Business Podcast | From Startup to a $54 Million Exit w/ Clay Clark Friend & Tech Entrepreneur, Piyush Patel + 8X Growth of Pappagallos.com + 94 Tickets Remain for June 27-28 Business Conference Featuring Tim Tebow!

Audio Transcription

How does one man take a $54 investment and turn it into a company that he later sold for $45 million of cash and stock? How does one man build an online business worth over $10 million with just two coders? On today’s show, we interview my friend, Peesh Patel, the founder of Digital Tutors, the company later acquired by Pluralsight. By plural site during today’s interview peach discusses how he started digital tutors how he got his first customers How he recruited top talent and his book leads your tribe love your work an entrepreneur’s guide to creating a culture that matters What BAM stands for and much much more? Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show but this show does. Two men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Timeshow. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Thrive Nation, on today’s show we have an incredible guest, my friend Mr. Pish Patel. Welcome on to the show! How are you, sir? I’m awesome, thank you. Pish, for the listeners out there that are not super familiar with your background. Could you walk us through kind of your history building digital tutors, kind of where it all began and then where it ended for you? Yeah, I was a sixth grade science teacher turned college professor, then entrepreneur, and then sold it for over $45 million in cash. That’s the one sentence. Okay, so let’s repeat. Okay, so step one, you’ve got to gather the $54. Step two, sell for $54 million. Okay, now talk to me about this, though. How did you get your first customers at Digital Tutors, and what product did Digital Tutors sell to the world? Right, so we were pretty much an online training Academy much like your business school online. We were you know a video based Platform for people who make movies and video games so you know the key there is niche and then niche again And then we nitched one more time so video based training for people who make movies and video games. And, you know, our first customer showed up at 9 o’clock in the evening purely by word of mouth, and this guy was in Israel. So the word had gotten from Oklahoma City all the way to Israel in a matter of a day. And this was before YouTube, before, you know, Google. It was all a word of mouth thing. And how did you create that word of mouth? Were you doing mailers? Were you cold calling people? How did you get that initial, just to get the word out there initially? Did you run around Oklahoma City with a megaphone? What did you do? I wish. I wasn’t smart enough to do all of that. We followed this method of marketing called cult branding, and it was really around, I just need to have one person who believes, and then I’m going to ask them, okay, introduce me to five people who also are your friend network. And then introduce me to those five people, and then we just kept going. And really, that’s how we got to the first 100 customers, is we just asked our customers, hey, go tell your friends. And we looked at it as if we build a product that people want, they’ll tell their friends. That sounds so easy, but I think in execution and application, that can be very hard for people. Could you talk to… They can, but I think as an entrepreneur though, Clay, you and I both agree, it’s what you don’t know. I was too dumb to know what I was even getting into, so what did I have to lose to ask for a referral? Hey, tell me some of your friends. If they say no, okay. Do you have any other friends? Right. But that’s a move, though, and that’s a move. I was just talking to Paul Hood and your team about this, Paul, probably two weeks ago. And I was telling you about an insurance agent that I worked with, and his whole thing, Peach, was after he had wowed you by saving you money and showing you all the holes in your coverage, he would just ask, hey, are you happy with what I’ve done for you so far? Yeah. Well, you know, what five people do you know that I can help? And this guy built one of the biggest insurance practices in Oklahoma by doing that. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody out there. Absolutely. Now, Pish, you are in Oklahoma, or you were in Oklahoma when you built this company, which is known more for ag tech, agricultural tech, not necessarily ed tech, educational technology. How did you recruit coders in Oklahoma? Well, we recruited amazing people. Half the company was local, the other half was brought in from out of state. But I’ll be honest with you, we built this $10 million business on two developers. I hear people going, we need 50 developers to get to a million. It’s like, no, you got the wrong 50. We only had two. Most of our people were content people. We also got there with no sales people. So we did all of this completely organically, no outside sales people. I remember one time I was talking to you about search engine optimization and how you were talking about the importance of just having your blogger constantly blogging, constantly blogging, just getting it out there. Can you talk to listeners out there about the importance of if you have a website for your business, why it’s so important to just keep creating copious amounts of content. That’s right. It’s all about content-based marketing. That’s kind of the adage we took. We had a $30,000 marketing budget, so that’s not a lot of money on a $10 million revenue business. Yeah. And really, the angle that we took was, we’re going to release two blog articles every day, no matter what. And it could be anything from a video game review to a really high-end technical technique that we’re going to give away. Yeah. So what happened is over the years, we became the experts. Like we were seen not only by the search engines, but by the community that we serve as, Hey, these folks are the true experts. And it doesn’t matter if you’re selling plumbing services, if you’re doing electrical work, if you are a bricklayer, or if you are a doctor. I think the more content that you have out there, the more trust you’re gonna develop in your customer base. What was your wife’s role, Lisa’s role in starting your business? So Lisa took care of all the books and she was the house mom. You know, we hire a lot of young people, a lot of millennials, and a lot of them kind of needed a house mom. So she used her background in child development to help keep the office afloat in terms of emotionally. Now, what was the most challenging aspect of growing from 100 customers to 500 customers? You know, as you began to scale, what was the most difficult aspect of doing that? So, and I’ll just be dead honest with you, when I exited the business, we had 1.5 million people in the system. So, the first 500, 11 years, 14 years prior to that, were just a blur. Like I said earlier, Clay, I was too dumb to know what I was getting into, and I just kept showing up. I mean, we hit our first million dollars literally just by showing up and working hard. And I think that’s part of the base of any entrepreneurial journey. You’ve just got to show up. Now, when you got approached for someone to purchase your business. When Pluralsight reached out to you guys and said, hey, we want to acquire you, merge with you, hostile takeover, I’m not sure what the language was that was used, what was your initial reaction to potentially selling your baby, the great orange monster that you had built? What was your initial thought when you got approached to be purchased? Well, their initial thought was, it’s not for sale. I mean, we’ve never had this conversation of selling the business. For us, we were serving our customer and having a great time, and we loved all our employees. So we were doing what we were destined to do. But really, the owner of Pluralsight said, well, look, if we don’t buy you, I’m just going to be really honest, we’re going to buy somebody just like you, and we’re going to pump them full of cash. And I thought, oh my gosh, we’ve worked so hard to be in a space with no competitors. What’s it gonna look like? You know, is this gonna be an uphill battle every day or do we merge and do something bigger? And so we decided to be acquired. And when you, it was for $54 million of cash? It was 45. 45. Stock. So when you got $45 million of cash, for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with this kind of transaction, did they bring by a briefcase and is it filled with 1s, rubber bands on it? How does that go down? You get a little alert on your phone that says, wire complete. And that’s about as, honest to God, that is about as dramatic as it is. It’s like, oh, okay, wire’s complete. There it is. We gifted, you know, we decided instead of gifting 10% with something that my wife and I like to do with our income, instead of gifting it in a traditional way that we would gift it, we decided to gift it to all of our employees. So they received $1,000 for every month of service, and if they were on my executive team they got another big bonus. So some of them walked in that morning with a house payment, car payment, and student loan payment, and then they left at the end of the day with no debt. And when you, so you’re out there, you know, you help the employees, but a lot of people say money changes people, but I’ve known you here for a while, you’ve been a kind and generous guy for a while, and everyone I know who knows you says that you’re a kind and generous guy. Have you found that getting a big lump sum of money has changed you in any way? I mean, do you find yourself going for walks naked in the woods? Do you find yourself getting odd tattoos? Do you find yourself talking in movies a lot? How has it changed you? Honestly, it has not changed me one bit. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. The only thing that it has made us do is become a lot more cautious because all of a sudden there’s a whole bunch of people who now want to be your friend. And I love that hip-hop song, No New Friends. My wife and I don’t need any new friends. You know, that’s interesting, but I read an article about President Obama, and again, the listeners know this isn’t a political show, but this is the thing. During his run for president, one of the things he and Michelle agreed to is we’re not going to meet any new people this year, because henceforth, you can’t trust anyone’s motives. So we’re not going to meet anybody new as we’re running for president. And he talked about how those friends he had from back in the day when he first, you know, before he became a big deal are some of the same friends he has today, most of the same friends he has today. One thing I have noticed, though, about the money that’s changed you is it’s allowed you to have some time and some space to create piece 2.0 in terms of your career. So now you’re writing books and such. Can you tell us about your book Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work? Well it’s really about how we built this culture and really I think culture as a very competitive tool in every entrepreneurs tool set. I think strategy is important, execution is important, sales market, all those things are important. But for me culture was my X factor. When I would tell people about our environment, how we only turned over 12 people in 14 years, they’d look at me and go, of tech workers? I’m like, oh yeah, and millennial at that. They’re like, no way. There’s no way you did it. So I decided I’m going to write a book about it. Yeah, and in your book, you talk about a lot of really practical things in the book, but one of them is this concept called BAM. We say boom a lot here, so at first I thought maybe Pish has misspelled boom. I thought, no, Pish is a smart guy. I start reading the book and it talks about belonging, affirmation, and meaning. Talk to us about BAM. It’s the BAM philosophy. At the end of the day, people work for BAM. Every company is going to give you a paycheck and some level of security, be it through health insurance or life insurance or some kind of retirement plan. But really people want to work for, they want to belong to something bigger than themselves. They just want to be told that they’re doing a good job. And at the end of the day, it can’t be meaningless work. Give them some meaning in what they’re doing. And people will stay with you forever because they want BAM in their lives. BAM, now BAM, belonging. You talk about making your own jerseys. How to create that sense of belonging. Why do we have to create our own jerseys? Talk to us about this idea. Well, we’re all a team, right? I tell this all the time. We’re a tribe, we’re a team. We’re not a family, because you can’t fire your family. You still got to show up for Thanksgiving dinner, right? Got it. But you can be a great team, and great teams have a really instant way of knowing whose team you’re on. You’re the good guy, the bad guy, and it’s all about the jerseys. So I was a huge fan of spend as much money as it needs to make enough shirts and sweaters and sweatshirts to give everybody enough clothes to wear every day because they’re in the community wearing our brand, supporting our brand, and supporting our message. So yeah, your listeners, if they’re not investing in office clothing for their people, they’ve got to. Now, affirmation. You talk about meeting rituals. Talk to us about a meeting ritual. Are you burning some sort of incense? What kind of rituals are we talking about here? No incense. I had so many asthmatics that worked for me to burn the incense. But meeting rituals, it starts with core values. So every single meeting we have starts with, okay, let’s go around the room and share stories around our core values. What did you see in the past week or the past month? And it just sets the tone. And I get it, if you have 45 people and they’re all in a room for one hour telling stories, that’s really expensive. But what about the money you’re gonna lose when you don’t share those stories? I think you have to have some campfire time to get the group together and talk. This was a move that I’ve learned from many entrepreneurs who talked to me about the importance of doing this. And, Pesh, I was 24, 25 with the largest wedding entertainment company in the country, and I thought this was a complete waste of time. So I didn’t do it, you know, and I kept having turnover in all the wrong spots. And now, I’ve just accepted that this is what you do, and this is going to be a move. And so we schedule it into our calendar. And you think about it. If you have, in my case, you have on a Friday, Andrew, there might be 50 people in that meeting maybe on a Friday, 55 people. And if all of them are making an average of, let’s say, $25 an hour, that might just cost you a $1,500 meeting, a $2,000 meeting. But it absolutely is vital. Paul, I want to get your take on this. You help companies grow from an accounting perspective. What questions would you have for Peach about how to create a culture or holding people accountable? Because Peach is the expert of culture development, my friend. He’s the man. Peach, I just want to know, so I deal with a lot of very intelligent people. I deal with engineers, doctors, and Clay. Clay is one of the most intelligent people I know because he’s my coach. But anyway, so you came from the education background, which typically you don’t see a lot of financial success from people that are in the educational background. So you’re obviously a very intelligent person. How did you bridge that gap? What kind of advice can you give me to get people to really work on their business, to end their business, because a lot of my clients struggle with that. They are the best at what they do, but they’re doing it. Every minute they’re doing it, they’re not growing. Well, that’s true, but I can probably tell you most of those folks are inefficient. Yes, they are in the middle of doing it, and it seems like they never have any time, but they’re still able to go on vacations. They’re still able to take the evenings off or go to a kid’s soccer game. So a lot of that is boiling out enough time to work on the business. And for me, it’s as simple as just asking everybody, tell me some stories about our core values. And I can tell you very quickly, either they get it or they don’t. When you were growing Digital Tutors, you became efficient, but you also had daily fires and you’re putting out issues there. What time did you typically wake up, and what did the first four hours of your work day typically look like when you were growing Digital Tutors? Yeah, so in the knee-deep of it, I got up about 7, got to the office by 9. And I’m the key firefighter, right? So I thought. So I had to put out all fires. And it really wasn’t until we started adopting the traction system or the EOS system. Yeah. That I really started to really work myself out of a job. So my mantra in the shop was, at some point, this business is going to outgrow everybody, including me. And I will tell you, I was so proud. It hurt a little, but I was really proud that after I sold the business and I exited like permanently exited My phone never went off. I never got an email like how do we do this? Where’s the password for this? I had to literally work myself out of a job. Do you know Wichman’s system traction is a great program? I hear a lot of people say wow, that’s expensive But let’s let’s take the cost out of it for a second and let’s just talk about how it helped you with digital tutors. What kind of principles and action items did you begin to, what kind of action items did you begin to take as a result of the traction program that allowed you to work on the business and not in it? Right, so there’s, within the business you have lots of processes. How do we solve this customer’s issue? How do we close a ticket? How do we release a new product? But rarely is there a system or a process on how are we going to actually run the business, not just our product and our service. It doesn’t matter if it’s traction from Geno or if it’s burn harnesses scaling up or Rockefeller house, it doesn’t matter what system it is. Using a system, because they’re all kind of the same, they’re all a little inbred from each other, having a system means you’re going to have a system and you can fall back on, well, I’m not for sure how we do that. Let’s look at the system. And it gave everybody a rallying call of this quarterly flow and not just a, oh, we’re going to pick a goal and then try to hit it. It was real accountability. This is what we’re doing. And we grew leaps and bounds because we just went back to the system, a process. So, Pish, your system, BAM, we didn’t talk about the M. I want to talk about the M now. The M. Belonging, the B. The A, the affirmation. Now the M, the meaning. What is this meaning? How do you develop meaning in your workplace so people don’t just say, ah, frick, all I have to do all day, every day is code this. Or all I’ve got to do is fix mufflers all day. How do you keep the sarcasm and the cynicism and the pessimism out of the business? And how do you add real meaning to somebody’s job? Well, that’s a two-part question with a simple answer. First, it starts with the leader. So if the leader is pessimistic and has no value in the people that work there, then it’s going to flow downhill, as they say. But the second really is a simple question that you can ask your employees. Next meeting, even on one-on-ones, if you just ask, hey, what’s the most important thing you’re working on? They’re gonna tell you exactly what the meaning they want out of their work. They’re gonna tell you, this is what’s important to me. We developed this thing called three happies, which is two work happies and one personal happy in the last 24 hours. And we do it every morning at nine o’clock on the dot. Let me tell you, that little piece of, we do it on a post-it note. That little piece of paper will give you all the BAM information you want on any person in your organization. It tells them what’s important to them, what’s meaningful, and by writing and sharing it, they create instant affirmation. It’s just an amazing little tool set. They can get it off my website for free. It’s really simple to implement. Could you tell listeners out there the best domain to learn, to gain this information, to gather this from you? Sure. It’s my personal website. So, Patelokc.com. P-A-T-E-L-O-K-C dot com. Lots and lots of material there. Now, you’re speaking all over the world right now. You’re speaking all over America. You’re doing speaking events where people are hiring you to come in and teach about, do keynotes about how to build great company cultures. Could you share with us a little bit about the kinds of things that you would talk about during a one-hour keynote or a 90-minute keynote? You bet. I mean, it goes not only from the story of building this organization and kind of the roller coaster ups and downs, but really key takeaway practical information, things like these three happies. We teach everybody how to do a GROW meeting, which stands for Goals, Reality, Options, and then the commitment is the W, What Will You Do? It’s a great way to diffuse conflict and to get to the point of how do we get this thing done. For us, it was really about how do we take these creative tech workers and get stuff done? We’re so small. We’re in the middle of Oklahoma. We’re not cash-rich. We’re scrappy. We just got to get stuff done. We tried to really eliminate any other garbage of running a business and focus on how do we move the needle. That’s a lot of what we share. After you began to move the needle with digital tutors, it took off and it created, obviously, some financial freedom for you, some time freedom for you. You’ve gone on to have some financial success there. Can you talk to us about your love for the Oklahoma City Thunder and just how close you sit to that court? I love the Thunder. I’m there almost every game and the funnest thing that I’ve gotten to do in my whole career is sit courtside. And I love sitting at the baseline because they’re running at you and it just feels very different than TV. Does Russell know who you are? Do you and Russell talk a little bit? You and Russell? Russ and I don’t talk, but I feel like I’m giving him some play tips with my eyes. I’ll lock eyes and he’ll know, oh yeah, okay, he just wants me to pass more. I’ve only seen Russell play very, I’ve only sat really close to the court twice, but watching Russell Westbrook play basketball, it kind of feels like watching an adult varsity basketball player playing dodgeball against second graders. The intensity, it’s like his intensity is like two or three times more than that of the average player. Do you agree with that, or am I out of my mind? I mean, that guy’s intense. The speed goes from zero to a thousand. I don’t even know where it comes from, but there’s a fire in him that’s very different than the rest of us humans. What is your favorite Oklahoma City Thunder moment so far? Sitting court side there where you go, oh, that right there, that was worth the ticket price. Oh, my goodness. There’s been a whole bunch. I can’t, Clay, that was a tough question. Are you a good heckler? I can’t even nail it. Do you heckle the other team? No. Do you have a lot of tips you give them? No. Boo! No. OK. I have lived by this adage that the most heckling comes from the cheapest seats. Ooh. Nice. And I believe that. I sit and I’m respectful of the other team. If one of our players gets traded or goes to another team, I cheer them on in the opening. I’m proud to be there. I love watching the game. So you’re not the streaker. You’re not that streaker guy. You know, Peace, I’m glad to know that you’re not that streaker guy. I’m not the streaker guy. I remember when I used to go to Timberwolves games, there was one guy who was legendary. He would walk up and down the baseline. You know, he had tickets right there on the court, but he would basically just heckle people the whole game. He’d hold the program and just heckle people. Do you have any good hecklers out there where you go, this guy has got a mental disorder? Are there any hecklers that are kind of infamous hecklers at the Thunder Stadium, or is it just all good people? The Oklahoma City Thunder, they’re all good people. I love the guy who, Mega Thunder, whatever that guy’s name is, who doesn’t wear a top and has suspenders, big guy. He has to get the heckles for everybody in the stadium. Nice. Now talk to me about, talk to the listeners out there about your shared love of the winery, the whole winery game. Where did this love for having a winery come from and how have you gotten involved in the alcohol business or the as an entrepreneurial endeavor now? Well everybody seems to enjoy alcohol so I don’t think that’s going to be going away anytime soon. The winery was a unique situation in that we had just sold the business and I overheard my son telling a group of friends, he said, wow, what does your mom and dad do? You’ve got all these video games in this house. And my son said, I don’t know, my mom and dad just hang out the house all day. And you should have seen the look of just horror on my face because I just don’t want to raise a young man to think that’s what adult life looks like. I need him to go one day be a great dad. So I told my wife, we got to find something. This honeymoon of retirement is over. We’re too young. We’re 40 years old. We got to get busy. And so I bought a winery because it was, it wouldn’t affect my non-compete. I has really no computers or anything like that. And I didn’t know much about the wine business. And now I know a lot about the wine business. It’s a sexy agricultural manufacturing thing, right? I mean, it’s at the end of the day, a lot of hospitality, which I enjoy. But that endeavor has led me to be one of the key investors in the Angry Scotsman Brewery here in Oklahoma City. The Angry Scotsman? Yeah, it’s a super fun brewery here in town. You know, I’m going to Google search that real quick. I’m going to put that on the show note there. The Angry Scotsman. Did you come up with that name, or who did come up with that name? No, he’s a Scottish guy, and I’ll be honest with you, Clay, I hated the name. Really? Absolutely hated the name and he was like, really? And I was like, look, I don’t want to get involved because who, which, which group of young females want to go to a bar, a pub or a brewery called the Angry Scotsman? That just sounds scary. He’s like, really? Because I think people like it. I said, well, let’s do this. Let’s just let the numbers decide. And so I hired a virtual assistant to go poll 100 college-aged females, and it was overwhelming. They loved the name Angry Scotsman. So I was like, hey, you’re on. So now, how do you decide, for the listeners out there, because there’s a lot of listeners out there that are looking for investors, and I know that you do some investing. How do you decide what kind of businesses you’re going to be an angel investor in? And what kind of businesses where you go, that’s a great idea but I’m not going to get involved? Well they have to be on, they have to be past the idea stage. So there’s enough gambling money out there that people can raise money with an idea. I look at execution. So can you execute the money that I give you, can you be respectful of it, can you grow it? It really follows my own core values and I’m betting on the person. I’m not really betting on the company or even the idea or the product. I’m really betting on that entrepreneur who can go solve that. This young man at the brewery, he’s got a PhD in chemistry. He knows how to brew beer because in a can of beer, if you put it in the fridge and you go buy a new one six months later, those cans have to taste the same. That takes a lot of chemistry knowledge to do that. For me, I’m betting it him. If there’s a listener out there who’s trying to get in touch with your organization about funding, is there a certain way, is there a certain website they go to and they submit their business to, or do you reach out to people? How does that process work for someone to get in touch with you about raising investment capital? Yeah, so I don’t do much retail. I really stick with the reoccurring online. I’ve kind of gone back to what am I good at, and I know how to sell online and I know how to do marketing online, so I’m finding myself going back to that model. But we have a form on the website that they can reach out to and we can set up a time to meet. I say no more than I say yes. That’s just how I am. But I’ll tell people no up front, so I’m not going to lead anybody on. For your listeners, if they’ve done pitch meetings and they hear things like, well, that’s really interesting, I’m going to have to take it back to my partners, that’s a no. Or if they hear, oh, I’m going to have to do more due diligence, that’s a no, because more than likely you’re like a yes the minute that you hear where they’re at and what they want to do. Dr. Z has often said it’s either a hell yes or a no. Everything is either a no or a hell yes. There’s nothing in the middle. Do you agree with that idea? 100%. Okay. So, the listeners out there, if you have a business that exists, that is making money, it’s not just an idea, and you go to patelokc.com. There you can learn more about your speaking, learn more about the investing, learn more about your book. In your book, you talk about how people don’t quit jobs, they quit people. So I want to ask you this question. I know Paul Hood has a hot question for you. So again, somebody out there is listening, they’re taking notes, they go, okay, people don’t quit jobs, they quit people. What do you mean by that? Well think of all the nasty, terrible jobs that are out there, and people do them. It’s not typically for a whole bunch of money. People do the work that they feel adds value, that creates BAM, but when you put a manager or a leader in place that does not create BAM for that person, now they’re looking at that job as purely a transactional. It’s essentially, I don’t make enough money to do this job, but really, I don’t make enough money to deal with your garbage because it’s more than just the job. And I really think if you’re not investing in your people’s emotional well-being and creating BAM for them, you’re missing out. You’re totally missing out on the opportunity. Pesh, Paul Hood has a hot question for you. Now, Paul’s been known to paint our guests into the corner as his favorite pastime as one of our show sponsors. So, Paul, what’s your question for Pesh Patel? Pesh, I don’t know what he’s talking about. I am a very sweet man. I don’t have the… You’re very sweet. I don’t know what he’s talking about. He’s very sweet. So you mentioned cult marketing. So do you… We do a little bit of referral-based marketing. I’m a financial advisor as well. And did you… When you were in the middle of growing this, did you just use the wow factor to motivate people to refer to you? Or did you, for instance, we do at our offices, once we set up a planning session with people and they love us, which they generally do, thankfully, we say we’ll give you a $25 gift card. I have one caveat, Pish, before you tackle this question. Just one caveat for the listeners out there that don’t know Pish Patel. Pish Patel is a man that if he says he’s going to do something, Pish Patel does it. Boom. Pesh, you always own it. You said if Digital Tutors is going to do this, then if you say I’m going to do it, you did it. So I just want to make sure the listeners out there get this because as a business coach, I’ve discovered that a lot of people drop the ball all the time. Right. So I would say just yes, from my experience, I know that Pesh Patel’s team was wowing people. Back to you, Paul. I just want to make sure because I know that he was wowing people. Yeah. And so we do too, but I just wanted to know, you know, we offer a little token $25 gift card or something for referrals. And with the knowledge that that’s just the little tip that gets them over the hump, because we are going to over deliver. So did you ever have any kind of carrot, if you will, to get referrals, or was that just straight up, the carrot was how you guys delivered? Yeah, no carrot. So I never wanted customers to feel like a friend of theirs recommended them, they signed up, and then when they signed up, one of their friends, out of just altruistically, they got a card in the mail that had a $25 gift card in it. It’s like, whoa, so did the other guys sign me up and recommend it, or was they genuine about it? And we went through, this was a 14-year process to really nail down what worked for us, and us. At the end of the day, it boiled down to building a product that people really wanted. We get lost sometimes in jockeying for what would be better. We removed no discounts, no salespeople. We removed everything that wasn’t making the product better. Then our was on we don’t want product customers to churn. So we became obsessive about maintaining and growing the customer base but by not by losing half and gaining a third and losing another half gain a third right so churn in the online world is just it’s destructive and for us churn meant we’re not doing the right thing by our customer. Now how… So we really focused on wow. You said it was 14 years you grew Digital Tutors? That’s right. 14 years. If you’re out there listening today, you want to get rich quick, step one, work at something for 14 years. Then you can get rich real fast. The wire came in real fast, right? It was a quick wire? That’s right. It was a 14-year overnight success. There it is. Also, in your book, you talk about hiring, you talk about making sure that you’re… You talk about this concept called the second wake-up call. Let’s dive into hiring here. What kind of things do you teach readers in your book about hiring? Well, if you hire somebody and you put them in a desk and you tell them, ready, set, go, do this thing called work, you guys are all setting yourselves up for failure. The cost of replacing employees is upwards of 150% of their salary. I’ve heard of that number even higher depending on the type of work they do. For us, it actually starts even before your first day. Two weeks before you start with us, you get a box in the mail, all of our handbook, do all that at home. But in the box also includes some clothes, some shirts to wear on your first day, a little book about your team. But I’ll tell you, Clay and Paul, the most important thing in that box was an empty picture frame with a note that said, bring a picture of your loved one so your desk starts to feel like home. People say that two of the most stressful days of any person’s career is the first day they take the job and the day they are let go. And I didn’t want their first day to be stressful. And so when they think like, Oh my gosh, what have I jumped into? And they see their loved one on their desk? Yeah, I get this. So for us, it starts before you even take the job. Then on your day one, you’re going to spend half a day with me. And some of your listeners are going to say, well, I’m too busy for half a day. OK, well, just take how much of that salary you’re going to pay and throw some of that away. I agree with what you’re saying strongly, but I know that there’s probably 95 percent of our listeners. I know our listeners. I know these folks. These are great people. And there are some of our going, really? You’re going to have someone shadow you? Like you, the owner, the guy? I mean, you’re the dude. You, you really, really, really? Because, you know, we have these entrepreneurs out there, you know, and they’re kind of, they’re inquisitive people. For somebody out there who wants to ask the question, really? You have them shadow the boss? Again, did you really do that, Bish? Horses mouth. I need every employee to hear it from me. This is why we started the company. This is how you play your part. A lot of people, we teach them the game of business. You’d be surprised how many people don’t know the simple game of business, right? And when I ask things like, we’re paying 100% of your health insurance. Why would I do that? Because you’re nice. Well, I like to be. Why else? Because you have to? Nope, don’t have to. And then when you explain, oh, it’s because I don’t need you sick. And if you’re sick, I don’t want you making everybody else sick because we’re running a business. They look at you like, oh, that’s why you do that. We were open book. We taught them how to read our financial statements. We taught them how the business, how the money flows and how the teams work. The other half of the day, they would spend with their team learning about how the process works. And really, I’m not asking for any actual work for a couple of weeks, because it’s gonna take you a couple of weeks to truly understand how we play before we throw you into the game. Now, Pish, in your book, you wrote, “‘Work is war, and good leaders are in the trenches.'” Now, I want to provide some balanced perspective to this. You enjoyed teaching people how to make video games and how to do all these different kinds of creative skills, which you turned into your business. With my company, DJ Connection, I loved DJing. I was into DJing. I would bring people with me to shadow and to DJ. They’d learn the DJ skills from me. Here I had the largest wedding entertainment company on the planet, and I’m still DJing, working in the trenches, or still coding, or still cold calling, or still doing whatever you have to do, and delegating? For a guy like Paul, still being a CPA versus delegating. Talk to me about getting in the trenches and that balance in this quote, work is war and good leaders are in the trenches. Well, every one of my managers was a working manager. So the person who ran the curriculum had to create a course. Where everybody else may have created 12, 13 a month, they have to create one. If you were in charge of the customer success, well, you also had to take on a couple of accounts and not just manage your team. So every single manager in the organization was a working manager. They knew what they were asking of their people. I felt the same way. I will tell you, over time, over those 14 years, I went from chief janitor and doing everything to, towards the very end, I just really needed to have a once-a-month meeting with everybody and then a once-a-week, one-hour meeting with my team. That was how far I had gotten away from working in the business. I think it’s that transitionary process, but it really starts with the people you start to promote inside your company to make sure that they are all working managers. I think people respect those kinds of folks more because they go, oh, you’re not just telling me what to do, you’re actually helping me do it. Now, Peach, I have two final questions for you. I know Paul has one final question for you as well here. I want to ask you about dysfunctional habits. You see a lot of business owners, and now you’re doing some consulting. You’re leading an organization where you’re helping entrepreneurs get some traction. And I’m sure you’ve seen common denominators that cause dysfunctional businesses. Can you talk to us about the common denominators that you see amongst chronically dysfunctional businesses and business owners? Absolutely. So, some of them are, they’re thinking small. They’re not really solving a customer problem. I think the big buzzword for 2019 that you’re going to hear from a lot of investors is product market fit. So that’s, you know, they’re not solving the customer’s problem. And they’re not focused on getting paid. So there’s this idea of, well, I just need to raise some money and I’m successful. And I think in the music world that would be like I got paid from my contract BAM and I think that that’s a mistake right you’ve got to solve a problem and and People don’t understand when they take on an investor they’ve just taken on a massive customer right because that investor has an expectation and a communication and Most people don’t need an investor. They just need to get to work solving a custom problem. Let the customer fund their business like mine. I Tell listeners of this all the time, but I want to use this as a Opportunity to share it again when you take on an investor You’re gonna take on what I call the three C’s you’re gonna take on the council You know the advice of the investor whether you want their advice or not if someone’s giving you a million bucks They’re gonna give you advice You’re gonna get their connections whether you want it or not if they’re affiliated with good people or bad people. If they have a good reputation or a bad reputation, you take that on. And then the third C is, yeah, you do get the cash. But those are the three C’s that you get with an investor. Paul, you’ve got a tough question for Mr. Pesh Patel. Your final question of the day, my friend. What do you got? Sure. The question is, Pesh, a lot of times people see people are successful, and like Clay says, it was an overnight success that took 14 years. How did you deal? There had to be adversity in there. How did you deal with that? Who did you turn to? What was your go-to move to get back up and push forward? For me, the God sent was joining the Entrepreneurs Organization. There’s a chapter in Tulsa and one in Oklahoma City. There’s 14,000 members all over the world. Like I said, my background is a sixth grade science teacher, so that’s what I’m good at, that’s what I’m trained at. To run a business, every day was new. Like I said, I was just too dumb to know. I just kept showing up, good or bad, plan, no plan. I just kept showing up. It wasn’t until I got involved with the Entrepreneurs Organization that I got to be around peers who, some were in my situation, some were a few years behind me, but many were ahead. I got to see what exiting a business looked like and how to structure that deal before mine came along at an intimate level. Otherwise, I would have just been lost. How to grow the business, how to transfer. We went from physical CDs in the mail to 100% online. Can you imagine we were at about $3 million in revenue. One day we had three million dollars worth of customers and the next morning we fired all of them and said, okay now you have to buy it completely online. But in that year we went to five. So I mean it was well worth making these transitions. Now to the listeners out there, I have purchased a copy of your book, Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work, An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating a Culture That Matters. It was definitely worth the read, culture that matters. And it was definitely worth the read, definitely worth the money, definitely worth the investment. For the listeners out there saying, you know, Pish, you’re a well-read guy. I mean, do you have another book you’d recommend too? Do you have one more book or a couple of books that you’d recommend for all the listeners out there? Yeah, I’ve got two. One is Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last. I’m a huge fan of Simon Sinek. I’ve met him a few times and I love the message in the book and it resonates with my style of leadership. For all of your Oklahoma listeners, or those of your listeners who have an Oklahoma tie, I am in love with Sam Anderson’s book, Boomtown, which is Oklahoma history mixed with Oklahoma City Thunder history and stories of how it all happened. I’m listening to the audio book because I heard it was better than the print and I’m just in love with it. I think I’ve bought 20 copies already. And you actually recommended to me the book Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen which led to me interviewing Clayton Christensen here just about a month ago and hopefully you heard the Peach Patel shout out in that podcast because I did. It was a great interview too. He’s just a living legend. Peach, I thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule. I know you could be doing anything right now. You could be courtside preparing yourself mentally and spiritually for the next game. You could be chasing your wife around. You could be at your winery. You could be meeting with someone about investing in their business. You could be doing a keynote speech out there. But thank you so much for investing in our listeners. My pleasure, Clay. I really appreciate what you’re doing. And as of all these years I’ve known you, I’ve always wished you nothing but the best of success. Hey, well, thank you and have a great day, my friend. Thanks, Clay. Thanks, Paul. Now it’s time to take some action. On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest, how highly would you rate your culture? I would encourage you to write down that number today. Again, on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest and one being the lowest, how highly would you rate the culture in your business? How could you improve the onboarding of the employees within your business? What would be a better way for you to show your employees the path to their career success within your company? And how can you truly mentor each person more effectively? And we like to end each and every show with a boom. So now without any further ado, here we go. Three, two, one, boom! Ladies and gentlemen, on part two of today’s show, I’m really focused in, I’m really focused in on helping you to save some money. Now, again, I work with 160 plus clients, so if you go here to thrivetimeshow.com and you look at the clients I work with, I’ll just show you some examples. Papa Gallo’s, they’re a pizzeria, they sell pizza. And you’re gonna hear their success story on today’s show. They’re wonderful, wonderful people. Papa Gallo’s Pizza. These guys, they sell pizza, they sell a high quality gourmet Italian food, but at the end of the day, it’s not about how much money you make, it’s about how much money you keep. So Papa Gallo’s, every time that somebody comes in there to pay and to buy a pizza, people use their credit card. So people use their credit card to buy or to purchase something, and when they buy something, what happens is that there’s a credit card fee that goes out. There’s a credit card fee that goes out, a processing fee, and simply by comparing rates, I know they were able to save thousands and thousands of dollars. Another long-time client of mine, you think about a company like Oxifresh.com. Oxifresh.com, they have over 500 locations. How much money do they spend per year in credit card fees? How much money do you spend, folks, in credit card fees? You know, one of my clients right now, Williams, I’ll be talking to him later today, a wonderful guy in the construction business, he does millions of dollars a year of credit card transactions. And I always tell people, look, if you’ll just go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit cards, I’ll pull it up real quick here, Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit cards. You could join the thousands of wonderful business owners who’ve been able to save thousands and thousands of dollars per year simply by comparing rates. And so today we’re joined here with the leader, the head of IPS, it’s integrated payment services. This is our credit card processor of choice, Tyler Carson, welcome onto the Thrivetimeshow. How are you, sir? I’m doing great, Clay. Thanks for having me. So, Tyler, for people out there that haven’t heard your voice yet or don’t know who you are, tell everybody out there, what is your role with IPS and what are the services that you guys provide? Yeah, so my role is managing partner, one of the owners here, and services that we provide are we have softwares, you know, any way you can think of accepting credit card as a form of payment or ACH as a form of payment as well. So you, for any of the listeners out there that have a business and they process credit cards, you’re a potential solution. I believe you have a presentation or at least a comparison you can show us today because again, I tell people all the time, if they go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card, thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit card, they can save a lot of money. But you’ve got a real world example you can show us. I do. You know, it’s a guy that I did a comparison for yesterday. So I’m just going to pull this up here. I’ll share my screen and kind of show you guys that this was a restaurant, do about $74,000. As you can see down here in the bottom, right on savings, here was his annual savings of $2,582.78. So I have a conversation with this guy later today to give him some good news that we’re going to be able to really help him out and really show him some significant savings. And you’re saying that’s off of a $70,000 a month in credit. And so for anybody out there that again just looking with the short math, I know business owners typically can fire off short math pretty quickly, but that’s about $900,000 a year gross sales and off of gross sales of approximately $900,000 a year or $74,000 a month or approximately $888,000 a month of sales, this guy is able to say potentially $2,000 or more a month Just by comparing rates with you, so I guess what my question is how? Huh, well for him for him. He you know he hasn’t looked at it in probably 15 years and so his rates are just Increasingly gone up and up and up um and you know the way that we do things is we price everyone aggressively from the get-go We don’t have any contracts. Everything’s month-to-month. We’re not exclusive with any one processor, so we can guarantee that we can get you the lowest rate. Now, we’ve utilized your services for years and years, and so I frankly don’t ask you a lot of questions because I’m very happy with the service, and every year we compare rates with different services, and you guys are always the best, and we’ve been happy to stick with you for years. that people most often ask you when they are looking into comparing services with you guys? I mean, normally it’s, you know, we kind of get the, well, you know, we don’t want to do it, or, you know, we’re happy with who we use, or we haven’t looked at it in forever. Why would we use you? And, you know, my answer to that is always, even if you’re happy with who you use, it’s great to keep them honest. So, you know, it takes us, you know, a two to four minute conversation, and then we can have a comparison pumped out, just like I showed you, where we can show you the savings. Worst case scenario is maybe there is no savings. Best case scenario, for this guy, maybe you’re going to save $30,000 a year, which for him, that’s going to be a pretty nice… That’s a new car, Clay. What kind of… What are the biggest hiccups when people are comparing rates? You know, the biggest where you look at it and they go, because you obviously see people can save enough money to buy a new car, but some people, they haven’t compared rates in a long time. So what are the predictable hiccups that you often see when somebody, you know, goes to compare rates and maybe there’s a little frustration or a little hiccup that maybe prevents them from actually sitting down with you? I would say it’s that they’ve been taken advantage of by somebody in our industry. And so now they’re maybe they’re, it’s kind of like, it’s, you know, it’s not broke. So why even look at it? And to that, I would say, we’ve got numerous examples and numerous references that we can provide to show you that we are a reputable company and we do what we’re going to say. And that’s one reason why we don’t do any contracts. And again, folks, I’m absolutely super happy without apology, endorsing Tyler and his team. So we’ve created a landing page for you so everyone can go there right now. If you want to look at the actual company itself, it’s called Integrated Payment Services. That’s Integrated Payment Services. And then on part two of today’s show, folks, we’re going to actually share. So after this portion, we’re going to share with you the success story of a client called Papa Gallo’s Pizzeria in Florida. Wonderful clients of mine. And I want you to hear their success story. Again, that website you can go to to compare rates is thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit card. Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit card. I’m going to give you the final word there, sir. What do you want to say to all the listeners out there that are, I don’t know, on the fence thinking about, you know, should I save $2,000 a month? Should I fill out the form? What would you say? I’d say do it and let’s take a look at it. There’s no reason not to at least, you know, take a look and see what’s going on. It’s the lifeblood of most of your business’s business. I mean, especially if they’re taking credit card, that’s the lifeblood of their business. So we can get your funds next day and we can probably do it in a cheaper way. Amen to that. Again, that’s Tyler Carson. Thank you so much for carving out time for us, sir. We’ll talk to you next week. Awesome. Thanks, Clay. Bye-bye. All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, I want to give you an encouraging word. These are actual real people, real clients we’ve worked with. They’re not holograms, and they’ve had real success. And I know we’re living in a challenging economy and a challenging world, but I’ve worked with these guys for years, and they really are diligent doers, and I just wanted to celebrate their success and let you see that it is possible to achieve massive success in this crazy world. Dave and Tricia of Papagallo’s and Morning Glory, welcome on to the Thrived Time Show. How are you guys? Hey, Ben, how are you? Doing well. I’m fired up. So, Dave, I’m going to start with you. How long ago was it when you first heard about us? How many years ago or what year was that, sir? 2017. 2017. A customer actually mentioned you guys and we looked into it. And I remember our first call, I had to hide in the storeroom to get a half an hour to talk to you guys. So, you, when you first heard about us, you were a little bit nervous, right? Yeah. I was a little bit nervous. I was a little bit nervous. I was a little bit nervous. I remember our first call, I had to hide in the storeroom to get a half an hour to talk to you guys. So, you first heard about us six years ago. We’ve been working with you since that time. Trisha, I know that you look at the numbers and so does Dave. When you think about the growth of Papagallos from that first call to now, and then you started Morning Glory since that time, what kind of growth have you guys. And then Morning Glory was an idea, so it’s kind of hard to think about the percentage of growth because it wasn’t a thing yet. But that business is doing well too, right? Morning Glory? Yeah, surprisingly good. Sometimes it upsets me how well it’s doing so fast, but a lot of the things we’re doing we didn’t do with Papagalos because we didn’t know. And we got to implement some of the things we learned from you guys with the new place and it’s taken off a lot faster. Now, your business has a lot of things that you, a lot of variables. I’m going to kind of march through them and I’m going to see if you could teach our listeners about this here. The first thing with Papagallos, the food has always been great. Morning Glory, the food has always been great. If people are in the Satellite Beach area, they need to check out the food. Most restaurants I work with, I have to work with them on food quality I’ve never had to work with you at all on food quality However, the one area you guys were not getting reviews from your happy customers people love the food But you weren’t getting objective reviews and people read those reviews Can you talk to us Dave about the importance of I know I harass you about it every week But can you talk to the listeners out there about there about the importance of gathering those objective Google reviews and oftentimes video reviews as well. Oh, absolutely. I didn’t think it would be that huge when we started down that road, but every week we get people that come in and go, oh, we drove 40 miles because we read the reviews about the place. And to be honest, if we go out of town, the first thing we do is look at the reviews as well. So, I mean, you don’t think it’s going to make that big a deal, but it’s a game changer for sure. Now, Trisha, on the websites, we’ve worked to create the websites for both Morning Glory and Papagallos, and I find a lot of business owners can get stuck infinitely doing small, little minutiae changes to their websites instead of building a website that ranks in Google. We’ve worked with you guys on building both websites, and we do have to update the menu pricing from time to time and do some things, but how much of a game changer has it been having websites that actually come up top in Google? Well, I mean, coming up on top on Google is huge because everybody’s using their phones these days to ask where they should go. So for that to just pop up up top is, you know, you can’t put a number on that for what it does for your income. And the people look and search your website. I mean, Dave was writing blogs and stuff that helps with the SEO and coming up high on that. And we got a catering just from her reading one of the blogs. I mean, how do you put it? It is. Yeah. Yeah. It’s just been that part of it’s been a big eye opener for me because I just didn’t put that much weight on it until we started. I kind of, we always kind of start with a we’ll try anything until it doesn’t work So we went in with that with you know this full blast and it just blew my mind how well that works now tracking results is a big thing and I love working with you guys because You’re diligent people that show up to work every day, and I don’t care how good of a boss You are in the restaurant business I really I really don’t no matter how great of a boss you are you’re gonna have turnover in the restaurant business because young people who are waiters and waitresses, they decide to move, they get pregnant, they get another job. There’s a lot of variables. And so you’re never stopping recruiting. Dave, I can’t tell you how many restaurants I’ve worked with over the years, and I tell them, listen, recruiting is a never-ending process as a restaurant owner. It’s like a garden. You have to pull the weeds every week. Can you talk to the listeners out there about the importance of you never stopping recruiting? Because again, I could give you all the advice in the world, but if you would not have implemented it, it wouldn’t help. Can you talk to the listeners out there about the importance of never stopping recruiting? Well, it’s just from week to week, like you said, you never know. One day you don’t have enough shifts, and then the next day you come in and four people disappear in the night, you don’t even know what happened to them. And by having people lined up to come right in, it smooths over the transition. And it’s this never-ending process. And it seems like lately the new younger groups that come in, the younger kids, they just change jobs every four or five months just because. You know, when I grew up, you got in a job, you liked it, you stayed. But it’s not that way anymore. People change just for the sake of changing. So keeping the recruiting going keeps staff. Now this is a big thing. The experience itself is a wow. I know we worked with you guys on making sure we had an intentional wow moment in terms of the decor, the atmosphere, the music, everything. Again, you guys have great food, but let me get Trisha’s thoughts on this. When people go to Morning Glory for the first time or they walk into Papa Gallo’s, and I’ve had friends of mine, the Johnsons, Jared and Jennifer Johnson, actually came to your restaurant and their comment was, wow, that’s awesome. Can you talk about the importance of being intentional to make an experience that wows their nutrition? Well, I mean, that’s the people look with their eyes first, so they don’t even see the food yet. So if they’re looking at your, you know, seating or your walls, or and they don’t get that kind of wow from it, they’re not going to get the wow from the food either, because that comes later. So it’s very important, especially ladies with bathrooms and stuff is huge. You know, if you’ve got a really poorly put together bathroom and the lady’s got to go in there and they just don’t like it, they’re not coming back. Even if your food is amazing, if your bathroom isn’t there, it’s just a game changer for them. Now, checklists and processes. You guys have done a great job making checklists for everything. I’m going to pull up these websites here. Again, if you’re in Florida, it’s worth the drive. PapaGallows.com, MorningGloryEatery.com. It’s worth the drive. You’ve got to check it out there, folks. Checklists and processes for everything. Dave, you’ve got to make a menu. You’ve got to have recipes. You’ve got to have checklists. You can go out there and make a great menu, but you have to deliver on it. You guys do such a great job of that. You have a menu, but you’ve got to deliver on it. So you’ve got the recipes and the checklist. Can you talk to the listeners out there about the importance of taking the time over these past six years and even before that of building checklists for everything? Well, it’s just especially with in the kitchen area the cooks even though you tell them certain things if it’s not written down and make them measure, everybody wants to put a little more of this or a little more of that and then that messes with your consistency. So having that recipe and being able to see somebody putting something together like the dough recipe and see them measure now how much goes into it versus just eyeballing it is a big deal. And if there’s a checklist and you can just see, okay, it’s out or it’s not. And I’m constantly in the kitchen saying, are you measuring? And use a checklist because they don’t, you know, everybody wants to put their little spin on stuff and you just can’t have that. Now, one thing I really enjoy about working with you, Tricia and Dave, is you’re really, really wonderful people. And you guys aren’t petty people. You’re not, but petty means focusing on small things. You’re not ignoramuses, you’re not jerks. You’re kind people. And so it’s fun to help amplify your business and to see it grow. But growing a business, again, is like growing a garden. You have to pull weeds every week. And so every week I hop on the phone call with you at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, three times a week, or the website will go down or there’s a pricing increase or something will change. Or when the COVID lockdowns happened, it was getting PPP funding and there’s just so many of these urgent things. I’d love to get your thoughts, Tricia, on what it’s like to have our team available to help you in your times of need on a weekly basis. You know, because a lot of people view growing a business as an event where really it’s a weekly process. Can you talk to listeners out there about the value of having a weekly support team that you can trust? Yeah, I mean, like with our menu and stuff, especially after COVID, you never know when we’re going to have to change something because we can’t get a product anymore. Or like exactly today, we just found out that one of our wines is discontinued and no longer available. So that’s just going to put a, you know, a new change on the menu or onto the website as well. Um, the website’s gone down and all of a sudden we get a notice from a customer that it’s down. And now we even have like the beach jam on it, which is huge, which you guys helped us with. So that’s gotta be up and running, you know, 24 seven as well. Um, I think with COVID, when we were going through COVID, um, you, you were ahead of the game as far as everybody else. Like we still are getting stuff for ERC credits, which we have already done, thanks to you guys being able to tell us, hey, you need to look into this. So I think your help in all those areas, like you said, on a weekly basis has kept us ahead of every little thing that’s come our way, especially if you’re COVID. Now, Dave, I have a printer guy that I probably haven’t talked enough about my printer guy, but I have a guy, if you’re listening in the Tulsa, Oklahoma area, I will give you my printer guy’s number, bud. But I have printers everywhere in my office. Printers, flat screen TVs, and I’ve worked with the guy, I think, for 10 years. And every time a printer goes out or a TV goes out, I call him, he comes by and fixes it. And I can’t tell you how rare that is to have a vendor that I actually am not fighting with every week, every month. I mean, this guy is on it. Can you talk, Dave, about that? Because we work together every week, and the relationship that you and I have, I think, is very responsive. Or if you have something, we knock it out, and it’s sort of that win-win relationship. Can you talk, Dave, about the importance of having a team that you can trust to work with you? Because I think there’s a lot of squirrely vendors out there. Well, the biggest help with that is it’s like we get an objective opinion on something. Like, you know, you kind of know what you want to do on any given circumstances, but being able to pick up the phone and have access to your experience and your expertise and say, yeah, that’s a good idea or no, stay away from that because this is why you don’t want to do it. And it’s objective. So, it’s not somebody who’s actually got a vested interest in what’s going on, but we get an opinion really quick. And a lot of times we agree with it and it just reaffirms that this is something you should do or shouldn’t. Now, Tricia, one of the things I did when I was growing my first company, DJConnection.com, is I had a company I hired for graphic design. And somehow, no matter what we talked about, it was always $4,000. And then I had a web guy, and every time I’d call my web guy, I don’t know how, but it was always $400. Every time I talked to him, $400, $4,000 graphic design, video guy. I don’t know why it was, but it was always $3,000. And then they would never talk to each other. So my video guy, my web guy, my graphic design, and there was all these vendors, and I could never get any of them to communicate, and I always had these massive bills. How helpful is it for you doing the budgeting? I know you work together doing this, but how helpful is it for you knowing that it’s going to be a flat rate every month, that’s what it’s going to cost. Well, I think we’ve had those conversations before, you know, with like the web and the printing, which we do a lot for at the restaurant, stuff like that. Just have one person, one place, have all of our information already, one-stop shop, you know, instant response. We’re constantly, I think since COVID we’ve been talking about this a lot lately, nobody really does their job anymore and follows up on what they’re supposed to do. So we turn into being babysitters and making sure that people do their job. But we don’t have that with everything that you guys do for us. We just know that we reach out to you whenever it needs to be done. Don’t even worry about price. It’s already set in place and make it happening and actually get it done and not have to babysit you. Now, I mean, I don’t spend on that. My final two questions I have for you is why should anybody out there who’s in the satellite beach area, why should they come by Papa Gallo’s and Morning Glory? Why should they do it, Dave? Why should everybody come by at least once? I would argue people might want to plan a vacation just around the idea of coming to Morning Glory and Papa Gallo’s. Why should people check it out? I think the biggest thing is we’re local. We’ve been, Papa Gallo’s has been around for 33 years, Morning Glory going on four. So we’re part of the community. If you want to get an idea of what the community is like, some of the kids have grown up in our place working, so it’s just a local place. It’s a local taste of, you know, Florida, really. Beach is right out back. You can look at the ocean and have a drink or have a pizza or eggs benedict and look at the ocean. It’s just a nice Florida experience. And a lot of the comments we get with our staff is, you know, a lot of the people go to restaurants and such, but when they come to our restaurant, the staff is always happy and are there to, yeah, friendly and are there to serve you, not just, oh, you’re another customer, you’re another table, you know, kind of do a shoddy little job and move on. You know, they really do care. And I think that comes from Dave, you know, caring about the food as much, it’s gone on to the staff as well. And it shows through the customers’ responses. And I’m not asking for the number on the show, I’m not asking for a specific number, but since we’ve started working with you, I believe Papagallis is four times larger, and I believe Morning Glory is about the same size as Papagallis. Is that accurate? Yeah, and like I said, sometimes it just drives me crazy because it took 33 years to get Papagallis to that level, and Morning Glory sometimes beats it, and it just drives me bananas. But it’s, I mean, it’s, like I said, when we started with Morning Glory, we started with both feet in the right place and knew where we were going, where we spent a lot of years at Public Outlets trying to figure stuff out. And having you in our corner to just bounce ideas off of is a huge comfort and help. Well, Dave, I really do appreciate you guys. And I will just have my final question for you there, Tricia. For people out there that are thinking about coming to one of our workshops or thinking about hiring us for consulting. We only take on 160 clients, so I don’t want to waste anybody’s time out there who wouldn’t be a good fit. And I want to respect everybody’s time, but who would be a good fit in your mind for what we do? I mean, pretty much anybody. I mean, you’re not a niche one type of, like a restaurant type of person to go to. You do it with all the businesses. So anybody that has a business that wants to grow their business or even make it better and set up the systems and stuff like that, definitely don’t even hesitate. Just give them a call. Well, I appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for carving out time. And folks, if you’re watching today, I want to encourage you. We’ve had the craziest last, what, four years, three years possible. It’s never been more difficult to hire people and Dave and Tricia have done it. They’re very normal people They’re not holograms, but they’re very abnormally diligent, and so if you’re out there today, and you’re a diligent person I want to encourage you that you too can have massive success. Thank you guys for carving out time We’ll talk to you soon. Okay gentlemen let me introduce you to the grill gun Hi, I’m Bob Healy. I’m the inventor of the grill gun and the civi gun. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. And a lot of people, you know, have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field. And off the field, the guy’s been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now, the big question is, JT, how does he do it? Well, they’re gonna have to come and find out because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow is gonna teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s gonna walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is gonna be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had where we’re going to have a man who has built a hundred million dollar net worth. Wow. Who’ll be presenting. Now we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some like a real estate sort of things. Yeah. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business and he’s built over a hundred million dollar net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising. Peter Taunton will be in the house. This is the founder of Snap Fitness, the guy behind 9 Round Boxing. He’s going to be here in Tulsa, Russel, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. JT, why should everybody want to hear what Peter Taunton has to say? Oh, because he’s incredible. He’s just a fountain of knowledge. He is awesome. He has inspired me listening to him talk and not only that he also has he practices what he teaches so he’s a real teacher he’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers so you got to come learn from him. And now the best-selling author of the carnivore diet and the multiple-time Joe Rogan guest Dr. Sean Baker joins our two-day interactive business growth and life optimization workshop. Also let me tell you this folks I don’t get this wrong because if I get it wrong, someone’s going to say, you screwed that up, buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s going to be coming. He said, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, for Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan. 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestselling authors he’s represented, including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say, Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes, Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s going to be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup. But I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? I don’t know what I do. How does it work? You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the request tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it and I’m super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton, I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, when’s it going to be? June 27th and 28th. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma. And someone says, Tulsa, Russia. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa Ruslim, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office and so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th and 28th. Who? You! You’re going to come! I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com and again you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford and we do have some select VIP tickets which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things, and those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re gonna give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re gonna leave with a workbook. You’re gonna leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars, and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies and I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California in the beautiful sunny weather of LA come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put an exceptional presentation. Really life-changing. And I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine. I’ll see you in Tulsa. James, did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine will be at the- have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico. This is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military and he started recording this podcast daily in his home to the point where he started interviewing big-time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, like Tony Robbins, and he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names putting out shows day after day and now he is the legendary host of the EO Fire podcast and he’s traveling all the way from Trujillo, Rico to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop. If you’re out there today folks, if you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to improve your marketing, if you’ve ever wanted to improve your marketing, your branding, if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales, you want to come to the two-day interactive June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas, and countless big-time, super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life-changing. Get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com. James, what website is that? ThriveTimeshow.com. James, one more time before it’s over. Chief, one more time before you leave me, I say. Thrivetimeshow.com. I’m a shot, everything rides on tonight. Even if I got three strikes, I’ma go for it. This moment, we own it, ay. I’m not to be played with, because it could get dangerous. See, these people I ride with this moment 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 system that dr. Zellner about 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, 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, but 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’ve 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 those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy, King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. I’m Robert Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a special guest today. Definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts as Mr. Clay Clark, he’s a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. But we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hours. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. Since you and Eric are close, Trump, what were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who’s my age, and I can say or cannot say? What was the- Well, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old, working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. And he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed, to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you, thank you sir for changing my life. Well not only that Clay, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. So anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy, Kings Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Whoa! Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpy. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored. You’re awake, alive the whole time. It’s not pushy. It’ll try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get in control of the business. Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life, and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively, they’re pretty friendly, helpful, and very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back, and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. Biggest takeaways are, you know, you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business. Whether it’s marketing, you know, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay, and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence. That businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort and you’ve got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the road map out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do and he gave me the road map out step by step. He’s set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want, they guarantee it will be answered. This conference motivates me and also gives me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s up to you to do it. Everybody can do these things. There’s stuff that everybody knows, but if you don’t do it, nobody else is going to do it for you. I can see the marketing working. It’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun, super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivates me. Your competition’s going to come eventually or try to pick up these tactics, so you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. 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 4 to 14 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 ten locations in only a year. In October 2016 we grew to 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. So we really just want to thank you, Clay, and thank you, Vanessa, for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the ThriveCon workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The atmosphere of Clay’s office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door. And it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business. Bottom line. Love the environment. I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow our business using Google reviews, and then just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high at Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me, as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business, as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before, we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews has completely eliminated that, because you’re able to really find the people that would really be the best fit. Hands on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. The one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Fly really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purpose for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. Hey, Flyover family, come join us June the 27th and 28th, 2024 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’re going to be there with Clay Clark, an amazing group of individuals that have made such a difference in so many people’s lives. Do you want to increase your production in a job? Do you want to make more sales? Do you want to own your own business? Do you want to have breakthroughs financially? The key to that is knowledge. Clay Clark is anointed to help people in business. We’ve watched him over the last couple of years and we’ve been blown away. He is part owner of over 160 businesses. 2.4 billion dollars in sales. Before politics and the great reset came into Clay’s life, he had the number one rated Apple podcast. And he interviewed people like Anthony Robbins, Seth Godin, the top authors, the top business minds in the world. At this specific event, there’s an interesting cast of characters that come from gangs to American Idol. Some of the guests that are going to be there, Michael Levine, Colton Dixon, Peter Taunton, John Lee Dumas, Mondo De La Viga. And Tim Tebow. They’re there to share what they’ve done and their breakthroughs and what their story is and then Clay lays his map of business success, calls the path for every person to follow. So you may be sitting there thinking okay okay I get it I get it what do I have to do? Go to thrive timeshow.com when you get there the tickets are $250 or whatever you can afford. Yes you got that right $250 or whatever you can afford. You can name your price. So there are no excuses. You have to join us there. There are only a few VIP tickets left, like David said, special dinner and special time with the speakers. That is $500 why they last. So $500, only a few left if you want a VIP ticket. We want to meet these speakers as well. So we got VIP tickets. I want to meet Tim Tebow. I do too. The date is June the 27th and 28th, 2024 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Go to thrivetimeshow.com to get your ticket. Oh my God! Look at this! Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey guys, Luke Erickson here with the Thrive Time Show. As you can see behind me, we’ve got all kinds of energy going on. People are starting to show up for the conference and it is hot in this place. We’ve got grill guns over here, we’ve got people playing the drums, we’ve got a fire breather, and man, people are so excited as they come in. The conference is kicked off, this house is packed, we’ve got Aaron Hansen, the shop owner, who’s up there, we’ve got Steve and I and Tim, who are doing the concepts up there, talking about what is possible when you just implement, when you implement, when you do the improvements. It’s so exciting. People are going crazy. Michael Levine, writer of many, many PR books, the man who represented people like Michael Jackson, Arbus Dreyfus, George Bush, and his standing party, is speaking to people here at our conference talking about branding. One of the greatest branding experts alive today is here at our conference talking to entrepreneurs. We just wrapped up day one. It was incredible. We had some remarkable speakers. Michael Levine. We just finished with a lady named Jill Donovan who owns a company called Rustic Cuff. Talking about the power of the Dream 100. I cannot wait to see what today has in store. Right now, here at the conference, we’ve broken into groups going over search engine optimization. I know for most of us, it’s a little bit of a stretch, but we’re going to be doing a lot of research. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine and how to get the most out of the search engine. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine and how to get the most out of the search engine. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine and how to get the most out of the search engine. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine. We’re going to be doing a lot of research on how to get the most out of the search engine optimization. And I know for most of us, myself included, if you hear that term, you go, what is that? What does that mean? That’s too techy for me. Well, our experts are breaking it down for people so that you can clearly understand how to come up top in Google. It’s doable. It’s possible. Now we’re in the middle of a break. And what we like to do is we like to give you as much tangible and relevant information from about the start of the hour for 45 minutes. Then we take approximately a 15 minute break to allow people to connect with other entrepreneurs around them, bathroom break, and also use this time to just really digest all of the good information that you’re receiving the whole time. Right behind me we’ve got Bob with his drill gun, melting an ice sculpture. It is awesome. The ice sculpture represents our life, right? It’s here for a time, but we all need to have the sense of urgency to implement the things that we’re learning so that we can make the most of the time that we have. We are outside. You can see a line behind me. What’s going on is that we partner with different companies to help them implement the proven systems over and over and over again. And one of those companies is Master Machine. And so what we like to do is partner with these companies to also help them give samples to other people as they come to the conference and truly get their name out. I just wanted to recap some of the amazing things that have happened today. We’ve had entrepreneurs like Paul Hood with Hood CPAs. We’ve had Jill Donovan and Michael Levine come up. We’ve had a lot of people come up. We’ve had a lot of people come up. We’ve had a lot of people come up. like Paul Hood with Hood CPAs. We’ve had Jill Donovan and Michael Levine come up and just impart so much wisdom and knowledge. We’ve got an incredible giveaway for one of our teamies. Hey there Thrive Nation. One of the things that we love most about our business conferences is that we want every entrepreneur to leave with their questions answered. So what we do is we let them put the questions up on the board here so that they can ask their specific questions and Clay will not end the conference until every question is answered. Behind this, Clay Clark is answering all the different questions that entrepreneurs have brought to the conference. Whenever someone comes here and starts to hear this information, especially for the first time, it just brings about so much anticipation of wanting to actually implement the proven systems and processes. And so the play always wants to make sure that it answers all of their questions so that they are the most set up for this, to be able to go home and start implementing. If you have any questions, email us at info at Thrivetimeshare.com. Hello, I’m Wes Carter. I’m one of the shareholders at Winters & King. My favorite thing that Thrive has helped me accomplish here in our firm is thinking a little bit outside the box. They do SEO, they do printing, they help us with a lot of things from the day-to-day marketing for the firm, but they also help us think of things that as attorneys we probably wouldn’t normally think of to help us market our services to our clients. One of the things I love about working with Thrive is that they make it enjoyable to actually do work with them. It’s not dry, it’s usually fun, but it’s always very enjoyable and practical. They give me things and ideas that I can put into place. It’s not just some theoretical spiel that they give me. We get practical steps that we work on together to do my job better. So me personally, I would easily recommend Thrive 15 services to my friends, my families. I’d recommend them to my clients. I think they do a good job. They’re passionate. They care about their clients. And I think it’s actually a valuable service they provide to people that are in the business world. My name is Jeff Thomas. I’m originally from Atlanta, Georgia. It’s all about getting to the grindstone. It is about putting the… It’s one thing to have a specific vision or a dream, but knowledge without application isn’t knowledge at all. That’s nothing. It’s really funny. The atmosphere is very lively. Everybody that is working for Clay is very upbeat and not tired, not sluggish, not complaining, not whining. They don’t have anything to do with those types of characteristics. It’s all about getting to the grind and having fun while you do it. I haven’t actually been to any conferences in the past, but what I will say from what I’ve seen on YouTube and what from other friends have told me is this isn’t like a motivational kind of thing to just you know hoo hoo rah rah it gets you motivated but it’s like practical steps that if you do take them which most people aren’t willing to do then you will grow and you will achieve the specific things that you want. Well for one thing I would say that this isn’t necessarily for everyone so if you’re not willing to work this isn’t for you. But I will say that if you are willing to work and you know you’re just getting started But you have actually taken a step to in that direction, then this will actually help you grow further Exponentially than you could ever imagine. My name is Taylor Hall. I’m the general manager of the Tulsa Oilers professional hockey team You know our goal every night here at the BLK Center to try to fill the seats with lots of people and create an exciting environment so when somebody comes to a game, they want to come back. Working with Clay and the staff at Thrive, they’ve really helped us in many, many ways. Website and graphic design and video production and a lot of things that go along and a lot of businesses including ours doesn’t have a staff or a full-time you know videographer or graphic designer but the biggest thing that we noticed was the needle mover. More sales, more attendance, more successes in business. We had a record year last season working with Clay for the first time. Our average attendance is higher than it’s ever been so there’s a lot of really cool things that we did and they worked. That’s the nice thing about working with Clay and the team over there, it’s just not one person, you get the entire team. If you need video design and editing and production, they’ve got that. If you need graphic design, if you need some coaching, your sales people and call scripts, PR, they offer all that. Clay was instrumental in helping, us and getting us on the right track so that you know we could you know really you know raise the raise the bar and become ultra successful so it’s been an amazing experience. My name is Kaitlin. I own a tumbling gym called Justice Tumbling Companies. Working with Clay is so helpful. He’s being diligent with everything and making sure we execute our goals and really make things happen. It’s fun, it’s high, it really gets you energized and going, it makes you really want to work. To get the momentum going, to really just like get that buzz, really give you the energy to get up and make it happen. I’m Bob Healy, I’m learning at this conference and from my regular weekly attendance that it’s helping me establish the business and get it off the ground. Clay’s presentation style is just Clayton disregard for what anybody wants. It just has fun, it’s him, everything that you see is authentically Clay. It’s a great deal of fun, everybody enjoys it. They know when you walk in they think they’re coming into a carnival, and frankly they are. It’s just great fun. There’s not another conference like it. You don’t go to a carnival atmosphere and learn what to do here at the Thrive Conference. It’s great. The reason people should attend at least one of these conferences is a business common sense. And everybody’s fed an entire line about the way you should run a business until you actually experience running a business, which is, candidly, what you learn here, how to run a business. You don’t know what you’re doing. My name is Tyler Hastings, and this is my wife, Rachel, and our company is Delrick Research out of New Orleans. During our time working with Thrive, we’ve had numerous successes. When we first started, we were working with one physician, we had one research site, and we were seeing on average, you know, between 10 and 15 patients a week. Since working with Thrive in the last 18 months, we now have four research sites, we work with over five physicians, and on average we’re now seeing over 60 patients per week. Recently we’ve been the top enroller worldwide in seven studies, which is just incredible considering where we were two years ago, 18 months ago. Thrive really differs from the other conferences that we’ve been to and the other kind of programs that we’ve been through because they actually really practice what they preach, and they implement the same systems and the processes that they teach you about. And they give you real life examples that really work for them and show you with the training how to implement that yourself. For example, Tyler and I actually got the opportunity to come out to Tulsa and we’re fortunate enough that the Thrive team took us out to some of the businesses that they own and we really got to see in real life, real time, some of the systems and processes and it was just incredible. A real life example of some of the businesses and the things that they’re implementing. Having a coach is important to us. They act as not only an accountability factor, but they’re someone we can talk to on a daily basis as we go through the problems of running a business that inevitably come up. They always understand what we’re going through and they’re always there to help us or guide us through the problems that we experience. The best part of our experience working with Thrive has just been seeing our relationship grow. So at each step as our business grows, they have something else to provide us with. They’ve got the resources, whether it be marketing, graphic design, website development, or even in the accounting practices, maybe we need a new insurance policy. They have someone they can connect us with, or they have the direct resource we need to speak with for any of the problems we face. Someone’s thinking about signing up for the coaching program, I would highly recommend that they call in for a free 30-minute coaching session and see exactly what the team can do for you. Just speak with someone, let them know what you’re going through, and I think you’ll find that regardless of what you need, there’s someone there that can help you. Clay’s presentation style is very real and raw. Like, it just gets real down to the bone of it and the real purpose of it. There’s no, like, fluffy vagueness about it, you know? So, he really gets to the point. I’m always reminded about how important it is to be intentional and to really pay attention to how you schedule your time and really honor it. Because whatever schedule gets done, that’s what he said from Lee Cockrell. So just constantly hearing that and getting reminded helps me to reinforce that in my own life. It always helps to get an outside perspective, and especially from a guy that’s owned and run so many multi-billion dollar businesses. It doesn’t hurt. My name is Nick Guajardo. I heard about the Thrive Time Show workshop through Andy Mathren. He is my… Andy Mathren and Larry Montgomery. They’re my bosses at Restore Home Health. So I work with a home health company called Restore Home Health. And my role is pretty much to bring in business. So I was hoping to learn kind of the sales process on top of just kind of the responsibilities and help understand what it looks like on the SEO side and just kind of an all around what it looks like to own a business because that’s something I want to do in the future for sure. How I would describe the atmosphere here at Thrive is high energy Great professionalism great people. It’s just it’s a place you definitely want to visit in BF. Plays delivery style humorous professional Hilarious just he does it. I haven’t seen someone do it better. So he does a great job. Most valuable thing I’ve learned so far, a lot of it has been extremely valuable. So, but one thing that’s always really stuck out to me is the SEO, learning the SEO stuff. I mean, that is, I think, things you don’t really even think about and then you hear it and you think you know it, but you don’t know it. So I feel like that was the most valuable. Well, they’re missing out on just what comes out to just basic applications to be a business owner. I mean, I feel like it’s like an absolute necessity to come here and learn the ins and outs and maybe come here once or twice if they take good notes, that kind of thing. Why? To just, it’s the experience here and what you can learn, like absolutely. So, marketing and SEO seemed like something that would be very scary, but then, in the way that Clay and his team described it, it became very clear and concise, and something that’s very accessible to any business owner. I’ve learned a lot about marketing at this conference, and a lot about business management and HR. Really, everything, the key components of anybody’s business, they’re going to give you the best tools to be successful at it. So most workshops or conferences can be really boring, really one note, or they just seem so theatrical that it’s a joke and it’s not even giving you the tools that you need or that you came there for. But here, it’s still high energy, it’s still fun, everything’s to the point, but it’s very professional and, yeah, you’re missing out on easy steps to use in your business that are very accessible and very clear. My name is Abigail McCarter. The best thing I’ve learned so far is definitely organization, schedule wise, always keeping a to-do list, keeping your calendar organized. I’m kind of all over the place, so that’s always good to know. style and the atmosphere is electric. It’s so energetic, it’s so fun, plays hilarious, but also knows a ton, so it’s just really great all around. This conference is much different than any other conference I’ve gone to, again because it’s fun. A lot of other conferences it’s like really quiet, really cold, and you’re just kind of get bored, but this one you’re like always engaged, you’re always learning something, and the staff is amazing They’re always super helpful. So just been really great My name is Clint Howard. We’re a personal training and fitness training facility. Oh wow, I’m learning a ton. Like this morning so far has been search engine optimization. So really just the importance of being at the top of Google How Google works and why it’s so important to go out and get video reviews, and testimonials, and getting Google reviews. And so all those things, we can take back and really apply that immediately. So it’s really cool to see not only how to do it, but really the relevance and the proximity of your long-term strategy as an investor. Now, it’s amazing, actually, the way in this morning, and yesterday, I was videoing as I was walking in, the front entrance. And actually, me, I go to a lot of seminars, I go to a lot of conferences, masterminds. I’ve been doing that since I was like 22 years old, so gosh almost 20 years now. And this is by far the most entertaining, not only the content, their content is amazing, but Clay and you guys do a great job of mixing in entertainment, entertainment where it’s fun, it’s fresh, it’s lousy, you never get bored. And I heard a study one time that the reason that children learn so much quicker is because it’s fun. Learning is fun. And so obviously, Clay is still that, where it’s very fun to be here. And it keeps you awake, keeps you energized. So have a blast. Yeah, I think any business owner or store that wants to own a business or considering owning and starting a business should definitely come. I know that I was referred here by friends of mine and clients of mine and I’ve referred other people. Again, just to understand what it takes to make a business successful, to have a good time, obviously, you know, like I was just saying, have fun and network. There’s a lot of people here you can learn from and there’s a lot of breaks you can talk to other people. So I think this is a must-attempt for anybody that owns a business or that wants to start a business. My name is Jamie Fagel. I’m with Jameson Fine Cabinetry. I heard about the conference through Andrew. He’s the coach that I deal with here at The Thrive. The most valuable piece I found even working with Andrew, but it’s been solidified when it came here, was you gotta actually do the things that they’re telling you. With no action, you’re not gonna get anything from it. I would highly recommend this to almost anybody in business today. I have recommended it to some of my other business partners. It’s phenomenal. It’s really something that if you want to start a business, the only way of doing things is done. This is what you got to do. It’s the only way it’ll work. Hey, this is Charles and Amber Kola. We’re the owners of Kola Fitness. The way we’re able to do that is working with Clay for the last three years. He has really readjusted our thinking and taught us that our business is here to serve us. And by doing that we’re able to live the lifestyle we want and take off on a random vacation last minute. We had totally planned on being at the conference. So wish we could be there and meet all of you. We know you’re having a great time. Yes, Clay in the last three years has helped us build all the necessary systems, checklists, workflows, task lists, time blocks, audits that are always running and the right capable lieutenants to keep track of all that so that you too can get time freedom, financial freedom and that’s what we have done and Clay has helped us do. We’ve got multiple companies in multiple states and they’re all doing very well getting ready to go to more locations in this next year and Co-op Fitness has a really big future. We’re teaming up with a couple other groups and we should scale the company here shortly. Hopefully we’ll open like 50 locations in the next 10 years. So but yeah, we’re on the way we’re going to probably more than double our company, maybe triple our company in the next eight to nine months and it’s just awesome. God is working in our business and we’re making Jesus and changing lives. We’re a strong Christian company that focuses on making Jesus famous and changing lives in the fitness field and this is Charles and Amber Cola. Thank you Thrive. Hit your action items. We love you guys. We wish we were there. You guys have a wonderful day. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. refining the processes for just the different concepts. And so it’s getting better and better. Things that were just big processes before, we have the foundation laid, and now we’re able to make it better and better. And I’m hearing different things now that we’ve implemented things. And so we can just make it even better implementing it in our own business. Clay’s presentation and the atmosphere is very exciting and fun. It keeps you awake. It makes it interesting. You have a lot of information, but if it’s not going to be entertaining, your brain is going to tune it out. But Play makes it just entertaining enough that you retain what you learn. Lots of rhyming and catchy things so that you remember stuff. What makes you different? Something that makes this conference different than other workshops or conferences that I’ve been to is that there’s a lot of people here in my same situation. Most of us are pretty small businesses wanting to improve and we want real life information and something that will work and that’s attainable and not just some crazy magic formula but actual action items that we can implement in our business and and actually see a difference. Everyone should attend a Thrive Type Business Conference, whether you’re a business owner or not. A, if you’re a business owner, it has practical applications that you can apply to so many different parts of your business, and then you need to come back for more, so that you can keep doing more of the wonderful things that you learn. But secondly, I am also a mom of three kids, and a lot of the concepts can actually be applied to home, like getting routines and getting, setting systems at home has just seriously made a huge difference in my life at home. So I’ve been able to improve our business, but I’ve also been able to improve things at home. And so that’s why everyone should come, no matter what your station is in life. My name is Nolan Kuh. I’m originally from San Francisco, California. The industry that I’m in is financial services. I’ve learned a ton so far, but what I can best apply from this conference is the opportunity, that hunger to go out there and make a big difference in my district. Blaise’s presentation style is amazing. He’s got an endless amount of energy. It’s contagious. And yeah, by being here, I really do want to go back and be able to face all the adversity that the industry had. Yeah, this conference, the thing that makes it different is that it’s special because it has a unique set of individuals that all share that same energy. I think you typed it as dragon energy, but yeah, that’s what it is. Everyone should come to multiple, but their first would be very special. Yeah, you’re welcome with a lot of enthusiasm. That’ll last for a long time. My name is Gabriella Cruz. Our business is PG&E Electric. My husband’s the owner, but I’m involved with that, so we’re an electric company. Well, here at the conference they talk a lot about consistency, and so just staying consistent with different things in the business, and it’s very fun and energetic. It gets you pumped and it gets you excited and it encourages you to do big things. Probably how real they are. They tell you up front what you need to do and what’s a no-go. Conferences, they kind of trigger code things, so I like how real they are here. I think it’ll definitely, if you want your business to grow, I think this will be a great experience and then not only that, it’ll encourage you and inform you on so many things you don’t think about on a daily basis. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place, so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super…it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool, the people are nice, it’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot, which, you know, we’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, so the humor definitely helps, it breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts, and it’s very interactive, you can raise your hand, it’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak, you know. The wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely, it’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars. So you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So not only is it a lot of good information, but just getting in the thought process of Clay Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses. To me, just that is priceless. That’s money. Well, we’re definitely not getting upsold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they upsold… where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference. Now I don’t want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like, it’s good information but we’re like, oh my gosh I want to strangle you. Shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome. I hate that. It makes me angry. So glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using to the last nine years So what they’re teaching here is actually way Better than what I got at business school, and I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school I would definitely recommend that people would check out the thrive 15 conference it’s The information that you’re going to get is just very very beneficial and the mindset that you’re going to get, that you’re going to leave with, is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. 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. 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. So we really just wanna thank you Clay and thank you Vanessa for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. 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 how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy’s just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crockrell, 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 multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building into a franchisable, scalable business. Like 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, like 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. And 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. And 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 listened 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, you know, 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 get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that and of course we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing and I encourage you if you if you haven’t worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s gonna help magnify you and there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps for maybe six hours a day and literally the rest of time he’s working and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day and and he loves it. So anyways this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank You Clay and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay. It’s a great great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. Bye-bye. Hi, I’m Aaron Antis with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them. And I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes, and then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15 year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of sales people for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. We’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four-month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town. And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs, I would just really encourage you if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know for me the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800 percent increase in our internet leads going from 10 a month to a hundred and eighty a month That would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about, and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it, because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full-time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide what do I want to do. My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder so real estate and home building go hand in hand and we just rolled with it. I love people, I love working with people, I love the building relationships, but one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing, I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time, and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. that we represent, everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago and in that time we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents, but I have to give credit where credit’s due. And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way, I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer insurance companies, I don’t answer to large corporate organizations, I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic.