Clay Clark | Entrepreneurship | The IDEA of Entrepreneurship Vs. the Reality of Being An Entrepreneur + How to Overcome Perpetual Adversity That Entrepreneurship Throws At You + “Face Reality As It Is, Not As You Wish It to Be.” – Jack Welch

Audio Transcription

I’m going to go. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, it’s Business School Without the BS, featuring optometrist turned entrepreneur, Dr. Robert Zellner, with USSBA Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark. Welcome to the Thrive Time Show on Talk Radio 1170. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. Typically, I start the show, we start the radio shows with kind of an upbeat introduction and some highly motivational or music that’s going to stir it up and bring some entertainment to the conversation. But today, I feel like it was inappropriate to start the radio show with our normal hype music because today we’re talking about a subject that is a subject that a lot of Thrivers have asked me about personally at our workshop. They’ve kind of pulled me aside and they’ve said, you know, how do you deal with life, you know, when bad things happen? How do you deal with these terrible things that happen? How do you do it? Because if you want to learn how to build a successful company, Dr. Zellner and I can definitely teach you how to do that. It’s not that hard. Between he and I, we’ve built 13 multi-million dollar companies, and you can do it too. So if you want to learn how to do it, get out to our workshop and we will teach you specifically how to do that. But there’s life that happens beyond that. There’s life that’s happening. The business, the whole point of a business is to build a company or a system or an organization that serves you. At least that’s our world view. And so for Elephant in the Room, you know, I mean the company is doing very well and it pays me a great income and I’m very happy for it. I mean, I’m very thankful for it. But how do you deal with life? I mean, how do you deal with the stuff that happens outside of the business? You know, once you have the financial freedom, the time freedom, how do you deal with sickness? How do you deal with knowing that your dad, I’m just telling you my personal examples. I’m going to put myself out there and the only rule is that you can’t make fun of me. You can just don’t make fun of me because I used to stutter as a kid and when you stutter as a kid, people love to make fun of you. And so I have kind of become sort of an American honey badger who can operate with or without the contact of other humans. And so I’m putting myself out there for your benefit today. I’m sharing, kind of making myself a little more vulnerable than what I would like to be, to share with you some things that I’ve gone through just in my life. And everybody listening to the show today, if you’ve ever dealt with grief or bad things have happened to you, guess what? We’re all in that boat together. I really do believe this. This is not a positive, notable, quotable, but maybe you should write this down. We need to learn how to deal with terrible things in life because it’s 100% for sure going to happen. If you live long enough, something terrible is going to happen. We have to learn how to deal with it. We can’t become fearful people that can’t deal with things because in life, bad things are going to happen. If you live long enough, bad things are going to happen. I’m going to go ahead and read a list off to you of some of the bad things that have happened to me. I’m going to give you all sorts of ample examples of horrible things that have happened to people throughout history. Hopefully, this makes sense. Sickness. Sickness. When your wife is sick, that’s not fun. When your wife has to have surgery, that’s not fun. When your dad dies, you know, my dad died of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, awful disease, by the way. If you’ve ever met somebody who’s going through this, I can’t explain to you how thankful they will be when you reach out and see if you can help. Because when someone loses control over their body, but their mind still works, it is just the most awful thing to watch. It’s horrific. And it turns spouses into full-time nurses. Just helping your father use the restroom, it’s just, I can’t explain to you how terrible that was. And sometimes I think about that. I think about what it’s like to try to help my dad use the restroom. And then I also, because I’m kind of a funny guy, I think about what it was like probably when he had to help me use the restroom as a little kid. It’s like full circle. It’s just awful. I would not wish ALS on anybody. My best friend got killed in a car accident. The one guy that I could confide in and talk to all the time and I was buddies with, he got killed in a car accident. That was the guy that I talked to all the time. The guy that I’m friends with, Mark DePetris, he passed away in a car accident and it happened. My son was actually born blind. Blind, he couldn’t see. I don’t know if you know that, but my son, Aubrey Napoleon Hill Clark, was actually born blind. And my wife actually wrote a book about the situation on, you can get that on Amazon, called Now I See by Vanessa Clark. Vanessa Clark. And really, it was not a good situation. Getting sued by an employee who fakes an injury. I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with that before. I deal with this crap all the time. Dr. Zellner was super nice and took my wife and I and a bunch of people to the rodeo to go see this professional bull riding. And I had never seen that before. And it was awesome. It was exciting, but I kept running into people that I have fired for being nefarious. Oh, that’s a word of the day, nefarious. Are you aware of the word nefarious, what that word means? Once you’ve discovered the definition of the word nefarious, you’ll probably use it a lot. Nefarious is basically intentionally wicked or criminal. It’s somebody who is evil or immoral. They’re intentionally trying to create problems and I can tell you what I was at the the bull riding event with dr. Z And I go to the bathroom. It’s like what are the chances that I’m gonna run into a former employee there and in one who? You know faked a bunch of things a lot of allegations a lot of BS Unbelievable unbelievable unbelievable we had an employee who actually I said hey I really am not comfortable driving at night would you be willing to book a hotel for me so to be a nice guy I booked a nice hotel like a four-star kind of a hotel for the person and this this this employee brought guns into the room like they had like loaded weapons that apparently they carry around and they left them on the on the bed and the probably they went to go work out the next morning. Housekeeping comes in and finds just an arsenal of illegal weapons and guess who they call because the rooms and whose name? My name. I had an employee who was a really great all-star employee, really doing a good job and then I was asked by a major corporation to send our video crew to go and film a big event for them. The videographers did a great job filming, but the lead person that I entrusted to go do the event decided to just run up a massive tab at Caesars Palace and basically spend three days completely intoxicated. Who has to take the fall for that? Does the employee or the employer? The employer! Even though the video turned out well and the customer was happy with the final product, I had to deal with this big bill. I had to deal with all of the situations that resulted from the things this person was saying while they were in Las Vegas. This is just what’s happening to me. I’m sure there’s other things happening to you. How about this fun move? How about when one of your employees doesn’t show up to work, but you as the employer have to jump on the grenade? Because it’s your responsibility, right? Is it not? I mean, it’s your responsibility. And then, so you ask yourself, gosh, did I hire somebody incorrectly? Did I make a wrong choice? Specifically in my situation, I had a top employee, a top member of a team, a person I thought I could trust. And so I booked him on a wedding for a wedding that happened there at the Moose Lodge. There, what, at 11th and Garnett in Tulsa. And rather than going to the event that they committed to go to, they pretended that they couldn’t find the place. This was back before text messages. They said they couldn’t find the place. They said they had a car problem. And so they never showed up at the wedding. Could you imagine what that would feel like to not have your entertainment, to have your entertainment not show up at a wedding? This was like 2000, what, maybe one, 2000, 2000. They didn’t show up at the wedding at all. You didn’t show up at the wedding. So here I am getting sued by somebody because the DJ didn’t show up at the wedding. I talked to the guy, finally got a hold of the guy. He says he couldn’t find it, he said he had a car problem, XYZ, all things that are not verifiable, things I could not see, things I could not verify, and he was pulling heavily on the trust we had. He deposited a lot into my love bank and he’s really making a huge withdrawal from that. Find out years later he went to a movie. He went to a movie. He skipped someone’s wedding for a movie. And so what happens is a lot of people, you kind of become reclusive and you basically don’t participate in the world of business for fear that bad things are going to happen. Right? And so this is what Dale Carnegie would say to you. He says, if you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. So if you want to start a business, I would highly recommend for you to go ahead and get your tickets for our next in-person Thrivetimeshow.com workshop because we’ll teach you how to do it. But you’ve got to get over this fear situation. Fear is just such a hindrance to success. And now I want to give you some examples of the bad things that are definitely going to happen to you. If you stand for anything at all. If you ever take a stand for anything at all. If you ever stand for your values in a valueless world. If you ever take the high road. Abraham Lincoln, President Abraham Lincoln. He was shot to death while fighting for slavery. Didn’t go so well for my main man, right? I mean, we have statues in his honor, but I’m sure he would have liked to live to an old age. He would have wanted to see his family do well, but he didn’t. Martin Luther King Jr. shot to death while fighting for equality. Jesus, Jesus killed at age 33. For what? For doing the right thing. Steve Jobs, I mean on a lighter level, Steve Jobs just fighting through nerddom and flash technology. Flash was on every device. Flash, flash, flash. Flash is a kind of technology that Adobe created. If you don’t know what it is, don’t worry about it. He was attacked because he said flash is a stupid thing. It shouldn’t exist. We need to get rid of flash. So when he came up with the iPads that didn’t have flash, everybody was saying to him, were you crazy? Are you nuts? What’s wrong with you, Steve? I mean, Larry and Sergey. Larry and Sergey, these are the guys who started Google. They made information easily findable for everybody. Thus, in order to do that, in order to index the Internet, they had to create their algorithm, their system. If you Google Tulsa men’s haircuts, you’re going to discover that we’re top in Google. If you Google Tulsa PR firms, you’re going to discover that we’re top in Google. That’s elephant in the room and make your life epic. If you Google Tulsa mortgages, you’re going to discover that Steve Currington is top in Google. And it’s not a luck thing. It’s not a luck thing. It’s just a thing of that’s how Google works and we know how Google works and so therefore if you’re a business coach client or you come to the workshop we’ll teach you specifically how to get to the top of Google. But other people don’t like that they can’t be top in Google and so what they do is they get upset with Larry and Sergey, they get upset with Google, they think it’s corrupt that everybody’s website has to be indexed the same way and that this is how it should work. This isn’t how it does work, but this is how it should work. And because they’re emotional, Larry and Sergey deal with a lot of that crap. I mean, is Google ethical? I mean, they’re making it possible to navigate anywhere with their GPS system that’s available on any phone, right? Google Maps. However, the tradeoff is they have to ask for permission to know the location of your phone. It’s like a tradeoff thing. And so I don’t care what you want to do with your life. It doesn’t matter what you’re going to do with your life. I care about what you’re going to do with your life, but I don’t care what that choice is. You’re going to eventually have bad things happen to you. You’re going to have to learn to deal with the terrible things in life that are 100% guaranteed for sure going to happen if you live long enough. I’m going to play this audio clip from a song that OneRepublic wrote called Fear. I’m going to play the song. I want you to listen to it. And when we come back, we’re going to get into specifically my system for dealing with terrible, bad, not so good things. My system for grief. When we were children we played. Out in the streets just dipped in fate. When we were children we’d say that we don’t know the meaning of fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear. Fear is such a big thing for people. And I wanted to play that song. I wanted to come in from the break with this song because one Republican put together this song, Ryan Tedder essentially, wrote this song. And he’s a Tulsa guy. He’s also a guy I went to college with at Oral Roberts University. But the song is all about fear and he says when we were children we’d play out on the streets just dipped in fate When we were children, we’d say that we don’t know the meaning of fear How many of us though, you know don’t do things because we just fear we fear. Well, oh my gosh What’s what could happen? What could happen? I might I might lose it all my business won’t maybe make it. I’m not encouraging you to run out there and to make irrational decisions. What I am encouraging you to do is to understand that if you live long enough, you are definitely going to have horrible things happen to you. If you missed it before the break, I was telling you about sickness in my family, my dad passing away of ALS, my best friend being killed, my son being born blind, constantly dealing with employees who screw you over, being sued. I could go on and on. At the end of the day, I could just make a long list of all the very bad things that have happened to me, but Dale Carnegie, the best-selling author of the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, he said, happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions. It is governed by our mental attitude. That’s worth repeating. I’m going to say that one more time. I know someone is trying to scramble to get a pen here, so let me just… There’s got to be a pen in here. There’s got to be a pen in here somewhere. Look how big that purse is. It says, happiness doesn’t depend on any external conditions. It is governed by our mental attitude. That’s Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie is a best-selling author, and he’s telling you this little tip. Well, Abraham Lincoln was shot to death for doing what for fighting for Equality amongst the races for fighting for civil rights Martin Luther King jr. Was killed why for fighting for equality? Jesus was killed at the age 33 for what being a very good guy I mean Steve Jobs was at mercilessly attacked because he wanted the product to be awesome And so he had to deal with mediocre idiots who happened to be on his payroll who refused to do things right. So he had to fire them. So he’s known as a hothead or an intense person. No, he’s an enemy of average. He’s an enemy of average. And if you’re going to be successful, you have to raise the expectations that you have for your life, for your business, for your business card, for your website, for your family, for your everything. You’ve got to raise the expectations because society will let you be mediocre. I mean, you can do that, right? But if you’re gonna stand up for anything great or believe in anything, if you’re gonna stand up for anything, I mean, Aristotle once said here, he said, the only way to avoid criticism is to do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing. That’s Aristotle. I mean, come on. So what we’ve got to do now is we’ve got to understand that if you stand up for anything at all, you’re going to be persecuted. So another example, you know the Bible? The Bible? Why do you always talk about the Bible? Are you forcing your religion on us? Well, the Bible, okay? This is on National Geographic, by the way. And by the way, all of our show notes, Thrivers, all of our show notes are now available for you at Thrivetimeshow.com. So if I ever tell you something or give you a statistic or a quote, you can usually find all of them right there at Thrivetimeshow.com. That’s why we have so many people every day, thousands of people a day, visiting the site, grabbing their quotes, grabbing the downloads, grabbing the statistics. Well, National Geographic had an article called, How Did the Apostles Die? Kind of a fun title. For some late night, good, put you to bed, feel good light reading, I encourage you to read the article called, How Did the Apostles Die? How did the apostles die by National Geographic? No, but in all sincerity, it’s an article, and in the article it says that John was one of the only original disciples not to die a violent death. Good job, John. Philip, though, was the first of Jesus’ disciples. He became a missionary in Asia. Eventually he traveled to the Egyptian city of, I don’t even know how to say it at this point, but it’s Heliopolis, where he was whipped and flogged. Why does it sound so bad? Then he was thrown into prison and crucified. Oh no, he was crucified. That’s not good. That’s nailing your hands. Probably hurts a little bit. Bartholomew preached. Bartholomew preached in several countries including India and long story short he was skinned alive. Skinned alive. Ah, it just doesn’t sound good. Then they beheaded him. Oh, that’s nice. That’s nice. And then you had Thomas, who preached the gospel, and then he got martyred while being stabbed with a spear. Well, at least he didn’t get skinned alive. It seemed like he had it off kind of easy. Matthew, this guy was stabbed in the back. I don’t know. James, I mean, was killed by, they hit him in the head with a club. Thaddeus, you know, this guy, he was crucified. He was crucified. Simon, I mean Simon He was crucified. I mean I go on and on I’m do I need to okay Judas He hung himself, but you know the whole thing is it’s it’s usually if you stand up for something You’re not gonna get a lot of Positive edifying feedback for most people a Matthew 510. I’m gonna give you Matthew 510 So you’ve never heard this verse before maybe you need this verse in your life because you’re going through something. If you’re going through something, you need this verse. Matthew 5, 10, it says, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So today as we’re talking about dealing with the terrible things in life that are 100% for sure going to happen, I call this process grief. G-R, right, Thrivers, are we on the same page here? I’m going to spell this out and then each of the letters stands for something. It says grief. G-R-I-E-F. Grief. So let’s start with G. You want to give yourself an allotted amount of time to deal with things. So whenever something bad happens, you want to give yourself a healthy amount of time to deal with it. So I’m going to use my father’s death from ALS is an example. Finding out that he had ALS was awful. I was in the Hummer and my dad called me and he said, son, I’ve got ALS. And knowing that your dad has a disease that’s gonna kill him the way that ALS kills people was awful. It was not good. I can’t tell you how bad I felt. I can just say that I pulled over there at 96th and Riverside, right past the toll booth there. I pulled over and I just wept like a baby because I love my dad and I don’t think anybody should die from that obviously. It just punched me in the crotch and then it reached into my chest and ripped out my soul and that’s how I felt about it. But I had to, gee, give myself an allotted amount of time. We’re talking about how to deal with grief as a business owner, as a human. Gee, you’ve got to give yourself an allotted amount of time. And as I did that, I reflected on the Bible verse, Matthew 5, 10, that says, blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And that’s how I dealt with it. I had to understand that it is not good, but he will be blessed in heaven. That’s how I mentally resolved that. But you can’t pull back from life and refuse to talk to your dad for fear that he’s going to die, or talk to someone for fear that you’re going to lose that relationship, or not start a business for fear that it’s going to end badly. You can’t do that. That’s not what living is. You must live, my friend. You have to live before you die. Stay tuned. It’s The Thrive Time Show on the radio. Hope when the moment comes, you’ll say, I did it all. I did it all. Hope when the moment comes, you’ll say, I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. I did it all. Hope when the moment comes, you’ll say I, I did it all I, I did it all I owned every second that this world could give I saw so many places and things that I did Alright Tulsa, Oklahoma, America, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show. We have so many listeners from all over the world who email in questions, and we’ve had a lot of questions coming in from California, Australia, Florida, a lot of people wanting to know specifically how do you deal with grief? Like how do you push through on a human level? How do you push through? And I know some listeners have, you know, if you listen to this show quite a bit, you’ll know these things, but my father recently passed away from ALS, just an awful disease, an awful way to go out, just, ah. You know, my best friend was killed in a car accident. My son was born blind. And what’s your story? I mean, you’re going through something, right? I mean, everybody listening to today’s show, I mean, we’re all going through something. In fact, I am 100% sure that if you live long enough, terrible things are going to happen. And so we’ve got to learn how to deal with grief. And so the G in our system, GR, okay, so G is first, and we’ll do R next. G is give yourself an allotted amount of time. You can’t lament about something forever. Lament to the definition means to express grief or to mourn. You just can’t do that forever. You know, I grew up as a kid stuttering. I was a stutterer, which means I couldn’t speak without interrupting myself by saying the same syllable over and over again. So, just kind of walking you through the mind of someone who stutters, this is what I remember, is I would try to say something. Someone would say, what’s your name? And I would say, and I couldn’t say it. When you can’t say your own name, my name that everyone called me back in the day was Clayton, right? So, if you can’t say your own name, then people make fun of you, most people. They shouldn’t do it, but they do, they make fun of you. So, as they’re making fun of you, you start to think, oh my gosh, you’re saying to yourself the inner dialogue. You’re going, I don’t have what it takes. I’m an idiot. I can’t do it. And you start to get more and more stressed out. And so it becomes this negative cycle. And so what you do is you have to decide, are you ever going to even converse with people? And I don’t know if it’s a byproduct of this or what, but I spent a copious amount of time, I reinvested the time I’d probably spend talking to people, drawing, painting, doing artwork, that kind of thing. So, I got really good at those things. I’m kind of like an artist first, business guy second. That’s how I describe myself. I do the art forms first and then business is second. If I just describe myself as a true, honest, to the core, what am I all about, I would say it’s art first and business second. But business allows me to fuel the pursuit of things that I view to be artistic. But I will just share this with you, is that I basically had to decide, am I going to give up on speaking? By ever talking? Well, then, obviously my mom forced me to go to a speech pathologist who taught me, and over time I learned to speak well. But as an adult, your mom’s probably not forcing you to go out and date again. I mean, you got burned, man. You went through a freaking divorce, it was terrible, and you did everything right, and then she cheated on you, and you gotta go out and date again, man. I mean, you can’t just not ever date again, right? I mean, or maybe you can, maybe you can. Maybe that’s what you wanna do. Maybe that’s your life. You know, maybe you had a business you started years ago and it failed. And maybe you just want to live inside a small income box and not start a business. Or maybe you’ve got to get out there and grow that business. Maybe you’ve got to, I don’t know what it is, suck it up, get the courage, Google it, find it, find the Thrive Time Show, get yourself to a workshop. We’re here to help you. But you can’t lament, express grief, or to mourn about something indefinitely. You eventually have to move on. And there’s a great book called Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, who is a clinical psychologist. And one of the observations he makes is that your ability to be successful is directly related to your capacity, your emotional intelligence, your ability to get over things, to rebound from adverse situations quickly. So here’s an example. You could have a high IQ, which is your intelligence quotient, which is basically how well you score on standardized tests relative to your age. So you have a high IQ. Yay, you have a high IQ. So you go into the University of Tulsa. You’re a TU student now. You’re an ORU student. You’re going to the Georgia Bulldogs with a full scholarship. That’s great. I’m happy for you. You went to Boston College. You went to school. You got the full ride. But now in life, something bad happened to you. You know, you had sickness. You had your dad died of ALS. Your best friend was killed. Your son was born blind. Something awful happened. And then since that moment, you’ve never been able to really move on because you just lament the negative thoughts over and over, expressing grief about the same thing. But what we’re going to find is top entrepreneurs, because we deal with so much adversity every day. I mean, I’m firing someone like every day. You know, so every day, I mean, think about that. There’s hundreds of people. So someone gets fired almost every day, every day, every day. Somebody expresses some sort of emotional situation. Just as an example, we have music that we play overhead at our offices and I’ve chosen those songs because I want them to be positive, upbeat, life-giving music. And so because I’ve chosen those songs, those songs are not necessarily what everybody else wants. And therefore, somebody might say, well hey, can we change the music? And then I say, just something simple like this. And I’ll say, no. And they’ll say, well, why? Open to new ideas? You’re a business coach, man, you? And I say, here’s the deal. The business exists to serve me and to serve our customers. And I want to create an upbeat and positive atmosphere, so you need to change the music. And they just can’t handle it. There’s people who get all emotional about it. They just cannot move on. It’s my business, so I can play whatever music I want to play overhead. That’s just how it works. But if you can’t move on from something like that, just a little disagreement with an employee and it stays in your head and haunts you, you can’t do anything. Let alone when your father passes away or you’re going through something. We’ve got to learn how to do that. Step number one, gee, you’ve got to give yourself an allotted amount of time to deal with it. Now we move on to move number two. Move number two. You want to reflect on what was lost. You want to give yourself time to reflect on what was lost. You want to sit down by yourself or in a group or in a therapy session or in the woods. I personally like to burn things. I love to burn, I just love pinion wood. I love to burn pinion wood and anything else that’s burnable that’s not toxic. You know, no toxins, no toxins. I just burn, I like to burn things. When I do, I like to reflect on things that have happened. I like to ponder, to deep dive into things because you’ve gotta give yourself that time to regroup, that time to rebound. You’ve gotta give yourself that time because you’re a human. So if something bad happens, one, give yourself an allotted amount of time, but two, in that time, reflect on what was lost. Reflect on the bad thing that happened and really come to terms with how bad it was, how bad it is, get it all out there. Find out exactly how bad it was. And if you’ve ever dealt with grief, you’re gonna love today’s show because this entire show was produced just for you and thrivers just like you who are asking questions, how do I deal with grief in my own life. My name is Clay Clark. I’m a business coach, and my belief is that you, too, can learn how to deal with grief. Stay tuned. When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be. And in my hour of darkness, she is standing right in front of me, speaking words of love. Broadcasting live from the center of the universe, it’s Business School Without the BS. Featuring optometrist turned entrepreneur, Dr. Robert Zellner with USSBA Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back into the conversation. On today’s show, we’re talking about how to deal with life when bad things happen. How to deal with the terrible things in life that are 100% for sure going to happen. If you live long enough, somebody you know, and I’m not speaking negative things over you. I understand the power of words. is I’m just sharing with you a fact that I in my life have, I’m only 36, you know, so I’ve dealt with my dad dying of ALS. I’ve dealt with my best friend being killed. I’ve dealt with my son being born blind. I deal with the constant irritation of idiot employees, of where you hire somebody who’s an idiot. We’ve all had great people that work with us and I’ve also dealt with people who fake injuries to sue. Fake injuries to sue a business. And I find that a lot of entrepreneurs I meet at the workshops or I’m meeting, so many of you are buying your tickets right now for the September conference and I’m telling you this event, we have remodeled the place, we’ve redecorated, we’ve moved stuff around to accommodate more folks and this September event is going to be a game changer. If you go to thrivetimeshow.com right now you can get your tickets while they last. Get the tickets to thethrivetimeshow.com get your tickets for the September event. We’re going to soon probably move into maybe like a format where we do fewer of them and they’re slightly bigger, not super bigger, but they’re definitely growing in size and so we’re still figuring out how we’re going to deal with that. But here is the deal, we’re talking today about a subject that so many people have come up to me and asked me at the workshops. They’ll say, I know your son was born blind. I know your dad died of ALS. I know your best friend was killed. I know you get sued all the time. How do you deal with it? Well, I’m teaching you my proven system, my system for how I deal with grief. So first off, G, give yourself enough time and space to lament. Lament means to express grief, to mourn, to just take in the sadness, whatever that looks like for you. For me, that involves burning things is what I like to do. But move number two is you want to reflect on what was lost because something was lost, otherwise you wouldn’t have grief. You know, maybe it’s a spouse that cheated on you. I mean, this is a business show. Why are you talking about it? Well, that could be something that’s impacting your business right now. It could be that your top employee quit and stole the employees. I love this. This is one of my favorite scenarios. I love it when you have a former employee who stole your customers, who literally, as an example, with DJ Connection, we had one guy who worked for us who did a great job as a DJ, and he just couldn’t be on time. He just couldn’t be accountable. He couldn’t be honest, and so we had to fire the guy. So we fire the guy, and when we do fire the guy, he does what? He starts his own company. Absolutely. That’s the move. You start your own company. So he starts his own company to compete with us. Why? Because he has a knowledge of the business. He has no other discernible skills. He starts the business, but yet the people who work in your own freaking office continue to have a fellowship with him because he’s their friend. He was fired for unethical reasons. Everybody saw his unethical actions, but because, I don’t know, I’m somebody who judges people based upon what they do, not based on what they say they’re going to do. You know, Henry Ford, the best-selling, you know Henry Ford, I mean he introduced the best-selling Model T car, he created Ford Motors. He says, he says, it’s hard to build a reputation based upon what you’re going to do. He says, it’s hard to build a reputation based upon what you’re going to do. So I fire the guy based on what he did, not based on what he said he was going to do. And then when you fire the person, what happens is you end up irritating people who are loyal to a dysfunctional relationship. So now in your office you have people who still work for you who continue to hang out with the person that you fired. And they act like it’s, I mean, to me it’s, no, no. I disagree with that. I am totally, you’re all in or you’re all out, black or white. That’s the Clay Clark philosophy towards life. I will burn bridges to create some distance because there are certain people that just they cannot be in your circle and it’s unbelievable to me that top members of your team can’t understand that. So then you have people on your team who have sort of that passive aggressive, almost a coup, you know, like they’re trying to passively, aggressively continue the legacy of Jackassery. And that crap happens all the time. And so for me, that’s the stuff that happens all the time. And so you have to find a way to grief and to get through it. And one is you give yourself time, but then R is you reflect on what was lost. And I’m going to give you a notable quotable that comes in hot from the Bible. The Bible? Yeah, from the Bible. You’re quoting the Bible on the radio This could offend certain people. Okay, I’ll read it just quietly. It’ll be between you and me And anybody who shares this podcast, okay, that that’s what we’ll do We’ll keep it between you and me and the hundreds of thousands of people who download the podcast every month That’s what we’re gonna do. But this is as it says blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness For theirs is the kingdom of heaven Matthew 5 10. It’s worth repeating So I will blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven Matthew 5 10 So Ecclesiastes chapter 3 you’re reading a lot from the Bible stop doing that Okay, this is what it says in chapter 3 of Ecclesiastes He says to everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under the under the heaven a time to be born. Oh, yeah, great babies a time to die a time to die I don’t like that part a time to plant Yes, I love green thumb a time to pluck that which is planted a time to kill what? Yeah, you know if you know this but Moses killed killed a guy and you know, Moses whacked a guy He didn’t do it though when God told him that was before God told him to kill things. Okay, but listen calm down work with me There’s a time when we have to protect the country. There’s a time. There’s a time. Many people are offended by this concept for some reason, that America has to have a massive nuclear arsenal so we can give a blasty blast to people like North Korea if we had to. The point of having a big military is so that you don’t have to give a big blasty blast to North Korea. The point of having a massive military is that you hopefully never have to use it. If you have an insane amount of weaponry, then people won’t mess with you. It’s like the beware of dog sign. You know, a guy has a big dog, crazy huge dog, sign says beware of dog. I don’t know, most people are going, I probably don’t want to break into that house. It’s just not worth the effort because, you know, there’s a big dog and I just beware of the dog. But some people think it’s unethical to have a big dog or to have a big weapon arsenal. They think, let’s let North Korea threaten us, and let’s see if we can all get together, and let’s just be calm about Guam. If he does blast them, then we’ll just try to coach him up. Let’s actually give tax dollars to terrorists to help them improve their economic situation so they don’t become terrorists. Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s black or white, if you can’t get it, just, you need to put your head in the toilet, hit the flush, make it swirl, and just kind of deal with that. So then there’s a time, there’s a time to weep, and a time to laugh, a time to mourn, and a time to dance, a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together. Good, because I’m a good stone gatherer. A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing. A time to get, and a time to lose. A time to keep, and a time to cast away a time to rend and a time to so a time to keep silence and a time to speak Somebody needs to write that down. There’s a time to love and a time to hate a time to hate What a time of war and a time of peace what profit hath he that worketh in wherein he laboreth I have seen that anyway goes on on just just just check it out read the verse the blow your mind Ecclesiastes chapter 3 and so if you’re on the planet earth and you own a business you are Going to be screwed. It’s going to happen bad things are going to happen to you. They’re definitely going to happen and when they do You got to get oh, you’ve got to get to a place where you just let it be You’ve just got to get to a place where you can a or you can step one You can give yourself the amount of time you need but then are You’ve got to reflect on what was lost and you got to find a way to do that on a weekly basis the way to kind of heal a way to Become whole if you feel like you’re full of holes You have to have a time where you come together to feel whole and that’s hopefully what this radio show is for some of you It’s a place of encouragement and a place of practical training We want to equip you to be successful and you can find the the outline of today’s show and all the notable quotables and all the downloadables available for free at Thrivetimeshow.com. All the transcripts are all up there at Thrivetimeshow.com. So go up there, check it out, and I just encourage you to be comfortable with letting it be. Let it go. Whatever is bothering you, find a way to let it go. You’re bigger than that. It’s time to move on. Become better. Don’t be bitter. It’s time to move on. When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom, let it be Let it be, let it be, let it be Well darling, the smiles returning to the faces Well darling, it seems like since it’s been here, it comes at sun. It comes at sun. And I say, it’s all right. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back into the conversation. Today we’re talking about grief and how to deal with grief. If you’re just tuning in, you definitely want to go to the podcast to download today’s broadcast to hear the podcast version again and to get the show notes because a lot of knowledge bombs were dropping everywhere. So whenever you have a bad thing happen to you, just understand that this is not unique. My father died of ALS, my best friend was killed, my son was born blind, and what are you dealing with? You’re probably going, yeah, well, you know what? I’m going to one-up you. I’m dealing with, I’ve got like a crazy rash and I’ve got one eye that doesn’t even open. And then I have like a cholesterol problem and my hair is falling out and I’m not good at sales. So in your face, Mr. Radio Show host. I have it worse than you. Well, okay, maybe you do. And that’s okay. But that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re not trying to one-up each other on grievances and issues and maladies and problems we’re going through. We’re talking about how to deal with it. So many entrepreneurs have come up to me at our workshops and said, hey, you and Z are positive like every day. You know, you and Dr. Zellner, you guys just seem like you’re positive every day. How do you do it? Well, one is Dr. Z preaches the gospel of showtime, which means when you come to work, you got to leave your problems at the door and get it done. You just got to deliver. You got people who can’t deliver, people that have a low emotional intelligence, people that have a low, it’s called EQ, but you’re a low emotional intelligence, they don’t do well. And it doesn’t really matter how high your IQ is. If you know everything, but you just can’t emotionally keep your crap together, it’s tough. And so you just, you can’t do well in the world of business. And so I’m teaching you the specific moves that will help you to rebound from tough situations when they come because they’re going to happen. So move number one is you want to give yourself an amount of time to deal with it. Give yourself an allotted amount of time. Decide right down on paper, this is how much time I’m going to give myself to deal with it. Two, reflect on what was lost. It’s super important that you know what was lost. You can’t just move on and say, oh my gosh, I’m just moving on. But you’ve got to think about what did you lose and how should you maybe treat life differently now as a result of that? As a result of knowing what was lost, how should you maybe approach life differently now? Perhaps maybe nothing at all. Maybe you just keep doing what you’ve always done because you’ve been doing it the right way and you don’t have any regrets. But some people tell me that whenever they have a breakdown, they tend to have a breakthrough that they Whenever they have a breakdown they tend to have a breakthrough where they discover they were big weren’t spending time The right way they were miss allocating time knowing that now time is is limited knowing that they just lost a dear friend or a dear person in their life now they realize how precious life is And they understand that this is in fact the day that the Lord has made and that they should rejoice and be glad in it. Some people tell me that after they’ve gone through a tough situation, that is then when they realize that this is the day that the Lord has made and they should rejoice and be glad in it. But before that time, it’s kind of like, wow, there’s other time available. I’ll get to that later. You know, that kind of thing. So that’s that’s just something to think about. Now, Napoleon Hill, the bestselling author of Think and Grow Rich, the author who is the bestselling self-help author of all time before Jack Canfield snuck in on the Napoleon Hill Foundation and sold 123 million copies of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. Do you have one of those books? You probably were given that book as a gift, but you probably haven’t read it. That’s probably how I perceive this. You probably have a Chicken Soup for the Soul book, but you probably haven’t read it yet. That’s usually how that purchase happens there. But Napoleon Hill, he writes, every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. I’m going to read it again. It says, every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. Oh, man. So whenever you’re going through a tough situation, you don’t view it as though this is actually a curse. I actually think that it’s not a curse at all. I think it’s actually something you should be thankful for because this is part of your history and you’re going to be able to empathize with somebody in the future. You’re going to be able to encourage somebody else. So many people tell me, as a business coach, Clay, it’s like you and Z have been through every scenario. So many people, if you Google Thrive Time Show reviews and you read the reviews of our workshops, they’ll say, man, it’s amazing. Like you guys have helped so many different industries. And I go, yes, this is true. Well, how do I know that? Because between Z and I, we built 13 multi-million dollar companies. And so we know how to do it. It’s not an industry dependent thing. It’s something that you can do, but you have got to be a coachable and Approachable and we would not know How to help you if we hadn’t personally have gone through it. We’ve gone through it which allows us to teach it So that’s just something to think about you learn from mentors or mistakes. By the way, our book is Available for free to download. It’s called the start here book Start here. It is absolutely free for you, the Start Here book, and it is phenomenal. We spent years putting this together, traveling all around the world, interviewing some of the top entrepreneurs on the planet to put the Start Here book together there for you, and it’s free. You can get it right now. All you have to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com and get it. You just go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Someone should write that down. You’ve got to go to Thrivetimeshow.com to download your free Start Here book. It’s available for you. Now the third step in grieving is you’ve got to identify learning opportunities. You’ve got to figure that out, right? You’ve got to write down as a result of what you’re going through, what can you learn. And I’ll just give you an example from my life. When my father got sick with ALS, I identified that I was very happy with the amount of time I had spent with my dad before he got sick. I don’t have any regrets in that regard I feel like I I called him when I said I would call him I stayed in touch I did the things I tried to help him move to Tulsa so he could be closer to us I actually hired him I did what I feel like I should have done someone else’s well You should have done more and why weren’t you more involved and I would say to that person who cares because I don’t care what? You think it’s a me I care about what I think and about what God good God thinks so I feel very good about that Well, then then though I started thinking about, you know what, I am spending though too much time with people that I don’t like. I am spending too much time as a 35 year old man with people that I don’t like. I’m just tired of seeing them. I’m tired of talking to them. I’m tired of communicating with these people. I’m, there’s certain people. So what I wanted to do, I was very intentional, I wrote down a list and my goal was to burn bridges to create distance Because that’s a that’s a that’s a thing. That’s a concept I wanted to burn bridges with certain people so that I wouldn’t have to see them again I wanted to just let them know in an unnerving Direct way that I am done with the conversations. I’m done with the Passive-aggressive attacks. I’m done with the visits. I’m done with the phone calls, I’m done with the insincere holidays, I’m done with those people because those people do not add any value to my life or my kids’ life and they take time away from me and what matters, which is spending time with my family and pursuing my life song, my life dream, my life vision, which is to produce audio excellence every single day to help you get to where you want to go. Because I’ve already done it with my businesses and I feel like it’s something I can do two hours a day. I can take time out of my schedule, two to three hours a day to prep and then two hours a day to broadcast. So about five hours a day I’ve got you on my mind. And I decided that’s what I’m going to do. So I’m going to be no longer available to certain people who are not deserving of my time. People don’t deserve my time just as a byproduct of being born. They don’t deserve your time, by the way, just as a byproduct of being born. Just because someone’s born doesn’t mean that they now need to, you need to be available to these people at all times. You don’t need to do that. In fact, what you need to do is you need to make a list right now. Make a list, get a sheet of paper, and on one side of the paper, two columns, by the way, we’re doing columns, is this a spreadsheet? Can I use my phone? I’m sure you can use your phone. Fine. Your Etch-A-Sketch. What about a crayon? Can I use a crayon? Yeah, you can use whatever you want to do to write this down. But get a sheet of paper and make a column. And on the left side, write down people who help you, people who love you, positive relationships. The win-wins. The relationships where you help them, they help you, things are good. That’s the deal. Make a list of those people. And on the other side, make a list of people that are not in that category. The kind of people who are kind of leeches. They’re riding on your coattails. They want to invest in you because of your previous successes. But the first sign of adversity, they’re done. Make a list of the people that want to team up with you because it’s a good opportunity, but as soon as you are not in that position, they’re done. Make a list of the doubters, the people who doubt. Faith and doubt can’t coexist, by the way. If you have any doubt at all, then you can’t have any faith. It’s faith or doubt, either one, A or B. Make a list of the people who passively, aggressively do things differently than you ask them to do in the office. You tell them to do something, and they do it differently in every way. It’s like you have to fight every day, all day, just to get stuff done because of these people. Make a list of the people that don’t honor your time, the people that show up consistently late and can’t seem to figure out how that bothers you. They just are consistent. We all get late occasionally, right? But that’s their consistent thing. Make a list of people who love to show up unannounced all the time. And they love to take things and then they leave. Make a list of the people who are the leeches. And then make a list of the people who are the great people, the people who have helped you in your times of need. And so when my dad was going through his situation with ALS, I made my lists. And I decided that I was going to, again, G, you want to give yourself time, right? R, you want to reflect, you want to reflect on what was lost. Now the next though, right, the next part, I, you want to identify the learning opportunities. So I wrote down those learning opportunities. This is what I learned from this situation. I’ve had employees steal from me. A lot of people steal from me. I’ve had equipment stolen from me. A lot of equipment has been stolen from me. But what I do every single time is I, gee, what do I do? I give myself time. I reflect, right? I reflect on what was lost. Then I identify learning opportunities, right? And then I move on to my next step, which is E, you want to edify the people, the deserving people involved. You want to edify the deserving people? Because whenever a tragedy happens, there’s inevitably a good person out there who has also been a part of that story, and you want to thank them for being the good person. This is a, encourage these people. You want to let you know how much character you have and how much I value your character. In a way, you’re kind of coaching them up to continue doing that kind of behavior. You’re coaching that. You’re celebrating that. You’re saying, I really do appreciate you being that kind of person in my life, but you need to make sure that during those times that you do edify the people, you coach up the people that are involved in that story and tell them thank you. We come back, we’re going to break down more about how to deal with grief because grief is a tough situation. In business, I think in business, emotionally you have to get very, very good at dealing with people betraying you, people lying, people cheating, people stealing. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and CBS News, if you Google this, 75% of employees steal from the workplace and most do so repeatedly. So if you’re a business owner, I mean, you have to have a high tolerance and a high emotional intelligence. My name is Clay Clark. You’re listening to The Thrive Time Show. Stay tuned. Out of time, I really thought you were on my side, but now there’s nobody by my side I need you, I need you, I need you right now Yeah, I need you right now So don’t let me, don’t let me, don’t let me down I think I’m losing my mind now It’s in my head, darling I hope that you’ll be here when I need you the most So don’t let me, don’t let me, don’t let me down Don’t let me down, don’t let me down, down, down I say and it seems so jaded Every place I go it feels so jaded There’s people all around but I’m all alone The clock in my head won’t stop ticking, ticking. The phone in my hand rings all day long. I’ve been in LA almost five months now. I try to pretend that it feels like home. Oh, oh. Maybe I’m too, too far. Alright, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. And today, not to take the room down, but we are talking about a subject that impacts each and every person listening today. And it’s this concept of how do you get over grief, or how do you press on and continue to move towards the achievement of your goals while dealing with difficult situations that happen? And I think a lot of the Thrivers know this. If you listen to the show a lot, you probably know these things. But here are just some examples. With my own life, we’ve had sickness in my immediate family. My father passed away a little bit less than a year ago of ALS. And if you know anybody who’s gone through that, it’s not a pleasant experience. My best friend was killed actually right when I was starting my business. So in my dorm room, it wasn’t a deal where we had a conversation saying, hey, when is a good time for you to have an unplanned death? It just took the wind out of my sails. My son was born blind. I mean, I could go on and on. Being sued, if you’re listening right now, what about a key employee that just quits and goes and works for another business, maybe a competitor? I mean, just the grief. How do you get over those situations? And so I’m going to give you the proven plan, the system that I use, and I’m going to break it down here for you. So if you’re just tuning in, move number one is G. You want to give yourself an allotted amount of time. Now Marshall Morris is on the show with us today and he is a he’s a business coach and he sees clients that get caught up in the emotions where they almost can’t move on because they’re still reflecting upon the employee who quit or the bad situation or being sued. And so Marshall I’m gonna read you a notable quotable and a definition. I want you to kind of break it down for us okay. So this is a notable quotable from Dale Carnegie. Dale Carnegie the best-selling author of How to Win Friends and Influence People. He also wrote the book called How to Stop Worrying and How to Start Living. He says, inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy. So Marshall, people need to grieve. They need to be able to let the sympathy out. They need to be able to let others sympathize for them. They need to be able to feel bad, to cry it out, as it were. But they also have to move on. So talk to me about giving yourself the allotted amount of time. As an entrepreneur, how long are you really allowed to give yourself? How many days off can you give yourself when something bad happens? So what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to get your business to a place where you’re actually not the one operating it. And I understand for anybody that’s listening right now and you’re like, I’m the one actually selling the service. I’m the one that’s operating the service or selling the product. That’s really hard for me to do right now. And I understand that. I’m just being blunt about this, but if you are in that situation, you have to be able to give yourself an allotted amount of time, and that time cannot be nearly as long as somebody who has a business that’s not dependent upon them. That’s right, and so once you’re not in it, you can give yourself more time. And so we’re working towards that. But let’s say that you don’t. Let’s give the example if you were the one actually operating the business. You’ve got to set aside, I would say maybe a day, okay, give yourself and put all of your grief into that day. Don’t think about the business. This is the trouble. It’s not necessarily the amount of time, it’s the concentrated amount of time where you’re allowing yourself to grieve because I think a lot of business owners, they get caught up in, I need to grieve, but I can’t stop thinking about my business. And one thing that I did that was really hard to do, but when my son was born blind, as well as when my father got diagnosed with ALS. Both times, I really, during the day, gave myself no time to grieve or to deal with it, but on the way home, before I got home, I would allow myself to feel that way. So I almost blocked it out, and I get a lot of my inspiration from sports. I love watching sports, but you know, Brent Favre’s father passed away, and he played like the next day in a game and he just dominated and then after the game is when all of the tears came out. And so I encourage you, gee, give yourself an allotted amount of time. Now R, you want to reflect on what was lost. You don’t want to get to a situation where you don’t reflect on what was lost. You don’t want to become callous. I mean, when I lost my father to ALS, you don’t want to go, well, that was it, moving on. Okay, you’ve got to give yourself time to reflect on what was lost and to think about it. And I put it into the calendar, a specific time, hey, this is time where I’m going to think about this. And I’m just going to give you a verse from Ecclesiastes chapter three. And if you are going through something, guess what? We’re all on that team. Everybody’s going through something. I mean, if you’re not going through something, I don’t know who you are. If you’re going through a breakup, you’re going through an employee screwing you over, you’re getting sued, you have someone who’s sick, you’ve got someone who was born blind in your family, your father’s got a terminal illness, it doesn’t matter what you’re going through, we’re all going through something. But you’ve got to reflect on what was lost. And so I’m going to give you this verse from Ecclesiastes chapter 3, where it says, “…to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born and a time to die. That didn’t feel so good. A time to plant and a time to pluck that which is planted. A time to kill. Whoa, whoa, calm down. And a time to heal. A time to break down and a time to build up. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together. Marshall, there’s a time for everything. Yeah, there’s a season for everything. So talk to me. If I’m an entrepreneur listening right now, and I’ve never designed my calendar, I’ve never designed my day, how do you structure your day? Because obviously, you go through things like everybody else. How do you structure your day? And in your day right now, where would you deal with stuff that was maybe a personal, not good thing? So this is how you’ve got to structure your day. First of all, you’ve got to identify your six different areas of your life. Your F6 life. Your faith, your family, your finances, your friendships, your fitness, and fun. And throughout the entire week, you must schedule time for all of those items. Now let’s say you’re dealing with something, you’re grieving in family. You’ve got to identify where in your day you can do that. For me, I would grieve most at the end of the day. Okay, I would grieve most. So therefore, I have to front load my day with everything that I need to get done. So that after work, I understand that I don’t have to go in and follow up on a bunch of work-related items. At the end of my day, that’s when I’m going to set aside time to grieve. Now for the thrivers who are just listening, we’re talking about grief today and how to get through tough situations. Now the next part of the grief process is there’s G. There’s an R. There’s an I Identify learning opportunities when we come back We’re going to talk more about this notable quotable from Napoleon Hill which says every adversity every failure every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater Benefit think about that. My name is clay Clark check out thrive timeshow comm so subscribe today for the podcast you will love it Love it. With all my delusions of grandeur I’ve turned into bad jokes instead. You’ll be there pointing and laughing to prove you were wiser than I. Well I’m just pretending perfection, I’m flying uncomfortably high. It feels like I’m falling. It feels like I’m falling Welcome to the Thrivetime Show on Talk Radio 1170 I wasted all that time on you Listen to the lyrics You told me go in December and I got signed in July You must think that I don’t remember Cause now you call me all the time If you think I’m gonna take you back Baby girl you got another thing coming You should leave me alone Stop calling my phone Cause I’m just gonna hit the, hit the, hit the Red button, red button I don’t wanna hear your voice Red button, red button You should leave me alone, leave me alone. Red button, red button, I don’t want to hear your voice. Red button, red button, cause I’m just going to hit the pit. Thrive Nation, we’re talking today about how to deal with grief. And it’s not an exciting topic, not a sexy topic, not a sexy topic, it’s not a topic that’s sexy. But it’s something we’re all dealing with, right? I mean, everybody, myself included, you just said body again. Well, every body, every human is going to go through these unsexy moments in life. I was just telling you from my own life, what happened was my father passed away from ALS. Not good. My son was born blind. Doesn’t make you feel good when that happens. Aren’t good things supposed to happen to good people? I got kicked out of college. That’s probably because you made some bad choices. That’s true. I definitely signed an honor code, which is an agreement, kind of like an operations manual, to attend Oral Roberts University, and I subsequently broke most of the honor code every day. So I would just encourage you to not sign the honor code to go to Oral Roberts University if you don’t have the religious beliefs or the worldview needed to go there. I am now a Christian. I’ve been on the Christian team. I’ve joined the Christian team on the other side of my son’s miraculous healing, but before that I was not. And so I’m kind of new to the Christian team, you know, kind of a new player. I don’t really get a lot of game time. I’m not a player you can count on. I’m not a pastor. I’m not a guy who’s, I don’t understand how it all works yet, but I am a guy who’s definitely been on the Christian team here for, you know, believing sincerely probably for now 10 years essentially. And so we all go through things though, right? Do we not? We all go through things. We’re all getting kicked out of college, or we’re all sick, or our dad has ALS, or we’re going through a, my best friend dying. We’ve all gone through something. If you haven’t, then you’re probably just living in an isolated bubble where you don’t encounter adversity, but then even if you did that, eventually you’d probably have atrophy from not moving your body. So again, I said the word body again. So what we’re talking about is how to grieve. How do you deal with these bad situations that happen because as a business owner you’re going to deal with adversity Often you’re going to deal with Adversity on a consistent basis. You’re gonna be dealing with a lot of rejection. So how do you do it? Well, here’s my method I’m teaching it to you right now Gee give yourself an allotted time to deal with adversity. So I like to give myself five minutes total five That’s the that’s the amount of time I like to give myself total to deal with basically any situation ever, five minutes maximum. I do not lament on things. Maybe if you’re listening here today and you’re like, I love to lament. Lamenting’s my favorite thing to do. Well, lamenting is basically where you’re talking about something and you’re kind of cathartically, almost therapeutically kind of explaining how you feel and then how they feel about how you feel and how do you feel about how they feel. And that’s okay if that’s what you want to do. I don’t really do that. But you want to give yourself time. I give myself five minutes. Now the second thing you want to do is you want to, this is, Thrivers, you’ve got to make sure you write these down, okay? This is very important that everybody does this, okay? So one, give yourself time. Two, you want to reflect on what was lost. You don’t want to just move on and go, well, I lost everything. I probably, okay, let’s get back. No, you want to figure out what did you lose, what’s the loss, why do you feel the way you feel. You want to reflect on what was lost. Now the third move here, the third move is what you want to do is you want to identify learning opportunities. It’s so important that you identify what can you learn as a result of this information, as a result of what you’re going through, what can you learn. My name is Nick Holman, I’m with Holman’s Custom Cabinets. I want to tell you about our Dream 100 marketing system that we started with Clay Clark through the coaching program. We’ve increased our repeat clients, our repeat builders that we work for, and we’ve got a lot more potential for growth since then. It’s very scalable. I’ve taken this young boy that I started this with this 18 year old guy who is my dream 100 marketing guy who’s just making phone calls, taking donuts, taking cookies out to new contractors and clients to try to reach them to making repeat sales with them. And I had a lot of concerns just at first with trying to maybe train somebody to do this. We had a repeatable process, a script for him to call and he’s doing that over and over. He calls anywhere from two to three hundred people a week. It’s been over three thousand calls since the first of the year. And sometimes he’s kind of switched over into sales because we have so many sales coming in that he had to help handle those sales and take away from the Dream 100 marketing because of that. We’ve been doing it about seven months. It took about two to three months for us to break even, to hit the break even point. And from the three to six month mark, three to seven months now, we’ve got a 300% return on my investment. I’m paying this young man, this 18 year old boy, a salary and then a 5% commission on these jobs. And he’s just literally been killing it. And we’ve increased our profit by 8% increased our sales by 10% and these are repeatable, most of them are repeatable clients new contractors that I’m doing repeat business on some of them I’ve sold 4-5 jobs to since January when we started this and it’s been a 335.6% return for this campaign and we’ve spent a little over $30,000 and made over $100,000 in gross profits. But just this last week alone, this Dream 100 process, we sold right at $65,000 in sales just from this Dream 100 process. and I can’t explain enough how blessed, how much of a blessing it’s been and how well it works. I’d encourage you to start doing it soon. Thanks. Alright Thrive Nation, I know that a lot of you watching this show on a consistent basis or listening to the show have a business or have aspirations to grow a business and if you’re not careful, your business can own you rather than you owning your business. You might find yourself at a place and space where you work all the time and you have no time freedom, although you earn financial freedom. And I know for anybody out there that’s never owned a business before, the idea of achieving financial freedom itself may be very exciting, but if you achieve financial freedom and you don’t have any time to enjoy that, the question is, what was the point? And so on today’s show, we’re gonna be joined here with an actual thriver, an actual long-time client who’s been able to achieve a time freedom to build a sustainable schedule that he loves. And here to share the story is Nick Holman. Nick, welcome to the Thrived Time Show. How are you, sir? Thank you for having us. Hey, Nick, what’s your website for anybody out there who wants to verify you’re not a hologram? Holmanscabinets.com, H-O-L-M-A-N. Okay, Holmanscabinets.com? Yes, sir. And where are you based there, sir? We’re in Sparta, Tennessee. We cover the middle Tennessee area. And how long have you been in that area? We’ve been here nearly 40 years. My dad started the company when I was just a little kid. Awesome. And so did your dad kind of mentor you in the ways of cabinetry? He did. I grew up from a little kid doing the business. I didn’t plan on doing it, didn’t want to, but it ended up that way and I really enjoy it. The Lord’s really blessed me. Now, how did you initially hear about us and what we do in terms of growing businesses? I was listening to a podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire and heard you interviewed on there and just sought you out. Well, you know one thing that we’ve had a pleasure of working with you on and something we’ve enjoyed is we here at the Thrive Time Show, we call them diligent doers is who we work with. People that frankly are hardworking and all they want to know is what do I need to do? The best way I would describe it or kind of analogous way would be, if you’re going to the grocery store, we’ve all been to the grocery store where there’s somebody at the store who has no intention of buying anything. We’ve all been to the mall or we’ve seen somebody who doesn’t want to buy anything. They’re just hanging out. And there’s a lot of people that kind of view entrepreneurship like that. They’re entrepreneurs. And there’s other people that actually are entrepreneurs. They actually implement. We call those diligent doers. And Sean’s had the pleasure of working with you. Oh, yeah. And Sean, so tell us, tell listeners out there, what kind of big improvements have you and Nick worked together to implement within the company, Holman’s Cabinet Stuck Up? Yeah. So we, I’ve actually had the pleasure of working with Nick for several months here, but he has worked with several different consultants in our program. By the time I got to him, I’m just going, hey man, what is, at this point, what is your biggest limiting factor? At the time, he’s saying, I’m pretty close to this ideal schedule, but there’s about 15 hours on my schedule of stuff that I don’t feel like I can delegate, but I’m kind of stuck there. So it’s been probably three months or so, Nick, that we’ve been working at trying to get those hours off your schedule. It was more of a high level task that we systemized week by week, working on training employees and refining the system itself. And that’s now resulted in Nick having that time back to use for other things. Now, Nick, before we worked with you, how would you describe where the business was at? I was all over the place, very, very busy. I worked about 80 to 90 hours a week, never home, running, doing jobs, working late at night at home with my laptop, drawing cabinet jobs, quoting cabinet jobs, and just really had no free time whatsoever. And so now how would you describe your schedule versus how it was then? A little bit laid back. I’ve even found myself bored a time or two. And that doesn’t last long. I’ve always, always can find something to do. But I’m looking at other business ventures, which I’m into different things and excited about that. And have a little bit more time with my family, of course. I love that free time. I’ve got four children, the Lord’s blessed me with. And some time to do ministry work that God’s allowed me to do. All of this is because of my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. I just thank Him, thank you all for the time that I’ve gotten back to be able to do that. It just frees up so much time, the time freedom. I don’t really need it financially, but the time is invaluable. So if you could describe for anybody out there that’s listening, what was the process like that we’ve kind of guided you through? What are some of the improvements that you’ve made in the business? Well, the first thing y’all did, of course, was the website, and you started encouraging me to get Google reviews. We’re the highest rated cabinet shop in the state of Tennessee now. Come on now. And that’s… It’s just been a blessing to see people call and they say, well, so how do you find us? Well, we see your reviews, they’re just unbelievable, the video reviews, and then also me training. I guess the last few months is hiring and training new people. I did not think that I could ever get anyone to replace a lot of what I was doing in measuring and learning all the different options of cabinets, appliances, the different ins and outs on different houses, different ins and outs of different cabinet options, whether it was custom or prefab or semi-custom, all of those different things. I didn’t think I could train anyone, and it’s been possible to do that, and now I’ve got two guys that are doing that. It’s really relieved a lot of my time. The hiring, the group interviews, doing that has really been helpful. Delegating and being able to train and writing down a process of how they can go through and learn what I’m doing. And it answers a lot of their questions before they ever have to ask me. With what we’ve written down, I can’t think of the term of it right now. The schedule and how they’re to do that, it’s just made it so much easier. So let’s talk about the branding for a second. When we first started working with you, did you already have a website in place or did our team have to help you with that? We did have a website. We redesigned it and made it much more Google canonical where Google could read it better. And of course the reviews and all that, and y’all were riding on the back of it all the time. And it’s been a lot more profitable when people look up our website. All over Nashville now, we’re almost two hours away. People call us all the time from Nashville, Brentwood, Franklin, and then even in our areas it’s just constant because of our website. And before we start working with you, how many web leads would you get maybe in a given month versus how many are you getting now? I’ll look off the top of my head, I don’t know, but I know that, I don’t know, we’re getting on average 8 to 10 a week now. I probably got 1 to 2 a week before. So maybe 4 or 5 times more leads? Yeah. Yeah, I was looking at the tracking sheet before we hopped on here, and it’s actually, this year, 34% of all of your leads have come from that. So that’s a significant amount. Now what we try to do at the Thrive Time Show, is for anybody out there that goes to thrivetimeshow.com and you click on the testimonials button, no exaggeration, I’m just gonna show this here. We have over 2000 client success stories on video. So if you go back and watch some of these people, you’ll go, wow, that was 10 years ago. Wow, that was five years ago. Wow, that was six years ago. The reason why we do that is A, it inspires confidence in potential buyers. Somebody watching this show today might go, well, you know what, this seems credible. The second is we want to build the faith of an entrepreneur, not in a religious sense, in our biblical sense, but the faith that they can do it. How has that aspect, the coaching or the mentorship helped having somebody that is showing you, hey, this is a proven path. We’ve done it before. We’re going to do it again. We’ve been coaching clients since before search engine optimization was a big thing. Now we’re doing it that, you know, now that search engine is a big thing, we did it before social media was a big thing. Now that it is a big thing, we’re still doing it. How does it help? How has it helped you knowing that you’re following a proven path and not moving just off of guesswork? It’s been tremendous. Just having a plan, I can follow a plan if that plan’s laid out. And you could see that, I could see that with other people. You know, you had another cabinet shop that was doing the same thing, I think, in North or South Carolina, you were working with, I’ve seen that, and I thought, I can do this. And then having that same plan from learning from y’all, taking the same thing and being able to teach my guys in much the same way, and they’re picking up on it and learning it. And it’s just, it’s teaching one that’s teaching another, and it’s just, it’s passing that along. It’s been tremendous. Now, we’ve worked on the online reputation, the online reputation enhancement, you know, gathering Google reviews, video reviews on your site. One thing that’s been nice, and I’ve heard about this through the coaches, is you guys do a good job, and it turns out that matters. And I hate to say this, but I’ve worked with a lot of restaurants in the past where when we start, we go in through the, I have a proven process I take people through. So somebody schedules a 13-point assessment with me, I hop on the phone call with them, just like I did with you there, Nick, and I try to go over, okay, I want to ask them, what kind of revenue did you do last year? What kind of revenue did you do the year before? How would you rate your website on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best, how would you rate your branding? How would you rate your accounting? We go through all these systems, and I’ve worked with a lot of restaurants who said, you know, the one thing though, is our food’s terrible. And, you know, so when people show up, they typically leave mad or upset. And you guys have always done a great job, and we would call that the quality control loop. And so when we go to your website here, you guys have gathered testimonials. How has having video testimonials from actual clients impacted you? When people call all the time, they say, your testimonials are unbelievable. And that helps set us apart from all the other shops that don’t have that. And I’m friends with a lot of the other shop owners, and we do 10 times more than most shops around us. Yeah. I think it’s due to the reviews, it’s due to the testimonials. They can look us up and see that we’re credible. Some of my workers came on board because of the reviews and they saw the credibility that we had among other people. And they wanted to be a part of the team because of the great work and the satisfied clients that we have. Now, if we go to the bottom of your website, we do ongoing search engine optimization for you, which is kind of a big task that if we do it right, no one knows we’re doing it. It’s kind of like pulling the weeds in a garden. I see so many inspired patriots. They say, Clay, I planted a garden. I was so inspired by your wife. And then I’ll see them, you know, a couple months later and they’ll go, I’ll say, how’s the garden? They go, don’t talk about it. Didn’t weed it, didn’t feed it, it’s dead. Go with the rock garden, baby, a rock garden. So there’s ongoing pruning that has to, we have to run the online ads for you, manage that. We have to get the search engine going, optimization. Then we have to track what we’re doing on a weekly basis and track order. How is tracking implemented you, just knowing that all these things are happening behind the scenes? Well, you can continually see where you’re at and what you need to improve on and what you’re doing well at and see how it’s growing. It’s just, I love the numbers. I love to see the numbers and see how you can track that. And it just continues to increase or say, hey, I need to work here on this area because we’re having some problems in this area. And that helps you to see that and what you need to work on. And that’s what Sean’s really helped me to do each week. And he points those things out to me. And but it’s easy to fix once you know what the issue is. But if you don’t know it, you don’t know what to do. You don’t want to work on. Now, one thing that blew my mind years ago is I had a chance to interview the NBA Hall of Famer and fellow Christian, David Robinson. And David Robinson was jacked. And if you’re watching this show and you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m going to pull up this video here, pull up this photo. He was so jacked. He was so physically fit. Do you remember this? Oh, yeah. If you Google David Robinson, jacked. David Robinson, just jacked. I mean, this guy just, oh, he was huge. And I remember talking to Dave off camera and then some on camera. I’m like, Dave, how did you know that it was time to retire? How did you know it was time to go? When did you know it was time to go ahead and retire? And he said, Clay, I was hitting the weights every day at the peak of my career. Every day. I’m in the gym, never cheating on my diet, following my diet, always hitting the weights, just… Those guns. You know, it’s the consistency. And it wasn’t that he had this super complicated workout program, it’s the consistency. And the Bible speaks to this a lot. It’s called Proverbs 10.4. For anybody out there that hasn’t read the Bible in a while, Proverbs 10.4 says, “‘He who has a slack hand becometh poor, “‘but the hand of the diligent maketh rich.'” And that’s the one thing that I have found over the years that I cannot really train. I can show, I can show people, but you know, today I woke up at three, came into the office about 5.30 today after organizing my day, hopped into our staff meeting at six and every single day. Can you talk a little bit about the diligence of maybe having a coach, if that has helped you or as far as, or maybe your dad taught that to you, or just a consistency of putting in the work every day? Yeah, my dad did teach it to me. I wasn’t raised in church or anything like that. Literally my dad worked seven days a week. We had a cattle farm with about, at one time, 500 head of cattle, the cabinet shop, and we had a tree nursery. So literally, dad worked seven days a week. And so I grew up with that diligence and just have brought that into my work life. And I enjoy work. Work is fun. I’m very hyper and energetic and I’m always doing something. My mind never shuts down, even so it’s hard to sleep sometimes. And so just being a diligent doer, which is a biblical principle I’ve carried over into my work life and even in other businesses, the Lord’s truly blessed because of that. But sometimes, you know, that can go the wrong direction too much if you’re too busy in the areas you don’t need to be in. All of this helps to organize that and to free up some time where you’re not too involved in that. And I’ve been told all my life, you don’t have to spend so much time in work. You can balance that out. Well, this has helped me balance that out because there was no way I could have kept going the way I was and it ever worked out. It’s freed up so much of my time and allowed me to have really a more balanced life, be more biblical in my life as a husband and as a father, as a Christian, as a church member. It’s helped me to balance my life in every area. So it could be safe to say you’re getting, you know, five times more leads and working five times less? Yes, sir. I mean, that’s pretty powerful. That’s a pretty powerful success story. Now, have you guys started documenting all the checklists and systems on the back end of the website yet? Is that something you guys have tackled yet? No, no, but that’s something that’s coming right up here. Just getting them all organized on the website for the employees to be able to access those systems. Well, I would just say this, just housekeeping note, when we hop off here, maybe you guys can hop on a call real quick. I’d love to book a 13 point assessment with you, just to touch base on a few things, because what’s happening is a lot of our clients, I’ll just give the listeners an example. This would be a Tip Top K9, and they are a franchise, and they’re a client that I’ve helped to franchise. And I think they have 16 locations open maybe now. I’m probably getting that wrong, maybe it’s 17 now. But they’re all over the country. They’ve got different locations on the tip tops. And one of the things that has to happen is as the company begins to grow, it’s, you know, we have to come up with a system to organize the systems, you know, to organize all the documents so that everybody can find them. And there’s so many core documents they’ve made over the years. And it’s like, we’ve got to be able to find those quickly. If someone’s looking for the system for how to train a German shepherd or how to write up an employee or how to find the core values document or how to find the goal sheets or how to find the insurance processes or the intake checklist or the bootcamp checklist or the closing progression or the sales manual. We have all those documents organized in one place and that really does help. And so we get off, I’d love to book a time. Yeah. So you and I can hop on a call and we’ll talk about kind of phase 2.0 as we take you from time freedom to maybe opening up multiple locations or scaling or whatever it is that you want to do. But thank you for carving out time for us today. And for anybody out there that’s listening, who’s contemplating scheduling a free consultation by going to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire. That’s thrivetimeshow.com forward slash EO fire, or thinking about coming to one of our in-person business workshops, what would you say to them? I would encourage you to do so immediately. It would free up your time and give you more freedom. I’d encourage them to contact Lake Clark, Sean Thrive Time Show, and come to one of those business meetings. And I will say this too, housekeeping note, a final note here, our consulting at $1,700 a month. So everybody out there listening, say, what do you guys charge? It’s $1,700 a month, one seven zero zero per month. It’s all month to month. And we have business conferences and we have VIP tickets and general admission tickets and we make it affordable for everybody. And we have scholarship tickets so everybody can afford to go. Thank you so much for carving out time here. I really do appreciate you. Thank you. And we’ll talk to you soon. Take care, brother. Yes, sir, thanks. Great job. You have questions? America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your Broda from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of Ask Clay Anything on the Thrive Time Business Coach Radio Show. Yes, yes, yes, and yes, Dr. Z, we have a hot question in here from the Thrive Nation. A hot question. Andrew, this is a hot question. It’s hot. Andrew, you know how hot this question is? Pretty darn hot. Oh, yeah. There we go. Step in into the business coach’s saunas. That’s right. OK, now, here’s a question. I don’t know why it was hot in here. The question from the Thriver was, how do you deal with a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? And how often do you guys have these? So we’re going to go around the horn. We have Paul Hood, a CPA with thousands of clients on the show. We’ve got Dr. Z here on the show. We’ve got myself. So, let’s go around the horn and let’s talk about it. So, Z, how often do you have the things, the variables, the bad things happen to you that some would consider to be… You’re a positive guy, so you don’t let it get you down. But how often do things happen to you where it would be easy to say, wow, that was a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day? Short of resetting my watermark, as I call it, there was a period of my life that I had a series of very unfortunate things happen to me and my family and my business, and that was pretty much my high watermark of stress and bad day. So once you kind of reset that watermark pretty high, it was a pretty high one for me that time, everything else you kind of go, you put it in perspective and go, well, you know, compared to that day, it’s not so bad. Could be worse. Could be worse. Oh, it could be worse. Could be worse. In Minnesota, by the way, if you ask anyone how they’re doing, you have about a 40% chance that they will respond with, oh, it could be worse. Could be worse. No matter what’s going on. That’s about the peak of the optimism. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it could be worse. But what I do is this. A lot of times, depending upon what category it’s in and how to process it, it can be pretty daunting. It can be pretty debilitating, and if you don’t get on top of it with your brain pretty quickly, it can kind of really shut you down for a little while. But when you have a really, really bad day, one thing that I like to do is I like to think about all the positives in my life. I like to pray also and be thankful for all the positive things in my life. I’ll just go through a checklist of all the home runs, all the games won, you know, all those positive memories in your life. You go back home and look at that big fat head of you, the full-sized photo of you and go, well done. Well done. That’s the only head I know that’s bigger than yours, by the way. It’s a big head. I don’t think it’s that big. My head, do I wear a size 14 hat size? Is that what it is? 14 and 3 quarters? Wow. That was 18 and a half. 18 and a half, okay. Well, you were like, your hat’s loose. You’re right. But I think the key is that you have to understand that if you’re in control of your joy, and this is a word for everybody listening out there, if you’re in control of your joy, then nothing can take it away from you. Nothing can take away your happiness. If you’re waiting for something to make you happy, you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you let something make you unhappy, you’re doing the wrong thing. So you need to be in control of your joy. You need to be in control. If it’s a bad day, how are you going to fix it? Is there a problem that needs to be fixed, or is it just a bad day? But if there’s a problem that needs to be fixed, and I go into problem-solving mode, step one, what do I need to do? Step two, what do I need to do? Step three, what do I need to do? Oh, and by the way, I’m really thankful because I’ve got three healthy children. I’m really thankful that I’ve got all these things I’m thankful for. I’d like to get Paul’s take on this, because Paul, you manage a team of employees. Yes, sir. And your core team at your three offices, how many people approximately are we talking about? Between the three offices, because you have other offices and locations, you’re always expanding, but maybe between Bartlesville, Tulsa, Claremont, how many people are we talking about? Well, we have a total of probably about 40 employees, but my key group is probably 12 or so. So let’s think about our 12s. Let’s think about your 12s. Z, you think about your core 12. I’ll think about my core 12 for a second. It seems as though there’s always something going on in the lives of one of those 12 people because there’s 12 people. There’s so many people, there’s always something. Now Z, with a team of like 50, there’s usually two or three bad things happening every day between those 50. Unfortunately, yes. And with thousands of customers, there seems to be usually, if you have a thousand customers that you provide service for a month, if you’re awesome, you have like a 1 or 3% complaint rate. So think about that. Open the room, Paul, we have 4,000 members, and see if we make a mistake with somebody’s hair, even only 2% of the time. That’s 80 bona fide complaints a month. Sure. So we had a guy shout at me from Minnesota, and I remember him saying this, he goes, how many complaints do you get a day? Did he say it could have been worse? Well, this is really funny, he goes, how many do you get a day? And I said, like three. He goes, three? I said, yeah, I mean, they only get to me if they’re like next level. But he goes, just for that business? And I said, yeah. So you get like, how many complaints a month? Do the math. Dozens. I mean, you know what I mean? And you start, but he goes, I don’t think I can handle that. And it was very good for him to know that he emotionally could. I said, why not? He goes, I just, it bothers me. If I get a bad review, it’ll bother me for like a month. Which is unfortunate. So I want to ask you this, Paul. With your clients, you do your best to serve your clients. I know you want to do your best. But if, for whatever reason, like our haircut business, we make a mistake 2% of the time, or if there’s a misunderstanding or whatever, how do you process that when a customer is frustrated? How do you emotionally and mentally process it when your business occasionally misses the mark like my business does and I think any business does? Well Clay, just like anything, you have to separate real issues with fake issues. You have a family member die. That’s something that there’s not a lot of positive that comes out of that. business issues or complaints or bad things. Really what I try to do is embrace that and accept that and appreciate that as a learning experience because if you’ve got an issue, it’s kind of like let’s say you’re driving down the road and you have your family in the car and the car starts sputtering and everything and you can get really upset, but the reality is maybe that sputtering helps save you from having a wreck. And so the way I look at things is I try to find the positive in it and I try not to get real upset and just try to say, well, this is something that’s strengthening my team. It’s a learning opportunity. It’s an opportunity to fix something. You know, I have, I’m a registered investment advisor and a personal financial specialist and I get audited every year by a government entity or whatever. And I embrace that because if I’m not doing something to the best of our abilities or missing something, I want to know. I don’t think it’s, and so if I’ve got a client that complains, and honestly, and I don’t say this to be mean, two-thirds of the complaints are really not valid, but it doesn’t really matter because marketing to me is top of mind. It’s how that person feels when they walk out of my office and what they’re going to say to other people. And so the old adage, the customer is always right, is kind of right. But I embrace it, I approach it head on, I personally make the phone call, and what can I do to solve this, to make you feel better, to make you happy. And it doesn’t really matter whether it’s a valid complaint or not, it’s a complaint. And so, you know, I was taught a long time ago, do I want to be right or do I want to be rich? So I’d rather be rich than argue with a client all the time. I just want to make them happy. I have found for me, and see I want to get your take on this, I’ve got a few notable quotables I want to read to you. From the first, the first one will be from that controversial book known as the Bible, Matthew 5.10, I love that verse, Matthew 5.10 says, Blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness. For theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So blessed are those who are persecuted for being right. So here’s an example. You have an employee that works for you, Z, and they’re supposed to be on time. And they’re not. So your job as the owner, manager, whatever, is to bring it up. You say, hey, Doug, I need you to be on time. And Doug goes, oh, come on. Come on, man. What? What? And there’s this blow up, you know? Yes. And you would… Some people attack you when you call them out for being wrong. You hold them accountable. Oh, I know. I know. So I think part of it is just embracing that if you’re going to hold people accountable, aka run a business, you just have to get really good with knowing that a lot of people won’t be happy with you all the time. Don’t you have to get to a place where you just say, hopefully there’s a reward in heaven because I’m certainly… Blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I mean, you have to just go, well, hopefully there’s a reward up there because, whoa. Well, I like that the reward could be the bank statement because all of a sudden you’re cracking the whip and you’re making your business run better. But for everybody listening out there, if you’re thinking about it, we know 67% of you are, according to Forbes, that is our business Bible, by the way. I’m not taking anything away from the actual Bible, but that’s the business Bible. What happens is that if you go into this owning a business with the idea that you only get to wear the white hat, and you only get to be the good cop… You’re going to lose. At times, you’ve got to put on the black hat. At times, you’ve got to be the bad cop. At times, you’ve got to call people out, and you’ve got to correct them. And pruning and correction is good. Don’t you agree, though, that it’s kind of like raising kids. You can be a lazy parent and let them play in the street because you don’t want to upset them and correct them. The same thing applies with employees. If you hold them accountable, that’s actually good for them. It’s good for your business, it’s good for your other employees, but it’s good for them. When you’re not holding them accountable, you’re accepting their slackery, and therefore it’s bad for them, and they’re never going to achieve and reach their potential. I think about our office and just people on my team. There’s a guy on our team named Matt. Matt always says, how can I get better? At least he does that to me. He says, how can I get better? So I give him the same information as I might give somebody else, the same coaching, and he says, thank you. Thank you. How can I get better? But I think a lot of bosses feel like they’re being a bad guy, quote unquote. I hate to be the bad guy, but just by telling somebody, hey, you need to follow the script. Hey, you need to show up on time. This is what I’m paying you to do. And they feel bad about holding someone accountable because they’re the bad guy. You’re not the bad guy, you’re the right guy. You’re the righteous guy. Here’s another thought. Robert Green, the bestselling author of the book called Mastery, bestselling book called Mastery, he writes, the most effective attitude to adopt is one of supreme acceptance. The world is full of people with different characters and temperaments. Some people have really dark qualities that are especially pronounced. You cannot change such people at their core, but you must merely avoid becoming their victim. Do you agree with that, Z? Absolutely. People change seldom. It’s one of my core things. If they’re a bad apple, they’re typically going to be a bad apple. Instead of worrying about trying to life coach them into being a good apple, just get them out of your space. The quote that Z gave me years ago was so good. I love this quote. I’m going to high five you. This will set me free. High five. This is a good high five. You said to me, you said, Clay, unless you’re a life coach, don’t life coach him. And I was going, whoa, whoa, because that’s where I was at for a long time as a young man. I kept trying to fix everybody. How many businesses have you coached over the years where the owner comes up to you and they’ve got a bad apple working for them, and they put reflective thought back on the debt. I would say it’s two-thirds of what prevents businesses from growing. It’s the inability of the owner to hold people accountable, the complete refusal to hold people accountable. As we get back into this root topic of how to deal with the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day, I’ve got a couple quick tips here for you and I’m going to give them to you. One is there was a Joel Osteen quote from the book called The Best Life Now that set me free here. It says, live your best life now. He says, do your best and forget the rest and just give God the stress. So for me as a Christian, I go, I did my best. Okay, God if you want me to be like going through this whole Job phase of my life right now, if this is like some teaching part of the Bible where I’m getting punished or something, let that happen, if not, whatever. But I used to, once I just realized, you do your best and forget the rest, that helped me a lot. Probably because it rhymed. It helped me, though. That’s a rapper coming out of you right there. But seriously, it helped me just to know you do your best and forget the rest. And now, I really, I don’t care at all. I don’t care if somebody’s not happy and I did my best, I just don’t care. I don’t care. But I used to care a lot. Don’t you think a lot of that though comes from your core values of what’s important in life? You know, we make good money. But it’s not about the money. You know, I grew up, I’ve lived in trailer parks. I have both, nobody in either side of my family graduated high school besides my mom and I. I can be happy living in a trailer park. Not that there’s anything wrong with a trade apart. The point is, it’s not the money. I have confidence in myself to rebuild. If something falls apart, I’m going to do my best. If other people can run along with me, great. The reality is, I’m going to be happy regardless. This is what I want you to do right now. This is what I want you to do. This is the action item for all the listeners out there. Here we go. If somebody out there, if you’re having something bad happen to you today, tomorrow, the next ten minutes, whatever, if something bad happens, I want you to do this thing called the five minute rule. This is the rule I live by. All right. I try to do it. I’d say by 99% of the time I do it. Don’t make any decisions ever when mad. Okay, that’s good. Don’t make a decision. Just do not make a decision when mad. Then during those five minutes, think about the decision you’re going to make. How will it affect you a year from now? Will it affect you? Okay. As an example, when I went in the other day to a local fast food restaurant and they totally jacked up my order, you know why I didn’t freak out, Z? Because you did the five minute rule. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Five years from now, it doesn’t matter. I don’t care. The other day I was in a parking lot at Atwood’s and a guy cut me off. You spend a lot of time at Atwood’s. Well, a guy cut me off with a big monster truck wheel thing and he gives me the stink eye. I get out of my car and he’s following me into the store with the stink eye. You know why I didn’t say anything to him? Because it doesn’t matter. It’s the five minute rule. Because you’re a big buster truck. I can make a decision while I’m mad. I don’t want to get beat up in the parking lot of Atwood’s so I can write the wrongs. Don’t give me that shovel I was telling you about. So next time you get upset, take five minutes. Think about that. If it’s a bigger decision, if it’s a big purchase, if it’s a big… Don’t go buy things when you’re angry. Just don’t take big action when you’re angry. I promise your life will be better if you have more of a long-term perspective to everything. And that is how you deal with a no-good, terrible day. If you’re out there today and you’re having something bad in your life, don’t make it worse by making immediate action while angry. Don’t make it worse. Yeah, when you bite yourself in a hole. You know what they say, see a broad to get that booty, yak em. Leg her down and smack em, yak em. Stop the digging. And now without any further ado, we’d like to end each and every show with a boom. So here we go. Three, two, one, boom! JT, do you know what time it is? Um, 410. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Oklahoma, baby! Tim TiVo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma during the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th, 2024, Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the 2-Day Interactive Thrive Time Show Business Growth Workshop. Yes, folks, put it in your calendar this December, the month of Christmas, December 5th and 6th. Tim Tebow is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the Thrive Time Show 2-Day Interactive Business Growth Workshop. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old. And a lot of people 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 is 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, Russia. Folks, I’m telling you, if you want to learn branding, you want to learn marketing, you want to learn search engine optimization, you want to learn social media marketing. That’s what we teach at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive workshop. If you want to learn accounting, you want to learn sales systems, you want to learn how to build a linear workflow, you want to learn how to franchise your business, that is what we teach at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. Over the years, we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine, the PR consultant of choice for Nike, for Prince, for Michael Jackson. We’ve got the top PR consultant in the history of the planet has spoken at the Thrive Time Show workshops. We’ve had Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, a company that creates apparel worn by celebrities all throughout the world. Jill Donovan, the founder of rusticcuff.com, has spoken at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshops. We have the guy, we’ve had the man who’s responsible for turning around Harley Davidson, a man by the name of Ken Schmidt. He has spoken at the Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshops. Folks, I’m telling you, these events are going to teach you what you need to know to start and grow a successful business. And the way we price the events, the way we do these events, is you can pay $250 for a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. Yes, we’ve designed these events to be affordable for you and we want to see you live and in person at the two-day interactive December 5th and 6th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop. Everything that you need to succeed will be taught at the two-day interactive Thrive Time Show Business Workshop December 5th and 6th in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And the way we do these events is we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a question and answer session. So that wonderful people like you can have your questions answered. Yes, we teach for 30 minutes and then we open it up for a 15 minute question and answer session. It’s interactive, it’s two days, it’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve been doing these events since 2005 and I’m telling you folks, it’s going to blow your mind. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the Thrive Time Show two day interactive business workshop is America’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshop. See the thousands of video testimonials from real people just like you who’ve been able to build multi-million dollar companies. Watch those testimonials today at Thrivetimeshow.com simply by clicking on the testimonials button right there at Thrivetimeshow.com. You’re going to see thousands of people just like you who’ve been able to go from just surviving to thriving. Each and every day we’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today get those tickets today. Go to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com and some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? I don’t know how I do it. How does it work? You just go to thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the business conferences button and you click on the request tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you could 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 am 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, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma. It says it’s Tulsa, Russia. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa, Russia. 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 who you you’re going to come who you I’m talking to you you can get your tickets right now at thrive timeshow.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 Tebow time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. Hello, I’m Michael Levine, and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies. And I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now, why would a man living in Hollywood, California in the beautiful sunny weather of LA come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put 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. 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. 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 a cap? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever. We’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets and he can afford to earn fifty dollars we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you i learned at the academy and kings point new york octagon verba watch what a person does not what they say good morning to one good morning barbecue soccer instead radio show today i’m broadcasting uh… from phoenix arizona not scott tiller’s on a close but the complete from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And we 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. And so 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, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. And he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just wanna tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, 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, 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, at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say.