Philip Sarnecki for Kansas Governor
Philip Sarnecki is a Kansas businessman, family man, and job creator who has built companies that today employ approximately 1,000 people across multiple industries. He founded and led RPS Financial Group, Inc., growing it into one of the largest financial services firms in the nation before selling the company. Under his leadership, the firm expanded to 18 offices, including 12 throughout Kansas, served clients in all 50 states, and earned the trust of approximately 100,000 Kansans. His wealth management company had more than $10 billion of assets under management in Kansas, and in its final year under his ownership paid out more than $135 million in dividends to Kansas families and businesses.
In addition to financial services, Sarnecki owns businesses in various industries that strengthen communities and create jobs. He is the largest franchise owner of a national quick lubes company and has established locations across Kansas, including in Andover, El Dorado, Derby, Pittsburg, Fort Scott, and Independence. Sarnecki is also part-owner of 513 Films, a movie production company whose projects have featured Mel Gibson, David Henrie, Kevin Sorbo, Kevin James, Academy Award Winner Shirley Jones, and Grammy Award Winner Rebecca St. James, with a focus on faith-based themes and family values. In addition, Sarnecki owns companies in automotive, leadership, employee benefits, and real estate.
Philip’s commitment to service extends beyond business. He is the former chairman of the Board of Trustees for Athletes in Action, a past board member of the Board of Directors for Finseca and past Chairman of the Northwestern Mutual Managing Partner’s Association. He has coached youth and high school baseball for nearly a decade, mentoring young athletes on the values of teamwork, discipline, and character. The son of a janitor and a secretary, Philip never forgot his blue-collar roots and values.
Guided by his Christian faith and conservative values, Philip believes in hard work, strong families, and accountable leadership, not career politics. He is unafraid to take on entrenched interests and bring a business-minded, results-driven approach to government.
Philip lives in Bucyrus, Kansas with his wife, Heidi, and their three children. Together, they enjoy time at their Franklin County farm and remain deeply connected to the blue-collar values that shaped his life.
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-Transcript-
Brad Burrow (00:01):
Welcome to In a World With Real Media. I’m your host, Brad Burrow. In this podcast, we’ll dive into the lives of the most successful people in business. We’ll learn how they overcame adversity, took advantage of opportunities and learned from their experiences. Learn from our experts. Get inspired, then go live your story. It’s in a world with real media. Hello and welcome to the In A World With Real Media Podcast. I’m Brad Burrow and I’m here with Philip Sarnecki. Philip is a Kansas businessman, family man, job creator who has built companies that today employ approximately a thousand people across multiple industries. He founded and led RPS Financial Group growing it to one of the largest financial firms in the nation before selling the company. In addition to financial services, Sarnecki owns businesses in various industries that strengthen communities and create jobs. He’s the largest national owner of a quick lube franchise, and that has established locations across Kansas.
(01:07):
He’s also part owner of Five 13 Films, a movie production company whose projects have featured Mel Gibson, David Henry, Kevin Sorbo, Kevin James Academy Award winner, Shirley Jones, and Grammy Award winner Rebecca St. James with the focus of faith-based themes and family values. In addition, Sarnecki owns companies in automotive leadership, employee benefits, and real estate guided by his Christian faith and conservative values. He believes in hard work, strong families, and accountable leadership, not career politics. Philip lives in Kansas and his wife Heidi, and their three children. Let say that again. Philip lives in, Philip lives in Syrus, Kansas. Am I saying that right, Cyrus? Yep. Okay. Philip lives in Bucyrus, Kansas with his wife, Heidi, and their three children together. They enjoy time in their Franklin County Farm and remain deeply connected to the blue collar that shaped his life. So thanks for being on the podcast. Yeah,
Philip Sarnecki (02:07):
Thanks for having me. Great.
Brad Burrow (02:08):
This is really awesome. We’ve known each other for quite a while, and I just want to say transparently, I appreciate your mentorship and helping us with the business, and like you, I always know can, if I have a question, I can come to you. So thank you for that.
Philip Sarnecki (02:24):
Absolutely.
Brad Burrow (02:24):
It’s been
Philip Sarnecki (02:24):
Great.
Brad Burrow (02:25):
So let’s start out. I want to set the foundation of who you are. Tell me about growing up and what your life was like growing up.
Philip Sarnecki (02:32):
Yeah. Grew up in a small farming community, about a thousand people, a little town that has no stoplights and one grocery store and one gas station. You kind of grow up knowing everyone. I say it was a farming community. Now, we didn’t farm. My dad was in Vietnam, went to Vietnam with 2020. Vision comes back legally blind at night, and so kind of limited his career options. He was trained to be a paramedic, and he did that part-time, but he couldn’t do it full-time because of his eyesight. So he was a janitor for 35 years. My mom was the secretary. They worked very hard. They worked multiple jobs. My dad was the emergency services and disaster agency coordinator for our small town on a part-time basis. So we certainly didn’t have a lot of money. Grew up in about a 950 square foot home with one really small bathroom for the five of us challenge.
(03:30):
But looking back, I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world because it set the foundation of who I am today with my family, our faith and the values and the hard work. But it was just the kind of place where if we had a car issue, my dad would fix it. We would change our own oil if we had, I remember I was probably 10 or 11 years old. We needed a new roof on the house. Well, it was uncles, cousins, dad, me and my brother helping out putting on a new roof. And it’s just the way we kind of did things.
Brad Burrow (04:11):
And looking back, that foundation was kind of the foundation that you’ve learned how to build businesses.
Philip Sarnecki (04:20):
First of all, you got to figure out what God’s gifted you to do, and I think the work ethic that came along with that, listen, if I wanted things for the most part, other than food and the roof over my head, I needed to go out and get a job and pay for them. So at a very young age, I was delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, walking beans, which is a miserable job.
Brad Burrow (04:42):
What is that?
Philip Sarnecki (04:43):
Yeah. Well, I think today they don’t even do it anymore because now the herbicides and everything kill all the weeds. But as a 13, 14-year-old, 15-year-old, there’s a period of time where the farmers need to get the weeds out of the bean fields. And so you would just, from 6:00 AM to about two o’clock in the afternoon, you would walk up and down the bean rows with the long hook and you’d be pulling out the button weeds, et cetera, and it was blazing hot. You’d have long sleeves, long pants, big hat on to
(05:15):
Keep the sun off of you. Yeah, it’ll make you want to go study, but it paid well. So we really had three options. You could bale hay. Well, that was for the older high school kids. The bigger kids, you could de tael corn or you could walk beans. Those are really kind of the three options. So we did all that in addition to playing three sports throughout middle school and high school, I would work as well. So there wasn’t a lot of free time. I mean, I grew up working and playing sports, and that’s really just what we did. So
Brad Burrow (05:43):
Those values are what you’ve kind of built your foundation on in business. Tell me about your first business.
Philip Sarnecki (05:50):
Well, my first business was actually selling insurance as a 19-year-old in college and kind of self-employed underneath a larger umbrella of a Fortune 100 company. But I found an opportunity to go out and meet with when I was young, it was mostly moms and dads or even young single people, and go out and meet them at their kitchen table and help them solve financial problems. I was good at math. I found an opportunity where really my performance dictated my financial opportunity. So the harder I worked and the more I produced, the more I got paid. And I fell in love with that, and I fell in love with the idea that I was in control of my own destiny by doing that. So that’s how we got started. I literally started as a teenager.
Brad Burrow (06:42):
So tell me about your faith background. Did you grow up with your parents
Philip Sarnecki (06:47):
Faith? Yeah. My dad really kind of came to faith later in life. He didn’t go to church much when we were growing up. He encouraged us to go, but my mom was incredibly faithful and never missed, and that was really the foundation of my faith and our family’s faith. And then later on in life, my dad really got very involved with my mom at their church, and I got very involved in college as well through an organization called Athletes in Action, which ironically, I almost went on staff with athletes in action. I kind of thought if I wanted
Brad Burrow (07:23):
Early on
Philip Sarnecki (07:24):
When I was graduating from college. Is that right? Yeah. I almost gave up the business career to go into ministry because I thought to be a good Christian, I had to go into
Brad Burrow (07:32):
Ministry,
Philip Sarnecki (07:33):
And I really didn’t want to go into ministry. I had no interest in going into ministry. So I thought, well, if I have to go into ministry, I’ll go into a sports ministry, even though I didn’t want to do that. And fortunately, a person that was running a Bible study for our college football team, I wasn’t playing at that point, but he kind of pulled me aside and said, where’d you ever get the idea that you couldn’t be a Christian and go into business?
Brad Burrow (08:03):
And
Philip Sarnecki (08:03):
I was like, I don’t know. That whole camel Eye of the needle kind of thing. And he really kind of walked me through how making money is a spiritual gift, and it’s not about making it, but it’s about what you do with it and how you impact others with it. And that was kind of a watershed moment for me. And ironically, God’s got a sense of humor because then you can fast forward about 15 years after I graduated and I got invited to go on the Athletes in Action Board of Trustees, and I’ve been on the board of trustees for 18 years, and I’ve been the board chair for the last 12, although I’ve just stepped down now because of the gubernatorial race.
Brad Burrow (08:46):
Yeah, that’s awesome. What a great organization too.
Philip Sarnecki (08:48):
Yeah, it’s fantastic. It really is. So
Brad Burrow (08:50):
Probably not too many people that have the history with them like you do.
Philip Sarnecki (08:53):
Yeah, the people I’ve met, it’s really been amazing and Hall of Fame coaches and athletes, but really the impact that Athletes in Action has on students, college students, athletes that you’ll never know about, you’ll never hear about, but the impact that they are then having with their platform of sports
Brad Burrow (09:14):
And God gives them a huge platform does. That’s really awesome. Yeah. So from there, you end up with a very large financial services company. Tell me how that kind of happened. Obviously, I didn’t realize you were selling insurance and your first job, so that’s pretty amazing.
Philip Sarnecki (09:31):
Well, it just grew through the years and was able to expand with a Fortune 100 companies. So the way that it works, essentially, they finance the acquisition. So we ended up with over time, I did that for about 21 years. I was the CEO of RPS financial group, and we had offices, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, about 250 financial advisors. It was a large organization. We had over 60 billion of life insurance enforce. We had actually just in the state of Kansas now, we had clients in all 50 states, but just in Kansas, we had over 10 billion of assets under management, and we had almost a hundred thousand Kansans that trusted us to help them with their financial futures. And actually last year we paid out just in Kansas about 135 million of dividends to people in the state of Kansas. So just great organization, great people, incredibly blessed to be a part of that. So
Brad Burrow (10:34):
When did you realize that you had a business acumen? You know, I mean, obviously you had the foundation of working hard and knowing what that looked like and your parents and all that, which is really awesome. But when did you realize, okay, this is something that I know I can do?
Philip Sarnecki (10:51):
Well, I went to college with really two ideas. One idea was to be a college football coach. My brother just retired. He’s been a high school football coach for years and years. And then my second option was actually to hopefully go get my MBA from a really good school, go work on Wall Street, probably in the investment banking world. Like I said, I was pretty good at math and I didn’t have any money, so I thought, well, I’ll go work with money. I liked the idea of doing deals and solving problems, financial problems. And really what happened was one of my best buddies, his dad, John Wright in central Illinois, was doing what I wanted to do or what I saw him do in his lifestyle with very intentional lifestyle. It was certainly financial, but it was so much more than that. It was the impact that he had on people’s lives. It was his own lifestyle, freedom, flexibility, and it was just really attractive. And honestly, I saw my college football coaches and I saw their lifestyle, and I thought John’s got a way better lifestyle than what they do. And so that really led me into the financial services world, which is where we spent over 30 years.
Brad Burrow (12:06):
Did
Philip Sarnecki (12:06):
You play sports? Were you playing? Would be a misnomer? I practiced for one year. I redshirted and practiced. I mean, in high school, yes, I played three sports, captain of three sports, et cetera. But in college I practiced for one year as a red shirt and that was it.
Brad Burrow (12:22):
Well, I know that your son’s a really good baseball player and you’ve coached him, and I’ve done the same thing with my kids and stuff, but sports is such an amazing thing to do with your family,
Philip Sarnecki (12:38):
Unfortunately, or fortunately, maybe it worked out really well, but wasn’t quite gifted enough to be a professional athlete. But yeah, I was able to, I’ve coached my son baseball and basketball for about seven years, and then when he hit about 14, I thought he needs another voice, the power of another voice. And so I kind of backed away. But then I was an assistant high school baseball coach on our high school team for a couple of years. And yeah, that’s been a lot of fun. I mean, it’s just to pour into young people and into their lives and sports is a unique way to be able to do that.
Brad Burrow (13:12):
One of the things that, this is a little side note, but the organization that you were with, I know that they would bring on kids that had come from college sports background and there’s a reason for that. Can you talk about that a little bit? Just the sports,
Philip Sarnecki (13:27):
Makeup,
Brad Burrow (13:29):
Kids that have had to work hard, playing in college is not easy, and you get up early, work hard weights, all that stuff that sets you up for business, is it?
Philip Sarnecki (13:38):
Yeah, I think it was actually of our 250 at financial advisors, almost 40% of them played a college sport. So yeah, you’re right. It’s the discipline. It’s the hard work, work ethic. It’s going through the pain, right? You’ve got to go through the pain to be good, the physical pain, the emotional pain, the mental pain, and you’ve got to learn to deal with that. And it’s kind of that mental and emotional toughness that we really look for. Certainly not all athletes by any means, but there’s a certain type of athlete that is a really good fit for an entrepreneurial sales career, which is really what we offered to people.
Brad Burrow (14:15):
And rejection,
Philip Sarnecki (14:16):
Rejection, dealing rejection, absolutely.
Brad Burrow (14:18):
Being able to take that in stride and move on. You’re hitting a lot of walls in sports, aren’t
Philip Sarnecki (14:23):
You? Right? Correct.
Brad Burrow (14:24):
In baseball,
Philip Sarnecki (14:24):
Yes.
Brad Burrow (14:26):
Hitting 300, you’re only,
Philip Sarnecki (14:27):
It’s a failure sport. Yes, that’s
Brad Burrow (14:29):
Right. So tell me a little bit about some of the businesses that you’ve been involved with. There’s a lot of ’em, obviously not the financial services side, but some of the other
Philip Sarnecki (14:38):
Businesses. Yeah, I’m a little bit of a business mutt, I guess, if you will. We have an employee benefits company. We’re a largest national franchise owner for a quick lube company. We’ve been able to do that. We’ve done some real estate. We have a leadership company called Leadercast, which I know you’ve been involved with.
Brad Burrow (15:02):
Great company,
Philip Sarnecki (15:03):
By the way. Great company. John Maxwell. Started that company about 25 years ago. We bought it a few years ago, kind of re-imagining. It was really a live event company. And then when COVID hit kind of got shut down. And so we just have an incredible library of talks and speeches of some of the greatest leaders and an athletes, politicians in the world. And Leadercast has a great brand name. We do an event once a year. We brought it back to Kansas City last year.
Brad Burrow (15:37):
It was a great event, by the way. Thank you.
Philip Sarnecki (15:38):
Yeah, it really was. And I give Brian Morris a lot of credit for that, our president, and so Leadercast. And then another of fun deal is we do faith and family films. I have a film production company called Five 13 Films, which is Matthew five 13. And so yeah, I’ve just been really fortunate there. We just had a movie called Monster Summer. I was an executive producer. Now, my company didn’t produce that, but we were an executive producer and it has Mel Gibson and Kevin James and Lorraine Brocko, Mason Tames, and actually had a two three week run on Paramount Plus where it was number one on Paramount Plus. Amazing. So it’s doing extremely well. We have another movie right now called One Heart that it’s finished. It’s a true story. We’re shopping it to distributors right now.
Brad Burrow (16:28):
That is a great story, by the way.
Philip Sarnecki (16:30):
It really is. We can’t wait for it to hit the theaters.
Brad Burrow (16:33):
You need to see that movie when it comes out. It’s going to be really amazing.
Philip Sarnecki (16:35):
Yeah, I’ve been in four screenings, Overland Park, one in Illinois, LA and Texas, and in every screening there are people, men at the end just in tears. It’s a great inspirational, true story.
Brad Burrow (16:51):
Do you know when that’s going to be released by chance?
Philip Sarnecki (16:53):
Well, don’t, we’ve got a couple offers for distribution right now. We’re working on another one that we think could be really good with a very prominent distributor. And so we’re just waiting to see where that ends up.
Brad Burrow (17:05):
So why are you attracted to the film business? And I know you’ve also supported some Christian artists before too, on the music side.
Philip Sarnecki (17:12):
Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it’s really just same reason you look at sports and my involvement there, it’s the impact on culture and sports and entertainment. I don’t know that much else impacts culture more than those things do. And so we’ve worked really hard to bring faith and family entertainment to the masses, if you will. And it started, I didn’t have any background. I mean, I’ve been kind of involved in it now for, gosh, 17, 18 years, but we’ve really gotten really involved over the last seven to eight years and have been able to do some really neat things with it. So making
Brad Burrow (18:00):
Movies is fun, isn’t
Philip Sarnecki (18:02):
It? It’s fun. It’s fun. I happen to think it’s pretty fun. Yeah. Yeah. Now I don’t make that, I’m not the producer, but being part of producer, the director. Yeah, exactly. So I help on the business side and the financing side and things of that nature.
Brad Burrow (18:15):
So I had, one of my notes I wrote down here is that The Turnaround for Kansas might make a great film. What do you think about that? Absolutely. Yeah, you bet. Maybe we should send a crew everywhere you go. I like it. We’ll just we’ll document this happening. That’s right. Yeah. We’re going to make it happen. Yeah, it’s awesome. Okay, so let’s switch gears a little bit. Tell me a little bit about, you’ve had all this success in business. I mean, you’ve done incredibly well and you’re kind of giving that all up to run for governor, that to most people, they would think, well, why would you do that? I mean, you’ve got everything you would want,
Philip Sarnecki (18:54):
Right? I thought the same thing. Did you? Yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Why would I do this?
Brad Burrow (18:58):
Did Heidi say, can we pray about this?
Philip Sarnecki (19:01):
Well, we did. There was a couple years of a lot of prayer, not just us, but other people praying for us. And really, to be honest, we got to the point where we knew God was calling us to do this. I had people approach me about political opportunities for a long time, and I said, no, no, no, not interested. One of the things that though I got frustrated with is Heidi and I, my wife, we were the ones donating. We were the ones hosting the fundraisers, trying to get people elected. And in a state where Donald Trump won 58% of the vote, where we have not elected a Democratic senator since 1932, we’ve had a liberal democratic governor the last two cycles. And if you look at CNBC, for example, just came out with their business rankings by state. They have our economy as 48 ranked, 48 out of 50 states.
(20:00):
They gave us an F. We are the third most likely state to go into a recession based on CNBC’s reporting. And there were COVID federal funds that came in. But those are almost completely gone now, and it’s not a pretty picture on what we’re looking at going forward. And I don’t believe that that is going to be fixed by a politician who has spent their life in politics or has been running for 20 years. I think it has to be an outsider. It has to be a business leader. It has to be a CEO. I’m in a group called CEO Forum that Glenn Kin is in the governor of Virginia, who was somebody who had never run for office, by the way, as a side note, in addition to Donald Trump who’s obviously doing this at the federal level, two or three years ago when we started really looking at this and really praying about it, there were, I believe at the time, 12 governors, a dozen governors who had never run for office. They were all business leaders and CEOs. You had the Doug Bergham and Bill Lees of the world and the S and the Kevin Stitts and the Glenn Jenkins.
(21:09):
But a conversation I had with Glenn last summer was really interesting in that as we were talking about this, he said, Philip, people have this tendency to just lump political jobs together. They kind of do it subconsciously. They think they’re all the same. He said, the governor’s job is really a completely different job. He said, it is a CEO job, and it is called the executive branch for a reason.
(21:33):
But the problem is he said, I don’t follow Kansas that closely. He said, but it sounds like in the last two governor’s races, you’ve had legislators that you’ve tried to have them become executives. And that really hit home with me a lot. And he said, the skills that you’ve developed over the last three decades are exactly what’s needed in the governor’s seat because it is that CEO job. And as I looked at the candidates and the people that were running, we talked to a lot of people. I mean, I know almost all of these folks I’ve given money to many of them, A couple of them I consider friends and they’re good people,
(22:15):
But I don’t believe they have the skillset, that outsider business leader that we really desperately need in Kansas right now. And quite frankly, to be honest, they’ve lost. They keep losing the governor’s seat. And so we have to do something different. And as me and a few other people really started to look at, okay, who could fulfill that role? Like a Billy in Tennessee, like a Glen Young and like a Kevin State in Oklahoma, this outsider CEO business leader, quite honestly, over a year and a half or so, people kept going, Philip, you would be great at this. You would be great at this. And at first you kind of blow it off. It’s like you said, no, I got a great life. Things are going great. But as we continued to hear people say that, continued to pray about it, doors kept opening, and eventually you get to a place and you’re like, you’re being called to do this.
Brad Burrow (23:08):
I better say yes.
Philip Sarnecki (23:09):
I better say yes. That’s exactly right.
Brad Burrow (23:12):
Yeah. Talk about the skillset. One of the things you mentioned is career politicians don’t have the skillset that running a business that comes from running a business. Talk about some of those key things that you bring to the table that a career politician doesn’t have.
Philip Sarnecki (23:29):
Yeah. Well, think about a governor. What do they do? They run a multi-billion dollar budget. They build leadership teams, they appoint people. I mean, the state of Kansas is insane in the number of employees it has per capita. I mean, we’re one of the worst states. So it’s just bloated with bureaucracy and red tape and the amount of red tape and bureaucracy that people need to go through in Kansas to start a business is really insane. And I’m keenly aware of that both for myself and other people. Most of your
Brad Burrow (24:04):
Businesses have been in Kansas, right?
Philip Sarnecki (24:06):
Yeah. Well, yeah. We have presence in many states, but Kansas has certainly been a main focus for them. But so we have to clear the obstacles for new businesses to get started in the state of Kansas. And it’s a mentality on the way that people think. And I think whether you like Donald Trump or not, whether you like his style or not, he clearly is bringing an outsider’s perspective and a new way of thinking to that presidential role because he didn’t come up in the political swamp. He didn’t come up in that political arena. I had a good friend tell me kind of a really simple almost children’s analogy, but he said, if you’ve spent your entire life as a fish in water, you have no idea what it’s like to be outside of the
Brad Burrow (24:58):
Water.
Philip Sarnecki (24:59):
You don’t know what it’s like to go to a bank and have to borrow money. You don’t know what it’s like to have to meet payroll. You do. I do for sure. With your own money or to pull up to when I started my first business to pull up to a gas station, no money in your bank account. I had one employee at that point, she once paid, I put my credit card in the gas to get gas and it’s declined.
(25:27):
And you like, what do you got to do? You got to figure out a way to get her paid and to make that business work. So anyway, I think it’s that real world experience. I think it’s understanding how business owners think. I met with the CEO here in the Kansas City area on the Kansas side just a couple weeks ago for about an hour, and he literally stopped. He’s been a big political donor. He literally stopped and looked at me and he said, this is so refreshing. And I said, what’s that? He said that I can have the conversations with you that I can’t have, I’ve never had with other politicians. And I said, well, good. That’s kind of the whole point on why we decided to run.
Brad Burrow (26:13):
And the career politician mindset has never had those issues, probably ever. They’ve never had to deal with the things that you’re talking
Philip Sarnecki (26:20):
About. For sure. Absolutely. I mean, there’s people in this race that literally have not had another job other than politics for 25 and 30 years. And again, good people, I know them, but that is not what we need right now. Look at where our state is and more importantly, look at the trajectory that our state is on as CNBC just said. It’s not good.
Brad Burrow (26:41):
So let’s jump into of the issues that you’re going to be running on a little bit. I don’t know if you want to just talk about some of them. I have a couple that I wanted to bring up. One of them is that you mentioned in the video that we’re one of the highest tax states in the Midwest.
Philip Sarnecki (26:58):
Well, we are actually of all of our border states. And you can throw in Iowa and Arkansas, which aren’t technically border states, but they’re close. We have the highest personal income tax rate. We are number two in corporate tax rate of those same states. As people know our property taxes are out of control. I mean, we have people, and again, I grew up in a working class, very blue collar family, not just my own family, but my extended family, and I keenly understand this. I mean, think about paying off your home and then the property taxes don’t stop. And as a matter of fact, they’re making, they’re taking huge leaps year after year, and you end up really never owning your home. The government basically owns your home, and that’s a major problem as well. And we have to figure out ways to do better than that. And so it’s taxes. The quality of life, I would say in Kansas is wonderful. The people in Kansas are wonderful.
Brad Burrow (27:56):
Exactly right.
Philip Sarnecki (27:57):
But the trajectory that we’re on is extremely concerning. I talked about a few of them. It’s the red tape to get businesses started in the state of Kansas. It’s the bureaucracy to get businesses started in the state of Kansas. So I think we will take a sledgehammer to a lot of that and we’ll make a major difference. I
Brad Burrow (28:20):
Mean, if you’re starting a business, you’re more likely to go somewhere else than Kansas if it’s,
Philip Sarnecki (28:26):
Well, for sure. Yeah, because the red tape, the bureaucracy, the income tax, the corporate tax. And then, I mean, look, we haven’t grown our population of any note in a couple of decades, but just in the last seven years, our total budget has grown by over $10 billion. Now think about that.
Brad Burrow (28:46):
That’s crazy.
Philip Sarnecki (28:46):
That’s because politicians have been running our state and we’ve got to change that.
Brad Burrow (28:52):
So what are some of the things that you would do coming out of the blocks to fix some of those things? I mean, obviously you’re going to have to change a lot of things, change mindsets,
Philip Sarnecki (29:02):
Policy,
Brad Burrow (29:03):
All those things.
Philip Sarnecki (29:04):
Yeah, I think we’re actually working through the details of a lot of that right now. And we’ll be rolling out some policy probably closer to next year. But we’ve got to get the income tax rate lowered. We got to get the corporate tax rate lowered. Think about the cycle that happens with new businesses. So because you can’t get the number of new business startups up and going and successful that we need because of the bureaucracy in the red tape, then what happens is the politicians go out and they give away massive tax abatements to companies to try to recruit them to the state. You and I are baseball guys, so I use kind of a baseball analogy. If you can’t build your own farm system, you got to spend an enormous amount of money going out and signing free agents every year. Now, I’m not totally opposed to signing a free agent. Occasionally, if I can get the right free agent and I desperately need a first baseman left-handed power hitter, then that might be okay. But the way that we’re doing it, and we’re doing it because we have no farm system, IE the small businesses, the incubators. And so there’s a tremendous opportunity to do that in the state that would keep us from having to go out and doing a lot of these tax abatements, which, oh, by the way, what does that eventually do when you’re giving away that tax revenue? That’s driving up people’s property taxes?
Brad Burrow (30:24):
So it’s just a cycles. You got to stop that cycle. That’s right. Okay. So we talked about that a little bit, the corporate tax rate as well being high. Let’s switch gears a little bit here. I want to talk about the education system and parents are getting taken out of the education
Philip Sarnecki (30:46):
Process.
Brad Burrow (30:47):
I mean, that needs to change.
Philip Sarnecki (30:50):
Well, yes, it does. And I remember when I was on a COVID reopening task force for our school when we were looking at opening schools, I remember we were on a Zoom call. Of course I remember you didn’t have a mask
Brad Burrow (31:05):
On, did you?
Philip Sarnecki (31:05):
No, I didn’t. Didn’t wear a mask very often. I remember getting in an argument with this woman. She was a doctor, and I was just looking at the empirical evidence, and I felt like what she was saying was so, and I said, well, the schools in Europe have been open for months and we can see the effects and it’s not affecting the students. I don’t think COVID and students are going to be any different in the United States than they were in Europe. But they would just ignore the empirical evidence and lean on this kind of fear. It’s just one example. But our parents need to be in charge of their children’s destinies and the Democrats and the liberals, and probably even a few Republicans, they have flipped that. And I believe that the government eats here to serve people. And the government has gotten so large that I think so many people in government, especially career politicians, some of even on both sides, they believe that the people are here to serve the government. And we’ve got to flip that script.
Brad Burrow (32:18):
One of the things too, that my wife’s part of a private school and people are coming to the school telling us things that are happening in the public schools and DEI type stuff and gender change and all these things. It’s just crazy what’s happening in the public schools right now.
Philip Sarnecki (32:36):
Well, and not only that, and I agree, but what happens too is when they’re hiding things from parents, they’re taking our children and they’re really indoctrinating them and trying to hide it from the parents. And that’s a major concern. And that’s one of the positives that came out of COVID is the parents were awakened to what was going on in a lot of the schools, and obviously it greatly, greatly concerned them. So parents need to be in charge of their children’s lives. And again, we need to get the government out of that and let parents do it.
Brad Burrow (33:09):
So switch gears to another thing here. So just tell you a little story. My son, my oldest son’s 30, just married two years.
Philip Sarnecki (33:18):
See, I thought you were 39,
Brad Burrow (33:20):
So I’ll
Philip Sarnecki (33:20):
Have you have a 30-year-old.
Brad Burrow (33:20):
Well, I started very young, so as far as you know, but anyway, he’s got a great job. His wife is an engineer. They have great job. They just bought their first house and needed a lot of help to be able to do that. It’s not too far from here. It’s a house probably close to $400,000,
Philip Sarnecki (33:42):
Which is a starter home here.
Brad Burrow (33:44):
That’s a starter home.
Philip Sarnecki (33:44):
That’s right.
Brad Burrow (33:45):
And they’re fortunate. I mean, they had the wherewithal to be able to do that. Most people are not going to be able to buy a house like that starting out. The housing situation is really, really crazy.
Philip Sarnecki (33:56):
Well, it’s really the whole cost of living situation.
(34:00):
Kansas has been such a good place from a cost of living standpoint for a long time, and it’s still okay compared to some other states. But in the states, again, around us, the ones we compete with we’re not doing well, and it’s getting worse and worse, and it’s getting worse and worse very, very quickly. And we do need more housing. We need more homes that young people can stay in Kansas, their lives, Kansas. That’s right. And so we can also start growing our population, and the more we grow our population, obviously we’re going to have a bigger tax base. We can bring in more tax revenue without taxing the people who are already here more and more and more because we’re not able to grow the population. So again, you get this kind of cyclical problem that’s going on.
Brad Burrow (34:41):
And you mentioned in the video that people are leaving because they can’t really start a career here, or they can, but if they really want to build a house and all those, they have to go other places to do that right
Philip Sarnecki (34:51):
Now. Yeah, we need more jobs. That’s recruiting businesses to the state. I believe that the governor, the CEO of the state needs to also be the chief cheerleader of the state. Now, it doesn’t do any good to go out and do a lot of cheerleading, if you will, and trying to recruit businesses if A, you can’t speak their language, but B, you don’t have the things that those businesses need. You’ve got to
Brad Burrow (35:10):
Have, you got to offer ’em something, right?
Philip Sarnecki (35:11):
That’s right. You got to have the engineers that they need. You got to have the tax base that they need, corporate tax, personal tax, et cetera. And so that’s what we’ll be laser focused on coming into office.
Brad Burrow (35:24):
So one of the last things I wanted to ask you about is we talk a lot about the career politician mindset. What does that mean exactly to you? I know that you’re more of a business approach, which is awesome, but what is the difference if somebody’s watching this video and they’re like, what does that even mean?
Philip Sarnecki (35:43):
Well, again, I think it goes back to, it’s maybe a little hard to describe, but it goes back to that conversation that I was having with that CEO who said, this is so refreshing.
(35:54):
I’ve never had a conversation like this with another politician. They just don’t understand. They don’t get it. They don’t understand what business owners truly need. They don’t understand what it takes to start a business to get it up and going to recruit people the financing that they need. And we understand that, and not only myself, but the team that will build around us will understand that as well. And we’ll be able to go out and implement that across the state of Kansas and make it one of the best places in the country to do business because it has some of the best people in the country, and we need to take advantage of that.
Brad Burrow (36:31):
The people in Kansas are great. They absolutely, the work ethic a wonderful place. Yeah, I would agree with that. Not just a flyover state anymore. Not at
Philip Sarnecki (36:39):
All. Not at all. We need to be a destination state. We’ll make it happen.
Brad Burrow (36:41):
Yeah. Alright, so the last thing, if you could just tell the audience why they should support you. I mean, what is it? Give me your one or two minute kind of elevator pitch on why they should
Philip Sarnecki (36:55):
Support you. Support me financially. Is that
Brad Burrow (36:57):
Or that, but support you as
Philip Sarnecki (36:58):
Governor? Yeah. Well, again, I think it’s a lot of the things that we’ve talked about. I think my background, number one, I mean, I understand coming from a working class family, I mean, I remember being, I don’t know, maybe seven years old and walking in our little home, walking out into our kitchen, and my mom is sitting at the kitchen table. She has bills spread out all over the table, and she has tears coming down her face. She doesn’t know what bills to pay and that will impact me as governor and how I run the state. We grew up, one of my favorite stories is we had a white station wagon when I was a kid, and we had a hole in the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. So you could see the highway or the road.
Brad Burrow (37:41):
Is that right?
Philip Sarnecki (37:42):
Yeah. My brother and I joked, we called it the Flintstones Mobile. My dad had a board and a blanket over the top of it and always told us not to mess with it, but we liked to kind of lift it up. You remember those little red bouncy balls and we liked to drop ’em. And then we’d sprint to the back of the station wagon. Now, this is before seat belts became a really important thing,
(38:02):
And we loved to watch the little balls go bouncing down the bouncing down the road. When I got to high school, we moved up to a yellow station wagon. The floorboard was intact, there were no holes, but the car didn’t go in reverse. So that was always kind of a fun adventure on parking when you have a car. That was the car I drove in high school park, some place you can pull out. So it was kind of a fun joke between myself and my friends. But my point to all that is I understand because I’ve lived it, I grew up with it what working class families go through. I worked and I worked really hard, even as a kid to provide money for myself. And we will take that approach as governor to the state of Kansas. And so number one, I think that’s it.
(38:51):
Number two, because I know that we can win. And I don’t believe, and quite frankly, if I did, if I thought the other candidates could win, I would just keep supporting them. I would keep cutting them checks. Quite frankly, I got to the point where I said I’d rather cut my own checks to me to be able to do this. Now that said, although we’ll certainly put money into this campaign, we need to raise a lot of money as well. And so we’re doing a lot of that right now and we’re leveraging a lot of the relationships that we have. And I’ll tell you, the response has been phenomenal. People are so excited about an outsider coming into the race. People are so excited about a business leader coming into the state. And so the response has been very humbling and really a little overwhelming. And quite honestly, we have the polling and the data to prove that people are desperate for an outside business leader to be the governor of the state in a job that really is an executive job. And so that’s what we need to bring to the table. I think the people that I’m running against would be great in Congress or in the Senate, but I don’t think the skillset that’s needed to run the state as the governor or the CEO is what they bring to the table. Very similar to what President Trump is doing nationally.
Brad Burrow (40:01):
Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. So how would somebody sees this podcast and how would they support, how could they get
Philip Sarnecki (40:08):
Involved? Yeah, very simple. You can go to our website, philipsarnecki.org or PhilipSarneckiforGovernor.org, and you can go to our website and do that, or you can reach out to us, our financial team, our campaign manager. And we’ve built a fantastic team just like we’ll do as governor when we come in. But yeah, we need to raise a lot of money. And part of it’s kind of the scorecard too, in the political world as well. One of my favorite movies of all time is it’s a Wonderful Life. Our family watches it every Christmas Eve. My youngest daughter is so adamant that we never miss that on Christmas Eve. She’s a sophomore in high school now. But one of my favorite scenes is where Jimmy Stewart’s character, George Bailey, is about to commit suicide by jumping off the bridge. And Clarence, the angel decides, Hey, I think the way I’ll save him is I’ll jump in first and then he’ll have to save me.
(41:09):
And so he does that. And then kind of afterwards, the scene afterwards, they’re sitting in this little room kind of shivering and freezing while they’re clothes are drying. And George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart’s character, looks at Clarence the angel and says, Hey, by the way, you don’t happen to have any money, do you? Clarence? The angel says, well, he kind of chuckles and says, well, we don’t use money where I come from. And George Bailey looks at him and says, yeah, well it comes in pretty handy down here, bub. And so in political campaigns, it comes in pretty handy down here for sure. So yeah, that’s a big part of what we’re doing right now.
Brad Burrow (41:48):
Yeah, that’s awesome. So we have a tradition on our podcast, and I’m throwing this at you the last second. So it’s called In World With Real
Philip Sarnecki (41:56):
Media,
Brad Burrow (41:57):
And I’ve got this kind of movie voice thing that I do.
Philip Sarnecki (42:00):
Okay.
Brad Burrow (42:00):
So I’m asking you if you want to do the Inner World Movie Voice, give it a shot. You bet you in a
Philip Sarnecki (42:06):
World with
Brad Burrow (42:07):
Real Media. Oh man.
Philip Sarnecki (42:08):
I don’t know if, can you do
Brad Burrow (42:08):
It? I’ll give a shot. You’re a film guy.
Philip Sarnecki (42:10):
Yeah, I’m on the other side of the camera, but we’ll give it a shot. We can cut
Brad Burrow (42:14):
This out if
Philip Sarnecki (42:14):
You don’t want Say Okay. In a World with Real Media.
Brad Burrow (42:20):
There you go. Is that decent? There you go. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thanks Brett. Thanks for having. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Feel free to share this podcast. We want you guys to like it, share it, send it to people that will like this content. We really appreciate it. And subscribe to our podcast so you can see lots of new content that’s coming out. We appreciate it and we’ll see you on the next one. This has been In A World with Real Media. Thanks for joining us. And be sure to subscribe on iTunes and follow real media on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. So you never miss an episode.