Barry Meguiar 00:00
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Ignite. I have a great story to tell you, particularly at this time of year when we had graduating students going out looking for jobs. I mean, it’s proliferating. It’s happening everywhere. And for all my years, I’ve been amazed. I’ve watched it happen with great interest in my own family and in my church. Kids I know, they go through church they’ve lived in church their whole lives they go through christian college and now they got to get a job and my point is that it’s amazing how quickly that all the teaching and the scriptures all that the altar times whatever all of a sudden kind of fades away by the time they’ve been turned down six or seven or eight times is now it’s like where are you God, he’s right there but they lose faith so it’s their first test in the real world and they’re not doing so well with it. You might say they’re failing the test. So I spoke at University of East Coast a little earlier and I dealt with that, particularly for the graduating students. And I said, how would you like to go out on the job market with no fear? You know, whenever you fear, you’re shouting the message of God, I don’t trust you, God. That doesn’t make God very happy. So obviously we shouldn’t be doing that. So how do we, how do we address any of the problems in our lives without fear?
You know, I wrote this book, Ignite Your Life. The byline on the front of the cover says, defeat fear effortlessly. I’m weak and free. God, help me. I want to have faith. God, I trust you. I trust you. This is basically shouting to God, I don’t trust you. If I trust God, he knows it. I don’t need to tell him. I’ve been in so many prayer meetings where people are yelling, they’re just, we trust you, God. I don’t have to tell him. I don’t have to tell him. I trust God, explicitly 100% of the time. So, I’m going to tell you a life lesson that goes back for me back when I wasn’t just right out of college, but it was fairly early on. I was building this, our brand and the retail market, and it’s time to go to the big box stores, the Targets, the Walmarts back in that day.
Kmart is the biggest of all. And they all told me, you got to go on television. If you go on television, we’ll put you on our shelves. So I went to our family board meeting and half the ownership, half the company was owned by a brother, a half-brother, and he, none of them waxed their cars, none of them wanted to be in the retail market. They basically hated me.
But we had some outside board members because of them and my dad and me, I usually got the vote by one vote. So, we did this and we committed. And you commit those dollars in the fall, for sale, for ads you’re gonna have in the spring and so we did that and ended up every one of those buyers told me no, every single one of them told me no. They, they had good relationship and respect for me, but they said, you know the buyer in the case of a big department store, drug store, whatever. I don’t care what the cosmetics, what have you, but the buyer is just the Cleary House. And then they go to the merchandise manager, Vice President Merchandising, their committee and each one told me their committee didn’t believe that a company are small would spend that kind of money on [unintelligible] and they’re right, we would. We were doing like, I think we’d finally made it up to about 12 million, and we just committed like 3 million to a TV ad campaign. It was outrageous. They didn’t believe we’d do that. So, when I got those no’s, I want you to know that I was disappointed, of course. I really needed their business. But more importantly, my goal was not to get business from them. My goal was to lead them closer to Jesus.
And from then to now, that has been my goal. Wherever I go, I just want to lead people closer to Jesus. And I know when I do that, that God will make it good. Because that’s His promise in Romans 8:20. You live for my purpose to seek and save the loss and I’ll make everything work for good, okay? So I knew the end result would be fine but in the meantime these guys are telling me no, but I just loved on them. And I smiled at them and I said, you know, I so want to earn your favor and I love you and thank you for investing time into my life and I’ve taken copious notes and things you said I should start doing and I’m going to start doing those things. I could earn your favor. Anything I pray for you about, anything, I just had good relationships with them.
But the end result was they told me no. That was not real popular with my family, instantly. The board meeting after that happened went down. That’s a whole other story. I’ll save that for another time. But you get the drift. Here’s the deal. We get to the big trade show, okay? It’s a massive trade show. And now we have like, I don’t know, maybe 40 people in our booth at the trade show. By the way, Karen still goes right to the booth and sits down and starts working. I said, you know, you’re 80 years old. You don’t need to do that anymore. She said, I love it. It’s her life and she has, we have known her for 50 years but back in the early days, it was just Karen to me. And you had to wear high heels. She had the high high heels, okay? And she stood all day for four days. And she didn’t go to the bathroom. Should I say that? We didn’t. We couldn’t leave.
We couldn’t get a bite to eat because if we left, there were two or three bars we had to have. We just had to talk to. And if one of them would come by and I was occupied, we’d miss that person.
We’d be a waste of the show. We couldn’t do that. So we both worked all day, every day. And on the third day of the show, when we were especially tired in the afternoon, the owner of one of the big trade magazines came by, stopped by, and he said, Hey, Barry and Karen, we’d like you to join us for dinner tonight. Okay.
We’re going to have all our retailers in. We do this every year. We have a big group. And so we’d like you to join us. Well, I’ve got to tell you, our plans for the evening was as soon as the show was over, go back to our room and take our shoes off and order room service.
Because we had to be back there at 9 o’clock the next morning. But he said that. I looked at Karen, and Karen says to me, we need to do it. Bless her heart. She gave me such an incredible wife. She’s been with me every step of the way. She’s never failed. She’s always there. And so she said, okay, we’ll go. So there we are. And we knew what it’d be like. It was Gina and Giorgetti’s, a great restaurant, crowded restaurant in Chicago. And it was just amazing. And of course, back in those days, it was cigarette smoke. So it’s like you can’t hardly see anybody for all the cigarette smoke. And we don’t drink. And it’s foul language. And any place we’d rather be than there. That’s not our crowd. But we suffered through it. And then he said, okay, now we’re going to do awards. At the end of the dinner, we thought we could finally escape. And he said, now we’re going to do awards. Well, we’re stuck. We can’t leave. So we’re going to have to labor through this as well, right? So they gave the award.
They said, okay, one that we have the most fun with is vendor of the year. And of course, you folks decided, we’d give out the ballots, but you’re the ones, the big box retailers, they’re the ones, they’re buyers. They’re the ones that make the decision. And who they want to honor is… As vendor of the year, now you understand a vendor, if you don’t know the term, it means that you’re a supplier. You know, when they take your products and put your products on their shelves, you’re a vendor. Okay, you got it. So this is for their vendor of the year. Of all the people, every one of those buyers probably has, I don’t know, 30 vendors. A lot of them go back for a lot of years. You’d be a buyer for a while and all of a sudden you go to dinner with your vendors. It’s the old buddy system. And I’m a white guy, punk kid from California, okay? Not unlike young people today going out trying to get a job.
I’ve liked any of those two things together. Here’s how it works. So they Announce Vendor of the Year. And this year’s winner is Barry Meguiar. I’m not a vendor. I’m not selling… any of them. They have all these vendors with years of experience and they voted collectively for me to be vendor of the year. And they gave me a trophy. I have a few trophies. You get trophies when you live long enough, you get trophies for that. This is my biggest one. Look at this trophy. Vendor of the year. Can you believe that? It’s unbelievable. This is my most treasured trophy. You know why? Because it reminds me of God and His faithfulness and the fact of the matter is I wasn’t their vendor, but you know what? I loved on them. I loved on every one of them. I knew their wives’ names, their kids’ names, sometimes their pets’ names and I ministered to them and loved on them. Guess what? It happened.
God makes everything work for good and the next cycle around we got, we couldn’t ship it fast enough. The truckloads and truckloads and truckloads and stuff that went out. That’s a whole other story. The point being at that moment, we hadn’t sold anything and they had to be as vendor of the year. Folks, if you’re facing a challenge right now, here’s the whole point of all this. It’s brief. It’s pretty obvious at this point without me even saying it. But particularly those of you who are college students. Yeah. And you’re the flux of having turndowns and so easily disturbed and fearful and worried. And you want to get out of your parents’ house.
You’ve got to find a job. Your own self-worth is starting to fall apart. You’re wondering where God is. You have the wrong goal. If that’s where you are, that’s your wrong goal. I would submit you just this. When you go out looking for a job, getting a job your second priority. And this is a lesson for life, okay? I can speak this. This is not academic for me. It is scriptural, but it’s not just scriptural. For me, it’s real because I lived it as a young person, not much older than some of you college graduates right now. But you get to the point where all of a sudden you’re an adult and it’s really, is the gospel true? Are the scriptures true? Is what your Christian professors taught you true? Is there any truth to that or is it just a myth? It’s true. I often say what I’m with group speaking. The scriptures work. Who knew? They actually work. And even though I know the whole scripture, the ones that are most important is he said, right? What’s the most important thing? And he said, love me and love your neighbor as yourself. And Romans 8:28, he puts it in the way of, I’ll live for my purpose. Love me and live for my purpose, to seek and save the lost. You live for that. Not to sell car wax. Selling car wax is not my goal. You know, for the rest of your life, he’ll bless whatever is in your hand. It doesn’t matter what it is. If you use it as your pulpit to move everybody every day closer to Jesus. There’s nothing more important. Do you understand what I’m saying? There’s nothing more important. And I don’t care if you’re on the tennis court. Or you’re in a sales presentation. You’re in a board meeting. You’re in Starbucks. Or whatever tragedy. You’re in the hospital. Even more if you’re in the hospital. I was there. I was dying in the hospital. Doctors gave up on me. And I use it to move everybody every day closer to Jesus.
That’s a whole other story. But it works. And so, a college student in particular, I want to talk to you right now. It’s that time of year. If you’re in that crux, stop making getting a job your highest priority. Whatever it is, whatever you need, whatever it is that you live for, your passion for, whatever. It’s number two. Jesus said in Revelations 2, I know you go to church. I know you’re in the Word. I know you give generously. I know you know good teaching from bad, but I have this against you.
I’m no longer your first love. It speaks to the same thing in this respect. Whatever you love most, you talk about most. I talk about my wife all the time. Anybody knows me, I love my wife. I talk about the Lord all the time. Whatever you love, you’re going to talk about. If you’re not talking about Jesus, I’m not saying you’re not going to heaven and I’m not saying you don’t love him but he’s not your first love. It might be your family, maybe your girlfriend, maybe your grandkids, maybe your job, maybe something that you’re doing athletically. I mean there’s all kinds of things we can put up there. Whatever fills your prayers.
Whatever comes out of your mouth, whatever you focus on, whatever the desire of your heart is, that’s your God. And I’m just pleading with you, let God be your God. And yes, graduate, when you go out looking for a job, make that your second priority. Everybody that’s interviewing you, make sure before you leave that interview, you move closer to Jesus. You can find all kinds of creative ways to do that. This is not the time, you just get the point. You move every one of them. closer to Jesus. And guess what?
You get 10 turn downs, that’s 10 people. You’ve been able to move closer to Jesus. I mean, it’s almost you want them to turn you down. Seriously. If they give you the job, of course you’re going to smile. But it’s not normal for you to smile when they turn you down. And you say, well, thank you for giving me time and I hope that at some point I can earn your approval because you have a great company, you’re a great person. I’d love to work for you someday. Thank you very much and God bless you.
You think that’s not going to move them closer? They don’t have people smiling at them when they turn them down. But here’s the best part. He makes it all work together for God. Every turn down, you know you’re living for God and you know you’re building up a treasure.
And you’re going to get that job. You’re not really going to get a job. You’re going to get the job. Hear me on this. If you get more turn downs, it gets more. With every turn down, it gets more exciting. I can tell you that from a million experiences of my life. The bad things, it gets more and more exciting. It’s just like, how are you going to do it, God? And then he gives you a job. And I’ve heard sometimes it’s like they got the job that wasn’t even available when they first started searching for a job. And the job they ended up with was 10 times better than anything they’d ever seen before. Did you get the draft? Here’s the point. Whether you’re a graduating senior, whether you’re facing a medical trial, whether you’re in financial difficulty, whatever, don’t waste it. Use that moment to move everybody. I mean it.
That’s your highest priority for everything you do with every breath you have. Praise the Lord. Move everybody every day closer to Jesus. And when you do that, you’re living for God’s purpose and he’ll make everything work for good. See you next time.
