Willis Johnson: Wealth Means Nothing Without THIS | Engage Your Destiny Podcast with Ben Peterson

Well, the first location we bought, we went and prayed. It was five acres. We went and prayed on all four corners and gave it to the Lord. Who wants to give a junkyard to the Lord? Well, it's the Lord's junkyard. It's a wrecking yard that the Lord owns and he's ran with it and we've... and that's why I said I prayed over every acquisition I did. I just think that... I really don't know how to answer that. He just has blessed us from day one. And if something comes out wrong, I don't blame him. It's just life. Sometimes life's cruel, but it's not his fault. It just happens. You just got to get over it.

Well, we're not that smart. I mean, he made us, so why? Why? It's like me ever questioning my mom. She made me. What my mom said was gospel. Whatever she said, I believed it. Right or wrong didn't matter. She was never wrong in my eyes. She made me. God made me. So why do I need to question his decision? What's going to happen in this world? I know my job is to take care of my family and take care of America and take care of the right politicians in America, because if America goes down, the world goes down. That's just the way it's going to be. God gave America to us and he can take it away. So we need to get more Christian leaders in America now, which I feel a lot better about. It just never... never had that in my mind.

Yeah, they do. I don't know how to solve that problem. I look at it this way: God made pastors and that's their calling. Just like you have a calling. My calling was to run a business, make a lot of money, give a lot of donations out, help a lot. You be the funnel of the money that all these charities need to help. I'm not a pastor or a Sunday school teacher, but I know how to run a company and make money and get money out to the people that do.

Most of the companies I bought were mom and pops. They owned one or two locations and built it from the ground up, and I built mine from the ground up. So we talked better. My competitors were college graduates who learned how to buy companies and worked only on numbers. I couldn't care less how much that company was making. They came in with nice suits and fancy cars and wanted to go to a steakhouse. Me, I wanted to go to a Cracker Barrel, shoot the breeze, eat some banana pudding, or say, 'Why don't we get together in the morning?' and the wife would say, 'I'll cook breakfast.' So I'd come over and we'd have breakfast. I got into their life, not just going to dinner. Usually, about 65% of the time, the wives ran the inside of the company and the husband ran the outside. He couldn't run the inside. He ran the forklifts, trucks, and that stuff—I call him a gopher. She ran the inside. But when she got grandkids, she told her husband she was done working, and when she was done, he decided to sell. I called every one of my competitors every six months to see if they wanted to sell, because if their kids were on drugs, the wife didn't want to work, they weren't making enough money, they lost some insurance or cars to a competitor—you never know what kind of day they're having. I'd call and say, 'You interested in selling?' I didn't care what their books were. My competitors would say, 'We'll pay you five or six times earnings.' But in a mom and pop business, you can't count earnings because they're all driving Mercedes, have boats, and everything's on the company. You can't tell what kind of money they're making because they're private. The college guys say you got to pay on earnings. I'd go in and say, 'How many cars you doing?' I knew how much money I'd make on them. I didn't care what they were making. So I'd give them a price that sometimes might be 10 times earnings. I call it the broom account, because if you go to their house, they had swimming pools and diamond rings. They were living really good. It's not all reported. That's just how life is. If you own a pizza parlor as a mom and dad, you might have sold 35 pizzas but only rung up 20. It is what it is. So I'd usually make a deal and pay them more. I'd say, 'Okay, I'll buy your company for this, lease your land for 10 years, pay you this much rent, with an option to buy it in 10 years for this kind of money. I'll give you all your accounts receivable, and you'll lease my land and buy it out. I'll give you a cost of living adjustment every two and a half years and this big chunk of money.' Usually we could make a deal within an hour and a half, two hours. I'd sit down with a yellow pad, write down six or seven items, shake hands, and send it to my lawyers in California. The next morning they'd fax me the contracts, and I'd go back through them. I'd say don't sign them because most of them didn't have attorneys and had lousy accountants. I'd say, 'Hire a good attorney firm; it might cost you 15 or 20 grand, and have your accountant do your numbers. If you get a bad attorney, we'll never get a deal done. With a high-priced attorney, he knows all the legalities and we'll do everything honest.' So we could handshake a deal within five days, have a contract done, then I'd do environmental checks for 30 days. By that time, my integration team was training people, putting in new computers, handling accounts receivable and payable. We'd collect their accounts over three or four months and give it to them because they already sold the vehicles. That helped swing the deal.

Well, I had a dismantling facility and I specialized because I couldn't compete with all the other guys. So I specialized in Chrysler, Dodge, and Plymouth. Then I opened up a mini truck yard in the early 70s when they just started coming out. Then I opened up a foreign car yard. Then I went to LA and saw a guy who built a yard called Pick-a-Part, Self-Service Wrecking Yards. I liked it. So I came back and opened up a big one I called You Pull It. It was 12 acres. First day, 800 people came through, paid 50 cents each to get in and pull parts. It was a gold mine. So I had all these dismantling facilities and opened parts houses because if you sell a used motor, they need oil and filters. I went to Taiwan and bought aftermarket cheap metal and radiators and shipped them to my facilities. Then Iacocca wanted to change Chrysler, so I met with his people and bought a lot of factory shut-down engines, transmissions, motors, carburetors—stuff they had when they shut down. I bought it for five or ten cents on the dollar because you had to take 5,000 carburetors, hundreds of rear ends. They had no buyers for that much. I was buying so much that Chrysler said it's okay, pay us in six months or a year. They trusted me, no interest. I just took it and sent them checks as I sold it. I became a distributor all over the country. Our company got big, and I was buying so many cars at salvage auctions that one of the guys wanted to retire, so I bought his auction. I really liked that auction business. So I had the You Pull It yards, parts houses, wrecking yards, specialized yards, and built up five auction houses. Our competitor went public in Southern California. I didn't even know what public was. I never paid attention to the stock market. I read they went public and asked how they did it. I read a prospectus and told my wife they didn't have to pay the money back. They raised money on Wall Street with nothing about paying it back, but you give up some ownership. So I called attorneys in the Bay Area and said I want to take the company public. They brought in investors for a private placement. I gave them 26% of the company for $10 million, had to pay interest, and had to go public within five years. I took the money, went on a road show, went public within a year, and paid them all back. Then I had money from Wall Street to raise more and just started buying companies and built a conversion team to integrate them. I changed them to our company name and policies. I'd already built computer systems back in the 80s with big reel-to-reels and did a lot of programming. So I knew what I wanted to do to grow. You have to be top-notch on computers. Today we have 1,800 programmers and engineers. They take care of our websites, programming, and engineering because we're gigantic. We have to communicate with every tow company, body shop, auto dismantler, insurance company, car rental company, and manufacturer in America every day. So we have a system that can talk to them all at once because we're bringing in thousands and thousands of cars a day.

Out of the company. I didn't go buy a big home. We lived in a trailer house. All the profit I had went back into cars. I just kept buying cars. My wife was good with it. She said, 'We got to build this company up.' So all the money we made, we dumped it back in the company.

But I didn't borrow money. I got one $50,000 SBA loan right after I got started, and when I paid it off, International Harvester financed some trucks and a couple forklifts. After about four or five years, I got them paid off. I said, 'I don't want to owe no money.' So I never borrowed any more money after that. We just grew out of growth. When we went public, I went back to Wall Street three or four times to raise money. You give up ownership, but I raised money to invest in the company. I also bought a lot of companies with stock because we were a public company. So I used stock and cash, but we kept growing. Now we make a lot of money, so whatever we buy, we buy with cash.

I'm 78.

I don't know. I still watch over a lot of our divisions overseas and help a lot of the execs in my company who started with me when they were in their early 20s. They're in their 50s now. They listen to me. I go into the corporate office and brainstorm with them all the time. I call our overseas operations because I know all the guys we put in place. So I'm usually busy a couple hours every day in the morning, because overseas there's a six to eight hour difference. I'm up at five o'clock. This morning I was talking to the UK. I get involved with them and just give them advice. I don't tell them how to run it. They're open to me and tell me their heartaches and problems, and I tell them how to solve it. It keeps me busy. But I don't have to go to work every day. These people have been with me for years, and I love them like kids. I want to hear about their family problems. You get really close. There's a difference between an entrepreneur founder running a company and a hired gun. Hired guns do it for money and don't have that love affair. Me and Jay, we have a love affair with all the people. We're big shareholders in the company. We're not going anywhere. Once you get a certain amount of wealth, you don't need no more. So you just keep the stock and it keeps giving you more ownership. You just don't need the money. The best thing you can do is take care of the employees you have and dream up new ways of helping them. When COVID happened, we didn't lay nobody off. We said, 'Look, we make a lot of money. Let's just keep paying everybody. We'll get through this. We'll do less cars because fewer people are driving and getting wrecks.' But it's okay. We make less money, but we're not going to lose employees. We didn't do that because they've been with us for a lot of years. You can't punish them.

Well, I think first of all, they got to find the job they like to do. Probably the most satisfying thing. Everybody can't run a company, but you can find what you like to do. Going to a job you don't like is not fun; it hurts you. Even if you make less money, do the job you like. You go home happy with your family. But if you go to a job where you can make more money, but you're not happy, the eight hours go by really slow. If you're doing something you like, that's good. Then you got to keep your family together. The best thing for a young family with a wife and kids is to take your kids to Sunday school. They want to sing 'This Little Light of Mine.' There ain't a better song in the world. So they just got to stay in faith and stay with family. No matter how tough your family is, you got to back your family no matter what. After God, family comes first. They just got to build that kind of life.

Got to back up what got them there. My dad could only read. He was an alcoholic too. When me and my wife got married, I ran a wrecking yard for him. But we couldn't get along because he drank. But I loved him and he loved me. When he drank, he got rowdy. So you just got to avoid it and say, 'Hey, I got to take care of my family no matter what.' So we moved. I said, 'I don't want this to cause a problem.' My dad was a really good guy, but I think he drank because his business got busier and he couldn't handle it. The alcohol took the pressure off. None of us eight kids drink. I owned a vineyard for 15 years, but I didn't drink. It was a cool thing to have in California.

I guess I don't know no better. I just never want to take the chance of letting him down. He gave me life and a wonderful wife, kids, and relatives. I just don't know that I'd ever want to even think that way. It never enters my mind. Life's been too good. I'm just a blessed person. If I died tomorrow in a car wreck on the way home, that's fine. Life was good to me, and my family and relatives. I don't know what else to say, but life's good. The military was good for me too. Even though I was drafted, it was the best training. I don't think I could have gone to college and learned as much as my DI and commanding officers taught me. They taught me chain of command and everything that makes a good structured man. I think every young man should be in the military for a couple years. It's the best training in the world. If you don't have to go overseas, just go through the training. We spent two years climbing in the mud with tear gas on your face; you go, 'Time to grow up.' At 18, it's fun. I loved every minute of it—crawling under barbed wire with booms going off, bivouacking, watching out for razorback pigs in Louisiana. They teach you how to tear a gun down and throw a grenade. Even the hippies in there enjoyed it. It changed their lives. Military is good for people, good for women and men. It's a good thing for America. Every time you meet a military guy, they're appreciative. I never meet a bad one. They're glad they did it. I see them in a restaurant, go say hi, thank them, often pick up their meal. They're happy even though they're underpaid. I think one of the biggest mistakes this country made was not having mandatory service after World War II. They could have instituted it then and it would have changed generations. It trained you how to exercise every day, follow rules. It's an unbelievable deal. You get to travel for free. They don't pay you much, but you travel. Cigarettes were only 10 cents a pack at the BX. I didn't smoke when I went in. But we were on the beaches and the DI said, 'Everybody have a smoke break.' Everyone lit up. Me and another guy didn't. He said, 'Hey Johnson, you're not smoking.' I said no. He said, 'Come over and help me unload the truck.' I thought that's not good. So the next day I asked a guy for a pack of cigarettes and lit one up. He said, 'Johnson.' I said, 'I'm having a smoke break.' He said, 'Oh, okay, never mind.' So I kept smoking until about a year after I got home from Vietnam, then stopped.

Believe it or not, I'm still pretty tight. I spend a lot of money, but I still like to get a bargain. I watch my money. You could be worth billions of dollars, but you still say, 'That's too much money. That's just stupid.' I'd rather help somebody out with it before I buy something stupid like a $10,000 Rolex. Why do I need that? I have a phone now. I don't even need a watch. I got a lot of cars, but they all go up in value. They're an investment. I've had some go up three or four times in value over time. At least I tell my wife that. Doesn't mean it's true.

God, I want you to watch over Engage Your Destiny. It's a pet peeve of mine. I love the military and think when a guy goes into a war zone, he needs to know you're watching over him. If he passes away, you've got him. If he lives, you got him. Engage Your Destiny is an unbelievable foundation that needs all the blessings you can give. Watch over Ben as he goes through his life of growing this foundation. Give him all the blessings you can. Amen.