Jumping Fleas and 9 AM Meetings: How Doug Ecklund and Cellular Advantage Defied the Odds

Doug Ecklund is the longtime CEO of Cellular Advantage, a company that he and his wife Mitzi have grown from a single mall kiosk into one of the top US Cellular Authorized Agents in the country with over $28 million in revenue and more than 100 team members. Doug invests his time supporting the culture that has been built to enrich the quality of life of those in and around the business.He has been a member of the Young President Organization since 2004 and wasa founding member of the Iowa chapter of the Entrepreneurs Organization in 2000. He enjoys being outside with his family, whether it is walking the dogs in the timber or with a golf bag on his back. Doug and Mitzi enjoy serving as adult leaders for sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade boys and girls at their church.They have two children and live in the Des Moines area.

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Full Transcript

Jeff Johnson: Welcome to Courageous by Crossroads Apologetics. A look into what motivates us to step out in courage and the everyday bravery of men and women like you. In each episode, we hear a personal story of bravery centered around this question. What’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And now your host, founder of Crossroads Apologetics, Jeff Johnson.

Okay. I’ll be honest. Sometimes I hang around people and I think I know everything about their story, and I don’t until I ask some deeper questions. Our next guest, Doug Eklund, is a good friend of mine, and I know Doug, or I thought I knew Doug, until I was able to sit down and ask him the question, what’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? And I found out so much more about him, and this little interview blessed me.

I almost feel selfish putting it out there because I gained so much from just sitting down and visiting with my friend. But I know that you’re gonna gain a lot too. So Doug Eklund, man of great courage, we jump right in learning a little bit more about him. Enjoy. So would you start off telling our listeners a little bit about who you are, about the business, about the family, bring them up to speed with who we’re talking to.

Doug Eklund: Business first, I guess. So Cellular Advantage is our company. We started it out of a one bedroom apartment, back in 1993. So my wife, Mitzi, worked for US Cellular, right out of college and did really well with them, and she earned the opportunity to take over one of their stores. So we were engaged to be married, twenty four years old, and she’s like, What do you think?

Should we start a business? And so I went to my boss at the time and I said, Hey, I’m gonna take a leave of absence of like a month to just try to help my wife start this thing. And a couple weeks in, I called him, I’m like, Yeah, I’m not coming back. So we started this out of a, we moved out of a one bedroom apartment into a two bedroom apartment so that we could have an office. And we opened a store in Southridge Mall.

So we had a US Cellular store in Southridge Mall and just kind of grew it organically here in Des Moines. So we added Valley West Mall and, you know, just worked like any startup entrepreneur. I mean, we borrowed a little bit of money and we went to a bunch of banks and the business model was, we’re gonna buy these phones, because this is back in the day, so we’re gonna buy these phones for a hundred, hundred $50 and we’re gonna give them away for free. And the bankers looked at you like, you’re absolutely bananas. And, and they said, and then we’re gonna get paid a commission for them activating the phone, and that commission will come in anywhere from thirty to sixty days later.

So they’re like, I think every bank was like, your cash flow is completely upside down. This is a complete terrible idea. So we got the stamp of no, no, no, no, and we finally found a banker. He’s just like, it’s like $35. And he’s like, this isn’t that big of a deal.

Let’s just give it a swing and try it. And, you know, I don’t know how much we’re gonna get into the the business here, but, I mean, it was just kind of a it was kinda comical. You know, we we ran out of that money pretty quick, then we we got every credit card you could apply for, we applied for, you know, so that we could have additional money. I mean, I can remember we’re $2,500 short for payroll coming up in a week and we fire sailed my car so that we could have money to, you know, do payroll, and Wow. Her parents gave us their Chrysler kei car station wagon with wood paneling on the sides to drive.

Jeff Johnson: How far into the venture was that when you’ve had that?

Doug Eklund: That was, you know, we started in ’93, so that was probably ’94, ’90 ‘5, right in there. Okay. ’96 was the first year that we actually, you know, kind of got over the hump and made a little bit of money because the first two years were terrible and and, you’re working seven days a week with the mall hours and and just trying to just trying to make it work. And it was, it was it was super challenging.We had a Was that model let me interrupt. Was that model of buying phones and giving away for free, was that in place already? Were you copying a model that was already out there, or was it just The free phone deal, you know, would kinda come and go as a promotion, I would say. But we we were able to strike up a relationship with the manager of the Sam’s Club here in Des Moines. And so about once a quarter, they would have us come into Sam’s.

And if you renewed your Sam’s Club membership, you got a coupon for a free phone. So we were doing that was kind of our that was one way that we kinda got started and, you know, and then ultimately, Sam started selling phones themselves out of their store, but that was one thing that we did to kind of help get things going. But it was you tried to lose as little on the phone as you possibly could, but the bag phones and the big handheld phones back in the day, those things cost $100 to $150, and that was kinda what you’d lose on a on a device. And Yeah. You know, now an iPhone costs you a thousand bucks to buy.

I mean, it’s crazy. Just So you were a couple years into it and not making I think our W-two in our first year, I think we made $7,800 and somehow decided it was a good idea to do it another year, and I think we made like 24,000 in our second year. That was at the point, that was a big decision time. We were lucky to have a friend, one of my wife’s good friends in college, her father-in-law, entrepreneurial guy, owns several companies, on the board of several companies, and we were struggling, and he just, he kind of pulled us in under his wing, and he’s like, Let’s just get together and talk about this stuff. And so we sat in his kitchen.

About every two weeks, we’d get together for a couple hours and he’d just talk about business. And he taught us about what we were truly losing on the phone. He taught us how to manage costs better. He taught us how to negotiate a lease. He taught us a lot of things about being a business owner.And so that helped. And I think just some, I don’t know if you want to call it dumb luck, but we were able to kind of get through that initial deal. I think it wasn’t really a retail product in ’93, ’90 ‘4, ’90 ‘5. It was more of a direct sales model. We had four or five of us just out there calling on the attorneys, accountants, plumbers, contractors, you know, just out there trying to sell.Mhmm. And then it slowly started to become more of a retail product. And there was a tragedy of a a girl that went missing out on the highway. I can’t remember her name right now, but that drove parents in by the gang load, getting emergency phones for their kids to have. And that was kind of a, that’s when I think it became a little bit more of a normal thing for families to have in their possession as compared to a luxury item.

It became a little bit more of a, we’re gonna have this because just in case.

Jeff Johnson: So you got a little bit of right place at the right time Yeah. A little bit. But I’ve heard it said before that the people that, I don’t know, I’m not gonna say this right, Doug, but the people that win are just the people that don’t quit. Yeah.You know, like most of the people quit five minutes before the miracle Right. Or something like that. So was that what you and Mitzi had? I mean, it sounds like you had some tenacity.

Doug Eklund: We did that a couple a couple different times where, it was time to quit and we didn’t. And, you know, we so we we kind of made it through that initial first few years and then we we grew the business to six stores in Des Moines. We added T Mobile. We added AT and T. We added Nextel.We added Sprint to go along with US Silvers. We had five of the six carriers, in our store. So it was a nice one stop shop for people to come in. They could kind of compare everything, see what the best fit for them was. And so we rode that until, I think it was right around 02/2002, and US Cellular came knocking on our door and they said, Hey, we really love how you run your business.We would I should rephrase that. We like how you run your business, but we would love you if you ran your business with us exclusively. So they wanted us to to get out of these other agreements and just work with them exclusively, and in exchange for that, they would help us grow the business. So they wanted us to become what they call the national agent. And the national agent has stores in four states.

You have to have at least 25 of them. And so they came in and started talking about this and me, I mean, talk about something to just pump my ego up. I spent some time with Ken Blanchard years ago, and I heard him describe the word ego as edging God out. And hindsight looking back on it, that’s exactly what was going on there because it was, we’re gonna make the Inc. Five hundred.We are gonna be this big deal. I’m gonna be this big CEO. You know, we had our first our first kid, and and Mitzi was kinda she had kinda transitioned out of the business. I’m like, this is just this is a big deal. So we signed this deal, and it was four states, 25 stores, and we had a year to do it.

So we opened 19 stores in twelve months, and we went and we borrowed a ton of money, at least a ton of money for us, and we got ourselves to where we were out of compliance on probably four covenants with the bank. You know, we’d grown. We were out of money. The thing was in trouble. I mean, we were a phone call away from the bank just saying you’re done.

I was never home. I would I would definitely say I was an absent father. I was an absent husband. You know, and then if if I did have any free time, well, I needed that time for me time. Maybe it’s a golf trip or who knows what.So it was kind of, from on the family side, things weren’t where they should be. On the work side, like I said, we were out of compliance and they could have called us on the carpet at any time. We hired a new CFO during that period. He really helped manage the bank relationship. He helped control our costs, helped us really get through that mess.But the big thing, and if you wanna talk about what’s the most courageous decision that we’ve ever made, We had a neighbor that knew that things weren’t great on both fronts, the home and the work front, and she literally invited us to church. Church hadn’t been anything. We hadn’t been to church in probably we were the Christmas and Easter. We were the CNEs. We do Christmas and Easter.And so we rolled into Point of Grace Church out in Waukee, and our son had some severe food allergies, environmental allergies, and he’s a little kid at this time. He’s not even a year old yet. We’re just, like, nervous as heck to drop him off in the kid’s room. And Nancy Morris, she says, here’s a pager. She says, we won’t have any snacks today.

We’ll just make sure that everything’s good to go so you can go and enjoy the service. So we’re like, all right, this is great. So we walk in and it was unlike a church service I’d ever been to. I grew up in the wood pews with an organ and, you know, kind of like looking at your watch, is this thing done yet kind of a deal? Yeah.

We walk in there, the music’s amazing. They played a Simpsons clip to prove a point in the message, and I’m like, this is and the message, Jeff, couldn’t have been any more It was like we were the only two people sitting there, like they were talking to us. Yeah. Wow. It was one of those times when I’m just like, man, I’m like, what do we got to do to take a look at this?

And I got the program and I flipped the program over and I’m like, there’s a marriage class starting. I was drinking all the time. There’s a Celebrate Recovery deal. I’m like, I’m gonna check that out too. And then there’s a men’s deal.And basically it was like, my way isn’t worth the crap, so let’s, why don’t we jump in with both feet and see where this leads us. And, you know, that changed how we did life together, and it changed how we ran a business. And it was That one trip to church. That one thing just set the whole thing in motion to where, so Nancy Morris, who met us in the kids ministry, her husband Don ends up becoming a mentor of mine, we end up renewing our wedding vows with Don, and we did it the right way. We’re putting Christ at the top, and the idea of that being a triangle, that if the two of us are becoming closer to him, then we’re automatically becoming closer to each other.

And we ended up leading a marriage, one of the small groups for the Marriage Matters series. We started a men’s fraternity, men’s ministry there that we ended up running, not only at Point of Grace, but at the Healthy Living Center. So a group, a couple of guys and I. But at work, instead of what can this business do for me, what can this business put in my pocket, what can I get out of people, It completely flipped the script of, all right, let’s leave this with a servant’s heart? And what can we do to invest into people instead of what can we get out of people?

And so that just changed the whole dynamic of what cellular advantage stood for. You know, the core values were crafted out of scripture. You just get down to, you know, we’re gonna love God, we’re gonna love our people, people, and what can we do to love our people.

Jeff Johnson: Okay. That’s a powerful story. And this podcast is about what’s the most courageous thing you’ve ever done. So you’re walking into the most courageous thing you’ve ever done. Is that correct?

Doug Eklund: I would say so. I mean, coming into here and being like, we’re gonna change how we do things.That’s it. It’s a it’s it’s a complete one eighty. Yeah. I mean, I’ve had people say that, you know, that first ten years of cellular advantage was cellular advantage one, and then year 11 and beyond was was version two. And it’s just and it’s just everything’s done differently.

Jeff Johnson: So Because you start this, you know, Mitzi is the catalyst. Yep. Hey, Doug. Do you wanna go do this thing? You guys jump into this thing, and it’s hard.So there’s probably a lot of steps occur at wealth. Obviously, a lot of steps of courage along the way. But you express your god given talents to both of you, and you run this business up to where it gets noticed. Yeah. And then you really press into it, but it’s not it’s not working.

Doug Eklund: No

Jeff Johnson: So if you would if you wouldn’t have if you wouldn’t have had that holy spirit intervention with that invitation to point a grace, what do you think would have happened, Doug?

Doug Eklund: I don’t know if I don’t know if we’d be married still. I don’t know if we’d have a business still. I mean, I really I, you know, it’s it’s hard to even really think about it.Yeah. So but we, you know, we made it through the deal, and that’s where that so then, so Nick Velotti, who Nick is our VP of sales. He really, I mean, he’s the stick that stirs the drink, so to speak. And he, you know, we did the men’s fraternity series together, out of Point Of Grace, and then we took it out into the city from there, but he had the green light to start doing things different with his team. And so he started to have a standing open meeting in his office.

09:00 in the morning, you could just sign up for it if you just wanna come in and talk about life. Mhmm. So Nick started having people come in at nine and a lot of times he would start the conversation off with, what do you want? What do you want out of life? What do you want to do?What do you want to be? I don’t expect you to be here the rest of your life. What are some things? If you wanna dream a little bit, what would it be about? And he said he got the deer in the headlights stare nine out of 10 times, and people had no idea what they really, what do they wanna be?

What do they wanna do? What do they wanna learn, what do they wanna go see. And, he started to help these people dream and put these things into more of a formal document, so to speak, on helping them dream a little bit. And then, there was always a financial component to making this stuff happen. And so he started helping people do a budget, which then turned into us offering Dave Ramsey’s courses to our staff and to our team members.But anyway, so Nick started doing these things and it became the stories coming out of it, people completely becoming debt free, people paying cash for engagement rings, people leaving here to start, a guy was starting a hair salon. You know, we had people leave, you know, just different the stories that came out of what he was doing were so powerful, we ended up deciding we ended up writing a book about it called The 9AM Meeting. And a part of that deal, was the was the eulogy. And that’s where you literally write your own eulogy. And that’s a story I love to tell, and I’m probably completely off topic here now.

Jeff Johnson: You’re completely on topic. Please keep telling it.

Doug Eklund: So, it was like, all right, if you go back to like, I’m trying to think of the, oh, it’s a famous book, you know, and one of his big things was Begin with the End in Mind, and I can’t think who wrote it, but it’s like, well, you can’t get much more of an end than if you’re imagining yourself at your own funeral service and what are people saying about you. And so back right at the beginning of the transition, if you want to call it, from being a, you know, edging God out to being all in with both feet, I literally sat down and wrote two eulogies, and I wrote one as if I had died that day. And I saved it, I still got it.It’s a yellow notebook. There’s tears and messed up ink all over this thing about what would people say about Doug Ecklund if he died in 02/2002, ‘2 thousand and ‘3, right around there. It was ugly, and it was one of the most liberating things I ever did though, because it’s like, all right, I don’t want that. And so you flip it over to, okay, we’re jumping in with both feet into a new faith based life, and so I wrote the second one. What would people say about me if I finished strong, lived a great second half, so whatever you wanna call it, and that helped really to flush out, okay, what’s important?You know, it’s not a golf trip. It’s spending time with your kids. Yeah. It’s a quarterly getaway with your wife. It’s a date night.It’s, you know, what are the things that are truly important so that at the end of the road when people are there and you’re in the box and they’re talking about you that you get some really cool stories to hear? And, from there, you just can back it into, okay, well then what’s the next year gonna look like? What’s a month look like? What’s a week look like? What’s a day look like?And then from there, it’s let’s boil it down into what’s a word. So what’s your word? My word was significance, is the word I landed on, and that’s just living a life of value. I certainly you know, don’t have it all figured out. And there’s times like this year, I feel like we’ve got such a great team here at work that, I mean, I’m not as not nearly as necessary here as as I, go back however many years as I used to be, and it’s tough sometimes to, what am I doing here?Am I still doing something that matters? Am I doing something that adds value? And I feel like that’s that’s been one tough thing this year for me has been not feeling like I’m adding any value right now, which but This is this is this is inspirational, Doug, and this is I’m sure this is transformational for a lot of people that are listening to us right now. You remind me of, you know, of course, I quote CS Lewis all the time. Everybody should, but he says, you can’t change the beginning, but you can always change the ending.Yeah. And this is this is the courage that you had in the middle of. I’m sure people are listening and thinking, I’m in college or I’m in the middle of this business or things aren’t working or maybe if things are working, but but the point of your story is to listen to God’s nudge. Yeah. Let a little bit of that pain or a whole lot of that pain do its work.Or it’s a sledgehammer. Or a sledgehammer. And and have the courage to say yes to something different. Yeah. I mean, that’s a very that’s a amazingly courageous thing.And then walk it out. And now look at what’s happened on the back half of all of that.

Jeff Johnson: That’s powerful. So do you I’m curious. Do you mentor people?Do you coach people? Do you I mean, as a leader in a business, you’re always doing that with people around you, but I mean

Doug Eklund: I’ve got there’s one guy, we’ve just been getting together about every month right now, but not, that’s one of those things that should I be doing more of that kind of deal. Yeah. Yeah, there’s a guy that a friend of mine, he owns a business, and he’s got a guy that’s just an up and comer, he’s a world beater, and he’s like but he’s like he’s got all these big life events that are coming at him pretty quick, and he’s like, you know, maybe you could help him not jack it up. Yeah. Hey. I’ve been there and I’ve done that. Right. So I can I’m like, yeah. It’s great.I can show him what not to do and he’ll hopefully learn from it. So, yeah, it’s good. Yeah. Well, I let you know, the people that are listening, they they know that I’m a person that’s involved in recovery. And one of the biggest blessings in recovery is being able to hear these very raw stories from people’s experience. And nine times out of 10, you’ll hear people say, well, here’s what here’s what I would do. So I suggest you do exactly the opposite. Yeah. Right. Because that’s that’s what my best judgment got me.And and you’re talking about being swimming in a wealth of experience. Who who exemplifies courage for you? When you think of courage Oh, my wife would be the first one that pops to mind just because Yeah. I mean, she could have easily, during the whole business nearly going under and me not being a crappy husband, I mean, she could have easily just punted. Yeah. I mean, that’d been pretty easy too, and just, I’m gonna go find somebody that’s gonna treat me the right way. And she didn’t, and she was the one that, that Sunday morning, she woke up and she’s getting ready, and I’m like, What are you doing? She’s like, Julie invited us to go to church. I’m like, Well, you care if I go? And she’s like, No, you should probably come too.I’m like, All right. She’s always been just go, go, go, and her drive to push us through to a whole different, better place in our marriage was so key, you know, and her being open to looking at things a different way was so key, and probably not listening to what the world was telling her. I mean, the world was probably telling her, your husband’s a jackass, you know, and what are you doing with him? And for her to not listen to the world and to go a different direction, probably, I mean, as courageous of a human being as I could think of, So, yeah.

Jeff Johnson: That’s wonderful. How does your faith because your this is what I love so much about your story because it’s almost a divine intervention story, but it still requires obedience on your part to follow through, which is where the real courage comes. You know, you can’t you’re not God’s not gonna drag you along. You know, you’ve got to say yes to him, and that means living a completely different way. I’ve heard people talk about, you know, where our podcast is called the courageous crossroads.You know, crossroads is a 90 degree angle, and I’ve heard people reference the cross of Jesus Christ Yeah. As having 90 degrees, which represents the hardest change that you can make, 90 degrees. We still have to make that change. I’m curious how making that change and saying yes to that and your faith informs your decision making now. I’m envisioning somebody in front of me now who’s who’s more relaxed and listening and empathetic than the person that was starting the business.I think that’d be accurate. Yeah. I mean, it’s you know, we crafted a purpose statement, you know, and it’s to enrich the quality of life of our own and our customers at each interaction. So that’s the purpose statement. So that’s a big that’s the big, you know, are we doing that on a daily basis?Are we trying to enrich the life of our own and our guests? And if we’re doing that, it seems like a lot of other stuff just kind of falls into place, you know, which is nice. And, you know, I’m trying to think of where you’re where we’re going with that. But I mean, it’s just Yeah. Enough.Your faith informing your courageous decisions. Right. So it’s just, you know, we We’ve not been a place where we are pushing a faith message down anyone’s throat, but if you look at our purpose statement and our core values, it’s where it’s based on, and people know it. And people know. I mean, they know that, and they and then when people have questions, I mean, they’ve got Nick, they’ve got myself, they’ve got me.People are here to if they have any questions, you know, this is still you put it in perspective, it’s still a small business. What can we do just to love our people while at the same time If people know you love them and people know that you care about them and you respect them, they’re so much more open to being coached. They’re so much more open to being coached because they know that you have their best interests at heart. They’re not looking at you saying, he’s just trying to eke another $20 out of me for me to sell a little bit more, for me to sell a little bit more, try a little bit harder. They’ve asked me what’s important to me, and they know that I need to have I’m trying to build an emergency fund of a thousand dollars up right now, and that if I did sell these three more things last month, I would have hit a different bonus tier, and I’d be that much closer to hitting my goal of that emergency fund.

So the fact that you know what’s important to them, the fact that you know where they’re trying to get to, when you’re coaching them, you’re coaching them towards that place, and so they’re like, they’re so much more open to it as compared to if you didn’t know a thing about them, you didn’t care about them, you didn’t love them, then all they’re seeing is somebody that’s hammering on them to sell more stuff. Mhmm. It’s like, we of course, we’re a sales organization. We want you to sell more stuff, but the reason we want you to sell more stuff really boils down to the fact that we care about you and what’s important to you. Mhmm. And, you know, when you hit your goals, we pay more, and which changes our margin, but it changes it for the good of everybody. I don’t know. Right. No. See, it this is interesting to me again because I’ve known you for quite some time, but we’ve gotten closer here recently. Yeah. But I’ve never really known what the special sauce, it’s a terrible way to put it, but what what is it about Doug Eklund? And now sitting here learning this about the transition of the business and your faith in doing that, I’ve now I get it. I completely get it. And I love how that precedes people into a room.So now I understand a little bit better. Yeah. Do you think we live in a society that has a courage deficit or Sure. Are are people are people acting courageously all around us or

Doug Eklund: I think people, I mean, I’m one of them. I mean, people like to avoid conflict when they can, and I think that people, courageous, tough conversations are people that have the skill to have courageous conversations, tough conversations are fewer and fewer, I feel like.People hide behind social media, they hide behind text, they hide behind email, and so much gets lost in translation with with those forms of communication. And, so the people that have the ability to sit down and actually have a conversation are they’re fewer and far farther between, and I think it’s because it’s hard. And so many people don’t wanna do hard things, and they just wanna take the easiest path of least resistance in life, and they just kinda take what, I’m just gonna take what life throws at me and just react to what life throws at me, and I think that’s the that’s a big differentiator that we try to going through the 9AM meeting, we try to teach people that there’s there’s two camps. You’ve got the reactive camp, which is just gonna react to what life throws at them, and you got the proactive camp that’s gonna have a plan for my future. I mean, faith is future based, man.And what if if if you can have faith in a future that’s better than your current situation, that’s better than your past, that’s step one moving you towards that. And as compared to just reacting to life and saying, nope, my future is probably not gonna be any different than my past, I’m just gonna take what life throws at me and just kind of react to it and put out the fires as the fires happen. You know, the other person who’s being proactive and they’re engaged in life and they have a I want to have that emergency fund. I want to put 20% down on a house when I buy a house. I want to pay off my car.You know, I want to see the Grand Canyon. Mhmm. I want to go to the, you know, I want to learn a musical instrument. I want to, you know, whatever it might be. I want to break par on the golf course.Mhmm. The people that are engaged in life and have those goals and have those dreams out there, I mean, those are the that’s where the cool stuff really starts to happen. That’s when it’s really fun when you when you learn about people and what’s important to them, and then you can start to see them do those things. It’s just awesome.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah .How do you encourage people to find that courage to make those kind of changes, to listen and to say yes to the Holy Spirit or to yeah. And just to step out courageously. How would you encourage them?

Doug Eklund: We encourage them through we have a it’s a formal process now through the 9AM meeting to help people start off by let’s let’s think back to when you’re a little kid and you get to dream a little bit, you know, because no one when you’re a kid, no one told you you couldn’t be an NBA player, you know, nobody told you that you couldn’t do something. You know, it was, oh, you wanna be a fireman?Heck, yeah. You should be a fireman. Oh, you wanna be an astronaut? You should heck, yeah. You should be.You know? And then you’re making a spaceship out of a cardboard box, you know? I mean, you’re dreaming and you’re having fun. And then life happens, and life starts to beat on you, and starts to hammer on you, and maybe it’s family members, maybe it’s friends, maybe it’s your first job, and someone’s telling that you’re not good enough or that you can’t. And We use the example of the jumping fleas.This is part of the process when we take somebody through it. When you’re a kid, you were that flea, and the flea is the world’s, I believe, greatest jumper or the world’s second greatest jumper. Something like that. They can jump however many hundreds of times higher than their size. So, if you put them in a beaker, they could easily jump out of the beaker.

The experiment goes that they then put a piece of glass over the top, put a glass lid on the beaker, and fleas start jumping up and they start hitting their head into the top. So the fleas now are conditioned into, that’s my max height I can jump, because I keep hitting my head and it hurts and I don’t like that. So that’s the people in life that are telling you, no, you can’t do this. You’re not good enough. Enough.You can’t do that. You’re you’re just a son of a plumber. You know, you’re not good enough to do anything. Right. And so that piece of glass is now your lid and you are stuck.Now the experiment goes, they take the lid off. Do the fleas jump out of the beaker now? No. Because they they’ve been conditioned to the fact that I’m not good enough to jump out of that thing. I can only be here.You put a little heat under the beaker now, and so they start heating it up. Now the fleas are like, this doesn’t feel very good. Well, guess what? They jump right out. Yeah. Because they’re now they had some kind of inspiration for them to jump out. So what we’re trying to do is help people how do we take the lid off? What are those self imposed or family member imposed or whatever your past is that’s keeping you down? How do we eliminate those things and help you break out of them? And that comes down to being engaged in life.And I mean, there’s financial components, there’s goals to it, but I mean, the faith component, it’s there, we talk about it in the book, you know, just how do you truly look at my future can be better than my past, and you know what, I have something to do with it. So That’s fantastic. But the fleas, the eulogy, we try to get everybody to write a eulogy. Yeah. That’s a tough one.I mean, we’ve had guys come in and they’re like, I went home and I told my wife that I was gonna share my deepest goals and my deepest dreams and stuff at work, and she’s like, that’s career suicide, why would you do that? Why would you talk with your boss about all this stuff? I mean, I work at big corporate America, and all you’re conditioned to do is at the water cooler. Hey, how’s everything going? Great.How’s things with you? Great. You know? There’s never it never gets past the surface, and we we we are happy to go deeper than the surface here. And And, again, that comes back to, are we gonna love each other?You know, we’re gonna love God and love people. I mean, it’s just I try we try to keep it pretty simple. And if we’re loving our people, we’re gonna learn about them, we’re gonna care about them, and then provide tools to help them become a better version of themselves. And that’s what’s really fun.

Jeff Johnson: That’s fantastic.Doug, how can people get a copy of your book?

Doug Eklund: I think there’s still some out there on Amazon. It’s just the 9AM meeting, Doug Eklund. Or if somebody lets you know I’ve got a stack of them over here, I’m just happy to send one to somebody. Alright.

Jeff Johnson: we’ll put do you have contact information that we can put in the show notes? Or I’m sure. Yeah. Okay. We’ll put your contact information in the show notes, and we’ll put link to buy the book and show notes.

So if people wanna get it, that’s the way they can do it. And, you’re inspiring me to I did not honestly I mean, I maybe I shouldn’t say this. I didn’t walk in here thinking I was gonna be walking out with this kind of story under my belt, but this is that’s fantastic. So you still have the 9AM meetings.

Doug Eklund: Yeah.Now we’ve got, we’ve got a couple of our district managers who, they’ve got a great heart for God, they’ve got a great heart for people who are now doing the same thing. So it’s because it used to be it was Nick. I mean, Nick, this was his deal. And then when you’ve got people in Nebraska, Northern Iowa, Southern Iowa, Eastern Iowa, I mean, he just, he couldn’t do it. But now when you’ve got a leader in a different area who is, they want to invest in their people too, and so they’re rolling it out.It’s not something we require by any means. It’s really, hey, if you’d like to go through this process, you can go through this process, and it’s got the potential to change your life. And, you know, so some people are wanting to do it, but we’ve got a generally a very young demographic that, you know, it’s kind of a paycheck to paycheck mentality of, you know, I’m gonna make sure I got enough to go out this weekend and have a great time. And hopefully there’s still a little bit left in the tank by the time the next paycheck comes in. But when you can get people to go from that to really being engaged in their life and really looking at what’s, you know, what’s some cool stuff that they can do.

Jeff Johnson: I mean, it’s it’s neat. Investing in people. Doug Ecklund, you’re a man of courage. Thank you so much for sharing with us today.

Doug Eklund: It’s been a pleasure, Jeffrey. And thanks for being my friend.

Jeff Johnson: Yeah. You too. Thank you for joining us today on Courageous. If you’d like to hear more about the work and ministry being done at Crossroads Apologetics, please visit our home on the web at crossroadsapologetics.org.

Would you or someone you know like to be featured on Courageous? Send us an email at info@crossroadsapologetics.com or info@crossroadsapologetics.org, telling us about the most courageous thing you’ve ever done.