Clay Clark | Ray Lewis | Daniel Paisner (The Ghost-Writer of Choice for Ray Lewis, Denzel Washington, Daymond John & More Shares How he Turned His Passion Into Profits) + Tim Tebow Joins June 27-28 Business Workshop (15 Tix Remain)

Audio Transcription

Today, I wanted to just really hit on something, dealing with pain. I asked my mom one day, I said, Mom, I don’t gamble in my house. Ain’t no cards coming in my house. I said, Mom, I don’t need them for gambling. I don’t want them for gambling. I just need a deck of cards, Mom. My mom, for years, from the time I was four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. I never saw a woman take so much physical abuse than the way I’ve seen my mother be every freaking day of my life. I can’t help her because I’m not strong enough. I don’t have the muscle to get these men off my mother. My mother is a very high yellow woman and every time they hit her, she would bleed from her eyes. She would walk around for days with sunglasses on in the house. I said, Ma, I need a deck of cards. Last altercation we got in, my stepfather hit my mama so hard in the face, my stepfather hit my mama so hard in the face I called her and I looked at him with this rage and this pain in my eyes like one day, one day, and I took this deck of cards. I couldn’t live in the house so I had to live in the garage. And after this last altercation we had with this guy, I ran to my garage and I grabbed this deck of cards and I flipped a 7 and I started doing 7 pushups. I flipped a 6, I did 6. I flipped a 9, I did 9. I flipped a 2, I did 2. I flipped another 9, I did 9. Until I got all the way through the deck. Jack, Queen, King were 10. Ace is 25 and Joker is 50. Until I got sick and tired of what pain felt like in my gut. It didn’t even matter to me no more. Because I started shuffling them all over again and that’s when I started doing the sit-ups. Because I wanted to make sure sports wasn’t the reason why I started training. It was to make sure man never put his hands on my mama again. And I told my mama no pain, no pain will ever stop me from taking care of you and my brothers and sisters. That’s why I started doing what I started doing. Sports was a byproduct of what people started to see. It was the behind the scenes that was driving me crazy. There’s two sides of pain that I don’t think a lot of people really understand. There’s one side of pain that’s the suffering and the discomfort side of pain. It’s called effort. It’s called glory. It’s called if you can find a way to push through pain, there’s something greater on the other side of it. And if you never tap into it, it’s because the first time you felt it, you backed off. The first time you felt, ah, that burn. The first time you felt, that, it’s too much. And we rationalize with ourselves to where we automatically stop. That’s why a bunch of us give up so much in life so quickly. That’s why kids have a problem finishing things in today’s time. Because as soon as they feel a small bit of discomfort, of things ain’t right, they’re gone. I can’t do it no more. But suppose I told you, the greatest pain of my life is the reason I’m standing here today. I dare you to take a little pain, to go through it. You’re not gonna die at the end of pain and success. Pain is temporary. It may last for a minute or an hour or a day or even a year. But eventually it will subside. And something else will take its place. If I quit however, it will last forever. On the other side of that pain On the other side of that pain On the other side of that pain Is your promise. At 10 years old, I picked up these deck of cards and one day I counted them and I found out it was 52 of them in the deck of cards. 52! And I turned my greatest pain into in my business where the greatest achievement ever is the touchdown body trophy 52 cards and ironically my number end up being 52 ladies and gentlemen on today’s spooktacular show we are interviewing a man who I would personally consider to be the greatest ghostwriter of all time. What’s that in the bushes? I can see it now. What does he do? This man sits down with A-list celebrities like Denzel Washington, Damon John from the FUBU in short-take fame, Ray Lewis, the NFL Hall of Fame football player, I don’t know. I have a bad feeling about this. Legendary high school basketball coach Bob Hurley. He gets to learn their stories. He interviews them. He gets to know them. He gets to learn their voice and then he turns their interview and their stories into the books that you can find at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million. The best-selling books are written by this man. And does his name normally appear on the cover of the book? No, because he is a ghostwriter. Ghostwriter? Hey, who said that? Ghostwriter he is. In due time, take you to him, I will. You guys said that this ghostwriter thing was just a play on words. He’s not actually a ghost, right? Paisner, you seek Daniel Paisner. 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. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Time Show. 1, 2, 3, 4! Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get there. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Thrive Nation, I am fired up about today’s guest. He is a significantly above average ghostwriter. Mr. Daniel Paisner, how are you, sir? I’m good, Clay. I like that. Significantly above average. I’m going to start using that. Well, you are one of the more humble people that I’ve ever cyberstalked, and so I would like to call you the greatest ghostwriter of all time, but I can’t do that. So I’m just going to say, a significantly above average ghostwriter. I appreciate it. I think I’ll have a t-shirt made. I would like to ask you this because, obviously, if our listeners Google search your name, you’ve worked with Bob Hurley and Denzel Washington and Damon John and Ray Lewis. Big names. But where did it all start? Where did you go to high school and when did you first become interested in writing? Well, I grew up on Long Island and I was kind of a journalism geek. I kind of came of age during the Watergate. So I had posters of Woodward and Bernstein up on my wall when I was a kid. And I always thought I’d be a swashbuckling journalist, you know, writing wrongs and setting America right. And I never quite thought that I’d be working in the trade in the way that I am now. I don’t think you could find a middle school kid or a high school kid anywhere in this country who’s dreaming of becoming a ghostwriter. It’s sort of a silent, hidden profession. And so I set out to become a journalist, and I started doing that. I freelanced. I went to school up in Boston. I was the editor of my school paper up there. I went to journalism school, and somehow I backdoored into this element of publishing, which has turned out to be a very great way to make a living. It’s a great way to meet interesting people and give me the time I need to also work on some books of my own that nobody reads, but I still crank them out. Now, I would love to hear about the path you took from college to becoming a ghostwriter. What was your first job after college? You know what? I took a job. I was lucky enough to win an award in my senior year of college from Gulf and Western, which used to be, if you remember from the old Mel Brooks movies, Engulf and Devour was how he sort of parodied corporate America. So Engulf and Devour awarded me a publishing scholarship in my last year of school. And Gulf and Western was the parent company of Simon & Schuster at the time. So the award came with a job after graduation at Simon & Schuster, which was not something I wanted, although I did want the scholarship that came from my last year of school. So I grabbed their money and I went to New York to work as a publicist at a publishing house, which turned out to be a very clever, scheming thing to do, although I didn’t recognize it as such at the time. I was fairly miserable working there as a publicist, but because I came in there with this sort of pedigree as a Gulf and Western scholarship winner, I had the ear of and access to all the players at Simon & Schuster at the time, including the chairman of the company, Dick Snyder. So I would go into his office every so often and sort of complain, I didn’t want to be here, I want to be a writer, this is no place for a writer, you publish books, I want to write the books that you publish. And at some point, after I finished my one-year obligation to them in honor of the scholarship that I won, I had one foot out the door, and he threw me a bone. They sent me over to 30 Rock, across the street from where Simon & Schuster is located in Manhattan, because they had signed a book with Willard Scott. Do you remember Willard Scott, the happy weatherman from the Today Show? Back in the day. So I went over to meet Willard, and he said, well, Simon & Schuster sent you over here, what the hell do I care? You can write my book. And I wrote Willard Scott’s book. I was 25, 26 years old and that was my first adventure, thinking it would be a one-off and that it would be one and done and move on to something else. But it’s like you get something stuck on your shoe, Clay, and it stays with you for the next 30 years. I’m one of these people that I don’t have a whole lot of skill, but I’m very curious. And so I’d like to unpack a few things that you just said. College. Did you go to college? Was it Tufts University? Is that correct? Tufts University? That’s correct. I went to Tufts University outside of Boston. And so when you got your first job as a publicist, we have listeners all over the world, and some people don’t know what that word means. How would you describe what it meant to be a publicist? My job was to promote and get some sort of attention for the books that Simon & Schuster was publishing. And that included writing press releases and calling producers of big shows like the Today Show and Good Morning America and little shows like, Hey, How Are You Cincinnati? For all of us here at News Center 4, I’m Ron Burgundy. You stay classy, San Diego. And because I was relatively junior, I was working with smaller authors on smaller books. It was ultimately a very frustrating job because my ability to perform was only as good as the appeal of the authors I had were to these producers that I was pitching them to. So that’s basically what a publicist does. We also would arrange bookstore signings and book events and things of that nature. Now you mentioned Dick Snyder and obviously most of the listeners out there, some have heard the name, but most people really don’t know his personality and what it was like to work for someone of that power, prestige, that sort of position. What was it like to work for Dick Snyder? Well he was a very gruff guy. I didn’t work directly for him. He was in an upstairs office and I merely had access to poke my head in once in a while and say, excuse me, Mr. Snyder, I’m the kid from Tufts who won this scholarship. But he had quite a roar and quite a presence in the publishing industry. He used to wear these suspenders. Lots of people in publishing wear suspenders. I don’t know if you know that, Clay, or at least they did in the early 1980s. It’s a very intimidating kind of power look. There was an editor at Simon & Schuster at the time named Michael Korda who also wrote a book called Power, how to get it, how to use it, what to do with it when you find it had to stay out of its way. So there were some interesting characters at Simon & Schuster at the time, but I was insulated from them to a degree because I was working in the publicity department, which was on a different floor from the power base, but it was a unique setup because I got to go upstairs and pick his brain every once in a while. Together with his wife, he was married at the time to a woman named Joni Evans, who was the publisher of Simon & Schuster at the time as well. You worked at 30 Rock. Do you still call Manhattan your home or New York your home at this point? I do, yeah. I live outside the city, but I do go into the city every so often. That’s kind of my home base, but I work in an office in my house, often in my underwear. Really? TMI? No, this is interesting, because I think this ties into a question I have here. A lot of people ask me, they say, Clay, where do you record your podcast? At some point, Daniel, have you ever been to Oklahoma, by the way? Have you ever been to Oklahoma? I have not been to Oklahoma, although I had a sister who lived and worked there for a little bit, but no, I have not been there. I know it’s on your bucket list and you’re still a young man, but at any point, if you come to Oklahoma for a sod farm tour, a lot of people will come here for our conferences and they’ll say, Clay, where do you record your show? And I live on, it’s 17 acres, we call it Camp Clark and Chicken Palace. If you could imagine a dive bar with the patina of a business that’s been around for 100 years, a lot of decor, pictures, photos, signed things, that’s kind of my man cave. What does your writing space look like? What does that place and that space look like where you sit down to write the things you write. I’ve carved out a small room off the main floor of my house and it’s lined with bookshelves and there’s a fireplace in there that doesn’t work, but it has become a repository for books and stacks of papers. And I kind of cocoon myself in here and work at odd hours when the spirit moves me. I made the mistake, and you’re probably old enough to remember this reference, but there was a Dick Van Patten TV show from the 70s and 80s called Eight is Enough. And he was a kind of stay-at-home journalist, and he had a study. I don’t have a study, but he had a study off of the grand dining hall in his home, and that was sort of the fulcrum of all the activity in the house. And one of the eight children, if they got in trouble, he’d call them into their office for a serious talk. That was always the highlight of each episode. It was this book-lined, wood-paneled room with a beautiful oak desk. That was my vision of what it would be like to work at home as a writer. I stupidly positioned my office right by the front door of the dining room, just like he had it on 8th and Up, not really counting for the fact that when the kids would come home from school when my kids were living in the house the house Would get busy and noisy and I wouldn’t be able to work at all, but it seemed like a good idea at the time What are your prime writing hours? What are your prime writing hours? I mean you did you because you have your own space you’ve carved out now. It’s lined with books I can kind of picture it there What time is your peak writing time? You know what? It really varies. When I’m working on something of my own, if I’m working on a piece of fiction, I’ve published a few novels, I’ve written some non-fiction books of my own, I tend to do that first thing in the morning. When I’m working on other people’s books, there is no such thing as writer’s block to me because the story exists. I know what the beginning is, what the middle is, and so that becomes more like a work of craftsmanship. So I’m able to do that at any time and that’s really a function of what my deadline is. It’s kind of like moving through life with a turn paper hanging constantly over your head. So if there’s something due, I’ll work all night to get it done and if it’s a beautiful day outside and I want to go for a run or if I want to go away for a week and go skiing because there’s been a lot of snow and I want to take advantage of that. I’ll put a pin in what I’m doing and go off and do that, but then I have to pay the price when I get back and work all night for a couple of weeks. So after you did your first book, your first ghostwriting book, I believe, with Willard Scott, when did you believe that you started to gain traction, where you began to be sought after for ghostwriting projects? You know, I didn’t really trust it for the longest time. My idea early on, as I mentioned, was to do it once and try to get some traction as a writer of my own. Remember, I wanted to be Woodward and Bernstein, not one or the other. I wanted to be both. So I didn’t set out to write other people’s books. For a lot of writers, it’s sort of a fallback position when you can’t make a living and you can’t make a go of it with your own material, there’s an honest buck to be made helping others realize their dreams in print. So I was really hoping to be able to get traction with my own work, and I was lucky enough to publish a novel early on when I was still a kid, but I couldn’t bring readers to it. It was good enough to get published, but it wasn’t good enough to take off. As the Willard book came and went, I replaced it with another one and then there was another one and each time I counted myself lucky that I’d find a gig that would help me pay my rent for the next six months or a year. I didn’t really trust it until I was maybe five or six years into it, realizing that there’s a steady stream of work here and there aren’t a lot of people who are doing this work. So that’s why when you say I’m a slightly above average ghostwriter, that’s kind of all you had to be when I started doing it because there weren’t a lot of people doing it. Tell us more about the decor of the place where you are writing. You have the books, it’s lined with books. What kind of desk are you writing from here? It’s an old desk that I grabbed from my father’s textile factory in lower Manhattan, and it’s a big, blonde wood desk, like one of those things where the drawers reach like three foot deep. And who knows what’s living inside these drawers? And the room is kind of a mess. It looks like a cyclone has hit it. So the shelves are filled, but then the books are kind of stand there at some towers of books on the floor too, I’m afraid to admit. And usually whatever book I’m working on, I kind of work on two or three books at a time now. So I have papers stacked all over and notes and files for those books as well. Do you listen to music while you’re writing? Is it silent? Do you listen to ambient noise? Do you unleash a herd of wild chickens into your studio? What do you do? What’s your process? I do occasionally listen to music at different times in the writing process. When I’m editing, as you must know, there’s a lot of back and forth with publishers. Once a project is essentially done, there’s a copy edited manuscript and there’s first pass pages, and there’s a lot of drudgery kind of reading that goes along with the writing. And for that, I’ll listen to music loud. When I’m creating something and trying to fill a blank piece of paper or a blank screen, I tend to listen to stuff without lyrics. The lyrics are distracting, so I’ll listen to jazz or I’ll listen to those weird spa channels that you can find sometimes that you hear at the gym, but ambient noise is the way to go for me. The lyrics mess me up. Do you ever listen to like a Hans Zimmer or John Williams or some sort of score composer? I do occasionally listen to scores. John Williams, yes, Hans Zimmer, no, and I do listen to some classical music from time to time also. There’s a wonderful collection of piano concertos that lived on my computer for the longest time before you had to stream this stuff. And are you typing from a Mac computer? Do you like to type from multiple screens? Walk us through the technology. I’m a PC guy, so I have a big PC computer sitting on my desk. I invested in, on top of this grand old Oak desk that I have. My wife bought me a couple of years ago one of those stand up collapsible kind of desks to help with your posture. So it’s not often standing, but I have that ability and in theory I do that from time to time. And then I also work on a screen occasionally, so I have a little portable tablet, laptop thing that I take with me when I travel and I work on that as well. And sometimes I just move to another part of the house and work there too. Now, you have worked on books with retired Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis. For the listeners out there who don’t know, you’ve worked with award-winning actor who I’m a huge fan of, Denzel Washington, the famous Shark Tank judge and entrepreneur, Damon John, the legendary basketball coach, Bob Hurley, who just his career is ridiculous. Can you talk to us about some of the common denominators that you have found about the personality types of what I would call super successful people? Well for one thing, and lucky for me, is they’re too busy to sit down and write a book by themselves. So I get work. But I would say they’re moving a million miles a minute. One of the first examples I saw of that in my own career was when I did a book with George Pataki, who was a first-term governor of New York State when I was working with him. I was young, and I had little kids, and I probably spent more time waiting for him outside his office than I actually spent with him inside his office. And you begin to realize that successful people are somehow able to choreograph their days in such a way that they move from one thing to the next, almost like a pinball in a lit pinball machine. And I’d say that’s true of Bob Hurley, that’s true of Denzel, that’s true of Serena Williams, all the people that I’ve been blessed to be able to work with. If you live a book-worthy life, it means that you’ve found a way to cram a lot into that life. So let’s go person by person. I’m not going to ask any paint you in a corner questions about anything personal. The listeners out there probably would never get a chance to sit down with a person of the character of Denzel has given so many eloquent speeches when he’s not acting, you know, when it’s Denzel. And I just, I have a big respect for what he’s done. What do you, what did you find to be the most admirable character attribute of Denzel Washington from your perspective, spending time with him? Well, I suppose it would be helpful to your listeners, Clay, if I told them what that book, what the conceit of that book was. Yeah. Because it wasn’t a traditional memoir. In Denzel’s case, you might know, your listeners might know, he was, I believe he still is, but at the time he was the national spokesperson for the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. He grew up as the product of the Boys Clubs in his neighborhood in the Bronx, in Mount Vernon, I’m sorry, in upstate New York, or just north of the volunteers who helped to shape the hearts and minds of young people who do not have every advantage all across this country. So what we did in that book is we went out together in some cases, often I would do it on my own, and we would interview some prominent alums of the Boys and Girls Clubs ranks, people from Hank Aaron to Jimmy Carter to George Steinbrenner, who was the president of the New York Yankees at the time, to Muhammad Ali. We collected about nine, Colin Powell, there were about 90 people that we interviewed who all had some connection to the Boys and Girls Clubs. We asked them to speak about role models, mentors, and influences in their life. The very nature of this book, I think, reflects on Denzel’s character. He did not want to write a book about himself. He wanted to write a book about people lifting others. The book was called A Hand to Guide Me, and it really became a very successful book. It was the kind of book that people gave to their kids on graduation, big ceremonial occasions, It offered a model for how to give and how to receive help from someone else. You’ve sat down with so many iconic people, and I want to just go through a couple more because I know our listeners are infinitely curious, and I’m going to get all sorts of email feedback if I don’t ask these questions. So Ray Lewis is an iconic character. He’s a guy that I subscribed to the NFL package just to watch all of the Ravens games I could possibly watch. And one of our Thrive Time show guests, Justin Forsett, was on the Ravens where the legendary Ray Lewis played. And I’ve just heard so many things about Ray Lewis anecdotally from other people. What was he like to sit down with? He has the passion of a preacher and the cadence of a preacher when you speak to him. So the man is all heart. The way he played, the way you saw him play on the field, is kind of the way he goes at life, even in retirement. I worked with him the year he retired, so he was no longer training to play football, but he worked out as hard as anybody I’ve ever seen, and he was no longer playing professionally at that point. That’s kind of the way he attacked the book. He was very thorough. We would actually meet at a friend of his house, because he lived in Baltimore, so we would meet in the city. He played football with Rowan Marley, who was Bob Marley’s son. And he was Ray’s teammate at Miami, and they’ve become lifelong friends. And Rowan would allow us to park at his place to meet, because it was a nice midpoint. And Ray was always there, and he did his homework. If I had told him, Ray, we’re going to talk about your senior year in high school, he had gone back and pulled all the clips and got his head around the material we were going to discuss, and he went at it hard. When you hear him talk about a game and it’s just the two of you in a room, he can break it down in such a way as though you feel there with him. He did this most amazingly when he was talking about his wrestling matches. Do you know that he was a national champion high school wrestler and his plan, his fantasy or the realistic goal really was to wrestle in college. That’s what he was hoping to do. When that didn’t quite work out, as a fallback, he wound up going to Miami and just embarking on one of the greatest NFL careers ever. How many hours do you typically spend with the person that you are going to collaborate with when you’re doing the researching phase, the gathering phase, the interviewing process? Again, it varies. I try not to run a tape until I spend a couple of weekends just hanging around with this person and osmosing the ways they live, paying attention to how they look out at the world, paying attention to how they speak, how they interact with their friends, with their family. So I try to be a fly on the wall a little bit and see what they see and think what they think before I bother them with a tape recorder. You probably notice this when you interview some guests, although maybe not if you’re doing some of these interviews by phone like this one, but when you present a recording device it changes the nature of the conversation. It becomes an obtrusive measure and you want to try to eliminate that as much as possible. I once, when I was working with Serena Williams on her book, this was maybe 10 years ago, and I used to, for the longest time, use one of those old Dadalax Radio Shack cassette recorders. Oh, wow. Because I didn’t trust the digital technology yet 10 years ago, and those micro cassette recorders that a lot of reporters used, I found very unreliable. The tapes would get all tangled and mangled, and the only thing I trusted were those classic old cassette recorders. So I would pull out this Radio Shack recorder that was about the size of a shoebox and I had all this with me whenever I bounced around the country to go meet someone. I was sitting with Serena one afternoon in a coffee shop and I put it down on the coffee table between us and she said, ìIf I buy you a small mini recorder, would you maybe use that instead? I think because she was just embarrassed to be seen with this guy with a big old… She’s from a younger generation. Who carries one of those things around? How come you didn’t just roll up with a boom box with a dual cassette player and the big old subwoofers mounted in there? Just carry that around your ear while you’re interviewing people. Exactly. But it does change the conversation. conversation and and so I try to to really develop a connection with a person I’m working with before I introduce the elements of the work at hand because I find you get a fresher more genuine take if they don’t really realize that you’re recording them or that you’re working. How many how many edits well after you’ve written the manuscript, right? So you’ve written it. I don’t think the listeners out there appreciate this. I’ve heard Paul Graham, the famous entrepreneur who built VIAweb and helped with Airbnb and Dropbox, he talks about the first eight iterations of anything are a word I won’t say on the podcast. I’ve heard Ernest Hemingway say the first version of anything is a word I won’t say on the podcast. How many times do you completely edit that manuscript? Once you said, okay, it is written, how many times do you edit it before it’s ready to be printed? You’d be surprised, Clay. Sometimes it’s zero. Of course, I edit it myself before I send it on to the subject I’m working with for review. Sometimes they don’t change a word. And then sometimes they roll up their sleeves and really have at it and kick it back to me and we go back and forth. It usually doesn’t happen in one finished chunk. I’ll probably send 30, 40 pages at a time just to make sure that they’re happy with the tone of voice, with the way I have them speaking, with the language choices that I make, with the structure that I have in mind. Sometimes they’ll have a grid that they want me to follow. So it really varies. I’ve done, you know, maybe 50 some odd collaborations and every everyone really takes a different path. How many times do you edit it before you send it on? Well, you know, it’s different when I started out. I believe the first couple of books I did were not on the computer. So when you’re writing a book on a typewriter, it’s a whole different beast. So when I’m working in a word processing scenario, before I start work each day, I’ll often go back and polish what I’ve written the day before. So I don’t think of that as really revising the whole manuscript at that point. It helps me to get back in the frame of mind that I was in the day before where I left off. I do make changes all the time as I’m creating a manuscript. Of course, now you have the ability, if I’m in chapter 8 or on page 100, I can go back and revisit something I wrote in chapter 2 or 3 that’s affected by what I just wrote in chapter 10. It’s a much more fluid process now than it was when I first started doing it. Now, Daniel, I don’t expect you to listen to a bunch of our podcasts as preparation for an interview, but just my background. I’m 38. My partner’s 54. Dr. Zellner has three kids. I have five. And between the two of us, we’ve built 13, going on now 14 and 15, multimillion-dollar companies. And people say, Clay- Well, I did check you out. Okay, yeah. Well, people always say, Clay, how would you describe yourself? I get asked that a lot at conferences. How would you describe your mindset? And I kind of consider myself as an artist slash entrepreneur. I think I just paint with capitalism. So that makes me impossible to… It makes it hard for me to stop a project once I’ve started because it’s not about the money. It’s about making it perfect. Can you talk to me about that? I think you are an artist slash entrepreneur too, so you probably have the same problem. Do you ever have a hard time turning it off, or do you ever turn it off? It’s very hard because there are a lot of moving parts that go into the making of a book. So when I’m in the middle of working on something, I do find that it’s bouncing around in my head all the time, to the point where I could be tossing and turning at three o’clock in the morning and I just can’t sleep and I get up and try to set things down on paper. So I kind of know where everything is and begun to take shape in my mind before it’s even down on paper. So I can’t imagine I’m all that much fun to be around during those moments. Days tend to fly by. Those are really the best times as a writer when you realize there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do what you have to do. You wake up one morning and then all of a sudden you realize it’s midnight. Those are kind of fun when you get locked into a zone like that. And that’s what happens when you’re trying to reassemble the stuff of someone else’s life, a life you’ve only recently become acquainted with, and try to set it all down on paper. But then there could be weeks where everything’s kind of slow and meandering and I wouldn’t describe my days like that at all. So it all varies. I don’t know if that answered your question. No, this is great. I just think the listeners out there, this is one thing a lot of our listeners out there are just dipping their toe into the world of entrepreneurship. And then other people are just huge businesses and they say, well, Clay, you know how many hours a week do you work? And I’m like, well, you know, I woke up at three the other night and I wrote something down on my little yellow tablet. And then I went, took a shower, thought about it then too, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it ever. So a hundred? I mean, you know what I mean? It’s like, I’d like to ask you maybe the same kind of question. How long does it, how many hours do you typically have to invest in a book? You know, with the person, with the subject directly, we’re probably together face to face for 30 to 40 hours of interview time, not just hanging out time or having dinner. So there’s really 30 to 40 hours of face to face interview time. But the books itself can stretch on for six months to a year. That doesn’t mean that that becomes my nine to five for the year. The person I’m working with might be busy doing other things and can’t devote his or her attention for weeks at a time, which is why I like to have a couple of things going. But I get what you’re talking about with the entrepreneur’s mindset. The past few books I’ve done with Daymond John, for example, have introduced me to dozens of folks that he’s met through his Shark Tank partnerships who really walk that same walk. In fact, our last book was called Rise and Grind and it was all about the hard charging mentality you need to embrace in your career and in your relationships if you want to succeed. How did that relationship with Damon John come about? That was pre-Shark Tank. We’ve done four books together, Dave and I were about to start on a fifth, and it started as an introduction through my agent, my literary agent. He was out to do a book, sort of the origin stories of FUBU, his fashion line where he made his bones, and it was a story of how he went from being a kid from the streets of Hollis, Queens, being raised by a single mom who had an idea for a clothing line that would make his friends feel included, like they could belong to a movement. Out of that, he grew FUBU, which became a pioneering urban fashion brand. That’s what put him on the map. FUBU had been around maybe five or six years when he and I did the first book. The first couple of books we did didn’t get a whole lot of love. The last couple of books post Shark Tank have been phenomenal successes. I like to show you that it helps to have a platform. I’m not going to ask you with a platform or without a platform how much you make per book or specific dollar figures. I just want, if somebody goes and buys a book today, I just want people to understand the industrial complex of publishing. If I buy a book today at Barnes & Noble for $20, or I buy one on Amazon for $20, how is the money divided and how does it get to you and the subject and then the agent and then the publisher? Are you making like two cents a book? The lowly ghostwriter might sometimes be making two cents a book, but the author himself, I mean, let’s just talk in general what the author makes. Most author contracts return a royalty to the author of about 15%. It starts at 10%, then it’s 12.5%, but these are in small numbers. By the time you sell your 10,000th copy of the book, you make 15% for the rest of the run of the book. So on a cover, and that’s off of the cover price, so it doesn’t matter what Barnes and Noble or Amazon has discounted it to. If it’s a $30 book, you’re making $4.50 a book, which is not a whole lot of money when you consider what the publisher is making. Typically when you’re dealing with a bookseller like a Barnes and Noble, they take half of that list price and the other half goes to the publisher. But out of that, the publisher has to pay their hard costs, their production costs, their salaries and all that, their development costs. So there’s not a lot of money to go around. What was your first book that really took off and you remember thinking to yourself, you know what, I’m actually a best-selling author! Woo! When did that happen? The first book that I wrote, I’m trying to think which of the first bestsellers was, one of the first was a book I wrote with Geraldo Rivera called Exposing Myself, which was one of my favorite titles of all of my books. It was actually a line that came from Reuben Frank, who was the president of NBC News at the time, or maybe ABC News. Geraldo was at ABC, but he said to a reporter one day that Geraldo Rivera should be arrested for exposing himself. So out of that line, Geraldo decided that this is what we were going to call his book. And that book became a big success. It made a lot of headlines. And that was one of the first books that I saw land in the New York Times bestseller list with my name on it and that was pretty cool. Do you, it’s so interesting because you are super well known in literary circles as sort of the really above average ghost writer guy. But the average person on the streets, the average listener probably does not know your name. What’s it like to write books, what’s it like to go to a bookstore and see your books that you’ve written, going, okay, that’s my book, and that’s my book over there, too. Oh, and that’s… I mean, you’ve had multiple times where you’ve had best-selling books in the stores at the same time. What’s it like to do that and to be completely anonymous to the average reader? You know what, Clay? It’s not… I mean, it was a goose the first couple times it happened, but it wasn’t really frustrating because what I’ve realized is to do this kind of work over the long haul and to be successful at it and not just to be successful at it, but to be content with it, you really can’t have an ego. So I don’t think of it like very often I won’t get credit on the cover of a book. In fact, from time to time, I’ll get offered money to take my name off the book, which is the sweetest deal going in publishing. So you just really can’t, or I have not let myself get caught up in the fact that I’m not getting credit in a public way. The people in publishing know what my involvement is. It helps me get work, it’s helped me build a sustained career but it doesn’t allow me to drag my friends or my kids into a bookstore and say, hey, look at me, I’m in the window. But it’s never been about that. Now, if it was a book of my own in the window, I’d be doing cartwheels if I knew how to do a cartwheel. But for these other books, there’s sort of a pride in craftsmanship. I used that word before early in our conversation. It does feel more to me like a craft than an art. I suppose I feel the same way that a cabinetmaker might feel when he goes to visit somebody in their home and he’s built them a beautiful set of bookshelves that they get to enjoy on a daily basis and he hasn’t seen until he visits them five years later and sees how they live with this little piece of artwork and craftsmanship that he’s provided with them. So I kind of feel more like that and I don’t feel the need to go and crow and say, hey, look at me, look at the book that I’ve done. However, that said, I will tell you that it is my fantasy, as yet unrealized, so maybe some of your listeners will help me out on this. It’s my fantasy to sit down on a plane next to somebody reading my book. That to me would be the coolest thing in the world. So which book should we read? I could leave, you know, we’re halfway through the trip, and I’d say, hey, how do you like that book? How’s it going? Should we all go pick up a copy of Scratching the Horizon, A Surfing Life? That would make me happy. Your name’s on the cover of that one. Which book do you want us to get right now? Andrew’s going to buy it right now on Amazon. I bet I have enough influence that maybe two or three other people will also buy these books. What is the book right now that we all need to buy? I’ll tell you the names of a couple of books that don’t get a lot of love, and they’re my very favorite books. This is nothing against the name-above-the-title people that I work with who have become friends of mine and I’ve come to admire in new ways after working with them. I really do love working with ordinary people who’ve done or seen or experienced something extraordinary. To me, that is much more gratifying than working with somebody who’s had a microphone or a camera in their face for their entire lives. They’ve told the same stories over and over again. But if I work with somebody for whom this is brand new, the material I’m able to pull from their lives and set between hard covers is so much richer. And to me, it’s a much more rewarding experience. So one of the books you just mentioned is a book called Scratching the Horizon, and I wrote that with a gentleman named Izzy Paskowitz, who is a legendary surfer. He’s from a famous California surf family. He grew up off the grid. His father was this nutty doctor, a Stanford-trained doctor, who decided to raise his nine children in a camper. No school, no nothing, and they just bounced around the California coast at first and then all over the country and even to Israel and all these kids did all day was surf. Izzy, I’m buying the book right now. We’re buying the book right on Amazon, right? We bought it. We just bought it. We’re gonna make sure we’re gonna leave an objective review after we devour the book. That will happen. What’s the next book? The next book which your listeners should really spark to is a book that I wrote with a Holocaust survivor. Her name is Kieger, and she survived for 14 months during the war in a sewer in Lwów, Poland, initially with a group of 20 Jews. Only 10 survived the war. She survived with her whole nuclear family. She was 7 years old when she came out of the sewer for the first time after 14 months. And that book is called The Girl in the Green Sweater. She wore the same green sweater that her grandmother knitted for her before the occupation in Lvov. Is that a movie? It was made into a movie by Agnieszka Holland that was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film a few years ago. The movie was called In Darkness. Okay, great. I thought I’d heard that. I had not seen that movie, but it sounded familiar. It’s quite a story. She’s a remarkable woman. She never really spoke about her story until she sat down with me. When I asked her about that, she emigrated to Israel after the war, where she and her family settled. She never talked about it from that point forward until she was an older woman. I said, �Why didn�t you share this story with other people?� She said, �Everybody has a story. We are all here because we have our stories.” And she didn’t want to burden anybody with her story. So to me, that was a great honor to be able to help her set her book down between hard covers and put it out into the world. So that’s another one your listeners should get. Well, we are picking up that book. We’re picking up both books. We just bought it. Okay, second confirmed Amazon purchase. We’ve got Amazon Prime. Big ball in here. Buying the books. Getting it done. If you’re out there listening, decide right now which book do you want to get? Scratch the Horizon, The Girl in the Green Sweater? We wouldn’t question your Americanism if you don’t buy this book from Daniel Pazner. But we would say, you know, maybe you should buy it. Maybe you should forego the regrettable purchases at your local convenience store this week. Maybe a hot dog you shouldn’t have, or some coffee, or a Starbucks beverage. Go ahead and just purchase one of those two books right now. Now, I have three final questions for you. I want to respect your time here, but I’m really just fascinated with this. You’re a guy who’s very proactive. You’re this craftsman. I kind of consider you an artist meets entrepreneur. We could agree on craftsman. How do you organize your day? On a typical day, what time do you wake up and how do you organize the first four hours of your day? It’s a fluid thing clay it really has to do with what’s driving me and what’s on my plate at that moment So I am also a famous and fabulous procrastinator I love to play hooky. So I will I happen to write quickly and and efficiently And if you promise not to share this secret with any of the people I’m working with I often overestimate how long things are going to take me, and I’m able to do that because the convention is that it takes a long time. I don’t need as much time as they give me on these deadlines, so as long as I can meet the deadlines, I can find out. There’s a lot of elastic in my days. So at different points in my life, I’ve had different pursuits. When I started out writing, I also started running. I became a marathoner when I was in my late 20s. So as you can imagine, you need to put in a lot of road work to prepare for a marathon. You need to run 50, 60 miles a week for the 20, 30 weeks leading up to the marathon. So I’ll find any excuse to put down my pen and go outside and do something as long as I know that I can meet the deadline. I’ve never missed a deadline. So my days are all looking kind of different. But again, like I mentioned, the stuff of my own that I work on, I kind of need to be fresh first thing in the morning, no distractions before I read the paper, before I see my kids, before I see my wife. The other stuff is more workmanlike, and I’m able to do that at any time. I grab whatever time I can. What time do you typically like to wake up? You know what? I would love—if I could wake up at 7.30 every morning and feel refreshed from a good night’s sleep, that would be ideal. The problem is when I’m tossing and turning, when I’m assembling the stuff of someone’s life, like I told you, it often feels like to me, and I can’t sleep, and I’m thrown out of bed at 3 or 4 in the morning to work, then I have no choice in the matter. But I will tell you, when those days happen, and it’s 7.30 in the morning, and I’ve already put in 3 or 4 hours of work, that kind of feels great when it’s 7.30 in the morning and you know that you’ve made that kind of headway. Now, my final two questions are for you. Are this, you’ve had so much success, yet you’re a guy who would take time out of your schedule to share your wisdom or your advice for the things you’ve learned with an audience of half a million people. What still motivates you today? What’s your big thing you’re working on here in the next 12 months? Or what’s your big passion projects? Well, you know, I have books of my own that I’d love to write, and I’d love for them to find a wide readership. So I just published a novel two years ago with an independent press outside of DC, which was my passion project for the longest time until I found a way to put that out into the world. And now I’m working on another one. The deal I made with myself early on in the Willard Scott days of my career was I would write one of theirs and one of mine, and that would be the balance, but it didn’t really work out that way. I’ve written 60 of theirs and 5 of mine, so sometimes you need to pay the orthodontist bill or sometimes I’ve got a daughter who’s getting married and you’ve got to deal with that or college tuition bill and life gets in the way of what your plans are. So my goal now, my dream now is to maybe get to a place in my career where the books of my own can speak for themselves and can throw off the kind of living I need to keep ahead of my expenses. So those are my passion projects now. I’m working on a novel now, probably, if I had to describe it, it’s probably about a guy around my age going through the similar motions as I am, sort of worrying about or wondering about the kind of footprint he’s left behind. You know, what does it mean to matter? What does it mean to leave a legacy and to make a mark? Final question I have for you. There’s listeners out there, many of which are aspiring authors. I would say, if you have a half million people listening, you might have 50, 100, maybe 1,000 people who want to be an author. They want to write that book. What advice would you have for anybody out there that wants to be an author as a profession and they’ve just run into some rejection and maybe they haven’t read about the lives of a lot of authors who’ve also been rejected? What advice would you give to the aspiring authors out there? I believe there’s a many-pronged approach here, Clay. The first thing is to read like crazy. You need to have a voracious appetite as a reader if you’re going to be a writer. You need to kind of have a template and understand what’s possible, what people have an appetite for, what writers have been able to do successfully, what kind of experiments as writers have failed miserably. You just need to immerse yourself into as much of the written word as you can. The other thing you need to do is write and ignore any rejection that comes your way. You are writing for an audience of one, and that one is you. If you write something that pleases you and satisfies you, then that’s a successful day of writing. If you can bring someone else on board and have them get something from what you’ve written, then that’s a bonus. That’s really gravy, but I think you need to start with satisfying that audience of one and not worrying about how you’re going to extract a living. Don’t worry about the commercial side of things. In my case, a lot of writers, especially when I started doing this, there was something pejorative about being a ghost writer. It was sort of a backdoor into a writing life. I think that’s changed over the years. I was never writing my own stuff. I was never working in service of my own ideas. What I told myself was, it’s really no different than a struggling actor waiting tables to make a living until he gets his big break. It just so happened that my version of waiting tables allowed me also to stitch words together, something that I was good at, something that came easily to me. So it was writing of a kind, and it was a way for me to make my bones while I was waiting to make a splash as a as a writer in my own right Dean oh I would I would tell your listeners just to write and read as much as they can write and read as much as you can Deal you have just been a blessing to have on the show. I’ve just got nervous today I’m like oh, no. I hope I don’t screw this up this guy’s so good. Thank you I really I really enjoyed it. I’m glad you found me, and I really enjoyed spending some time with you. Well, we’re going to try to sandwich the release of this somewhere between Wolfgang Puck and the founder of Ritz-Carlton. So we’re trying to put you right on the bookshelf between two greatest of all times, and in my mind, you are the greatest of all time in the space of ghostwriting. So thank you so much again, sir. Well, I appreciate it. Can I sneak in two quick plugs for books of my own that are coming out? Yeah, absolutely. Two of my books were out of print, and the Authors Guild has this wonderful back-in-print program that they initiated a few years ago. One is a novel called Morning Wood that’s going to be available this month, and one is a non-fiction book about the baseball that Mark McGuire hit for his 70th home run. It’s called The Ball. Mark McGuire’s 70th home run in the marketing of the American Dream. And it’s all about the aftermath of that 1998 baseball season, for those of your listeners who are baseball fans who might remember that that ball was sold at an auction for $3.05 million. So those books will both be out in new editions later this month. Well, congratulations. I know that’s great to have those big projects completed in a way that you’re proud of. Well thanks for taking the time and shining the light on what I do and I enjoyed visiting with you Clay. Alright, well you take care. If you are out there today and you feel like you have this big goal, right, you have this big goal, this big dream and you’re striving to achieve it but you don’t know where to start. The reason why I like to interview these huge success stories and then ask them where they started is because I want to make it real for you. I know that you have the capacity and the tenacity to achieve your dreams. So as an action item today, I’d encourage everybody to get out a sheet of paper, a journal, a notebook, something you’re gonna see every day. Maybe get out a mirror and write on there where you want to be three years from today and Then on that same sheet of paper that same journal that shame that that same mirror wherever you’re gonna see it every day Write down what are the daily action steps that you need to take every single day to get you a half a percent? Closer to that goal or maybe a tenth of a percent closer to that goal because it’s the it’s the compound interest of taking those daily Action steps that’s going to create the foundation for the success that you want to achieve. It’s not one big event. You’re not going to go viral on YouTube and all of a sudden have a book deal. You’ve got to sit down and block out time into your calendar if you want to be an author for daily writing, just like Daniel talked about. You’ve got to block out time every day to practice your craft. And that’s how you become good, and then how you become better, and then how you become significantly above average and then that’s how you’ll become eventually the greatest ghost writer of all time. My name is Clay Clark we like to end each and every show with a boom and so now with any further ado here we go three two one boom 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. Gentlemen, let me introduce you to the grill gun. Hi, I’m Bob Healy. I’m the inventor of the grill gun and the civy 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 going to have to come and find out, because I don’t know. Well, I’m just saying, Tim Tebow’s going to 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 going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Jerusalem. 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 $100 million net worth. Wow. Who will be presenting. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some 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 Nine 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’ve got to come learn from him. And now the bestselling 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 want to 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’s going to say, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t want to 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 Best Selling 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 gonna be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re gonna 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? What do 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. 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. So 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, Russell, Oklahoma. It says Tulsa, Russell. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russell. I’m 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 to 28th. Who? You. You’re going to come. Who? 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 going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to 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, 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 together 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. 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 traveled all the way from Princeville, Rico, to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th primetime show, two-day interactive business workshop. Thrive Time Show 2-Day Interactive Business Workshop. If you’re out there today, folks, you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to get in, 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 2-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 gonna be life-changing your tickets right now at thrive time show calm James What website is that drive time show calm? The ride time show calm Everything rides on tonight Even if I got three strikes, I’m gonna go for it this moment We own it, eh, I’m not to be played with because it could get dangerous. See these people I ride with this moment. We own it. 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 and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website, we’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days, you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems. So now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying. And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses? Or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever, and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money. So if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day, interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy, at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. Harvey Kiyosaki, The Rich Dad Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re closed, 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 is 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 hour. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. But I thought 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? Well, I have to, 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 Direct TV, 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, you know, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. You know, 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 too, or bad influencers. Yeah. 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 a 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. Octa non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. 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. 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. They don’t 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 control of 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. The biggest takeaways are you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business, whether it’s marketing, 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 got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the roadmap out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do and he gave me the roadmap out step by step. We’ve 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 this. 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 just the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun and super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivated me. Your competition is going to come eventually or try to pick up this tactic. 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. This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? This is 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 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 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 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, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow a 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 in 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. I like the one hour of doing your business. It’s real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. 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’s part owner of over 160 businesses, $2.4 billion 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 was 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 thrivetimeshow.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 wanted to meet these speakers as well, so we got VIP. 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! 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 Gary Antis with Shotguns up there. We’ve got Steve Curry and Tim Torelli with the concepts up there. We’re talking about what is possible when you just implement, and implement, and do that provenance. It’s so exciting. People are going crazy. Michael Levine, the writer of many, many PR books, the man who represented people like Michael Jackson, Barbara Streisand, George Bush, and Steve Curry. He’s a man who’s been around for a long time. He’s a man who’s been around for a long time. He’s a man who’s been around for a long time. He’s a man who represents people like Michael Jackson, Arbor Streisand, George Bush, is standing by and 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 tomorrow holds. Hey guys, Luke Erickson with the Thrive Time Show here with you. It is day two and the energy is high. People are so excited to be showing up. The team is ready. Come on, let’s see what it’s like to go on in for day two. Follow me. Come on. Come on. Come on. store. Right now, here at the conference, we’ve broken into groups going over search engine optimization. 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. 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 good 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. Why is Clay Clark answering all the different questions that are 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 Clay always wants to make sure that he answers all of those questions so that they are the most set up for success to be able to go home and start implementing. If you have any questions, email us at info at thrive timeshare.com. Hello, I’m Wes Carter. I’m one of the shareholders at Winters and 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 that 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 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 grindstones. 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. So that’s nothing. 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 such as 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 will 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 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. Our goal every night here at the BOK Center is 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 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 salespeople and call scripts, PR, they offer all that. Clay was instrumental in helping guiding 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 for us. My name is Kaitlin, I own a tumbling gym called Justice Tumbling Companies, we call them. Working with Clay is so helpful, being diligent with everything and making sure we execute our goals and really make things happen. It’s fun and tight, it really gets you energized and going and makes you really want to work. To get the momentum going, to really get that buzz, to really give you the energy to get up and make it happen. I’m Bob Healy, I’m in the charcoal grilling industry and the name of my business is Grillblazer. How will I apply what I’ve learned so far into my business? I’m actually a client of the Tri15 and I learned so much from what 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 blatant disregard for what anybody wants. He 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 just don’t go to a carnival atmosphere and learn like you do here at the Pride conference. It’s great. The reason people should attend at least one of these conferences is because it’s common sense. And everybody’s fed an entire line about the way you should run a business, but 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 Delricht 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, you know, they have something else to provide us with. They’ve got the resources, whether it be marketing, graphic design, website development, or even in accounting practices, maybe we need a new insurance policy. If they have I Let them know what you’re going through. And I think you’ll find that, you know, regardless of what you need, there’s someone there that can help you. Clay’s presentation style, it’s 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. 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 good schedule gets done, that’s what he said from Lee Copperill. 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 run so many multi-million dollar businesses. It doesn’t hurt. My name is Nick Guajardo. I heard about the Thrive Time Show workshop through Andy Mathren. He’s 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 and be at. 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, coming down to just basic applications to be a business owner. I mean, I feel like it’s like an absolute necessity, you know, 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? So 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, 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 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, like, 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. So Clay’s presentation style and the atmosphere is electric. It’s so energetic. It’s so fun. Clay’s 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 really quiet, really cold, and you just kind of get bored. But this one, you’re always engaged, you’re always learning something, and the staff is amazing. They’re always super helpful. It’s 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. 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 like immediately. So it’s really cool to see not only how to do it, but really the relevance and importance of it in the long-term strategy. 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, massive ones. I’ve been doing that since I was like 22 years old so gosh I’m almost 20 years now. And this is by far the most entertaining Not only the content, the content is amazing, but Clay and you guys do a great job of mixing in entertainment where it’s fun, it’s fresh, it’s lively, you never get bored. I heard a study one time that the reason that children learn so much quicker is because it’s fun, learning is fun. So obviously Clay is a nail-bagger. It’s very fun to be here and keeps you awake, keeps you energized. So I’m having a blast. Yeah, I think any business owner or someone 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’re not going to just stay in and have fun. And that works. 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 that wants to start this. 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 tribe. The most valuable piece I found even working with Andrew, but it’s been solidified when it came here, was you’ve got to actually do the things that they’re telling you. With no action, you’re not going to 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 old way of doing things is gone. This is what you got to do. It’s the only way it will 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. 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 Hammer 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 I’ll be able to apply a lot of the things that I’ve learned in our business because this is not my first conference and so a lot of the things that we learned, we put into place, and now we’re doing the next level of refining the processes for just a different concept, 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, implement it into 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 Clay makes it just entertaining enough that you retain what you learn. Lots of rhyming and catchy things so that you remember stuff. What 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 actually see a difference. Everyone should attend a DriveType 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 like. My name is Nolan Q. 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 could best apply from this conference is the opportunity, that hunger to go out there and make a big difference in my industry. Clay’s presentation style is amazing. He’s got an endless amount of energy. It’s contagious. And by being here, I really do want to go back and be able to face all the adversities that the industry has. 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 he picked it as dragon energy, but yeah, everyone should come to a multiple, but their first would be very special. Yeah, you’re welcome with a lot of enthusiasm. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. 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 Gabriela Cruz. Our business is PTCS Electric. My husband’s the owner, but I’m involved with that, so we’re a electrical company. Well, here at the conference, they talk a lot about consistency, and so just staying consistent with different things in the business. I feel like applying that to our business model will really help us grow. The atmosphere is very positive, uplifting, and it’s very fun and energetic. And so it gets you pumped and it gets you excited, and it encourages you to do big things. I probably have a really hard time. They tell you upfront what you need to do and what’s like a no-go. And so conferences are, 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 would be a great, 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, where it was great information and then they upsold us like half the conference, and I don’t wanna 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. Oh 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 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. 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, right? This is where we used to live. Here’s the house. 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 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 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grams 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. 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’s done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. He’s key, this kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crocker, or Head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with like 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 6-8 weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 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. I’ve seen guys from start-ups go from start-up 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 it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises, that’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal, and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not gonna touch it. I’m gonna turn it down. Because he knew it was gonna harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s, like I remember, we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to 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 haven’t ever 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 four, maybe six hours a day, and literally the rest of the time he’s working. And he can outwork everybody in the room every single day 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 Antus 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 salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And, I mean, 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 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 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 if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way. 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% increase in our internet leads. Going from 10 a month to 180 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 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 and helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes 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 to 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 and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. We’re not referring to him as a totally blinding concept of America, but we’re talking about what is possible when you just implement it. You implement it, you do the provenance. So people are going crazy. Now, Michael Levy, writer of many, many PR books, a man who represented people like Michael Jackson, Barbara Streisand, George Bush, Amy Stanypide, 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 tomorrow holds. Hey guys, Luke Erickson with the Thrive Time Show here with you. It is day two and the energy is high. People are so excited to be showing up. The team is ready. Come on, let’s see what it’s like to go on in for day two. Follow me. I’ll tell you what, people are so excited to be here for day two. It is going to be incredible. 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, 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. It just imparts 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 us, 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 Clay always wants to make sure that he answers all of those questions so that they are the most set up for the day to be able to go home and start implementing. If you have any questions, email us at info at tribe.show.com We have come to the end of the 2019 Christmas conference. It was incredible. These entrepreneurs have gotten so many tangible things that they can go and they can implement. Check us out for more information at Thrivetimeshow.com and as we always like to do we want to end with the boom. Three, two, one, boom! 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, they don’t 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 control of 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, he’s pretty friendly, helpful, 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’ve learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. Biggest takeaways are you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business. Whether it’s marketing, 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 gotta go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you wanna go. He actually gives you the roadmap out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do, and he gave me the roadmap out step by step. We’ve 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’ll 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 just the income increase that we’ve had. Everyone’s super fun and 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. If you decide to not attend the Thrive Time Workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The atmosphere at 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 a 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 in 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. It depends 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. I like the one hour of doing your business. It’s real critical if I’m going to grow and change. Play really teaches you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find your purpose in your business and find the purposes for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real.