Episode 101 – Jerry Bellune – Leaders on Leadership

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Leadership doesn’t come for free. It comes with a price, and sometimes, it could take its toll when you don’t have the mindset to tackle the challenges head-on. In this episode, Dr. Tracey Jones sits down with editor, reporter, newspaper owner, and publisher, Jerry Bellune, to talk about what leadership cost him and how he is overcoming them. He shares his take on loneliness, abandonment, and weariness and then provides great insights around gaining vision and more. Jerry then takes us into his career journey, from editing and working for newspapers to eventually having one of his own called the Lexington County Chronicle, while telling us of the importance of taking care of your people.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Jerry Bellune – Leaders on Leadership

Our guest is Jerry Bellune. Jerry is an editor, reporter, newspaper owner, and publisher. Jerry is the former President of the South Carolina Press Association and was named Journalist of the Year. Jerry has a phenomenal career, decades in the editing, publishing, and reporting journalistic industry, and has a great perspective on what it takes to pay the price of leadership.

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I am tremendously excited because my guest is Jerry Bellune. He coached editors and reporters at more than two dozen newspapers across the country. He is the Editor of two magazines and he started a newspaper executive search firm. In 1984, he and his wife bought a failing weekly newspaper, The Dispatch in Lexington, South Carolina, and they quickly turned it into a highly profitable award-winning newspaper. After disagreements with the majority partner, the Bellunes left The Dispatch News and launched the Lexington County Chronicle in 1992.

After nine years of competition between the two local newspapers, the owner of The Dispatch News asked them to buy him out. In 2006, Jerry was semi-retired from the Chronicle, and his son, Mark succeeded him as editor. In retirement, Bellune started Riverbanks Press, I want to talk about that, publishing eleven books and self-study courses. Jerry is the former president of the South Carolina Press Association and has been named its Journalist of the Year. He is a longtime member of the National Speakers Association and Toastmasters International for which he has helped establish three chapters and served as President and Area Governor.

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Jerry, thank you so much. We are so excited to hear your perspective on the price of leadership.

Thank you, Tremendous Tracey.

You are so welcome, Jerry. I love getting your weekly newsletter. I can't wait to hear from you. You send me some of your books so we're going to talk all about that. Jerry, one of the most requested and most often speeches that my father gave in his life was a speech titled The Price of Leadership. We even have a little book that talks about that. My father always talked about how he was passionate about leadership and leadership is what gives us a purpose for life. We're all called to lead at something but there's also a price you have to pay. It's a daunting price and that's why a lot of times, people will step up to the leadership plate and see the price they have to pay and they will say, “No, this is a little more than I bargained for.” In it, my father talks about four key tenets of leadership and the price you have to pay.

The first price that he talks about in paying the price of leadership is loneliness. A lot of our readers have heard, “It's lonely at the top.” Most of our leadership folks that are reading know that there are times where you truly feel alone or lonely. You've had an extensive career across many different industries. Can you unpack for us, as a leader, what loneliness has meant for you throughout your career? Share some times where you were in that season of loneliness and some tips that you would recommend to our other leaders out there.

I finished reading a book I recommend to you and your readers by David McCullough. He's a historian, but he doesn't write dry history textbooks. He writes books about the people who live the story he's telling. This one is called 1776 so you can imagine that it was about the American Revolution and George Washington, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Nathanael Greene, and all of those real heroes who place their lives, property, and families at great peril to tell King George and British Parliament where they can stick it.

One of the things that struck me in reading about Washington, he had very limited experience in directing troops. He had fought in the French and Indian War as a British officer but when the Continental Congress asked him if he would become commander of the Continental Army, he was hesitant at first. He considered quite an honor that they were bestowing on him. As they wrote Martha Custis, Washington’s wife, he said, “I feel ill-equipped for this job but I'm determined to do my best.” He talked a lot about the loneliness of command.

My experience has been considerably different from that. I know that one of my first real leadership experiences was in the United States Army infantry in Korea back in the ‘50s. I was a squad leader. When we would go on patrol whether it was at night or during the day, I always prefer the day because you can see where you're going and you might not step on the land mine. I always felt like I wanted to take the point. I wanted to be out front. If something happened, I didn't want my guys to get it before I got it.

I was nineteen years old but I always felt like being on the point also, I had the team behind me. It was lonely out there because you didn't quite know where the enemy was, he may have thought you knew where it was, and he may not be but I've always felt throughout my career and my experience in leadership that I connected both above me and below me. I always had a great support group so I never felt lonely.

When I met my wife, we were both editors on a newspaper in South Carolina and we both worked at night so we didn't have much social life but that may have grown us together. She was an Air Force brat. I know you spent your time in the Air Force. She is my ideal female leader. Her judgment, savvy, and ability to read people is much sharper than mine so I've always felt like I had a true partner and companion, not only a wife, who was always there with me, too.

I remember, when we started the Chronicle in our strategic business plan, we were supposed to break into the black and be profitable in the 10th month. Not a lot of businesses are able to break into the black early. Some of them take 2, 3, or 4. Jeff Bezos and Amazon is something around fifteen years before they were profitable and now he can say what they’ve got. I remember waking up early one morning like 3:00 or 4:00, I was lying there in bed, the 10th month had passed, and we were still in the red.

We had reserved funds, our own life savings. We could go for another six months if we had to but I thought, “What have we got ourselves into? Are we in danger of losing our dream?” My wife was all there lying in bed beside me, sleeping blissfully, and I thought, “Why are you over there sleeping? Why aren't you worried with me?” That was a lonely moment. I think was God talking to me, “She's there sleeping blissfully because she has not given up the dream.” It feels real to her. She believes that we're going to be profitable and that we're going to succeed beyond our wildest dreams.

I thought, “You're being foolish. Go back to sleep.” I have not worried about it since. We did break in black 30 days later. We haven't looked back since. COVID-19 has put up a hole in the waterline but we’ve got it patched. Our bottom line is not as good as it was this time in 2019 but few people are. Look at Disney World or Ford Motors. We've got money in the bank and we're still profitable. Maybe we were profitable like this in 2019 and we're profitable like this in 2020 nut we're still profitable. I looked at our numbers for 2019 until July of 2020.

Our bookkeeper got back from her honeymoon so I got the July figures a little later than I normally do and we are profitable in the year and on the month. Compared to 2019, we're not making near as much money as we did. One of the things that have always driven my wife and me is it's not the money. It's the meaning of what you give to the community, our customers, and to your staff. If you take care of them, they will take care of you.

Jerry Bellune: It's not the money; it's the meaning of what you give to the community, your customers, and your staff. If you take care of them, they will take care of you.

Jerry Bellune: It's not the money; it's the meaning of what you give to the community, your customers, and your staff. If you take care of them, they will take care of you.

Beautiful. I love that.

Enough about loneliness. Let’s talk about something else.

I love you said that she had not given up on the dream and that's the last you thought about. Jerry, it's so beautiful because we're still business people, we still have to look at the numbers but you do what you do and you do the best you can do. What good is worrying about it going to do?

Action and strategic thought are going to change things. Sitting around and woe is me is not going to do anything.

I love that you look at your wife, not as a life partner, but as a leader and value her input. That's huge. The second price my dad talked about was weariness. We're still pressing on and we're still looking for the next big thing. My dad always said retirement was a dirty word. He's like, “Retire? Are you kidding me? We still have so much more to do.” How do you stay refreshed because there are ebbs and flows with everything? How do you stay strong, active, engaged, and energetic?

I do believe that whatever talent, energy, and cost of stubbornness is in me is a divine gift. I not only want to take care of my brain, I want to take care of my body. I work out every morning. I worked out with a personal trainer until February 2020 when gyms were closed. I work out on my own. I do pilates, core exercises, and use weights at home. I work out every morning for 40 to 45 minutes. That's important to keep my energy level up and keep myself physically fit.

I try to eat right. I'm a low carb and low-fat guy. I eat a lot of fruits, vegetables, lean meat, a lot of fish, and chicken. I will make a Mediterranean shrimp dish with pasta. I like to cook. My wife cooked the first twenty years of our marriage and after that, she said, “It's your turn. You and the boys take over the kitchen.” That was years ago. She will cook on Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays, and special occasions. She's a beautiful and wonderful cook. Her mother worked for Clemson University. She coached foreign wives and young wives on the economics of managing a household, how to cook, clean, and shop.

She passed a lot of that to my bride. My sons and I enjoy cooking and we have a lot of fun doing it. It's not a chore for me. After twenty years, it became a chore for her. We both read a lot. She's got me trying to give away most of the 15,000 books we've got in this house. I take them and I give them to the Friends of the Library, God's house up the street that sells books for $0.10 or $.025 apiece. I give some of the more popular paperbacks to them because that's their audience. I give the nonfiction motivational books, stuff like Charlie’s speeches that he turned into books. I love The Price of Leadership. It’s a great book and the three wonderful questions. I'm going to write a column about those three questions, why am I here, and you know the other two.

I feel that a part of my responsibility as a child of God is to take care of what He's given me. I thank Him every morning. Mine is almost like The Lord’s Prayer. It's memorized. I thank Him for all the blessings, I know that I don't deserve that He gives me a lot. I thank Him for all the opportunities against me and I asked Him to help me keep my mind and my heart open so that I will recognize the opportunities when they come and with His guidance, I can make good decisions about what to do with them. I thank Him for the challenges because they test my character and they made me more analytical and strategic in my thinking.

I thank Him for whatever guidance He can give me in dealing with the challenges. I ask Him to help me resist temptations. I have my share like everybody else and to put Lucifer behind me. I thank Him for being inside me, Him, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. I know that they're always with me. They will guide me if I listen to them. Lord, please help me keep my eyes, ears, and all my senses tuned to what You have to tell me. I ask in Jesus’ precious name, amen. This is my morning prayer. The dogs and I are out for a walk at 6:00 AM.

Almost every single leader has talked about that time in the morning. The importance of health but also centering on God and realizing who you have with you. If that doesn't give you a kick of energy and peace. I’ve got this. I'm not doing this on my own. What beautiful wisdom. Thank you, Jerry, for sharing that.

I always think of that great painting of Christ in Gethsemane. He knows what's going to happen in the next three days. He knows it's going to be a terrible physical ordeal for Him as a person. He’s the son of God, the son of man, and the son of Mary. He's asking God to give him the strength to endure it, to get through it, to do what has to be done, and to forgive all of our sins. When I think about prayer, I think of Him in Gethsemane of what He was facing and I think about how lucky I am that my challenges in this life are going to be nothing like that.

Dad talked about loneliness. We covered weariness. The next point he talked about was abandonment. Those of us with the entrepreneurial spirit never have a shortage of things that we like to focus on or if you’re the next greatest idea, but my father talked about the abandonment of getting rid of what you want and like to think about in favor of what you need and ought to focus on. I look at abandonment as hyper-focus and it's so easy to mission drift or go, “I don't know if this is working. I might do that.” You have had this vision from the minute you got into your field, you stayed focused on your business and have been successful at it, how did you maintain that sense of abandonment and focus, Jerry?

I think of it as decluttering your life. My wife is a great aide to me in that. For instance, I talked about our book collection. I love those books. I have a self-written index in the back of them. If I find them on page 39 that I like, I'll underline it or highlight it with a yellow highlighter, and I'll write in the back book, “Strategy #14, page 39.” When I pick up that book again later, I can look in the back, “Here, I've got an index of the twenty best ideas in that book and I know exactly where they are.”

If I'm going to give a speech about leadership, I've got a collection of 100 books on leadership. Everybody who's ever written a book about leadership. Some are from you and your dad. I look through some of them and I’m going to say, “What have I not talked about lately?” If I'm looking to write up a newspaper column, I write a weekly column called The Editor Talks with You. It's a personal dialogue between me and our 30,000 readers. They respond to me. At the end of the column, I always say, “I’d like to hear what you think about what we've been talking about.” I get emails and handwritten letters from them. There’s one that came in. He copied something off the internet on the back of it that he wanted me to read. I get 5 or 6 letters like this a week. There's a dialogue going on there.

Getting back to abandonment, my wife who is my severest critic and my most loyal supporter says, “We’ve got to get rid of some of these books. Your desk is a mess. Why don’t you go clean up? Save the stuff that needs to be saved. Throw away the stuff that you no longer need. Declutter your life so you've got more time to spend with me.” That's my take on abandonment. Get the trash out of your life and keep the stuff that's worth it.

Jerry Bellune: Always take care of your people. You lose the best ones but enjoy them while you’ve got them and send them on their way with a hug.

Jerry Bellune: Always take care of your people. You lose the best ones but enjoy them while you’ve got them and send them on their way with a hug.

Those are such great insights. That’s loneliness, weariness abandonment. In the last point, he talks about the fourth price of leadership which is vision. Vision is one of these words that scares most of us mere mortals, “Am I a visionary?” My father talked about vision as simply seeing what needs to be done and doing it because a lot of people are good at talking about vision, but it has that integration and execution. How do you gain vision on what's next? How do you gain clarity on where to go next?

Let me tell you a little personal story. This goes back many years ago after I got out of the army, went back to college, and got a job in the daily newspaper in Charlotte, North Carolina. Charles Curl was one of my colleagues, Marion Hargrove, the guy who wrote See Here, Private Hargrove, which was a bestseller back in the ‘40s. It’s about his experiences in the army in World War II. He later became a movie and television producer. That was the kind of people I was working within this newspaper. I had a good friend in my hometown in South Carolina.

He and I had been talking about doing some writing together. He was a playwright. My long-term goal was to follow Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck's model, get into journalism, get a good taste of life and experience, learn the journalistic skills of interviewing, research, gathering information, and become an author. That was the dream. Looking back, I know that mine was living a lonely life. It's monastic. Hemingway would get up at 5:00 AM. Nobody was around to bother him and write for 4 or 5 hours. He had the rest of the day to go fishing, hunting, or whatever else he wanted to do.

I thought many times since, “God, you spared me a lonely life. You've got me into journalism where I've worked with people.” I'm a people person and you are too. I mean that as a sincere compliment. I took a year off. I told my boss, “I want to take an unpaid sabbatical and if you want me back at the end of the year and I'm not already in demand as a playwright, novelist, or whatever, I'll come back and work for you.” I took a year off.

Joe and I wrote a full-length movie script based on an experience he had in World War II. He was older than me. I was writing a novel at that time about my experiences in Korea as an infantry grunt. He and I came up with three concepts for a television series. One of them was intriguing was called The Infamous. It was about people who were infamous like Adolf Hitler and some who were quasi infamous like Napoleon and Black Beard.

These were our long scripts that were history as live drama. This was back during, what I would call the golden age of television when there wasn't a lot of live drama and comedy on television. We went to New York and we found an agent with the William Morris Agency. They agreed to represent us and we went happily back to South Carolina working on scripts and sending them off to New York. After a while, the guy wouldn't even return our phone calls. After a while, I'm starting to run out of money.

I called my old editor in Charlotte and said, “Come on up. Let’s talk.” A friend of mine, a fraternity brother, works at The State newspaper in Columbia and he told me, “There’s an editor down there, Lloyd Huntington, that you ought to meet. He's looking for people like you.” I knew if I went back to Charlotte, I'm still going to be treated like the kid I was when I first went to work there. The first boss never gets over that picture of you as the Green Hornet you once were. I won a Green Hornet. I worked for three years. I covered cops, courts, murders, you name it. I called Lloyd and I said, “I understand that you’re looking for an editor.” He said, “I am. Why don’t you come down here and let's talk.” He was in Columbia, South Carolina. I’d gone to Carolina so I was familiar with his newspaper. It was the morning and afternoon newspaper. This was back when there were afternoon newspapers.

I left home at 5:00 AM and drove to Columbia so I could get down here in time to go to the newsstand and get that morning's issue of the State and the afternoon issue of the Columbia Record. I would read them before I went to see Lloyd. I want to know what they were doing. I wanted to see how good it was. I want to see what I might suggest to improve them. I want to be able to have a conversation with him about his work. I've had more kids coming in and I even send them copies of our newspaper and I say, “Read this and have three ideas for me about what you would do if you came to work with us to make it a better reading experience for our readers or better sales experience for our advertisers.”

Some of them don't even bother to do it so the first question I ask is, “What do you think of the paper?” “I didn’t have time to read it?” I’ll say, “Joe, let me tell you something. If you're serious about working with us, you go home and read the paper. After you read the paper, you sit down and you write down three things that you want to tell me that I should be doing to make this a better newspaper. You call me and we'll get back together again.” I never hear from him after I send him the paper. It’s a low note that says, “Be ready to give me three ideas on how we can make this a better newspaper.”

I went in to see Lloyd. He’s a great guy. The only thing was his desk is clean. I've never seen an editor with a clean desk. There was a picture of his family on the wall and all the credenza behind him. It must have been twenty tennis trophies and he looked like a tennis player. Tan, lean, and look liked he could take names. We sat down at a little table in his office. He didn't get on behind the desk. He sat down collegially and he said, “Have you had a chance to read The State?” I said, “Yes, sir, I have. I read The Columbia Record too.”

He said, “What do you think is the better newspaper?” He also said that he wants the truth. I said, “The Columbia Record is the better newspaper. I know The State is the flagship morning newspaper. In circulation, you've got four times readership of the Columbia Record but the Record is different.” He said, “It's more like the Charlotte News. It’s personal. It tells stories on a personal way. It addresses the reader and asks them questions.” He said, “Let me tell you, the publisher lets me do whatever I want to do with the Record but he wants The State to be the majestic monarch of heirlooms. He wants it to be a newspaper with thundering influence. All I want to do is I don't want to take the thunder away. I want to warm it a little bit for our readers. Come to work for me on The State. You may help me warm it up.”

He sat back and began to talk about his vision of a newspaper that embraced its readers and tried to make a complicated world and understand them. He thought in terms that readers could understand that didn't use 25-sentence innocent words like Churchill used plain old 1 and 2 syllable Anglo-Saxonisms. I thought, “You're going to offer me that job. I was this kind of guy.” This is the beginning of a novel I'm writing, six months later, he collapsed in the hall with a stroke and die. For the staff of both newspapers, it destroyed morale.

A few weeks after the funeral, came the office politics. People were jockeying for bigger. The managing editor moving up to the executive editor. The assistant managing editor moves up to managing editor. The city editor moved to assistant managing editor. I sat back and watched all that was going on. What horse buggy. I didn't come down here to play politics. I came down here to edit a great newspaper so I'm staying out of that and I did.

A month after that, the publisher and the board decided to do something unusual. It took the guy who’s in-charge of State House Coverage. We had three reporters, including himself covering the South Carolina State House. One covered the House, one covered the Senate, one covered the governmental agencies. Their job was to have a story for me to put on page one every day. Something that would grab people's attention about what legislators were doing with their tax money and what stupid regulations were being imposed. That sharp-as-a-knife journalism. He had done a great job and he had half of legislator with it because they never knew when his life was going to come.

The publisher thought, “I need a real cowboy like Lloyd in this job. The managing editor is a nice guy. He's a real sweetheart, the staff loves him, and he's not a rammer. He’s not the guy that's going to kick people out. He had a great newspaper.” They reached over in the left-field and they brought Wickenburg. Wickenburg and I thought we were like this. He didn’t slap me in the face. We brought in our own fraternity brother as news editor including over me.

I told my wife, “I'll get my resume up. My old city editor at Charlotte had gone to New York and he called me. He told me, ‘I need a good editor here. Do you think that you and your wife would move to New York?’” She was pregnant and I said, “Do you want to move with me to New York? Our child will be born in New York.” A month before Christmas where we don’t know anybody except the guy who offered me a job. She's an Air Force brat. She said, “I'm used to moving. Go for it. It’ll be an adventure.” I've taken Lloyd's dream and it's become our dream. You're not going to believe this, Tracey. I edited thirteen newspapers at one time. I had a lot of other editors helping me do it but I was the big boss. I have taken that train through 26 newspapers. We edited two newspapers and this is our dream. This will be a newspaper that embraces its readers. That’s our vision.

Uncover Your Inner Sales Genius

Uncover Your Inner Sales Genius

Jerry, anything else that you would like to leave with our leaders that are reading that we haven't already touched on?

I'll give you a couple of things that proved beneficial to my wife and our sons. One is, never ask anybody to do anything you wouldn’t do yourself. If it’s cleaning a grease trap in the army and you want someone to clean it, you’ll be willing to do it yourself. If it’s vacuum the carpets, carrying out the trash, doing the dishes in the kitchen, or at the office, you will do it and set an example by doing it. My son and I take out the trash and do the dishes. We don't make their mother do it. She's doing plenty of other things, believe me. The only thing is when you hire people, design the job that you want them to do as if you were going to do it yourself. Make it the most exciting job you can make in the world.

Always remember Martin Luther King's speech about the street sweeper. He said in one of his sermons, “If God assigns you to be a street sweeper, be the best street sweeper you can be. It doesn't matter what you're doing in life, be the best you can be.” That's what people rise to. If you offer them a job that, for a second, you know that they’ve got to carry around all day and they'll go work for you long because if they’ve got any brains at all, they're going to go find a better job. Someone who gives them some responsibility and respects their ability to think strategically.

In the morning, at 9:00, our staff and I meet. Our news editor and our sports editor meet with us remotely on Zoom but the rest of the staff is there, the sales team, the bookkeepers, and all of us are there. The first thing we do is have a report from the bookkeeper on our finances. I want our people to know that this is not only a cause but a business and we have to be profitable. If we can’t be profitable, we're not going to be any good to the community because we won't be able to support the stuff.

Afterward, we talk about what everybody else is doing. We talk about how we stand on subscriptions, how we stand on advertising, and what are the stories and photographs that we've got the next week's edition. What are the stories we're going to be working on and posting on our website? We posted eleven stories on our website. I got the analytics for July 2020. Our visits to our website are north of 50,000 visits in one month. That's 1,600 plus visitors a day. Most of them in 8 to 9 hours during so do the math.

There’s a lot of people reading our news. We pulled out a lot of the stuff. We put it out and put it in the printed edition. We publish two newspapers. We have a free newspaper called The Lake Murray Fish Wrapper. That's where we live. Outside these windows is Lake Murray, it’s 45 miles long and 18 miles wide here in Central South Carolina. It’s one of the best striped bass fishing in the world. We have striped bass fishing forums here. People come from other countries to compete in these tournaments. This is where we want to live. That was our dream when we were in New Jersey. Coming home to South Carolina, getting the local newspaper, and living on Lake Murray and we did it.

Congratulations, Jerry. I love you wrapping that up. How can folks get in touch with you? What's your newspaper? How did they get access to all that you're putting out?

The print and digital subscriber newspaper is called the Lexington County Chronicle. We're in a county with 300,000 people. You can go online to LexingtonChronicle.com. A lot of states or communities, because Lexington and Concord, adopted a Lexington. My wife and I drove up to New Mexico several years ago and we stopped in every Lexington in every state from here to New Mexico. We visit the newspaper editors and publishers there. We had a great time. My personal website where my books are and where you can sign up to get my free business blog newsletter that comes out every week is JerryBellune.net. You can also do .com or .biz, it'll go to the same site.

You can get one of my free books there which you and Leo got called Uncover Your Inner Sales Genius. The reason I chose that name was I had a young lady working for me. She was our first neighborhood columnist. She wrote something called Around Lexington. Judy was one of those fireballs. She knew everybody in town. She wrote this wonderful column that had 75 to 80 local names in it every week. She got offered a job by the power company, The Oconee Utilities South Carolina Electric and Gas to sell gas to builders to put gas in the homes for cooking, eating, or whatever.

They offered such a deal with stuff I couldn't offer like golden parachutes, health insurance, and all the snow globes little guys like us can’t afford. I encouraged her and she didn’t believe me. She said, “I've never sold anything.” I’m like, “Judy, you sold me on you.” She is their top gas salesperson. I wrote a piece about that and all of us have hidden talents and we’re not aware that we have. They all come from you know where and we're sold if we use them.

I said, “I lost one of the best columnists we had because I encouraged her to take another chance.” One of the things that always impressed me about Lou Holtz, Lou came down here and coached the game for five years and did a marvelous job. One of the things he told us all once we were out at Carolina Stadium for dinner, he said, “I am so proud of my assistant coaches.” He started naming so-and-so was at Notre Dame, Texas State, and University of Southern California.

These are all head coaches now who coached for Lou at William and Mary, Wisconsin, Notre Dame, and South Carolina. I want to train our guys to be head coaches too. He said, “I know I'm going to lose them and miss them. I know there's another guy coming down the pike is going to be as good as them. I'm going to tutor him and I'm going to develop him up.” I've always thought, “Always take care of your people. You lose the best ones but enjoy them while you’ve got them and send them on their way with a hug.”

Jerry, thank you so much. To our readers out there, please reach out to Jerry. Get on his website and sign up for his weekly newspaper that comes out. I know I love seeing it come to my inbox. Check out his books and please subscribe to our channel at Tremendous Leadership Leaders on Leadership. Please if you would do us the honor, drop us a comment, we answer all our comments, leave us the honor of a review or rating or share this with other leaders who are out there making a difference in people's lives. Jerry, thank you again so much for all that you brought to our readers.

Tremendous Tracey, thank you for the opportunity. It’s a wonderful conversation.

It has been. It’s been a joy getting to know more about you and your journey. You have taught me a great deal. Thank you so much. To our readers out there, thanks for being part of our tremendous tribe. Have a tremendous rest of the day and keep paying the price of leadership.

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