67. SPECIAL GUEST SERIES 1 OF 3 – THE SILVER LINING OF UNEXPECTED HEALTH EVENTS WITH CATHY WINSLOW

Winslow 1 of 3

Adrian Schermer    00:02

Hello future millionaires and welcome back to the get rich slow podcast. We’re your hosts, Adrian Schermer, Rob Delavan and substitute today Ashley Whaley, subbing in for Lance Johnson, good morning, Ashley.

Ashley Whaley   00:15

Good morning, thanks for having me. Good morning, Robin.

Robert Delavan   00:18

Nice to have you here, Adrian as always.

Adrian Schermer    00:22

And you can find us online on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Audible, Amazon music, YouTube and Stitcher, among other streaming platforms. Today, we’re going to be starting episode one of three. We’re going to do a three part series with Cathy Winslow. Cathy works with Globe Life family heritage division and hey, Cathy, how are you doing today?

Cathy Winslow   00:44

Good, how are you?

Adrian Schermer    00:46

Good, Cathy, we are looking forward to this. This will be fun.

Cathy Winslow   00:49

Appreciate it.

Ashley Whaley   00:50

Hey, Cathy!

Cathy Winslow   00:51

Hey

Adrian Schermer    00:52

Cathy helps project individuals and families financially when their lives are turned upside down by a cancer diagnosis, accidental injury, heart attack, stroke or an ICU stay. So, we’re all about get rich, slow here. But as much as getting rich, slow is important, protecting that wealth and protecting your position when something hits the fan is of equal importance. So we want to get into that and learn about what made you into the person you are today, Cathy.

Robert Delavan   01:22

This will be fun and for those of you that are watching the actual PowerPoint here, presentation, you can see her entire family, where was this again Cathy?

Cathy Winslow   01:35

Disney World

Robert Delavan   01:36

Disney World and I assume is that rare rabbit on the front? [Inaudible 01:50]

Adrian Schermer    01:51

Splash Mountain, I went every summer when I was a kid. So okay, every winter break actually. Lucky me, you got a resident expert.

Cathy Winslow   02:00

That was right at the point where it’s like, oh my God; they just sprayed a whole bunch of water on us.

Robert Delavan   02:08

And I like it with Javi they’re holding his camera trying to get a video. Hopefully it didn’t ruin his phone

Cathy Winslow   02:14

It didn’t but it was funny.

Ashley Whaley   02:21

These are really fun, these book recommendations. I know you guys just started putting these into your guy’s podcast. But Cathy, thank you for sharing this book recommendation. I am a believer that Leaders are readers. So do you want to give a little recap on the integrity of selling for the 21st century by Ron Willingham?

Cathy Winslow   02:44

Yes, so I recommended this book because years ago, one of the jobs I had, sales jobs I had, that was how they they trained us with this book as a guide and so it just breaks down the selling process and makes it more of a, like it says how to sell the way people want to buy instead of pushing products on people, you actually have conversations, you get to know them find out what their needs are and where the hot points are and then slowly but surely get the sale that way by getting to know and building relationships with people.

Robert Delavan   03:22

So are you saying that the old way of cold calls and shoving things down people’s throat that they don’t want is maybe not as effective?

Cathy Winslow   03:32

Not at all

Robert Delavan   03:34

Novel Idea, hey, Adrian, how is it when you say you need a mortgage?

Adrian Schermer    03:43

Hey, you, buy a house. There’s no cold call. It’s just people calling being like, hey, I want to scam you for money, just skip the whole, like actually give you something in return part…

Ashley Whaley   03:59

Or they send you a recording

Robert Delavan   04:01

Yeah, exactly well, I mean, of course, my car warranties are hopelessly out of date.

Ashley Whaley   04:06

Yeah, mine too

Robert Delavan   04:08

Even though they’re new cars, but anyway, thank you for the recommendation. Okay, so question one, Cathy; give us a little bit of your background, where did you grow up?

Cathy Winslow   04:26

Okay, this will be an easy one. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon. North Eugene area and I grew up in the same house that my parents, my parents moved, two weeks after they moved there, they had me and literally, I had lived there my whole life. So you know, until I flew the coop.

Robert Delavan   04:47

Until they didn’t let the door hit you on the way and yeah, family siblings, that sort of thing, what did that look like?

Cathy Winslow   04:59

So, I grew up in a family with four kids, my brother being the oldest than myself and my sister and then we were all a year apart and then seven years later, we had a little sister. So four of us, six in the family.

Robert Delavan   05:15

And she grew up with a very different upbringing then the other three, right?

Cathy Winslow   05:20

Yes, absolutely.

Robert Delavan   05:23

Isn’t it always how that works? The youngest one always gets like the good stuff and the older ones always get the hand me downs.

Ashley Whaley   05:31

Mom and Dad are tired by then, they are like yes…

Cathy Winslow   05:36

My mom was [Inaudible 05:36] the first three of us and right, yeah, so, but then the oldest girl so I never had Tammy down so my sisters did.

Robert Delavan   05:48

That’s the one benefit of being though and was you a bit of a mother for the younger ones or who did that, did that dynamic develop or no?

Cathy Winslow   06:00

Yeah for our little sister, the one that’s you’re younger than me. We’re just like best friends growing up. We shared a room our life. The younger sister got her own room. But it’s cool we’re still really close. So that was good.

Adrian Schermer    06:21

Cathy, what was your childhood like?

Cathy Winslow   06:24

Sorry, my earplugs, were doing something funky so this and because I wrote it all out, because I’m trying to remember with so far, so long, soon enough, you’ll find out that my left ear pod isn’t working right now. Okay, so pretty much I have what I consider a normal childhood. I already told you about my siblings. My family, my dad was a farmer. He grew blackberries and wheat, the fields. We grew up in the north Eugene area and then the fields were like 20 minutes away in Junction City and so had those and then during the fall, he ran a nut dryer that was at my, his parents, my grandparents’ house at Eugene and so yeah…

Robert Delavan   07:19

Hold on, a nut dryer, like, you pick like hazelnuts and then dry them type thing or…

Cathy Winslow   07:26

So yeah, the farmers bring all from all around, they bring their walnuts and filberts and even plums to be dried into prunes. But you have to pull the moisture out of the nuts before you can sell them and so that’s what they did. They brought him in and they’re in these huge big bins and I mean, it was a big operation.

Robert Delavan   07:51

Does he still do that?

Cathy Winslow   07:56

He passed away in 2003.

Robert Delavan   08:00

I mean, that sounds like quite an operation.

Cathy Winslow   08:04

And the biggest operation was his, this is my maiden name, burner, excuse me Burner. So Burner Berry Farms, as it was called. So the blackberries were the main business. Yeah, so I mean, we were working since I mean, I think I was 10 when we started working in the berry fields and we had these huge, a couple of berry picking machines. So those were for the more mature fields, the younger fields, we had to pick by hand and so by the time we were able to work on what we call the picker, we were making five bucks an hour, while the minimum wage back then was 265 an hour. So our friends were making that, working in fast food and we thought we hit the jackpot.

Adrian Schermer    08:56

Oh, they’re paid by the flat, right. So the faster you can work, the more you can make?

Cathy Winslow   09:01

Yeah, well, so when we picked by hand, there were buckets, but then the buckets will go into flats. Yep and oh my god, I remember when I first started, it was like 40 cents of bucket and I picked like four buckets in a day and then my dad hired a crew and of Hispanic people, that people who were Hispanic descent and they were such hard workers and they were just like, picking, I mean, they were fast.

Robert Delavan   09:32

[Inaudible 09:31] I could see maybe the motivation is a little different for the kids. So it’s interesting that this comes up. We’ve actually interviewed in some other episodes. Just in the last few months, we’ve interviewed multiple folks that actually grew up in the farming community and obviously, that’s not where you’re at today. I mean, obviously, there are a lot of hard work and discipline and work ethic that goes into that maybe outside of the berry fights. Is that a common theme for you?

Cathy Winslow   10:19

For as far as…

Robert Delavan   10:22

You’re working, like you’re working in a young age?

Cathy Winslow   10:26

Yeah, we pretty much I mean, we worked and we had to use the money to buy our own school clothes, most of them things like that. So yeah, we were taught early on the value of hard work. And, being humble and things like that. My dad was a really good boss, but we teased him a lot and he was a good entrepreneur, he was very shrewd and just taught us that, he always say, what do you think we’re made of money? You need to work hard to be street smart. You know, he’s given us in the past. But we tried to make it fun. But we’re like us, you know, the socks were going in the fields. But it actually I’m glad we have that experience, because it teaches you to really appreciate what you have.

Robert Delavan   11:14

That’s a big deal, there’s some huge value there.

Cathy Winslow   11:19

So, anyway, okay.

Ashley Whaley   11:26

Question three, Cathy, thank you so much for being here, I just so enjoyed getting to know you and your story and it’s so cool that you have that farmer’s daughter work ethic in you because I remember friends growing up, that grew up on the farm and it was like, they always had money. Like all my friends that grew up on the farm always had money, worked really hard all the time. So it’s really cool to see how that transitioned into your work ethic now. So thank you so much for just sharing that kind of brains snapshot of, of what your childhood was like. So what is a significant story that has made an impact on your life?

Cathy Winslow   12:10

So I actually have two things that happened in my life that really made a huge impact and so I was thinking, shall I go on with these two stories because they might take a little while but I guess I will. The first event that really made an impact on my life and my career was in May of 91. I was working for a company; I’ve been in sales my whole life. So I was working for a box chocolate company, Russell Stover. And, went from sales rep to key accounts rep and I was up in Seattle at the time to that’s what blew me up there and it was about the company about a year and a half got promoted to district manager and they’re only 16 DMs in the whole country and so I was in charge of nine reps within six states and so right around the time when I was going to start training after being promoted, I needed to fly to Kansas City, Missouri that’s sort of based out of and but I’ve been seeing, I’ve been waking up and seeing double vision and also feeling numbness in my feet and legs. What the heck, I’ve never had visual; I’ve never had glasses or anything.

So by the time I got there, I was seeing double 24/7 and I was talking about it to a co-worker and the vice president of sales was in there training us and he’s like, what, what’s going on? Hey, we need to get you to the emergency room right away. Like, okay, I’m in this strange city and I go there and so in the ER, the doc that had a CAT scan and they suggested okay, we should probably fly back to Seattle and have more tests done and so I flew back and bottom line long story short, is that they did MRIs and everything turned out I was diagnosed with MS sclerosis and I was like, I never had anything serious before and I’m just like, wow, I have this incurable disease. What the heck, I knew nothing about it so yeah, that really rocked my world because I just been promoted to this position and so yeah it made me reevaluate things because I was so focused on my career. I was 26 years old and I was just working really hard and I thought what’s most important health, family and friends and then my career, really, I mean, some of us get so focused that we lose sight of other things like our health.

Ashley Whaley   14:51

That was a silver lining, I mean, blessing in disguise to be able to kind of reevaluate, where you were headed. So did you end up with Meeting Russell Stover, then?

Cathy Winslow   15:03

I continued to work as a district manager for about a year and a half and then I ended up moving on, a lot of people start off in consumer product sales and then they move into like medical or dental and so I actually went to work for a dental company, root canal.

Ashley Whaley   15:21

Ironically, all the candy that’s now rotting the teeth

Cathy Winslow   15:25

I know, people keep asking what?

Adrian Schermer    15:29

On both sides, I like that [Mixed Voices 15:34]

Cathy Winslow   15:43

So, I was in sales for many years and then I told you, there are two major events so the next event happened in 2007. So, I got married for the first time in 2001, had our first son the next year and my husband, Rusty had been experiencing abdominal pains for a couple years and he was all I kept saying you need to get it checked, he is like after the golf tournament, yada, yada but at the same time, I was like, I really want to have two kids and at that point, I was 43. So we were talking about my age. So we decided to go through fertility treatments and so he had continued to have abdominal pains off and on and so finally, I became pregnant and then around the same time, he was just in excruciating pain. So finally got him in and November of 7th, pretty much had to open him up and do surgery and they found out he had stage four pancreatic cancer. So I don’t know he was 46 years old and I was at that point a couple of months pregnant. So four months later, he passed away. March 31st of 08 and I was six months pregnant at the time and our son was four and so yeah, I mean, talking about major event that happened, it really rocked my world.

Ashley Whaley   17:20

Yeah. I can’t even imagine just what that would feel like, let alone how you would even manage getting through the day to day of life, that’s just…

Cathy Winslow   17:38

And you just pretty much I guess, go into survival mode because I had to be there for my four year old son and I was pregnant turned out to be, so anyway, had my youngest son, three months after my husband died, the end of June 27th. So he’s coming up on 14 years old now.

Adrian Schermer    17:57

That’s awesome. Maybe a blessing that you were pregnant, then just give you something that there’s no choice, you got to take care of that kid, right?

Cathy Winslow   18:05

I know, it’s one thing, I realized later on. I think I delayed my grief because I was so focused on you have to be strong for my son, you have to be strong.

Robert Delavan   18:16

And a baby makes you numb anyway.

Adrian Schermer    18:20

You’re too tired to be sad. Just pass out.

Cathy Winslow   18:25

Exactly, I’m just sitting there with a Kleenex box. Just you know, crying and my son, are you crying again? Like, I know, I’m sad.

Robert Delavan   18:38

Four and five year olds are very honest, which isn’t always a bad thing and things they say rushing. I mean, obviously, you’re in the insurance industry and I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves on that sort of thing. But in this episode is, you know, looking backwards and obviously, this was incredibly impactful for your life. I mean, maybe just a little bit of a plug here in the sense of I mean, was there life insurance involved?

Cathy Winslow   19:13

Yes, thank God

Robert Delavan   19:16

Like, you weren’t also broke and grieving with the baby on the way and a four year old.

Cathy Winslow   19:26

Yeah, I mean and I was fortunate enough to have investments but that was incredibly helpful to have the life insurance as well.

Robert Delavan   19:41

Not that we’re plugging life insurance but honestly, if you’re going to be an adult, you should have life insurance.

Adrian Schermer    19:47

Yeah, life insurance is one of those professions that can sometimes get a bad rap because there are a lot of money grubbing people in there. I get the same in my industry. You know, there are just people who enter it just because they want to make some extra cash and that’s really the goal for them. But you’ve obviously, I think it’s one of the big reasons we had you on to be our representative in the insurance realm because you’ve got genuine experiences to draw on as to why insurance was more than just financial coverage, it makes a difference. And, gosh, even just this last year, I had a client who we were going to refinance and the husband passed away halfway through the transaction and it just killed the whole thing and it was so, there was this extra layer of devastation to her because she just couldn’t afford the lifestyle that they had built together. So I’m really looking forward to finding out more about your business and how you operate because I genuinely believe every one of our audience members can benefit from understanding how insurance works and what the best fit is to make sure that the people they care about are protected.

Cathy Winslow   20:48

Absolutely, it really saved me and then, at the end of the year 08 was economically or for businesses, a lot of businesses were going out of business or making cutbacks and the company, I worked for lifeline screening, I set up ultrasound events, for risk of stroke and things. So they did with my ultrasound team at the end of the year and then they had to let me go, they felt really bad because they knew my situation and stuff and I was like, That’s it, I’m taking a year off, moving back to Oregon and I ended up with the economy and thinking, oh, my God, housing, but I was in a one level house, which wasn’t very common in the area was in Bonney, Lake Washington. So my house sold within four months and I bought a house, sold my house and bought the house in Wilsonville within a week of each other, it just totally closed. So it totally worked out.

Robert Delavan   21:47

And then that year off, was that a pretty impactful from just being there for your boys?

Cathy Winslow   21:54

Yeah and it turned into 10 years. I never thought in a million years, I would be a single mom, I waited so long. It was 37 when I got married first time and as we go along, but yeah, so moved back to Oregon because I have family in Oregon and yeah, I tried it that job for a little while and it just wasn’t my thing, wasn’t what I like to do. So I just kind of took my time and it ended up I’m like, 9 or 10 years it took off. So but it was great to have the time to spend with my kids.

Robert Delavan   22:30

Yeah, we’ll talk about an impact. I mean, just big deals and these are what shaped us. So it’ll be fun to explore that as we work through the next couple episodes.

Adrian Schermer    22:49

All right, Cathy, where can we find you? Where can our audience find you?

Cathy Winslow   22:57

Well, you can email me at [email protected] or you can call or text me at 503-862-6980 and I also have Instagram @GlobeLifeFHD so that’s F as in Frank HD and my Facebook page is Cathy Winslow agent. Cathy with a C and you can also look at my website, Cathywinslow.com

Adrian Schermer    23:33

CathyWinslow.com, got it, FHD like family heritage division of Globe Life, check it out. You can also check it in the show notes. We’ll have links to Cathy as well as Delevan Realty, my stuff for the mortgage and ROI financial for Lance Johnson. Ashley, thank you again for subbing in, I know you’re gonna be with us for the next couple episodes. Well, Lance gets some stuff taken care of. You can find out more about what we’re doing locally at ROI-fa.com/events. We’ve got mixing sippin mingle events, we’ve got learning grows, there’s a summer bash coming up, I know and there’s some holiday photos as well. So check out our calendar at ROI-fa.com/events to find out how you can meet up with us and maybe meet some other very cool people that we are fortunate enough to have in our circle, that about wraps it up for episode 1 of 3 of the get rich slow podcast series with Cathy Winslow, we look forward to talking to you guys next time.