The Plain Values Podcast EP #52 – Ernie Hershberger: From Chicken House to the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Ernie Hershberger:
I walked through the shop this morning and they were doing the final photo shoot of a 30 piece collection that we just finished up for a launch in New York City at the Met. And then it took us four years to make seven pieces. Wow. It was absolutely brutal, but it springboarded us into a global. I mean, the collection won best of the best. Nobody had ever done gold into the wood grain itself, that it stays there where you still see the grain. And so we wasted thousands of dollars of gold in the R&D of trying to figure out how to do this. The first time I

Marlin Miller:
Heard you talk about goals, I completely flipped out. You don’t believe in goals.

Ernie Hershberger:
No, I don’t. I

Marlin Miller:
Sat down with my friend Ernie Hershberger from Homestead Furniture. Ernie is not your typical Amish preacher. He recently did a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art on an unbelievable, unbelievably beautiful piece of furniture, actually seven pieces of furniture. We sat down here and we talked about that process. We talked about his new book coming out. We talked about life as an Amish guy here in Holmes County. It is a wonderfully revealing and fun conversation. Please meet my friend, Ernie Hershberger. And if you like the content, if you get anything out of it, I will very humbly ask you to like and comment and smash that subscribe button. Thank you. This podcast is sponsored by my friends at Azure Standard. A while back, I had a chance to sit down with the founder, David Steltzer, right here at the table. And we had a great conversation.
I love the Azure story. They started out as farmers back in the ’70s. And I think in 1987, they began a nationwide food distribution company. And guys, they are non – GMO, organic. They do it right. They do it so well. And you can get a truck to drop food right in your town. Check them out at azurestandard.com and tell them Marlon and plain values sent you.
So born and raised in Mount Hope. How many siblings?

Ernie Hershberger:
Well, there were eight of us. Four boys, four girls. And I was the oldest.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. You’re a firstborn.

Ernie Hershberger:
I’m a firstborn.

Marlin Miller:
Okay.

Ernie Hershberger:
Heidi, hi, I, firstborn. All the problem childs.

Marlin Miller:
Shocker. I love it. Okay. Okay. I know a few of your siblings. I don’t know that I know them all, but okay. So your mom and dad, were they farmers?

Ernie Hershberger:
No. So dad was a mechanic. He grew up as a farm boy at home, but he started early in his career as a mechanic, worked at a motor shop, and then he was hired as a mechanic at Trox of Walnut Creek, which is the mom’s side of the family, the uncles there. And worked there for 20 years as a mechanic. And then boys all kind of followed in his footsteps and working there in, not necessarily in mechanic position. Andrew, helped a little bit maybe, but we all spent time in the shop, helped out, whatever. And then once we got out of grade school, it’s where we dove in kind of and I was exposed to everything from sawmill to dry kill to rough lumber to all the rough components of creating a component of what would go into a piece of furniture or a cabinet.

Marlin Miller:
As a kid?

Ernie Hershberger:
Oh yeah. From 15 to 22 when I got married and then moved to Bound Hope.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. I got a question for you on trocks. Are they not the local company that builds a ton of the very simple wooden caskets?

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
That’s what I thought.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. Yeah. So they do custom kitchen cabinets and then they also have a casket division.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. And they’re shipping them all over.

Ernie Hershberger:
All over.

Marlin Miller:
All over the place. Okay. So you and Barb got married at 22.

Ernie Hershberger:
Well, we were 23, 24.

Marlin Miller:
Yep.

Ernie Hershberger:
And so then we moved eight miles. So I grew up in Walnut Creek and then moved to Mount Hope. And that was a long commute before e-bikes. So I didn’t want to pedal eight miles and to hire a driver just didn’t make sense. And so I put my application in for a mullet cabinet fryberg door, which was considered direct competition to Schrock’s. And my wife’s mom and dad, they had. So her dad had a quilt or a harness shop, shoe shop, and her mom had a quilt shop. And then six months before we got married, Barb and her parents decided to start a retail furniture store. And I remember coming up there one night, had a date with her on a Friday night, and they were tearing out all the pens, chicken pens of their old chicken house. Chicken house is small, narrow, long. It’s 40 wide, 100 feet long building.
And I was like, “What are you guys doing?” And she said, “We’re going to start a retail furniture store.” And I said, “That is not a good idea.” And she still married me. But anyhow, so at the same time that I started for Fryberg Door, this furniture, fledgling furniture company started off and I didn’t want anything to do with it.
But what was fascinating of what happened is I had no experience in retail at all. It was all manufacturing up to that point. And so coming from shrucks, making custom kitchens every day is different. Every day is different species, different components to kitchens, whatever it may be that customer wanted. And then being exposed to retail where I shockingly discovered that most of the furniture’s being built in North and South Carolina and Grand Rapids, Michigan. And so we would order furniture from those areas and here it came. And then a customer would walk into the store and say, “Hey, I like that color over there. I want this molding.” And I’d say, “Sure, because we were taught how to draw and all that.” So I draw it out and I had an idea because of my background in buying raw goods and being involved in labor costs and all that.
I kind of had an idea. So I knew that if a customer walks without a price, that the odds are like 50% against you, that you’ll close that sale. So I’d draw it out and give them a price on the spot. And I started getting these orders and then I’d send them to North and South Carolina and Grand Rapids. And I got every one of those POs back. And I was like, “What’s going on? Or what’s happening? This is not rocket science, what we’re doing here.”

Marlin Miller:
Hold on. When you say you got the PO back, you mean they didn’t want to build it?

Ernie Hershberger:
No, because. And it’s still today, the vast majority of your furniture manufacturers that are mass producing, they want to build 500 or a thousand at a time. So this is what they told me. They said, “Oh, well, we don’t build one-ups like that.” And I was like, “Why not?” They said, “No, you don’t understand the industry. We built 500 to a thousand, put it in a box, put it in a distribution yard you buy from distributor, you put it in your retail store, and then you convince your customer that this is what they want.” And I was like, “That’s about as un-American as it gets. I’m not doing that.” And so not one of my POs that they make, if it wasn’t something that was totally standard, like it came out of the box. Wow. So here I had a customer’s money deposit and married by that time, two kids.
And I was like, “I’m not turning that order down.” So I’d go to the local cabinet shops and have the furniture built for me. And so it didn’t take long till word got out on the street. We had no game plan, no marketing plan, nothing. We just wanted to serve the customer at a high level. And word got out of the street that there’s a little furniture store called Homestead Furniture in the middle of Mount Hope, in the middle of nowhere, that builds custom furniture to the same specs that you would expect from a high end custom kitchen cabinet shop. And it just went crazy. In 10 years, we had customers in every state in the United States and in eight countries, all word of mouth. And they came to us from that perspective.

Marlin Miller:
What

Ernie Hershberger:
Year did you start? We started in 1990, October of 1990.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. So were you the very first one? Because today there are what, three?

Ernie Hershberger:
38 retailers that sell so-called Amish furniture in about a 30 mile radius. And when we started off, there were six.

Marlin Miller:
Well, but not only that, on the manufacturing

Ernie Hershberger:
Side,

Marlin Miller:
There are hundreds of

Ernie Hershberger:
Manufacturing. Manufacturing at that point, probably a dozen to 20, somewhere in there. I mean, there were very limited. They would specifically focus on dining room or bedroom, that type of stuff. They didn’t get into where now we have glider rockers and hutches and coffee ends and all that stuff. But

Marlin Miller:
They weren’t doing the custom stuff.

Ernie Hershberger:
No, not to the level that we wanted them to do. We really pushed them, said, “Hey, we need it. We need it.” And initially we’d have to go to cabinet shop, either Mullet or Schrock’s, and they’d actually build us or I’d go to another cabinet shop and have the pieces built. But as it gained momentum, we partnered up with builders that were able to give us what we wanted. And then later on, obviously we started our own manufacturing to take care of the full on custom. And today it’s just. I walked through the shop this morning and they were doing the final photo shoot of a 30 piece collection that we just finished up for a launch in New York City at the Met in February. And we’re doing a huge house in Medina right now where the bed, the headboard of the bed is about 20 feet tall and 16 feet wide.
And it’s a full arch, full on custom. I mean, just crazy. The

Marlin Miller:
Headboard is 20 feet

Ernie Hershberger:
By 16

Marlin Miller:
Feet.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. And then they’ll put their bed kind of nested underneath that. So it’s like a huge build-in.

Marlin Miller:
All right then.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah.That’s what they wanted. That’s what we made.

Marlin Miller:
I love it. Okay. So we’re going to pause on the whole Met thing because I want to hear the story about how you got there and how they. They actually came after you, didn’t they?

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. You know what? Let’s just go there right now. I mean, we’re talking about the furniture. Okay. This whole thing started a couple years ago, right?

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. I think it was in 2019 when they reached out to us. We got that call out of the blue and the general manager for Abner Henry at that time called me. I was sitting in my office and he called me and said, “Hey, the Met just called and they want us to build a home collection for them.” And I was like, “Who’s the Met?” I mean, I kind of knew who it was, but I kind of still said that, I guess.

Marlin Miller:
By the way, Ernie, can you clarify a little bit the differences between Homestead Furniture and Abner Henry?

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. Yeah. So Homestead is what originally started in the chicken house and is a full-fledged retail store today, have almost 37,000 square feet, three-story building. And the focus is as much American made. So if you’re looking at upholstery or hardwoods, it’s American-made. I mean, unless you get into the artisans of individual that might make pottery or hand-blown glass, you can’t buy a lamp or an accessory that’s not made in China anymore, which is kind of disturbing, but it is what it is right now. So 100% American-made, full-on custom is homestead. Out of that backdrop of having our own manufacturing for all these years, in 2008, we started dabbling a little bit in the design market. And then it kind of went away because we were struggling to get in because I mean, most of your really high-end design brands have been around for 80 to 100 years.

Marlin Miller:
You started Abner in 2008.

Ernie Hershberger:
With the idea of it, because it was the early onset of that economic downturn from 2008 to 2010 and 12. And we saw the transition of a lot of furniture manufacturer in North and South Carolina and Grand Rapids were headed overseas into China, Vietnam and over there. And I was like, there has to be a vacuum of all this coming back because customers are not going to buy a high-end piece of furniture and knowing that it comes off an assembly line in China. And that’s exactly what happened. And so we started dabbling with it, but we didn’t have the scale and design and all that stuff correct. And so we kind of floundered for years, but then we kind of picked up the pace again from 2015 on up into 19. And then 19 is when we got the call from the Met. And so they’ve been tracking us.
They had

Marlin Miller:
Been watching.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. We didn’t know it, but they’ve been tracking. They did a global search of all the furniture companies in the globe and they wanted somebody that understood design scale, had the ability to build, be sustainable American-made, solid hardwood, totally custom, all that stuff, and had the skillset of a team to design, engineer and work through a whole thing. And so they gave us the opportunity and we went to New York with a whole team and came back with over 5,000 photos. We were in storehouses that general public hasn’t been in for decades that we could use as inspiration.

Marlin Miller:
Okay, let’s set the stage here. They call you, they tell you what they want.

Ernie Hershberger:
No, they didn’t tell us. They just said, “We want somebody to create a home collection for us.” They didn’t give us a clean sheet of paper, no direction. They said, “Go into whatever direction you’ve deemed necessary that we want to tell. Our call.” Your

Marlin Miller:
Call, “Use the inspiration of the art, any pieces of art in the whole museum. And build me how many pieces?”

Ernie Hershberger:
Well, no, we determined that later on. So they didn’t even give us that direction. They just said, “Here, go.” And we floundered a little bit because, “Well, give us some parameters or some guidelines.” They’re like, “No, that’s why we picked you guys. We want you to put the program together.”

Marlin Miller:
They trusted you that far.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Ernie, that’s pretty stinking amazing. I mean, it just is.

Ernie Hershberger:
Looking back, yeah. I wonder why, but they did. And we ran with it. I still sit there and I’m amazed at what’s happening in the original seven pieces. We actually started off our first, if I go back to the first design pieces, just the drawings that we were doing, we were drawing a lot of inspirational ideas from a 5,000 year old piece of pottery that had very intricate detail. And we’re trying to map that into a bedroom and a dining room designs and stuff like that. And it didn’t flow. And we were trying to force it. And so finally, after about a year and a half, I pulled the team together and it’s like, “Guys, I’ve always dreamed to build a really expensive piece of furniture. And I only build it once and some collector buys and I sign it.” And it’s like, we need to think limited edition, very unique.
And so that’s then when we kicked it up out of some of the artifacts into some of these famous inspirational paintings and Van Gogh and Monets that were part of that. And we started looking at that. And so nobody had ever done this and has never done it in the history of furniture making and art where we took famous paintings, drew inspiration from that and had to draw inspiration from the artists themselves of what they were going through spiritually. And then we tied that into a whole concept of idea. And then it took us four years to make seven pieces. Wow. It was absolutely brutal, but it springboarded us into a global. I mean, the collection won best of the best in the global design world. And so that springboarded us up. And now we have like the next step was in the facade of the Met.
Now we have 60 pieces that go with that. And of course we’re working with a lot of other designers all over the world now.

Marlin Miller:
Goodness. What were those conversations like with you and your design team when you say, “Okay, there’s a painting like a Van Gogh.” Did you sit there and just brainstorm? Give me an idea of what that conversation actually looked like. This episode of the Plain Values Podcast is being brought to you by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. Derek and I were talking this morning and he shared a story about how they like to do business. And they like to do business with people that are like them. And they like to be treated in a way that they treat their own customers. He told me about a customer of theirs that he had to fire. And this was not going the way that it typically does. And this guy was not being happy with anything that they did and nothing was good enough. And finally Derek said, “You know what?
You’ve disrespected my team enough and I think we’re done. And so you can go find your lumber someplace else.” And the attitude and the heart behind the way that Derek sees the world is exactly the way that I see the world and I have a hunch you might as well. If you call Kentucky Lumber, just know that they might fire you if you treat them poorly.
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Ernie Hershberger:
Well, that was a very, very intense time because since nobody had ever done it, we had no protocol to follow. Most other things has already been blazed. The trail has been blazed. So there was a huge amount of trial and error and just in the thought process. And then things evolved as it happened. I mean, the whole team was focused in. We meet once a week, the whole team, review of what we progressed, what roadblocks we’d hit, where the brains were as these pieces started coming together. And then even the raw sketches of just the pencil sketches of the imagination of looking at the painting and what came out of that to then decipher what was actually on paper from an engineering standpoint. And then the engineers were pulling hair out because we had so many things that we developed in R&D that then didn’t fit in the end because just like the hand carved handle on the wine cabinet I made out of Alabaster.
And I still want to use it somewhere, but it didn’t fit in the final piece. We had to improvise in the tail end because when you put the final scale and design together, it has to flow and it didn’t flow. There was a hiccup in the middle of the piece. And so we had to remove it after spending a hundred hours probably just on the pole and having hand carvers involved. And no, this isn’t where we need this design because we need to this and it needs to flow with this.
I remember one day, well, one thing that really sticks out is one of the engineers one day pulled me aside and said, “So I’m completely stuck. We have been bouncing off the wall, banging our head against the wall. It’s not working. It’s not coming.” And he’s like, “What do you want me to do?” And I said, “Keep pushing forward.” He’s like, “What do you mean?” I said, “Find an artist and call somebody.” The philosophy that we use is that we’re six people removed from anybody and everybody in the world. So that means that we have access and six phone calls with the right people. You push through it. And so we applied the lean principles to every aspect of pushing through, asking the why, pushing through, asking the why. And hindsight to spend four years to create seven pieces is just kind of crazy. I don’t know if I want to do it again.

Marlin Miller:
Well, okay. You told me a couple years ago when we were talking about it, you were showing me the pieces. Didn’t you take little flecks of gold and put it into a piece of furniture? Into the actual,

Ernie Hershberger:
Was it the – Grain.

Marlin Miller:
It was the grain,

Ernie Hershberger:
Not even

Marlin Miller:
The finish.

Ernie Hershberger:
No. So the duet tables, we wanted to put 24 karat gold into the grain because of the reflection of the concept that we wanted of what Monet Painting was saying with the handling the garden. We wanted gold in the big table that was representation of dead. And then we wanted to put platinum in a smaller table. And then we coated the legs in 24 karat gold, which that was easy. I mean, there’s all kinds of artisans classic globe that will teach you how to put real 24 karat gold overlay into carvings into anything really.

Marlin Miller:
That’s a

Ernie Hershberger:
Biblical

Marlin Miller:
Skill all

Ernie Hershberger:
The way back.
It goes way back. But nobody had ever done gold into the wood grain itself, that it stays there where you still see the grain. And so we wasted thousands of dollars of gold in the R&D of trying to figure out how to do this. And I remember the day they called me and said, “Hey, we got it. You need to come see it, but we got a problem.” And I was like, “All right, I’ll come over and see it.” And so I came over and they had figured out how to put the gold into the grain, but on the dark side. So if the light shined from the front, it just popped and glistened. But if you walked around the piece, it was dark and really kind of moody because it was in the shadow because the gold was in the grain. And so it didn’t reflect off from the backside from the light.
And they said, “That won’t work. You can’t have a piece on this level that doesn’t look the same from all four sides.” And I was like, “No, that’s perfect.” And they’re like, “How can that be perfect?” And I said, “Because spiritually, if we’re in the light, we’re shining and glistening. If we’re in the dark and not in the light, then we’re dark spiritually.” And I said, “That works perfectly with the family in the garden because if they’re in the light as a family, they’re in the light and they glisten.” And so we left it. And that’s the philosophy behind it. And so that’s a typical small example of hundreds of processes like that that went into each one of those limited edition pieces.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. Okay. So let’s talk about some of the most painful lessons that you learned as far as leading a team. And even. Okay. I’ll just stay right there, but I’m going to follow it with your family. How you approach the stewardship of family, business, talent, all of it. What are some of those mind numbingly hard things?

Ernie Hershberger:
Well, the hardest thing that I’ve ever grappled with as far as from that perspective, and I see it and hear it from other people too, is the spiritual family and business balance. I had to learn to create daytime compartments in my daytime construction structure of obviously spirituals twenty four seven. And then family, that I carve out family time and that I don’t interact. I mean, let that overlap. Either I’m in family or I’m in business. And so I had to make some of those rules because otherwise what happened is all of a sudden I’d be putting in two, three hours at the business and then I’d go back to the family and then we’d do something or whatever and then back. And then all of a sudden there was no balance and there was no rest time. And so I kind of made a hard and fast rule that, like I said, spiritually throughout, and then I clock in, put in my eight to 10 or 12 hours, whatever needed, and then I clock out and I forget about it.
And I even went so far as spiritually on Sunday, I didn’t want to think about anything business on Sunday. And especially I wish I’d have made that rule way earlier in my life, but I did make it a hard rule after I was ordained. I didn’t want to sit in church and think about a business challenge or a proposition of something or a really good plan of moving forward. And so I made myself a rule that if I’m in church, I’m not allowed to use the idea. And you can actually train your brain. Your brain is like a muscle. When you beef up in muscle, if you want to beef up your bicep, you go through the whole exercise and you could beef up your. Your brain is like a muscle that you can train mentally with your willpower because your will controls your brain and your brain controls your body.
And so today, after now doing this years and years and years, I do not think of anything business on Sunday, period. I walk through the businesses through the parking lots on the way to church and stuff and nothing enters my brain business related because I know spiritually that if I think about it, I won’t use it and I can’t use it. And so it’s created a day tight compartment that on Sundays I’m at total peace, no stress, no nothing, focused on spirituality of church, all that stuff. Obviously spiritually through the day for the family stuff, but no business. And then the same way, if I clock out in the evening, I don’t think about business. You’re done. None. I’m done. And so once you get to the realization that if you’re committed to the stewardship of the talent that God gave you, and you’re also committed to.
And here’s a principle that most people struggle with is that is if they make a mistake, they don’t want to admit it because they feel then they’re dumb or somebody will look down on them. I teach team members and I hold myself accountable to the point that there is nothing wrong with making this mistake. What’s wrong about making a mistake is if you sit on it and don’t do anything. So the concept is make the best decision that you can at the moment with the details and the data that you’ve got. If you realize three hours later or three days later or three months later or three years later that was a wrong decision, then instantly fix it. Change it. What I’ve discovered is that in most situations, you have to adjust anything and everything that you’ve put in play or in motion at least three times before it’s off and running.
And I think it follows a trinity pattern of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And it repeats itself over and over and over and over and over for me.

Marlin Miller:
Hold on. Hold on. Okay. Say that again. So let’s say that I make a decision on a certain topic. You just said you have found that typically I’m going to make a tweak to that decision three times before I really get it to where it’s.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. And I think it applies in most any principle. I mean, I find it in, let’s say we decide to go with a different line of fabric or we decide to go with a different sofa or we’re doing a different stain technique or whatever. Maybe it’s layering color on top of color to create a color. You put your best foot forward and there you’ve got it now, but it’s not quite right. So you have a choice to make. Either are you going to take the time to fix it or are you going to just say, “Well, I did the best I could.” But my experience is to move through those pretty fast. I mean, I think the same way when we do research on a subject. We can write on this Subject, but how many times later on, even in books, you see revised version, revised version coming out.
Just move through that as quick as you can as soon as discovered. And now you might go down the line on even a business decision of a certain add-on or whatever it may be, and you’re going to have to make adjustments. And I encourage all employees, I sit them down when I hire them and I repeat it in our one-on-ones, make a mistake. You’ll never get any pushback from me from making a mistake. Where I get upset is if you don’t fix it when you know it was wrong. And I don’t care, literally I said three hours, I have been involved in many situations where we as a team or personally make the decision, let’s go, let’s go in this direction. And in a very, very short time, we realize that we have adjustments to make, but most people are not willing to make that adjustment right away.
And I’ve heard it. People say, “Well, you just told us to go in this direction. Now three hours later, you’re telling us, why didn’t you wait longer to decide? Why didn’t you wait longer? You could have made a better decision.” That’s false assumption because if we wouldn’t have started down the path, we would have never noticed what was wrong. So you have to move and then adjust, just adjust, and then you’re off and running.

Marlin Miller:
Why do people resist that attitude or that approach to fixing a poor decision?

Ernie Hershberger:
So I talk about that in my book about the silo effect and the false facade that we polish of what we want people to see from the outside when we’re an absolute turmoil on the inside. And so it’s an egotistical thing, spiritual wrong by sitting on a wrong decision because we’re afraid somebody’s going to look at us as if we’re dumb. And that’s not the case. If you’re self-aware and you recognize you’re a sinner and you need help, and Bible talks all about lots about through the council, many, we’re going to get saved. No difference in any other situation or decisions we make. So make it from the perspective that I’m a steward of the talent for Christ, not for myself. So then self goes out and now you’re making the decisions for him and now you move through it. And here’s the thing. If somebody looks down at you or makes a negative comment about you, it’s because they’re lagging of where you’re going anyhow.
So you never get criticized by a person that’s ahead of you. So make the decision, do what’s right and adjust the decision so that you can move the next step forward and then adjust that and then move the next step forward. And yeah, it has to happen. I mean, it’s part of the stewardship principle of continuously moving forward and refining processes and thought processes and just simply growing baby step by baby step by baby step.

Marlin Miller:
The first time I heard you talk about goals, I completely flipped out. You don’t believe in goals.

Ernie Hershberger:
No, I don’t. Because people set goals and they reach them.

Marlin Miller:
And then they do what?

Ernie Hershberger:
And then they stop.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah.

Ernie Hershberger:
And so my philosophy is that if self is completely out of the picture and it’s not about us anyhow, why do I need a goal to work with the same intensity and purpose in whatever I’m supposed to be taking care of without a goal? So my experience has been over and over and over and also with teams of people is that if we don’t set a goal, but we go at it in a daytime compartment so you can push through. I mean, you work eight to 10 hours and you give it all you got. And if you set a goal, you stop. You coast. You go have a pizza party. And I’m not saying that we shouldn’t celebrate wins along the way, but my experience has been over and over and over and over that with goalless goals, but with the same intensity and purpose in life moving forward for Christ, because of the talent he gave us that we’re supposed to steward, is that you’ll blow past where you were going to set the goal by 20, 30, 40, 50, sometimes 100%.
And you set a goal and then you stop. It happens every time. And now you have to reset the goal to motivate yourself. So why do we need a goal to motivate? And that’s my problem. You should have motivation without a goal.

Marlin Miller:
Because of the fact that we’re working for him.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. We’re not working for ourselves.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. That right there, that reframes all of pride and humility and work ethic. I mean, it changes everything. What happens to your team members when they really dig in and then work through that whole concept? Because I’m telling you, it was jarring for me because everybody that I’ve ever read and ever talked to, you talk about the B Hags and all of those things. It was a big deal for me

Ernie Hershberger:
To hear that. The best I can explain it, I don’t drive a car, but occasionally you sit in a fast sports car and when you stomp on the gas pedal, you have that surge. And if a whole team is aligned with goalless goals of a purpose in life for him, so imagine that surge and it stays there. When those first three seconds of that surge, it stays there. It doesn’t go away. And it’s an exhilarating ride of people that make mistakes, correct it, share, lead up, steward for him. And the team excels at a level that they never dreamed. And once you get that feeling, then you don’t want it to go away. And so you out exceed customer’s expectations. You’re at the top of the game. You move past your competition. People wonder what happened and they think you’re crazy or whatever, but it’s all for his glory anyhow.
And so yeah, we all have bad days. And I tell the guys, I said, “If you turn the doorknob to the business, just leave your bad attitude at home. Just drop it. Practice dropping it, turn on. And now you’re in a daytime compartment to serve at a very high level. And we roll with it and we support each other.” And it’s awesome.

Marlin Miller:
How have your kids taken this on?

Ernie Hershberger:
We all go through the same process. Doesn’t matter if you live with it and you see your parents doing it or a team member or even as they’ve come in. My kids start fairly young in the businesses or whatever and they get interns and everybody fights it. We all naturally fight it. It’s like sin. I mean, you just fight it. You’re like, “Well, you can’t keep that momentum up. You can’t keep that energy up and all that stuff.” But it does. And once you mentally have adjusted to it, you wouldn’t want anything else. Life teams are extremely dull and listless if everybody has individual goals that they’re trying to achieve because that’s their only motivating factor. If they’re energized and goal is driven, everything moves forward faster. Everybody’s more engaged. Everybody’s happier. They’re more in sync. They’re not afraid of making mistakes because it doesn’t matter.
If you have a goal and you make a mistake, guess what happens? Now you lose a step. In this type of process, you never lose a step.

Marlin Miller:
Because it’s all going in the same direction.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. I mean, even though you make the mistakes, you don’t have the same feeling. It’s not negative. There’s no negative feeling. And that’s a huge difference.

Marlin Miller:
Ernie, how long did it take you to get your team to get to that point? Because I –

Ernie Hershberger:
A long time.

Marlin Miller:
That

Ernie Hershberger:
Does not

Marlin Miller:
Happen quickly.

Ernie Hershberger:
No, it’s a brutal process. And I had to learn along the way, and the book talks about a lot of those processes, a lot of failures. And I’m still not 100% there. I mean, I’ve got team members that’ll be a friend ahead of me now and say, “Hey, dude, what’s up?” And so that’s why – So they call

Marlin Miller:
You out on.

Ernie Hershberger:
Oh yeah, we do. I mean, listen, I ask them to because I refuse to be called the boss. I absolutely hate the term boss. And I don’t even like the term ownership. I like the term stewardship. I mean, at this point, I have to accept the fact that I’m the hub in the wheel and the visionary of that. But I just want to be a spoke. And they know that. And it’s my job to make sure they have the tools and the resources and the vision to achieve the vision. And then we go. And every new employee that comes in doesn’t believe it because they work for a boss. And I tell them out of the gate in the interview, I’m not your boss, but I will be your boss. I have to let you go, right? But in between that, I’m going to delegate and you’re going to earn your respect because of how you perform and based on, not performance of how much you put through, but based on how you look at it from an attitude standpoint.
Because performance and throughput and all that stuff comes, then that’s the outcome. That’s not what we focus on.

Marlin Miller:
From the attitude.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. And

Marlin Miller:
The heart behind it.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yep.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. I have gotten to know Laverne. Is Laverne your oldest son? He’s the oldest. That’s what I though. Out of how many? Seven.

Ernie Hershberger:
Seven.

Marlin Miller:
You have seven kids. Yep. Four

Ernie Hershberger:
Boys? Three girls. Okay.

Marlin Miller:
Laverne is a really unique guy.

Ernie Hershberger:
He was a handful.

Marlin Miller:
I love being able to sit and talk to him. What has happened to him? Okay. Am I thinking straight that he didn’t want to come and work for the furniture store for a while, right?

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. Well, and I mean, I actually farmed most of the kids, not all of them, out to other avenues to go work for somebody else or whatever because they all go through this timeframe where they’re in their late teens and early 20s and they’ve got answers to everything in life and dad really doesn’t know what he’s doing. And this is just crazy. I mean, why can’t life be easier? And they want to coast and not deal with any stress and all that stuff. But what they discover with time as time goes on is that these principles actually are more peaceful, have less stress. It’s a team concept. But you have to get self out of the way. It doesn’t work if self is in the way. And I tell people, and it’s on our pathway, if you don’t know your why, then wisdom can’t even reach you.
And so what’s our why in life? And so we got to walk through it. And the kids have to go through the same thing. You might find this funny. All the children give each other a rough time on this because Laverne’s now 33 and the two of the girls are 31 or 30. And then Mike’s 25, 26, I think. And then Sharon’s 23 and the twins just turned 21. So this is an interesting stat. So when I was going through the biblical history of King David started his kingdom ship at 30, Joseph started his prime ministership at 30 in Egypt. And there’s a lot of 30s. And then when I discovered that the Jews have their bar mitzvah at 12 to 13 and that a lot of these kingdom ships or whatever started at 30, I started doing some research psychologically what happens. And so I discovered that a child, the Bible says yes is yes and no is no, and that need to obey their parents from that certain level up.
And here’s the example I give is like if you have an eight year old and you might say, “Well, he’s already old enough that he knows what he wants.” But it’s a disservice to them to say, “Hey, would you like to eat peas for dinner?” And he said, “I ate peas.” But he needs to eat peas because it’s healthy for him. So you tell them, eat your peas because it’s healthy and he needs to obey. It doesn’t happen till 12 to 13. There’s a psychology that your psychological effect switches. And if you watch it in kids, you can actually see it within a week, you’ll see the adjustment. And it’s the first time in their life that they can calculate an outcome. Like you say, you do this and this is your outcome. So

Marlin Miller:
A plus B equals – Yes.

Ernie Hershberger:
C. Before that, they can’t do that. They can’t comprehend the outcome of their decision. So an eight year old cannot comprehend the outcome of eating peas or not eating peas. And that is backed up scientifically and psychologically. So the other component is that your brain is not fully developed till you’re 30. And there’s a reason biblically why all these people had to go through that learning curve. And then when they hit 30, they were put in position of leadership and all that stuff. And so I see the same thing coming through. I mean, like you said, with Laverne and even the ones that are coming behind is they have to learn to get rid of self and they have to learn to serve and what their why is in life. And then they got to get past the fact that I’m only here to help steer and guide.
They’re really working for Christ, not for me. And when that switch happens, now they lead up automatically. And that’s a whole concept of servant leadership is to lead up. I mean, Christ said, come follow me. And we’re followers and we’re leading up. And so many people don’t want to lead up. They sit back and they sandbag you. Well, the boss didn’t tell me how to do this properly. The boss didn’t give me direction. I’m ready for the next job, but he didn’t tell me what’s next. And all that stuff. When you flip that around and you start leading up, then everything starts running smoother because now instead of shifting the blame like Adam did in the Garden of Eden, that it was Eve’s problem and not his problem is you take ownership. Now you’re taking ownership and leading up and everything streamlines. And so if you go goalless goals, lead up and steward your talent, changes the whole game in how things are done.
And so Laverne discovered that. And you can see a difference when they go over the 30 threshold. It might be a little bigger width in a sense than it is. I mean, 12 to 13, if you’re aware of it, you can see the switch. Literally see the switch when the lights go on that kid’s head that he can calculate the outcomes. So the running joke in our family is, yeah, you’re only 27. Your brain’s not fully developed yet. But they all know it. They know the principles and they watch it and they see and feel that now. And it’s remarkable to watch that. Yeah, it’s good stuff.

Marlin Miller:
I will never forget. I mean, oh my goodness. I lived that same thing so, so clearly. I think it was 22 or 23. And I didn’t get married until I was 25, but I remember there was a moment when I said the day before Pop didn’t know Jack Squat. He’s an idiot. And that one day happened. And I don’t even know what happened to make it happen, but I remember that in a course of a day it was like, wait, how did he get that smart that fast?

Ernie Hershberger:
Because

Marlin Miller:
He actually knows what he’s talking about.

Ernie Hershberger:
And

Marlin Miller:
I mean, goodness gracious, he’s gone now for almost 15 years, but I will never forget. And we joked about it. We talked about it because I talked about it. We would just very openly. I mean, goodness, arguing was a sport in our house and that’s just how we lived. Man, that’s so interesting. So you have alluded to a book a few times. Why don’t you actually introduce the book that you sent to the press last night? 10

Ernie Hershberger:
O’clock.

Marlin Miller:
10 o’clock last night. I thought so.

Ernie Hershberger:
Yeah. So with all this, I mean, with the Met contract, going from the chicken house to the store that we have in the shop and us working with customers all over the United States and the world, people have been bugging me for a couple years now to write a book of the journey. And all the hardships of me trying to learn how to give up and find my why and lead a team and all that. And then when I was ordained and the nuances of that. And so I finally broke down and hired a ghost writer and just started from the front and worked my way up and try to be as transparent as I can because I learned a lot, asked a lot of questions with time and made a lot of mistakes and still do. And so the book is part workbook, part memoir.
I’m very transparent of all the mistakes I’ve made. And if you talk to any of the former employees, they would readily agree with a lot of what I wrote. But I was like, I’m going to expose my hand. I have nothing to hide. And if somebody can learn from the principles of all the mistakes that I made and can avoid some of it, then I looked at it. Well, then maybe it’s worth writing it down because I don’t feel worthy of writing a book. I don’t think I’ve accomplished a lot in life in all reality, but I’ve personally learned a lot. And so it is in book form and we named it and Trusted. I think the brutal journey of faith, hope, and there’s a couple other words. I’m missing them right now, I guess. Mistakes and more, I guess. But anyhow, so it’s there.
Hopefully it’ll be totally live on Amazon by first of the week. And it’s just a lot of principles. And then in the workbook, I included a faith principle, a stewardship principle, and a servant leadership principle of every category in the book, basically category by chapter. And so there’s a lot of questions that I just put out that hopefully will make you think a little bit. And so it’s not perfect, but it’s my journey. And I guess it is what it is.

Marlin Miller:
I think it’s great. I can’t wait. Last question. How can we pray for you and your family and all the stuff that you have going on?

Ernie Hershberger:
Well, I mean, I think the most important thing in life is that we continue and never forget that we’re a steward of the talent that God gave us and that we have to get rid of self, crucify self, find our why in life, and then just move through with peace, living hope, holiness, and knowing full well that our reward will be after we die.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. And it’s all worth it. And

Ernie Hershberger:
It’s all worth it. Yeah. I

Marlin Miller:
Love it. Ernie, thank you very much for coming and being here for a bit. We might just have to do another one sometime.

Ernie Hershberger:
All right. I’m game. All

Marlin Miller:
Right. Thank you very much. My wife loves Jill Winger’s old-fashioned on-purpose planner. And this year’s is better than ever. It has all sorts of tabs from your gardens to your animals to your meals. Anything and everything that you can imagine that needs planning. Jill has built a spot for it in here. You can find this at homesteadliving.com. Or yours today for 2026. In his book, Rembrandt is in the wind. Russ Ramsey says that the Bible is the story of the God of the universe telling his people to care for the sojourner, the poor, the orphan, and the widow. And it’s the story of his people struggling to find the humility to carry out that holy calling. Guys, that is what Plain Values is all about. If you got anything out of this podcast, you will probably love Plain Values in print. You can go to plainvalues.com to learn more and check it out.
Please like, subscribe, and leave us a review. Guys, love y’all. Thanks so much.