come if you literally have purpose for your company. I think transactional relationships when you’re building a business, they’re great for a time.
They’re great. If you want to do something quick, you want to do something to make a buck, you know, and you want to just pass on. But that’s not how you sustain. That’s just not what you do to actually grow something that has purpose and that serves a particular community or solves a real problem. When I was in the hospital bed last year, my business was failing, and we were preparing for a 9-figure exit, and I literally realized that all of my relationships were Transactional and they really didn’t have the purpose that I would have liked that would actually sustain the business.
And now I see that, of course, systems and leadership is something that you always see management styles are very important and like the book, the motive, you really have to care about people first, when you’re doing this, it’s not so much as, you just being a leader is literally about caring about the people that work for you.
It’s caring about your customer or the community that you’re serving. And it literally means literally solving a real problem and having a purpose for your company. And I think companies that are purpose driven they’re more sustainable. And I think a lot of companies that I see fail and have put themselves in a position where they are making a lot of money, but yet the culture is destructive or not progressive or non-communicative or just a bad environment.
Those type of companies typically have those problems that I just mentioned. I ran companies like that. I was a part of companies like that, and I’ve seen others run companies that way. Now, that’s just not the way that I see that you should run a company. If you’re going to sustain, you’re really going to do something to actually help someone and solve a real problem.
I think that clarity is important, but clarity of purpose is more important. And that’s what I would say.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s such a great life lesson, no matter if you’re an entrepreneur or not. It’s about looking at the long game and how do you build and sustain relationships and putting people first, whether its employees building up that culture, that’s going to make your business not only be sustainable, but you’re not burning any bridges.
I guess that’s the point I was trying to make. It will actually leave a better legacy about you and the company using that approach, of course. But I appreciate that DJ. I really do. And DJ, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
DJ Rutherford: Well, thanks again, Brian. I really appreciate your time. Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
DJ Rutherford Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
