Business Podcasts | Why You Must Get All Your Teammates to Follow the Same Proven Systems & Processes + The Importance of Holding Your Team Accountable to Key Performance Indicators

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Catching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I break down the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s where I’mma dive. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio, and now 3, 2, 1, here we go! Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire. And page 164 of my newest book, A Millionaire’s Guide, How to Become Sustainably Rich. And we’re joined with Matt Klein, the franchise brand developer of Oxifresh. Matt, welcome on to The Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? I am doing great. How are you? Well, brother, I’m excited to talk to you about the stuff people don’t want to talk about, but you have to talk about it if you run a business. It’s called managing people. And so we go to page 164, and I write here in the book, I require everyone to use the same system. Today, there are many different management systems out there. However, you need to require your team to all be on the same page, literally. Now, I want to ask you this thought, you know, this idea of, if you buy an Oxifresh franchise, an oxifresh.com franchise, why would it be important that all of the people that work for you, that they all follow the approved Oxifresh system, as opposed to allowing each employee to have their own interpretive way of implementing the systems? Yeah, because if you don’t have some sort of process for them, they’re gonna start to do things the way they believe is correct. And for some guys, that might be great. For some guys, it’s gonna be very bad, right? Whether it’s time management, whether it’s communication with the customer, whether it’s down to mixing product in the right order, right, all the way down to literally how you get the equipment in and out of the home, right? These things are done for a reason, not only efficiency, profitability, but customer relations, right? I mean, there’s a process to every single piece of our cleaning process, which is like how you communicate with the customer before the job, like the way you park your vehicle in front of the home, right, to how you shake the hand of the customer and do the walkthrough and actually present the cleaning to taking payment and getting Google reviews. Any one of those things that are off will have worse results than if they were doing it in the order that we train them. Now, Oxifresh happens to be the world’s greenest carpet cleaning company. Have you ever had in your rich history of having opened up 500 plus Oxifresh locations, have you ever had an employee of any of the Oxifresh franchises that’s decided they want to use their own wet carpet cleaning process? Like they want to get their own, like they say, I want to buy an Oxifresh franchise but I want to use the hoses and the water and the steam cleaning and even though you have the world’s greenest carpet cleaning system which uses one-tenth of the water of Stanley Steamer. Have you ever had somebody who says I want to I want to follow the OxiFresh system I want to buy an OxiFresh franchise but I do want to do the steam cleaning the wet form of cleaning? We had a gentleman do this I won’t say from where but he essentially after a few years he bought a truck did it and the reason we found out is because the customer calls and said it’s been been wet for 24 hours and we’re like what and so they kind of did some investigating and yeah the one reason you wouldn’t use that cleaning system is the one reason that got the guy in trouble right it’s like you know it’s like well you guys say you’re you know you get one the cleaning wasn’t great to my carpets have been wet for 24 straight hours so it’s literally opposite of what we say we do on our right right and so when she saw it she it was not great I gotta ask you this again. I’m just asking because I’m trying to make this a benefit for the listeners out there. Because if you go to Oxifresh.com and you buy a proven Oxifresh franchise, I mean, you guys provide the proven auto wraps. I mean, you guys have a template for the auto wraps. You have a template for the business card. You have a template for the online ads that work. Have you ever had an Oxifresh franchise owner who’s bought the proven systems and they decided, you know what, I don’t want to follow the proven auto-wrap. I don’t want to follow the system that works. Have you ever had an Oxifresh owner that has said, you know what, I don’t want to follow the proven auto-wrap, I want to come up with my own strategy? We had a franchise try to create a, the thought was good, like his thought was fine, he just shouldn’t have done it because, like when you have 15, 16 years of marketing the same logo and the same name, it’s very important, that’s what people recognize. But when you change the logo color and you change it to say like, Oxifresh of a university, right? Like trying to piggyback off the university team, you lose everything that you’ve worked for for the last, it’s not recognizable, you don’t know who it is, it’s very specific to a general area, and usually somebody’s first try at that doesn’t look that good, right? And it did not work. Have you ever had somebody say, I love the Oxifresh AutoWrap, I love the carpet cleaning systems, I love the fact that you guys provide a call center for me to schedule my jobs for me, but I want to, you know, kind of give out my own cell phone number and, you know, kind of make that my own little call center. Like, I want to have my own little, you know, side call center. I mean, we can still use corporate, but I kind of want to have my own call center. Yeah, we’ve had some people try that in the past. And you know, the great thing about that one, that one comes to the surface really easy because they start to recognize like, oh, this is not that good. One, my employees aren’t good at answering the phones as much. They’re not actually experts on the language of the industry. Also pricing. So, I mean, our scheduling center reps go through quite a diligent training process before they’re on their own. So it seems easy to answer phones for a business, but until you do it, you’re going to realize there’s some gaping holes in knowledge, execution, software. It’s not great when you do it the other way. So it could be, it is safe to say that you’ve had people, even within the great OxyPress brand, try to not follow the systems. Yeah, and some of that is, you know, just trying things and maybe not realizing they’re doing something wrong and some of that was actually purposeful but you know it all comes to the surface pretty easy like I said and you know you shouldn’t get into a franchise if you wanna kinda buck the system it’s gonna be it’s harder it’s like trying to swim upstream and so I would say none of our successful franchisees do that but people have tried who have maybe not been as successful and they’ve tried and the reason I’m saying this is because, you know, you obviously sell franchises, and if somebody were to buy a franchise from you, the benefit is you’re buying a proven system. We go to page 157 of the book. So let’s just say now that I bought a franchise, and I love the systems, and I am personally following the systems, but yet I struggle to hold my team accountable to all following the systems. So maybe the owner of the franchise is following the systems, but maybe their staff underneath them is not. Page 157 it reads here, at the end of the day your company must consistently wow your ideal and likely buyers in a scalable way or you will not be able to earn enough revenue to turn your big dreams into reality. You must hold your team members accountable to completing their daily tasks whether they feel like it or not. As a consumer when we go to Disney World we don’t care whose birthday it is or who’s sick or who’s tired or who simply forgot to do their job this morning. We expect Disney World to be incredible because we’re spending a boatload of hard-earned cash to take our families there. As a consumer, when we go to In-N-Out Burger, we don’t care who’s running late or who’s going through a divorce or who has a headache or who feels like working or not. We just want to go to In-N-Out Burger for a quality burger. We expect In-N-Out Burger to provide great customer service and great tasting food because we have decided to spend our hard-earned money at this establishment. The point is you gotta hold your team accountable to following the system. And I feel like what happens is in small business, none of our listeners out there ever deal with this I’m sure, is that as a small business owner, if you’re not careful your team will drift and will fall to the lowest level of customer service that you allow. And that’s where I want to put the emphasis there. So if somebody travels to Denver, they buy an Oxifresh franchise, what sort of coaching or training do you provide for the new business owners on how to hold their team accountable? Yeah, so first and foremost, we’re going to train them as if they were going to be the employee themselves. They have to understand what that employee is going to be going through, how to communicate with the customer, how to actually clean. Whether they clean or not is not the question. They need to know what the standards that we’ve already set so that they can actually deliver that to their employees. Because if you don’t know what’s going on, how are you going to be able to say if it’s right or wrong? So, well, they’ll come to Denver, they’ll do a full training here on the right way to clean, the right way to manage a schedule, the right way to actually communicate with customers, the right way to clean, okay? And then we also hold the franchisees accountable. Like, we don’t just set it and forget it. I mean, we are actively getting customer service feedback from every single customer that responds to the email we send out after the job. And that report goes to each franchise each morning, not only to their customer satisfaction percentage wise per employee, but against the brand average. And so it’ll tell you where you rank. If you have an employee that’s doing great and they’re above, awesome. If you have a customer and it gives them a bad review, you’ll know. You can start to see trends and what that employee’s good at, maybe what they’re not good at. Maybe they have a hard time getting out of bed, so they’re always late to the first job, right? All of those things, you can’t really guess or assume. You have to have real data behind it so you can manage appropriately. Now, again, the thing about running a business is a business exists to create both time freedom and financial freedom for the owner, at least that’s my worldview. And so in order to create time freedom and financial freedom for the business owner, there’s three things that have to happen. There’s a lot of things, but there’s three things in particular that have to happen. The customer has to like you. The customer has to be happy with the product or service. You have to make sure that your product or service is something that wows the customer. Two, the people that work for you have to like coming to work. They have to find the workplace to be fulfilling. It has to be something they want to do. And then three, you’ve got to make a profit. The three Ps I call this. One, your product has to wow the customer. Three, your employees, they have to get paid. And third is you have to make a profit. And if your employees don’t get paid, it’s not going to work. If you don’t make a profit, it’s not going to work. And if you don’t have a product or service that the customer loves, it’s not going to work. And Matt, I find that business owners struggle sometimes to juggle all three of those. And I know at Oxifresh you do a good job preparing the owners for the battle, the daily grind of running a successful company. But which one of those three do you think is the hardest? Is it hardest for the owners to make a profit? Is it hardest for the owners to make a product that people, to deliver the product that people love? Or is it hardest to pay quality employees? Or is it all of them? What’s the biggest challenge for franchise owners? Yeah, I think first, I can kind of break into two categories. I think for a lot of people, they’ve never had a job or a career that they’ve hired people and or managed people. So they kind of have to learn a little bit about themselves, how they manage, how they talk to people, how they set expectations. And so that does take a little bit of time for people to get comfortable and really see like their faults and be able to fix it. And so we help them with that, you know, finding real people and keeping good employment. Because a lot of people always tell me like, well, there’s no good, there’s no one wants to work. It’s like, well, I don’t think that’s really the case. Like maybe they don’t want to work for you right now. So we got to fix the pitch, right? We got to fix the management style, those sorts of things. And then, for people that have never really focused on Google, like we talk about so much, some people do kind of struggle in the beginning on how to get reviews. And maybe, they got five and two of them didn’t stick so they get discouraged. So a lot of what we do in the beginning in that coaching program and onboard processes is really kind of talk about ways of getting around that, encouragement, maybe thinking outside the box. So everyone comes to us in a little bit of a different fashion. But yeah, those are typically the things that people struggle a little bit until we kind of get them over that hump. Final area I wanna hit on is page 165 of the book. I talk a lot about key performance indicators and Gino Wickman, a friend of mine, he’s been on our show. He’s the author of the best-selling book called Traction. And he describes at great length the importance of implementing key performance indicators. These are also called KPIs. But at the end of the day, everybody who works for you has a quantifiable number they’re accountable to. And I think a lot of business owners struggle to communicate that which is expected of the employee. So let me do an example. If you worked in my office today, folks, and you applied to work here, what we do with the culture we have in my office, I’m not saying this is the culture you should have in your office, but in my office, we start work at seven and we end work at three for most core positions. So if you earn your way into what I would call a core position, you’re working seven to three. That’s something that you worked towards, something you worked for, so you work seven to three, four days a week, which is something you’ve earned if you’re in those core positions. If you’re in what I would call a non-core position, you’re more of a nine to five, five days a week. And so some people, Matt, they really say, man, I wanna work four days a week, baby. I wanna be done at three. I want the three-day weekend every week. Every weekend, I want the three-day weekend. And I say, well, you gotta be a part of the core team. They say, how do I do that? I say, well, you start off. You’re more of a nine to five, five day a week kind of person. And if you achieve success, you do the certain key performance indicators, you’re in the top percent, then you get promoted to a position where you’re in that core position where you’re working seven to three, Monday through Thursday. And that’s just sort of a culture that I’ve created. But Matt, it’s very clear, it’s laid out, it’s communicated both verbally and it’s written. I think a lot of business owners, they don’t communicate verbally or in written form what the expectations are and they just get frustrated with employees that fail to live up to their non-expressed tribal expectations they have in their mind based upon where they’re at mentally. I would love to get your thoughts on just the idea of clearly laying out the key performance indicators for teammates. Yeah I mean this is this is so so important. I don’t really think you can have a company, at least like ours, where you have employees going out, you know, they’re producing. If they don’t know exactly how first they make money and the ways they can make money on that job, and you don’t have some KPIs like customer satisfaction or upsell percentages or, you know, tip percentages, all of those, you know, Google reviews, like if they don’t understand and have some real life, like for me, I require my employees to get at least 15 Google reviews a month, right? I require my employees to have at least a 10% add-on percentage. I require my employees, you know, in terms of working hours, they know. Their hours are set, they put the jobs in there, right? And so like, I can check these KPIs on a consistent basis so I can say, hey, you know, Tori, you did pretty good for the first few days and then you kind of dropped off what’s going on. Right? So I can live time manage my employees expectations because these guys want to make as much money as possible. And if they start to slip and I tell them, Hey, you know what’s going on. I can typically tell from my KPIs if something’s going on in one of my employees lives because they’ll have a consistency throughout and then something will drop. Right? And so for me as an owner, if I don’t know what these KPIs are. How am I supposed to manage my employees? Like I think guessing at this stuff is not the right way to do it. So I think it’s the most important thing for our businesses after getting jobs, right? Getting jobs is the most important, but after getting jobs, the most important thing is laying out real expectations and then having the KPIs to be able to manage those expectations. Because just telling them that and then not being able to like actually have conversations on real numbers, it doesn’t do anything for you. Now on part two of today’s show, I’m gonna share a success story of two clients, one that owns a harbor called Keystone Harbor. We helped him to grow his business dramatically. And the other one is a landscaper. And whether you’re a landscaper, you own a harbor, no matter what kind of business industry you’re in, these principles do apply. But if you’re out there today and you’re saying, hey, you know what? I want to maybe create another revenue stream for my life. I want to create another opportunity to make revenue that’s different than, let’s say you’re listening today and you do own a harbor or you do own a landscaping business, you are a dentist, you are a doctor, you are a lawyer, buying an OxyPress is one way to generate another revenue stream. I think that’s very, very important. I don’t talk about it a whole lot on this show, but my wife and I, you know, I worked very, very hard for many, many years to develop over a hundred different revenue streams. And some are impressive and some are less than impressive. I mean, one of my revenue streams was kind of funny today, Matt, but one of my employees saw this happen. But my wife said, hey, can I borrow your wallet? And I go, yes, you can borrow my wallet. What are you getting out of my wallet? And my wife says, I need to get a couple of checks out of there. And one of the employees goes, says, can I try that? And my wife goes, no, no, we’ve been working on this, my husband and I have been working on this for many years, so he knows what I’m talking about. But Matt, I have different checks that come in, you know, different commission streams that come in from multiple revenue sources and my wife was getting those and she bundles them all up and deposits them. And so some months, the revenue streams from some business and ventures are tremendous. Some of the homes that we’ve flipped have been great. Some of the properties that we’ve invested in have done great. Some of the business entities have been rocking, some have been slower, some have been busier. But Matt, I think everybody out there needs to have multiple revenue streams, or at least that should be the goal. What kind of folks are a good fit to buy an Oxifresh.com franchisor? Yeah, I think anyone that kind of has gotten to a point where they feel like their skillset, right, either from building up from corporate America or even currently running small business, like they need something where they can produce an income, maybe they don’t want to use all of their time to run it, they need a little bit of support, they need some software support, technology support, they need to know if they’re going into an industry where they have the advantage. So to me, effort is the main thing. Like, I don’t think you can really fail at something if you at least have the effort and the willingness to kind of go through the muck a little bit. Like I’ve found in my decade of doing this, there’s a lot more people willing to give up when times are tough than not. And so to me, it’s just someone that’s gonna work hard, wants to really change their life, get into something where they can follow the system, not afraid of technology, not afraid to get their hands dirty a little bit. I’ve never cleaned carpet for my franchise, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not working on my business constantly. What does it cost to buy an Oxifresh franchise right now? It’s $45,000 in initial investment, which includes your equipment, your product, your territory that’s protected, your seven-year agreement, plus a training where I’ll fly you out to Colorado. You can learn more about that today by going to Oxifresh.com. Matt, I’m going to give you the final word here, the final 60 seconds for anybody out there that’s taking notes, considering buying an Oxifresh franchise, what would you say to them, sir? I’d say if you want to change your life in a way where you can open up your time, create a second income stream or your primary income stream, and you wanna be taught how to run a successful business, we are a great option for that, right? Low cost to entry, completely automated backend, fully functioning cleaning system. We want owners that can focus on employee development, customer relations, and getting Google reviews. Matt Klein, you’re a tremendous American. I appreciate you. Thank you for growing out the beard. What is your hat? Are you a big Michael Jackson proponent? What’s your hat all about? Is your hat saying a subliminal thing? Is it some sort of business tip on your hat today? What’s happening here? It’s just a golf brand. Okay, it’s a golf brand. Okay, thank you, man. I appreciate it. You’re always working. You’re pushing the golf brand, you’re pushing OxyPress. Thank you so much for your time, sir. I appreciate you. We’ll talk to you next week. All right, thanks, Clay. Bye. Hey, this is Dustin Huff. I’m with Keystone Harbor Marina. We joined Thrive back in January and have been working with these guys for about seven months. During that time period, we have moved up our Google rank through reviews and SEO processes that we’ve compiled through these guys. Our leads have gone from about four a week to now 165 a week. So the process works. Once you begin, you have to stay with it. As long as you continually do this week in and week out, month in and month out, you’ll continually grow your reviews and you’ll also continually grow your revenues. So it’s important to stay with it. So this is not a get rich quick scheme. I would say stay with it. Google reviews are paramount and content is king. So as long as you stick with it, your revenue will grow and your business will grow. Started from the bottom, now we hit it Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get it Started from the bottom, now we hit it Started from the bottom, now we hit it We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top Teaching you the systems to get what we got Cousin Dixon’s on the hooks, I bring down the books He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks As the father of five, that’s where I’mma dive So if you see my wabbin’ kids, please tell them hi Hit the C and Z up on your radio, and now 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and that’s what we’re here to do. Alright, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, you’re going to get a chance to hear from an actual, real entrepreneur. Now, he may look like a male model, but no, he is not a male model. He may look too good to be true, but no, he’s a real person. He’s a wonderful client, a great guy to serve, a great guy to work with. He’s having a lot of success with his company, and he’s here to share his story. Ruben Duran, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Oh, I’m doing excellent. Thank you for having me. Okay, so tell us, where are you located, sir? And I’m going to take notes here so people can verify you have a real company, a real website. Where are you located? Okay, we are in Riverview, Florida and that’s about 30 minutes out of Tampa. Okay, so Riverview, Florida and I’m taking notes here. This is a real thing folks. Now what’s the web address people can go to right now if they want to prove that your website is real? Yes, we have toplawnprose.com. Toplawnprose.com. I’m going to pull up the website right now. I’m going to pull up on the screen so everyone can follow along here. This is toplawnprose.com. This is the website here. And how did you originally hear about us there, sir? How did you come in contact with us? All right. Well, I’ll give you the long story short. I was following a YouTube person and they mentioned the podcast. And I decided to give the podcast a try. So I went ahead and started listening to the podcast, binge listened to about, I don’t know, 100, 150 episodes before I decided to check out the conference. So I was, last year on, in March, I went to the conference in Oklahoma, went over there and checked out the conference. After that, I decided to start implementing a few of the things that, you know, you suggested during the conference. And then I reached out, decided to see if I could have an opportunity for coaching. So that’s how I learned about you guys. Now, you know, I’ve been doing this since 2005. So I, this is, you know, I mean, at this point, what, 18 years doing the same thing and helping people grow companies. And I love it because we meet wonderful people like you. And I talked to a guy the other day, true story. And he told me, he said, Clay, I’ve been listening to your show for like, it had to be at least seven or eight years. I said, well, you’ve, you’ve been listening, because I’ve been doing my show for over 10 years. He said, bro, I listen like every day. And for whatever reason, I just never thought that I could grow my company. And then he said, it’s a crazy story. I run into some guy at church, at my church, who uses you guys. And I was like, oh, well, I’m gonna reach out then. And he’s like, you know, this guy’s grown his business dramatically. What kind of growth have you had since you started working with our team there? Well, it’s been a 100% growth. So, to this point this year, we’ve generated as much revenue as we did all of last year. So, let’s be clear. So, you’re saying right now in July of 2022, so you’re seven months into the year, we’ll call it eight months into the year. So you still have four more months of the year left and you’ve already exceeded last year’s sales totals? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I know if you keep growing at this pace, where do you think you’ll be in terms of a growth over last year? Do you think you’ll be more than double or you think it’ll be about double or what do you think? It’ll be slightly over double if we keep up the pace of what we had last year. Now I want to get into some stuff, some kind of the stuff behind the stuff, because a lot of times you hop on a wonderful show and there’s great podcasts out there where they talk about the stuff like, you’ve got to work on your business and not work in your business. And you’re going, that’s awesome, I appreciate that. Or you’ll hear people with a different kind of tone, they’ll say, you need to work on your business and not in your business. Or you’ll hear kind of a funny guy, well, you want to work on your business and not in your business. But you’re like, what? Yeah, but what does that mean? So I’m going to get into the stuff behind the stuff. 10 things that you’re doing to grow your company. And there’s a lot of things we’re doing, but I just want to focus on the big 10 here. You have to gather objective reviews from clients. You have to gather objective reviews from real clients. You know, from real clients. Why do you have to gather objective reviews from real clients? Well, the reviews are, you know, you can’t put a price to the reviews because I get calls every single day of customers or potential customers saying, hey, I found you on Google and you guys had the most reviews. You guys had the best reviews. You guys had the best ratings. And that’s why we decided to call. Half of the time when they call, they’re already sold. There’s no selling. They’re already sold because they looked at your reviews, they looked at our website, and everything matches up, it looks great, and they’re already sold. So Google reviews are valuable. We made it part of our process, our system, with employees to gather Google reviews, objective reviews, from the customer. So when they’re at the customer property, they can knock on the customer’s door once they’re done with the work, show the customer the work, and they got the opportunity of doing not just the Google review, they can also do a video review. And we’ve got about 60 video reviews. You can go on our website and check out all those 60 video reviews. We’re doing a great job with those. Now again, this is the stuff behind the stuff. Somebody says, I don’t want to talk about the stuff on the stuff. I want to talk about the emotional stuff. Okay, we can get excited. We can get emotional. We can get fired up here. We can do that, but I just want to make sure we’re clear. You got to gather real reviews from real customers. Second is you got to get real video reviews from real customers. And if anybody says, I don’t know what you mean by that. I’m talking about you asking a real person, hey, how happy are you with my, serve with the service that we provided you. And then that customer is going to give you their feedback and you record that. And then we upload it to your website. And that’s the problem. And it just has to happen. You say, well, how many do I need? You’re never done folks. You’re never done. This just in, you’re never done. It’s like grass. It’s like cutting grass. You can’t Grass you gotta cut you gotta keep mowing that grass That’s a great thing for people like today’s guest Ruben the grass keeps growing and I mean this you got to keep you got to Keep cutting that grass Activity number three. I don’t know if you’ve started this yet with your coach who’s helping you down the path Because I make a path and a plan for every single client that we work with, and a big part of that, after we get the marketing and the branding and the website optimization going, now we gotta start to hire people. Have you started the process of doing the weekly group interview? Has that began happening for you yet? You know what, before I did any interviews or group interviews, we had some employees that were terrorists, so they were holding us hostage and trying to get us to do things their way and paying them whatever they wanted to get paid and work the days that they wanted to get paid. After I started working with the coaching program, we were able to get into these weekly interviews and not only doing the weekly interviews, we’re also doing a day of shadowing. That gives the employee the opportunity to see our culture here at Top Lawn Pros and see if this is good for them, but it also gives us the opportunity to see if this person is going to be a diligent doer. So one of the things that we do is we do that weekly interview at the same day, same exact time every single week. So what happens when we do that is that we get to see who’s going to be on time, who’s showing up on time. This guy didn’t show up on time or he’s not even allowed into the interview. Number two, we invite them for the day of shadowing. When they come and do the shadowing, are they showing up on time? Are they following the uniform that we asked them to wear for that day? Are they diligent? Are they going to be a team player? And we get to filter through employees really quickly. And we’ve created a great working culture due to this weekly interview. So I love the weekly interviews. Now, this is a big thing, because I see people that tell me they’re, they’re, they’re beaten from years of doing business the wrong way. The other day I was talking to a guy, true story, and I’ll be kind of vague so as to not give away too much details, but I am always flipping a house or investing in a property and I have kind of a method to that. That’s a whole separate show. But I’m meeting this guy and this guy was a professional baseball player. He played professional baseball over a dozen seasons pro baseball. And he actually teamed up to throw a no-hitter years ago. I’ll give you that much information. And but he is a professional baseball player. And he looked beat up. And I said, you good? You know, he looked like he had gone through just a heck of a life. And he said, well, you know, baseball, I’d get up there, I’d pitch, I had a plan, you know, with a catcher, call the pitch, I’d throw the pitch, I had a workout routine, I had the whole thing, it was like, you know, eat this food, follow this workout, play in this game. It was very, for me, it was like a routine, and it was great, and I didn’t know when I bought rental properties that my life would become a personal hell. And I said, a personal hell? He says, it was terrible. I said, why was it terrible? He said, you can’t find any good people and my staff are holding me hostage. These people don’t want to clean the rental houses. And I’m going, dude, you got to do the group interview. He’s going, what’s the group interview? I said, bro, every single Wednesday night at 5.30, I interview all potential job candidates. So whenever you apply for a job with me, I say, we want to interview you this Wednesday at 5.30. And I might interview 40 people, I might interview 50 people, I might interview four people, but I’m gonna interview them all every single Wednesday.” He goes, why do you do that? I said, because the people that are late, like you were saying, if they’re late, they’re always gonna be late. And if they’re late to the interview, they’re never gonna start to be on time. And he says, really you do? I said, yeah. He goes, wow, I’m doing like one-on-one interviews. Man, you just gave me back my day, my week. He was so fired up, but he said, what else are you doing? I said, well, this is the guy I’m talking about his property. I’m trying to get him to show me his property. He says, well, what else do you do? I said, well, you want to get objective reviews on your rental properties, because you’re renting these properties. You’re doing that whole vacation rental thing, the Airbnb, the VRBO, the vacation rental thing. I’m like, bro, you got to get reviews from the people that are staying at your vacation property. You have a beautiful property here. You need to get reviews. And he goes, I don’t know why I haven’t been getting reviews. Let me look at my reviews. And he had like a one. I mean, he had like a one star, Ruben. This guy’s written out this property for years. He had under a two star. So I mean, these are practical moves. Now, the next thing is your website. We have got to optimize your real website. And a lot of people, they find these Tai Lopez videos, not to call out Tai Lopez, but come on Tai Lopez, come on. And they go to these Tai Lopez videos. Have you seen these, Ruben? Have you seen the Tai Lopez videos? I have. I’m going to pull this up just so people can get an example of what I’m talking about. This is Tai Lopez on a jet, okay, and then books. So this is a real commercial. This is a real thing. I’m not making this up. So this is Tai Lopez. He’s on a jet reading books. Let me pull it up here. Where’s Tai Lopez? Come on. Tai Lopez. Okay, let me go ahead. Tai Lopez on a jet. Let me get it. I’m gonna get it. Here he is. Oh yeah, here he goes. You know what I like more than flying in a private jet like this? My books. Oh yeah, okay. Actually not, but I do bring books with me because… And he wants us to believe that he’s on this private jet with this woman, this woman, and this woman, and this dude reading books. We were just talking a little bit earlier on, the question was how to figure out what you should do with your life, like your destiny, what you’re meant to do, what your purpose is, and I find that’s the most common question and I was just thinking about it when I was here, we were flying to the biggest investor conference in the world. Get out of here. So a lot of people, they watch videos like that, how to get rich quick, no money down, and they’re trying to get rich in like seven minutes. And I’m trying to teach people how to build massive success over time, okay? I’m not trying to teach you how to get rich quick. And so we have to optimize your real website, and we have entire shows about that. And on part two of today’s show, folks, I’m going to introduce you to the godfather of search engine optimization. His name is Bruce Clay. He actually has written many books on search engine optimization. I have paid him $8,000 per month for multiple contracts to teach me what I now know years ago. I paid this guy eight grand a month. It’s a contract to teach me stuff. It’s phenomenal. So we’re going to do an interview with Bruce Clay. That’s Bruce Clay from the godfather of search engine optimization. So we’ve optimized your website. But we have to write content every single week to make that website rank in the search engine. So after we optimize it, we’ve got to write content every single week. Also on your website, you have to have a no-brainer. Your no-brainer you have right now is schedule your first mow for $5. You have a thing where you can read the reviews. You have to create a conversion video on the website. There’s a lot of details. We’ll get into that on part two of today’s show. Next, we have to pull the weekly stats. Why do we have to pull the stats? For anybody out there that’s going, Reuben, I don’t pull the weekly stats. Why do I have to pull the weekly statistics and look at them every single week, sir? Well, I didn’t see the value at first in doing weekly statistics. I was kind of annoyed at my coach when they wanted to do this every single week. I was like, what’s up? You’re making me do more work. So I was kind of annoyed of that, but I started doing that. At first, the way I was tracking it was, let me look at the bank account. Is there more money than was there last week? Okay, great. Then we’re doing great. We’re profitable. But doing this has given us some structure so we can see every week, how much money is coming in? How much are we spending? How much is the profit? What is our customer acquisition cost? How much are we spending on ads? How much, how many ads are we converting? Where are we converting those ads from? Are they coming from Google? Are they coming from any other search engines? Out of the people that call us, how many do we convert into members? Because we do have a membership for our customers. So we know exactly how much money is coming in every month. And we know if we’re going to make enough money to be able to pay our bills. So this has been great. We also track here our video reviews. We track our Google reviews. We track our competitors’ reviews to see how we’re doing against them. The number of customers being added, if we’re losing any customers, we track that. Conversion rate, there’s a lot of things that we’re tracking on this tracking sheet. And this thing has, I think this has taken us to the next level for sure. And I’ll tell you folks, if you’re out there today and you think that Ruben is a male model, yeah, he could be a male model, but he’s a real person. The company’s toplawnpros.com. Real guy, okay? The only difference between him, he and you, is he took the time to schedule a free 13-point assessment. He took the time to schedule a free 13-point assessment. I’ll tell you this, I do free 13-point assessments. I did one, that’s why I was about five minutes behind for our interview today. And I was talking to a knucklehead, a complete knucklehead, a guy who is not a good fit. And I’ll tell you why he’s not a good fit. He wants something for nothing. He wants a get-rich-quick strategy, and he wants to have his business grow without putting in the work. And you’ve gotta be willing to put in the work. I believe it’s about five hours a week of homework that you have to do every week to make the system work. How long per week does it take you to implement? You know, we’ve got a 28-page business plan and we’re working through it, but how long does it take per week for you to implement the systems that we’re teaching you to grow? We are probably anywhere between five and 10 hours every week of time outside of, you know, business hours doing this. So putting numbers into the tracking sheet, doing our 30 minute interviews, looking at our ads, different things that we’re doing. My coach is working with me on systems right now. So optimizing systems, having checklists, adding those for our team members. So yeah, I think we put a good five to 10 hours a week. How would you describe the business coaching for you as being slightly effective, life-changing, moderately effective, good? How would you describe what the business coaching has done for your business? Well, here’s why I reached out and I decided that this was worth my time and the money. I listened to the podcast. I knew what Clay was saying, is like, okay, go get reviews. So that’s one of the first things that I started doing. I said, okay, I started listening to the podcast. Before I listened to the podcast, I probably had like 13 reviews. Then I went to the business conference and listened to how valuable it was to get those reviews. So by the time I went to the conference and started the coaching program, I was already at 60 reviews. So I started working at this. It was about three months between the conference time and when I started the coaching. So I got 60 reviews, or about 60 during that time. And then after that, I just started implementing this, go get reviews from every single customer. So the coaching has just been invaluable for me. Holding me accountable has been one of the best things that, so if nothing else, if we didn’t track anything, just holding me accountable to do what I said I was going to do has been one of the biggest things that I can, and then challenging me. I’ve got that coach that just challenges me every week. Hey, did you do the group interviews? Hey, did you get more reviews? Hey, did you call back this customer? So just holding me accountable to doing the things that I said I was going to do is probably, you know, one of the biggest things there. You know, one of our clients, we’re gonna interview him next, I believe he’ll be on today’s show. And then we’ll have Bruce Clay on a part three of today’s show. His name is Gabe Salinas. His company is called Window Ninjas. And Gabe was a startup when we met him. And I think he now has, I don’t want to exaggerate, I think he has, we’ll say, more than five locations of his window cleaning company. I don’t want to get the number wrong, we’ll let Gabe tell you on today’s show, but he’s a normal guy, but the one thing that you do and that Gabe does and that all of our wonderful clients, I mean, we’ve worked with Oxifresh for over a decade. They now have over 500 locations, oxifresh.com. We’ve worked with Tip Top K9 to help them grow from one location now to I think 17 locations. I mean, it’s just incredible growth. All of you have in common two traits. There’s a lot of other traits, but there’s two in particular. You’re diligent, meaning that you are willing to sow the seeds needed to reap the harvest. You’re willing to consistently, you’re diligent doers. You put in the work. And diligent means you’re treating people the way that you would want to be treated while you’re sowing the seeds. And the second thing I have found is coachability. And I find that if you’re willing to have somebody who knows the way to teach you what to do, success is absolutely possible. Rueben, I’ll give you the final word for anybody out there that’s thinking about attending a workshop or thinking about scheduling a one-on-one consultation, what would you say to them, sir? Well, if you’re willing to put in the work and you’re willing to do the work and the nitty gritty behind the scenes, then definitely reach out for this coaching program. If you want somebody that’ll do everything for you and you want the magic to happen, then don’t reach out. I don’t think this will be a good fit for you. But definitely if you want to grow your business and the sky’s the limit when you’ve got a business coach for sure. You know, and we only work with 160 clients and people always ask me, why don’t you work with a thousand then? Because I’m going to a birthday party today for my twin daughters. I’m going to have a great time at that today. I’m going to spend a wonderful time with my wife on a date tonight. And there’s a lot of things I enjoy to my life beyond just business growth. And I built a schedule that allows me to have time freedom and financial freedom. And that’s what it’s all about there. Ruben, thank you so much for being so diligent and so coachable. It’s a pleasure to work with you guys. And again, folks, if you happen to be in the Riverview Florida area check out top lawn pros comments top lawn pros calm Ruben take care and have a great day are you too clear thanks take care bye-bye we’ve had is up 411 percent over last year we are Jared and Jennifer Johnson we own platinum pest and lawn and are located in a Wausau Oklahoma and we have been working with thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now, okay. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both 1.3 billion dollar companies. They both have two to three thousand pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts, and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also, we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews. And now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pest and Lawn Company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. So 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one-and-done deal. It was a system that we that we followed with Thrive and in the refining process and that has obviously the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months or I’m sorry the first we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year, from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews. That way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists that when everything gets done and it gets done right, it creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly, both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really, really contributed to our success, but that, like I said, the diligence and consistency in doing those in that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives, and also, you know, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten the success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know. Okay, the last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah. And so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. They implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind. Absolutely, it’s been a grind this last year. But we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut and and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline but that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So we just want to give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proven turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crocker, the head of Disney, with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So, think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up, and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multimillionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressive thing was when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company, or navigating competition and an economy that’s, like I remember, we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to how to get back open, how to just survive through all the covid shutdowns, lockdowns. I’m Rachel with Tip Top Canine and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top Canine. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to make your life epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right, this is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See, it’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing, and this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past. And they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales. Which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops. Because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because, as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money. So if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets and if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you.