10 Questions For Ken Anderson

10. On His Training

Andrew Soucek (AS): Who originally trained you, and what are some of the things that you learned from them that you can pass on to your students?

Ken Anderson (KA): I was fortunate in the sense through nothing more than a coincidence, or roll of the dice, that I picked some fantastic trainers out of Green Bay, Wisconsin and that was Eric Hammers and Mike Mercury.

I still remember the first thing that Mike told us when we started, and I was his first student. He said "The people that you step on, on your way to the top are the people you're going to bump into on your way back down." And that's something I've always tried to live by. Because it happens. And I always try to maintain a level of humility, and I still put my pants on the same way that everybody else does. That's something I really want to instill in our students.

There's another quote that stuck out in my head, that's when I got down to OVW finally. Jim Cornette was running the show and he just said "If you know somebody who this business would benefit greatly from having them, and you don't do everything you can, you don't go out of your way to get them looked at, or try to get them a job, you are admitting to yourself that you suck and you're worried that someone else is going to take your spot." And that's something I've always tried to do too, and that's what we want to do with the school, is really give people those opportunities.

We didn't know anybody when we first started in the business. We had to go out and make all of our contacts on our own. We had to do everything on trial and error. So many wasted hours of spinning our wheels, trying to figure out what the formula was. What are they looking for? What do they need? Doing things wrong. We want to make sure that we give our students...we want to make the line as short as possible and as straight as possible.