Clay Clark | Business Coach | Why Do Nearly All SUPER SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE Wake Up Early? How Clay Clark’s Friend, Piyush Patel Grow DigitalTutors.com & Sell It For $45 Million? Celebrating 2 Clay Clark Client Success Stories!

Audio Transcription

I Don’t know that most successful people do this I hope that you can be inspired by what I do and I need you to understand that the bigger your dream is early You have to get up. I am quite famous in my community at least from my commitment to my morning routine I do not deviate I do not deviate I do not deviate from it for any reason even when I travel even when I’m on vacation, the morning routine is preserved. And I figured this out a long time ago, realizing that as an entrepreneur working for myself, if I didn’t start the day off the way that I intended it, my day was just gonna run me over. I wake up in the morning around 6.30 without an alarm. Yep, right, you know, five, five, 10 most days, my wife and I, we work out, we eat a healthy breakfast with our children. I usually get in a good 30 to 40 minutes of reading. And this is all before I get on my email or anything else, right? This is all quiet time. There’s a lot less distractions in the morning. Oftentimes I’ll get up about 5.45, I start to rock into my day, and oftentimes by about eight o’clock, I’ve got some phone calls set up. And I always try and get a workout in there, because if I’m not working out, then I’m not creative. I have routines that I like to place in there where they fit, but I never compromise. The latest I’ll get up is 6.30, I try to spend the early part of the morning before other people get in doing study time because the office heats up around 830 or 9. So I’m most creative in the morning and that’s when I’m knocking out the kind of stuff that I study. I just want to be the hardest worker in the room. Like I refuse for anybody to outwork me. So I get up at four right away. Then I focus on one thing that I’m really proud of yesterday. Just a little thing that I was really proud of yesterday. Hit that dopamine hit of success right away. Get up at 6 a.m. every day. Just do it now. Wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake up, wake, wake, wake up, out of your sleep, wake up. So I get up at 6, but from 6 to 7.30 is sort of my private time. Wake up. I get ready, I get all prepped to do my day, and I don’t really get on to anything like emails or anything else until I’ve had at least an hour and a half, acclimate for the day, set out my goals, I look at my calendar, what have I got to do today, as opposed to when you have to jump out of bed and run straight screaming into the office. I will always make sure I have time in the morning. Get up at 6am everyday. Get up at 6. 6.30 without an alarm. I get up at 4. I get up at 6.30. I usually get up around 6 in the morning. I’m at work usually around 7.30 and that gives me about an hour before most people show up so I have some time to prepare even ahead of the day starting. I wake up early, usually before 6 o’clock and that always gives me a chance to clear my head I usually came in very early at five. I get up early this morning I got up at three o’clock and I don’t always get up at three But I typically have to get 430 or five and I do that because that’s the only part of the day you really control Usually I get up at 5 a.m. Every once in a while I’ll go to 535 40 anywhere between 430 and 5 every single morning between 4 o’clock and 6 o’clock I have my morning routine like most great truth in life that seems counterintuitive. But the reality is, if you want to get more done, wake up! So I’m usually up between 6 and 6.30. Getting up at 6, that’s the ideal time for me to wake up. I get up like at 6 in the morning. I wake up at 5 every day. I actually find that it really works for me because my brain is clear and I can go to the most important things right away. I wake up around 5. I think it was an effective way to live. Plan your day before your day. I get up around 4.30. I wake up at about 5, 5.30. I’ll be up at 4.30 in the morning, every single morning. We’re usually up by 5.30. I’m on early riser, so about 6. I get up at 5.55 a.m. I know it’s very precise and strange, but it’s just my time to get up an hour before my world starts to get busy, and I focus on myself. Wake up before 6. Just do it now! So I’m up at 5. I look forward to it. Those four hours are crucial for me. It sort of sets up my day, my mental space. I’m up at 430. So I use this strategy because I had to get up at 430 in the morning. Just took a page out of the wealthy people, the self-made millionaires in my study. That morning routine been paying off like crazy for me. And I think that’s why wealthy people do it. And I wake up every day around 630. During the season, you know, it’s usually 4.30, 5.00. 5.00, 5.30, I’m getting up in the morning. It’s a way to win the day before the day starts. I’m up every morning at about 4.30. The first hour is for me. Why did I make it 4.30? Because nobody else is awake. Nobody’s going to bother me. That time belongs to me. I’ve never woken up on the morning of a speech any later than 2.00 AM. But I’ll wake up at 3.00, and I’ll look at the clock and I’ll say, you’ve got to be kidding. It’s 3 a.m. And then I’ll say to myself, look, you’re not going to sleep anyway. So you might as well just get up and go in. I walked to my office at 6.15. I spent it and I took that time to plan my day, answer all my emails. Hour and forty-four, just get myself set up, know exactly where I’m going to spend the day, what I’m going to do, what I’m not going to do, answer people. And it’s chaos for the rest of the day. What if you’re not the only one that wants what you want? What if there are thousands of other people who want what you want. You have to outwork them You gotta out buying them. You gotta get up earlier. When you hit the snooze you lose and now the rest of the day You just kind of feel bad How does one man take a $54 investment and turn it into a company that he later sold for 45 million dollars of cash and stock How does one man build an online business worth over 10 million dollars with just two coders? On today’s show we interview my friend Peesh Patel, the founder of Digital Tutors, the company later acquired by Pluralsight. During today’s interview, Peesh discusses how he started Digital Tutors, how he got his first customers, how he recruited top talent, and his book, Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work, an entrepreneur’s guide to creating a culture that matters. What BAM stands for and much, much more. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Three, two, one, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we have an incredible guest, my friend, Mr. Pish Patel. Welcome onto the show. How are you, sir? I’m awesome, thank you. Pish, for the listeners out there that are not super familiar with your background, could you walk us through kind of your history building digital tutors, kind of where it all began, and then where it ended for you? Yeah, I was a sixth grade science teacher, turned college professor, then entrepreneur, and started with a $54 personal investment and grew it to $10 million with no investors, no debt, and then sold it for over $45 million in cash. That’s the one sentence. Okay, so step one, you’ve got to gather the $54. Step two, sell for $54 million. Okay, now talk to me about this though. How did you get your first customers at Digital Tutors, and what product did Digital Tutors sell to the world? Right, so we were pretty much an online training academy, much like your business school online, we were a video-based platform for people who make movies and video games. The key there is niche and then niche again, and then we niched one more time. Video-based training for people who make movies and video games. Our first customer showed up at 9 o’clock in the evening purely by word of mouth. And this guy was in Israel. So the word had gotten from Oklahoma City all the way to Israel in a matter of a day. And this was before YouTube, before Google. It was all a word of mouth thing. And how did you create that word of mouth? Were you doing mailers? Were you cold calling people? How did you get that initial, just to get the word out there initially? Did you run around Oklahoma City with a megaphone? What did you do? I wish. I wasn’t smart enough to do all of that. We followed this method of marketing called cult branding and it was really around I just need to have one person who believes and then I’m going to ask them, okay, introduce me to five people who also are your friend network. And then introduce me to those five people and then we just kept going. And really that’s how we got to the first 100 customers is we just asked our customers, hey, go tell your friends. And we looked at it as if we build a product that people want, they’ll tell their friends. That sounds so easy. But I think in execution and application, that can be very hard for people. Could you talk? It can. But I think as an entrepreneur, though, Clay, you and I both agree, it’s what you don’t know. I was too dumb to know what I was even getting into. What did I have to lose to ask for a referral? Hey, tell me some of your friends. If they say no, okay. Do you have any other friends? Right. That’s a move though. That’s a move. I was just talking to Paul Hood and your team about this, Paul, probably two weeks ago. I was telling you about an insurance agent that I worked with. His whole thing piece was after he had wowed you by saving you money and showing you all the holes in your coverage. He would just ask, hey, are you happy with what I’ve done for you so far? Yeah. Well, you know, what five people do you know that I could help? And this guy built one of the biggest insurance practices in Oklahoma by doing that. That right there is a knowledge bomb for somebody out there. Absolutely. Now, Pish, you are in Oklahoma, or you were in Oklahoma when you built this company, which is known more for ag tech, you know, agricultural tech, not necessarily ed tech, educational technology. How did you recruit coders in Oklahoma? We recruited amazing people. Half the company was local, the other half was brought in from out of state. But I’ll be honest with you, we need 50 developers to get to a million. It’s like, no, you got the wrong 50. We only had two. Two. Most of our people were content people. We also got there with no salespeople. We did all of this completely organically, no outside salespeople. I remember one time I was talking to you about search engine optimization and how you were talking about the importance of just having your blogger constantly blogging, constantly blogging, just getting it out there. Can you talk to the listeners out there about the importance of if you have a website for your business, why it’s so important to just keep creating copious amounts of content? That’s right. It’s all about content-based marketing. That’s kind of the adage we took. We had a $30,000 marketing budget, so that’s not a lot of money on a $10 million revenue business. Really, the angle that we took was, we’re going to release two blog articles every day, no matter what. It could be anything from a video game review to a really high-end technical technique that we’re going to give away. Two a day. Yeah. What happened is, over the years, we became the experts. We were seen, not only by the search engines, but by the community that we serve, as hey, these folks are the true experts. And it doesn’t matter if you’re selling plumbing services, if you’re doing electrical work, if you are a bricklayer, or if you are a doctor, I think the more content that you have out there, the more trust you’re going to develop in your customer base. What was your wife’s role, Lisa’s role, in starting your business? So Lisa took care of all the books and she was the house mom. We hire a lot of young people, a lot of millennials, and a lot of them kind of needed a house mom. So she used her background in child development to help keep the office afloat in terms of emotionally. Now, what was the most challenging aspect of growing from 100 customers to 500 customers. As you began to scale, what was the most difficult aspect of doing that? I’ll just be dead honest with you. When I exited the business, we had 1.5 million people in the system. The first 500, 14 years prior to that, were just a blur. Like I said earlier, Clay, I was too dumb to know what I was getting into. I just kept showing up. We hit our first million dollars literally just by showing up and working hard. I think that’s part of the base of any entrepreneurial journey. You’ve just got to show up. When you got approached for someone to purchase your business, when Pluralsight reached out to you guys and said, �Hey, we want to acquire you, merge with you, hostile takeover� I’m not sure what the language was that was used. What was your initial reaction to? Potentially, you know selling your baby the great orange monster that you had built What was your initial thought when you got approached to be purchased? Well, they were their initial thought was it’s not for sale I mean, we’ve never had this conversation of selling the business for us We were serving our customer and having a great time and we loved all our employees. So we were doing what we were destined to do. But really the owner of Pluralsight said, well, look, if we don’t buy you, I’m just gonna be really honest, we’re gonna buy somebody just like you and we’re gonna pump them full of cash. And I thought, oh my gosh, we’ve worked so hard to be in a space with no competitors. What’s it gonna look like? Is this gonna be an uphill battle every day or do we merge and do something bigger? We decided to be acquired. When you, you said it was $54 million of cash? It was 45 plus in stock. When you got $45 million of cash, for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with this kind of transaction, did they bring by a briefcase and is it filled with ones and have rubber bands on it? No. How does that go down? You get a little alert on your phone that says, wire complete. And that’s as bad as honest, oh God, that is about as dramatic as it is. It’s like, oh, okay, wires complete. We gifted, we decided instead of gifting 10% with something that my wife and I like to do with our income, instead of gifting it in a traditional way that we would gift it, we decided to gift it to all of our employees. They received $1,000 for every month of service. If they were on my executive team, they got another big bonus. Some of them walked in that morning with a house payment, car payment, and student loan payment. Then they left at the end of the day with no debt. You’re out there. You help the employees. A lot of people say money changes people. But I’ve known you here for a while. You’ve been a kind and generous guy for a while. Everyone I know who knows you says that you’re a kind and generous guy. Have you found that getting a big lump sum of money has changed you in any way? Do you find yourself going for walks naked in the woods? Do you find yourself getting odd tattoos? Do you find yourself talking in movies a lot? How has it changed you? Honestly, it has not changed me one bit. I’ve been this way since I was a kid. The only thing that it has made us do is become a lot more cautious because all of a sudden there’s a whole bunch of people who now want to be your friend. And I love that hip-hop song, No New Friends. My wife and I don’t need any new friends. You know, that’s interesting, but I read an article about President Obama, and again, the listeners know this isn’t a political show, but this is a thing. During his run for president, one of the things he and Michelle agreed to was we’re not going to meet any new people this year, because henceforth, you can’t trust anyone’s motives. So we’re not going to meet anybody new as we’re running for president, and he talked about how those friends he had from back in the day when he first, you know, before he became a big deal, are some of the same friends he has today. Most of the same friends he has today. One thing I have noticed, though, about the money that’s changed you is it’s allowed you to have some time and some space to create piece 2.0 in terms of your career, you know? So now you’re writing books and such. Can you tell us about your book, Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work? Well, it’s really about how we built this culture. Really I think culture has a very competitive tool in every entrepreneur’s tool set. I think strategy is important, execution is important, sales market, all those things are important. But for me, culture was my X factor. When I would tell people about our environment, how we only turned over 12 people in 14 years, they’d look at me and go, of tech workers? I’m like, oh yeah, and millennial at that. And they’re like, no way, there’s no way you did it. So I decided I’m gonna write a book about it. Yeah, and in your book, you talk about a lot of really practical things in the book, but one of them is this concept called BAM, and we say boom a lot here. So first I thought, maybe Pish has misspelled boom, you know, and I thought, no, Pish is a smart guy, and I start reading the book, and it talks about belonging, affirmation, and meaning. Talk to us about BAM. It’s the BAM philosophy. I mean, at the end of the day, people work for BAM. Every company is going to give you a paycheck and some level of security, be it through health insurance or life insurance or some kind of retirement plan. But really, people want to work for, they want to belong to something bigger than themselves. They just want to be told that they’re doing a good job. And at the end of the day, it can’t be meaningless work. Give them some meaning in what they’re doing. And people will stay with you forever because they want BAM in their lives. BAM, now BAM, belonging. You talk about making your own jerseys, how to create that sense of belonging. Why do we have to create our own jerseys? Talk to us about this idea. Well, we’re all a team, right? I tell this all the time. We’re a tribe, we’re a team. We’re not a family because you can’t fire your family. You still got to show up for Thanksgiving dinner, right? But you can be a great team and great teams have a really instant way of knowing whose team you’re on. You’re the good guy, the bad guy, and it’s all about the jerseys. So I was a huge fan of spend as much money as it needs to make enough shirts and sweaters and sweatshirts to give everybody enough clothes to wear every day because they’re in the community wearing our brand, supporting our brand, and supporting our message. So, yeah, your listeners, if they’re not investing in office clothing for their people, they’ve got to. Now, affirmation. You talk about meeting rituals. Talk to us about a meeting ritual. Are you burning some sort of incense? What kind of rituals are we talking about here? No incense. I had too many asthmatics that worked for me to burn the incense. But meeting rituals, it starts with core values. So every single meeting we have starts with, okay, let’s go around the room and share stories around our core values. What did you see in the past week or the past month. And it just sets the tone. And I get it. If you have 45 people and they’re all in a room for one hour telling stories, that’s really expensive. Right. But what about the money you’re going to lose when you don’t share those stories? I think you have to have some campfire time to get the group together and talk. This was a move that I’ve learned from many entrepreneurs who talked to me about the importance of doing this. And Pish, I was 24, 25 with the largest wedding entertainment company in the country, and I thought this was a complete waste of time. So I didn’t do it, you know, and I kept having turnover in all the wrong spots. And now I’ve just accepted that this is what you do, and this is going to be a move, and so we schedule it into our calendar. And you think about it, if you have, in my case, you have on a Friday, Andrew, there might be 50 people in that meeting, maybe on a Friday, 55 people. And if all of them are making an average of, let’s say, $25 an hour, that might just cost you a $1,500 meeting, a $2,000 meeting. But it absolutely is vital. Paul, I want to get your take on this. You help companies grow from an accounting perspective. perspective, what questions would you have for Peach about how to create a culture or holding people accountable? Because Peach is the expert of culture development, my friend. He’s the man. Peach, I just want to know, so I deal with a lot of very intelligent people. I deal with engineers, doctors, and Clay. Clay is one of the most obviously intelligent people I know because he’s my coach. But anyway, so you came from the education background, which typically you don’t see a lot of financial success from people that are in the educational background. So you’re obviously a very intelligent person. How did you bridge that gap? What kind of advice can you give me to get people to really work on their business, to end their business? Because a lot of my clients struggle with that. They are the best at what they do, but they’re doing it. So every minute they’re doing it, they’re not growing. Well that’s true but I can probably tell you most of those folks are inefficient. Yes they are in the middle of doing and it seems like they never have any time but they’re still able to go on vacations, they’re still able to take the evenings off or go to a kids soccer game. So a lot of that is boiling out enough time to work on the business and for me it’s as simple as just asking everybody, tell me some stories about our core values. And I can tell you very quickly, either they get it or they don’t. When you were growing digital tutors, you became efficient, but you also had daily fires, and you’re putting out issues there. What time did you typically wake up, and what did the first four hours of your work day typically look like when you were growing digital tutors? Yeah, so in the knee deep of it, I got up about seven, got to the office by nine, and I’m the key firefighter, right? So I thought, so I had to put out all the fires. And it really wasn’t until we started adopting the traction system or the EOS system that I really started to really work myself out of a job. So my mantra in the shop was at some point, this business is going to outgrow everybody, including me. And, uh, I will tell you, I was so proud. It hurt a little, but I was really proud that after I sold the business and I exited, like permanently exited, uh, my phone never went off. I never got an email like, how do we do this? Where’s the password for this? Um, I had to literally work myself out of a job. Gino Wickman’s system traction is a great program. I hear a lot of people say, wow, that’s expensive. But let’s take the cost out of it for a second. And let’s just talk about how it helped you with digital tutors. What kind of principles and action items did you begin to, what kind of action items did you begin to take as a result of the traction program that allowed you to work on the business and not in it? Right. So, there’s, within the business, you have lots of processes. How do we solve this customer’s issue? How do we close a ticket? How do we release a new product? But rarely is there a system or a process on how are we going to actually run the business, not just our product and our service. And it doesn’t matter if it’s traction from Gino or if it’s burn harnesses scaling up or Rockefeller How it doesn’t matter what system it is Using a system because they’re all kind of the same. They’re all a little inbred from each other Having a system means you’re gonna have a system and you can fall back on well, I’m not for sure how we do that Let’s look at the system and it gave everybody a rallying call of this quarterly flow and not just a we’re gonna pick a goal And then try to hit it. It was real accountability. This is what we’re doing. We grew leaps and bounds because we just went back to the system, a process. Your system, BAM, we didn’t talk about the M. I want to talk about the M now. Belonging, the B, the A, the affirmation, now the M, the meaning. What is this meaning? How do you develop meaning in your workplace so people don’t just say, ah, frick, all I have to do all day, every day is code this, or all I got to do is change, you know, fix mufflers all day. How do you keep the sarcasm and the cynicism and the pessimism out of the business, and how do you add real meaning to somebody’s job? Well, that’s a two-part question with a simple answer. First, it starts with the leader. is pessimistic and have no value in the people that work there, then it’s going to flow downhill, as they say. The second really is a simple question that you can ask your employees. Next meeting, even on one-on-ones, if you just ask, ìHey, what’s the most important thing you’re working on?î They’re going to tell you exactly what the meaning they want out of their work. They’re going to tell you, ìThis is what’s important to me. We developed this thing called three happies, which is two work happies and one personal happy in the last 24 hours. We do it every morning at 9 o’clock on the dot. Let me tell you, that little piece of paper will give you all the BAM information you want on any person in your organization. It tells them what’s important to them, what’s meaningful, and by writing and sharing it, they create instant affirmation. It’s just, it’s an amazing little tool set. They can get it off my website for free. It’s really simple to implement. Could you tell listeners out there the best domain to learn, to gain this information, to gather this from you? Sure, it’s my personal website, so patelokc.com. P-A-T-E-L-O-K-C dot com. Lots and lots of material there. Now, you’re speaking all over the world right now. You’re speaking all over America. You’re doing speaking events where people are hiring you to come in and teach about, do keynotes about how to build great company cultures. Could you share with us a little bit about the kinds of things that you would talk about during a one-hour keynote or a 90-minute keynote? You bet. I mean, it goes not only from the story of building this organization and kind of the roller coaster ups and downs, but really key takeaway practical information, things like these three happies. We teach everybody how to do a GROW meeting, which stands for Goals, Reality, Options, and then the commitment is the W, what will you do? It’s a great way to diffuse conflict and to get to the point of how do we get this thing done. For us, it was really about how do we take these creative tech workers and get stuff done? We’re so small. We’re in the middle of Oklahoma. We’re not cash rich. We’re scrappy. We just got to get stuff done. We tried to really eliminate any of the garbage of running a business and focus on how do we move the needle. Let me ask you this. That’s a lot of what we share. After you began to move the needle with Digital Tutors, it took off and it created some, obviously, some financial freedom for you, some time freedom for you. You’ve gone on to have some financial success there. Can you talk to us about your love for the Oklahoma City Thunder and just how close you sit to that to that court. I love the Thunder. I’m there almost every game and the funnest thing that I’ve gotten to do in my in my whole career is sit courtside and and I love sitting at the baseline because they’re running at you and it just feels very different than TV. Does Russell know who you are? Do you and Russell talk a little bit? Russ and I don’t talk, but I feel like I’m giving him some play tips with my eyes. He’ll lock eyes and he’ll know, oh yeah, he just wants me to pass more. I’ve only seen Russell play very, I’ve only sat really close to the court twice, but watching Russell Westbrook play basketball, it kind of feels like watching an adult varsity basketball player playing dodgeball against second graders. The intensity, it’s like his intensity is like two or three times more than that of the average player. Do you agree with that or am I out of my mind? I mean that guy’s intense. The speed goes from zero to a thousand. I don’t even know where it comes from. There’s a fire in him that’s very different than the rest of us humans What is your favorite Oklahoma City Thunder moment so far sit in court side there where you go? Oh that that that right there that was worth the ticket price. Oh My goodness, there’s been a whole bunch I mean I Can’t clay you that that was a tough. Are you a good heckler? Do you heckle the other team? I know free throws. Do you have a lot of tips you give them? No. Boo-hoo! No. Okay. I have lived by this adage that the most heckling comes from the cheapest seats. Ooh. Nice. And I believe that. I sit and I’m respectful of the other team. If one of our players gets traded or goes to another team, I cheer them on in the opening. I’m proud to be there. I love watching the game. So you’re not the streaker. You’re not that streaker guy. You know, I’m glad to know that you’re not that streaker guy. I’m not the streaker guy. I remember when I used to go to Timberwolves games, there was one guy who was legendary. He would walk up and down the baseline. He had tickets right there on the court. But he would basically just heckle people the whole game. He’d hold the program and just heckle people. Do you have any good hecklers out there where you go, this guy has got a mental disorder? Are there any hecklers that are kind of infamous hecklers at the Thunder Stadium, or is it just all good people? The Oklahoma City Thunder, they’re all good people. I love the guy, Mega Thunder, whatever that guy’s name is, who doesn’t wear a top and has the suspenders, big guy. He has to give the heckles for everybody in the stadium. Nice, nice. Now talk to me about, talk to the listeners out there about your shared love of the winery, the whole winery game here. Where did this love for having a winery come from and how have you gotten involved in the alcohol business as an entrepreneurial endeavor now? Well everybody seems to enjoy alcohol, so I don’t think that’s going to be going away anytime soon. The winery was a unique situation in that we had just sold the business, and I overheard my son telling a group of friends that, he said, �Wow, what does your mom and dad do? You’ve got all these video games in this house.� And my son said, �I don’t know. My mom and dad just hang out the house all day. And you should have seen the look of just horror on my face, because I just don’t want to raise a young man to think that’s what adult life looks like. I need him to go one day, be a great dad. So I told my wife, we got to find something. This honeymoon of retirement is over. We’re too young. We’re 40 years old. We got to get busy. And so I bought a winery because it was, um, it wouldn’t affect my non-compete. I have really no computers or anything like that. I didn’t know much about the wine business. Now I know a lot about the wine business. It’s a sexy agricultural manufacturing thing. At the end of the day, a lot of hospitality, which I enjoy. That endeavor has led me to be one of the key investors in the Angry Scotsman Brewery here in Oklahoma City. The Angry Scotsman? Yeah, it’s a super fun brewery here in town. You know, I’m going to Google search that real quick. I’ll put that on the show note there. The Angry Scotsman. Did you come up with that name or who did come up with that name? No, he’s a Scottish guy and I’ll be honest with you, Clay, I hated the name. Really? I absolutely hated the name and he was like, really? And I was like, look, I don’t want to get involved because which group of young females want to go to a pub or a brewery called the Angry Scotsman? That just sounds scary. He’s like, really? Because I think people like it. I said, well, let’s do this. Let’s just let the numbers decide. I hired a virtual assistant to go poll 100 college-aged females and it was overwhelming. They loved the name Angry Scotsman. I was like, hey, you’re on to something. So now, how do you decide, for the listeners out there, because there’s a lot of listeners out there that are looking for investors, and I know that you do some investing. How do you decide what kind of businesses you’re going to be an angel investor in, and what kind of businesses where you go, that’s a great idea, but I’m not going to get involved? Well they have to be on, they have to be past the idea stage. So there’s enough gambling money out there that people can raise money with an idea. I look at execution. So can you execute the money that I give you? Can you be respectful of it? Can you grow it? I mean, it really follows my own core values. And I’m betting on the person. I’m not really betting on the company or even the idea or the product, I’m really betting on that entrepreneur who can go solve that. So this young man at the brewery, he’s got a PhD in chemistry. He knows how to brew beer, because in a can of beer, if you put it in the fridge and you go buy a new one six months later, those cans have to taste the same. Well, that takes a lot of chemistry knowledge to do that. And so for me, I’m betting on him. So if there’s a listener out there who’s trying to get in touch with your organization about funding, is there a certain way, is there a certain website they go to and they submit their business to, or do you reach out to people? How does that process work for someone to get in touch with you about raising investment capital? Yeah, so I don’t do much retail. I really stick with the reoccurring online. I’ve kind of gone back to what am I good at? And I know how to sell online and I know how to do marketing online. So I’m finding myself going back to that model. But we have a form on the website that they can reach out to and form, and we can set up a time to meet. I say no more than I say yes. That’s just how I am. But I’ll tell people no up front, so I’m not gonna lead anybody on. For your listeners, if they’ve done pitch meetings and they hear things like, well, that’s really interesting, I’m gonna have to take it back to my partners, that’s a no. Or if they hear, oh, I’m gonna have to do more due diligence, that’s a no, because more than likely, you’re like a yes the minute that you hear where they’re at and what they wanna do. Dr. Z has often said it’s either a hell yes or a no. Everything is either a no or a hell yes. There’s nothing in the middle. Do you agree with that idea? A hundred percent. Okay. So, to the listeners out there, if you have a business that exists, that is making money, it’s not just an idea, and you go to patelokc.com, there you can learn more about your speaking, learn more about the investing, learn more about your book. And in your book, you talk about how people don’t quit jobs, they quit people. So I want to ask you this question. I know Paul Hood has a hot question for you. So again, somebody out there is listening, they’re taking notes, they go, okay, people don’t quit jobs, they quit people. What do you mean by that? Well, think of all the nasty, terrible jobs that are out there and people do them. And it’s not typically for a whole bunch of money. I mean, people do the work that they feel adds value, that creates BAM. But when you put a manager or a leader in place that does not create BAM for that person, now they’re looking at that job as purely a transactional. And it’s essentially, I don’t make enough money to do this job, but really, I don’t make enough money to deal with your garbage. Because it’s more than just the job. And I really think if you’re not investing in your people’s emotional well-being and creating BAM for them, you’re missing out. You’re totally missing out on the opportunity. Paul Hood has a hot question for you. Now, Paul has been known to paint our guests into the corner as his favorite pastime as one of our show sponsors. So Paul, what’s your question for Pesha Patel? Pesha, I don’t know what he’s talking about. I am a very sweet man. I don’t have the… You’re very sweet. I don’t know. He’s very sweet. So you mentioned cult marketing. So do you… We do a little bit of referral based marketing. I’m a financial advisor as well. And did you, when you were in the middle of growing this, did you just use the wow factor to motivate people to refer to you? Or did you, for instance, we do at our offices, once we set up a planning session with people and they love us, which they generally do, thankfully, we say we’ll give you a $25 gift card. I have one caveat, Pish, before you tackle this question. Just one caveat for listeners out there that don’t know Pish Patel. Pish Patel is a man that if he says he’s going to do something, Pish Patel does it. You always own it. You said if Digital Tutors is going to do this, then if you say I’m going to do it, you did it. So I just want to make sure the listeners out there get this because as a business coach, I’ve discovered that a lot of people drop the ball all the time. So I would say just yes, from my experience, I know that Pesh Patel’s team was wowing people. Back to you, Paul. I just want to make sure because I know that he was wowing people. Yeah, and so we do too, but I just wanted to know, you know, we offer a little token, $25 gift card or something for referrals and with the knowledge that that’s just the little tip that gets them over the hump because we are going to over-deliver. So did you ever have any kind of carrot, if you will, to get referrals? Or was that just straight up the carrot was how you guys delivered? Yeah, no carrots. So I never wanted customers to feel like a friend of theirs recommended them, they signed up and then when they signed up one of their friends out of just altruistically, they got a card in the mail that had a $25 gift card in it. It’s like, whoa, so did the other guys sign me up and recommend it or was they genuine about it? And we went through this, it was a 14-year process to really nail down what worked for us and at the end of the day, it boiled down to building a product that people really wanted. And we get lost sometimes in jockeying for what would be better. So we removed no discounts, no salespeople. We removed everything that wasn’t making the product better. And then our focus was on, we don’t want customers to churn. So we became obsessive about maintaining and growing the customer base, but not by losing half and gaining a third and losing another half, gaining a third, right? So churn in the online world is just, it’s destructive. And for us, churn meant we’re not doing the right thing by our customer. Now, how- So we really focused on wow. You said it was 14, 14 years you grew Digital Tutors? That’s right. 14 years. If you’re out there listening today, you want to get rich quick, step one, work at something for 14 years. Then you can get rich real fast. The wire came in real fast, right? It was a quick wire? That’s right. It was a 14-year overnight success. There it is. Now, also in your book, you talk about hiring. You talk about making sure that you’re… You talk about this concept called the second wake-up call. Let’s dive into hiring here. What kind of things do you teach readers in your book about hiring? Well, if you hire somebody and you put them in a desk and you tell them, ready, set, go, do this thing called work, you guys are all setting yourselves up for failure. The cost of replacing employees is upwards of 150% of their salary. So I’ve heard of that number even higher depending on the type of work they do. So for us it actually starts even before your first day. So two weeks before you start with us you get a box in the mail, all of your paperwork, fill all your W-2 stuff or W-4 or whatever that stuff is, fill it all at home, fill all your, read all of our you know handbook, do all that at home. But in the box also includes some clothes, some shirts to wear on your first day, a little book about your team. But I’ll tell you, Clay and Paul, the most important thing in that box was an empty picture frame with a note that said, bring a picture of your loved one. So your desk has starts to feel like home. People say that two of the most stressful days of any person’s career is the first day they take the job and the day they are let go. And I didn’t want their first day to be stressful. And so when they think like, oh my gosh, what have I jumped into? And they see their loved one on their desk, yeah, I get this. So for us, it starts before you even take the job. Then on your day one, you’re gonna spend half a day with me. And some of your listeners are gonna say, well, I’m too busy for half a day. Okay, well just take how much of that salary you’re gonna pay and throw some of that away. Is that expensive? I agree with what you’re saying strongly, but I know that there’s probably 95% of our listeners, I know our listeners, Pesha, I know these folks, these are great people. And some of them are going, really? You’re going to have someone shadow you? Like you, the owner, the guy? I mean, you’re the dude. You, really, really, really? Because, you know, we have these entrepreneurs out there, you know, and they’re kind of, they’re inquisitive people for somebody out there who wants to ask the question really? You have a shadow with the boss Again, did you really do that patient? Horses mouth. I need every employee to hear it from me. This is why we started the company This is how you play your part a lot of people we teach them the game of business They you’d be surprised how many people don’t know the simple game of business, right? And when I ask things like, we’re paying 100% of your health insurance. Why would I do that? Because you’re nice, well, I like to be. Why else? Because you have to, nope, don’t have to. And then when you explain, oh, it’s because I don’t need you sick. And if you’re sick, I don’t want making everybody else sick because we’re running a business. And they look at you like, oh, that’s why you do that. And so we were open book. We taught them how to read our financial statements. We taught them how the business, how the money flows and how the teams work. And then the other half of the day, they would spend with their team learning about how the process works. And really, I’m not asking for any actual work for a couple of weeks, because it’s going to take you a couple of weeks to truly understand how we play before we throw you into the game. Now, Pish, in your book you wrote, work is war and good leaders are in the trenches. Now, I want to provide some balanced perspective to this. You enjoyed teaching people how to make video games and how to do all these different kinds of creative skills, which you turned into your business. With my company, DJ Connection, I loved DJing. I was into DJing. I would bring people with me to Shadow and to DJ. When they’d go to Shadow, they’d learn the DJ skills from me. Here I had the largest wedding entertainment company on the planet, and I’m still DJing because I loved it. Where’s the balance between still DJing, working in the trenches, or still coding, or still cold calling, or still doing whatever you have to do, and delegating? For a guy like Paul, still being a CPA versus delegating. Talk to me about getting in the trenches and that balance in this quote, work is war and good leaders are in the trenches. Well, every one of my managers was a working manager. So the person who ran the curriculum had to create a course, where everybody else may have created 12, 13 a month, they have to create one. If you were in charge of the customer success, well, you also had to take on a couple of accounts and not just manage your team. Every single manager in the organization was a working manager. They knew what they were asking of their people. I felt the same way. I will tell you, over time, over those 14 years, I just really needed to have a once a month meeting with everybody and then a once a week, one hour meeting with my team. That was how far I had gotten away from working in the business. I think it’s that transitionary process, but it really starts with the people you start to promote inside your company to make sure that they are all working managers. I think people respect those kinds of folks more because they go, oh, you’re not just telling me what to do, you’re actually helping me do it. Now, Peach, I have two final questions for you. I know Paul has one final question for you as well here. So I want to ask you about dysfunctional habits. You see a lot of business owners and now you’re doing some consulting. You’re leading an organization where you’re helping entrepreneurs get some traction. And I’m sure you’ve seen common denominators that cause dysfunctional businesses. Can you talk to us about the common denominators that you see amongst chronically dysfunctional businesses and business owners? Absolutely. So some of them are, they’re thinking small, they’re not really solving a customer problem. I think the big buzzword for 2019 that you’re gonna hear from a lot of investors is product market fit. So that’s, you know, they’re not solving the customer’s problem and they’re not focused on getting paid. So there’s this idea of, well, I just need to raise some money and I’m successful. And I think in the music world, that would be like, I got a record contract. So I’m successful. So I don’t need to make any songs or go into a studio and record or even go on tour because I got paid from my contract. And I think that that’s a mistake, right? You’ve got to solve a problem. And people don’t understand when they take on an investor, they’ve just taken on a massive customer, right? True. Because that investor has an expectation and a communication. Most people don’t need an investor. They just need to get to work solving a custom problem. Let the customer fund their business like mine. I tell listeners of this all the time, but I want to use this as an opportunity to share it again. When you take on an investor, you’re going to take on what I call the three C’s. You’re going to take on the counsel, you know, the advice of the investor. Whether you want their advice or not, if someone’s giving you a million bucks, they’re going to give you advice. You’re going to get their connections, whether you want it or not. If they’re affiliated with good people or bad people, if they have a good reputation or a bad reputation, you take that on. And then the third C is, yeah, you do get the cash. But those are the three C’s that you get with an investor. Paul, you’ve got a tough question for Mr. P. Patel. Your final question of the day, my friend. What do you got? The question is, P. C., a lot of times people see people are successful, and like Clay says, it was an overnight success that took 14 years. How did you deal? There had to be adversity in there. How did you deal with that? Who did you turn to? What was your go-to move to get back up and push forward? For me, the God sent was joining the Entrepreneurs Organization. There’s a chapter in Tulsa and one in Oklahoma City. There’s 14,000 members all over the world. Like I said, my background is a sixth grade science teacher. That’s what I’m good at. That’s what I’m trained at. To run a business, every day was new. Like I said, I was just too dumb to know. I just kept showing up, good or bad, plan, no plan. I just kept showing up. It wasn’t until I got involved with the Entrepreneurs’ Organization that I got to be around peers who some were in my situation, some were a few years behind me, but many were ahead. And so I got to see what exiting a business looked like and how to structure that deal before mine came along at an intimate level. Otherwise, I would have just been lost. How to grow the business, transfer. We went from physical CDs in the mail to 100% online. Can you imagine? We were at about $3 million in revenue. One day, we had $3 million worth of customers. The next morning, we fired all of them and said, ìOkay, now you have to buy it completely online.î But in that year we went to five. So I mean it was well worth making these transitions. Now for the listeners out there, I have purchased a copy of your book, Lead Your Tribe, Love Your Work, An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating a Culture That Matters. And it was definitely worth the read, definitely worth the money, definitely worth the investment. For the listeners out there saying, you know, Pish, you’re a well-read guy. I mean, do you have another book you’d recommend too? Do you have one more book or a couple of books that you’d recommend for all the listeners out there? Yeah, I’ve got two. One is Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last. I’m a huge fan of Simon Sinek. I’ve met him a few times, and I love the message in the book, and it resonates with my style of leadership. Okay. And for all of your Oklahoma listeners or those of your listeners who have an Oklahoma tie, I am in love with Sam Anderson’s book Boomtown, which is Oklahoma history mixed with Oklahoma City thunder, history and stories of how it all happened. And I’m listening to the audio book because I heard it was better than the print, and I’m just in love with it. I think I’ve bought 20 copies already. And you actually recommended to me the book Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, which led to me interviewing Clayton Christensen here just about a month ago. And hopefully you heard the Peach Patel shout out in that podcast. I did. It was a great interview, too. He’s just a living legend. Peach, I thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule. I know you could be doing anything right now. You could be courtside preparing yourself mentally and spiritually for the next game. You could be chasing your wife around, you could be at your winery, you could be meeting with someone about investing in their business, you could be doing a keynote speech out there, but thank you so much for investing in our listeners. My pleasure, Clay. I really appreciate what you’re doing, and as of all these years I’ve known you, I’ve always wished you nothing but the best of success. Hey, well thank you and have a great day, my friend. Thanks, Clay. Thanks, Paul. Now it’s time to take some action. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest, how highly would you rate your culture? I would encourage you to write down that number today. Again on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the highest and one being the lowest, how highly would you rate the culture in your business? How could you improve the onboarding of the employees within your business? What would be a better way for you to show your employees the path to their career success within your company? And how can you truly mentor each person more effectively? And we like to end each and every show with a boom. So without any further ado, here we go. Three, two, one, boom. Oh, yeah, the incredible Bronson Schuber. Bronson, I was hoping that you might be able to walk us through some of the big successes, the big wins that you’ve been having since coming to the conference, implementing the system, getting going with our coaching program. Walk us through the different wins that you are having, my man. Well, we’re having some good wins. So year to date, our month of January was our best month of being five years in business. Out of five Januaries, it was the best month we’ve ever had. So that part is a huge win. We’ve written pretty much exactly twice the amount of colors we wrote last January. That is a huge win. Our office has got really good momentum going right now, positive atmosphere. You know, people are having fun. You know, we’re making sales and high-fiving one another, you know, hitting the gong, celebrating, just a lot of fun environment I guess to be in. And you know when you’re winning it’s just a lot more fun. Absolutely. And you came to the conference a couple months ago. And how long have you been doing coaching and what have we implemented thus far as far as the coaching program has gone? I guess we’ve been doing coaching now, I should say. And that’s kind of the main thing, I guess, that we’ve implemented so far. And, you know, it’s been going really well. It also has its challenges, I guess, with some tenured people and getting everybody on board, but I would say, you know, having that in place allows my new people, you know, to get up to speed faster. And, you know, just yesterday I had a new guy that has never even used the script in real life before and only role-played it twice, you know, go through it and have one of the best conversations with a person that I’ve heard in, I don’t know, months here. What are a couple, just back on your team that have been using the script, what are some of the things that you’ve seen change since having started using the script? With the script that you and I created, Marshall, it’s really designed to, I guess, let the customer talk more than us in the beginning of the conversation and really kind of pull out of the customer you know things that we need to know in order to build a relationship and build trust and And really find out you know how we can help them and so for my sales team It’s just it’s given them some more confidence And they’re coming back and be like man that you know when I asked this question Yeah, they just they just started talking and they just went on ranting about things. Where in the past we probably would have just blew on by and got through the cold as quick as possible and fight at the end to make the sale, now in the beginning it’s just a more enjoyable conversation so my team is having more fun closing business than they had. How has the coaching program rolling out these different systems changed your business overall. You’re obviously having success on the sales side, having systems. Getting going, I know that insurance, real estate, there’s a lot of different coaches out there and a lot of different resources that you can take advantage of. Why is getting started with the Thrive Coaching Program been a good fit for you moving forward in terms of what you’ve seen, conferences that you’ve been out to in the past, coaching programs and mentorship that you’ve had in the past. Why has this been a good fit for you? I feel like it’s been a good fit for me because you guys are successful, right? You’re successful, Marshall. Clay’s successful. You know, there’s lots of business coaches out there. I know some personally. But I’m a big believer in learning from people. I want to learn from people that are better than me, right, or that have had bigger success than me. And there’s a lot of business coaches out there that have never even been successful, which just blows my mind. And people pay them money for advice, and I’m just like, that makes no sense. And it’s been great for me to be involved and have that to talk to you. Because also as a business owner, when you are successful, and we’ve been successful, we’ve been some of the top in the country for our industry, but when you get to there, it’s hard to find other people at your level or higher that you can have good conversations with, you know, brainstorm ideas and implement new systems, and you guys have been a great resource for me on that. Yeah, just to brag on you a little bit, you’re not just a guy getting started in insurance. You’ve been doing it for five years. You’ve built one of the top agencies in your territory. You’re doing exceptionally well. Brag on yourself and who you are a little bit and how long you’ve been doing this. Yeah, I’ve owned my own agency. We’re in our fifth year of business. We’ve been awarded several awards with State Farm. We’ve been in the top 50 in the United States of 19,000 State Farm agents. We did that in our fourth year. We’ve won other awards with the company. We’re one of the fastest growing agencies around. We’ve had a lot of success. but I’m, you know, and I’m a big believer in, you know, I just want to keep getting better and better, and even though we’ve had that success, you know, I still reach out to you guys and ask you guys to start coaching me. You know, I haven’t had a coach the whole time, you know, and so where a lot of my peers can, you know, they’re kind of on the downward slope and, you know, don’t have coaching and, you know, they don’t show up to win every day. And now we’re kind of pouring gas on the fire, so to speak. We’ve got a good, great foundation going, and now we’re just trying to, I guess you would say, just blow the roof off this thing. The secret path to the bottom is called just enough, and you are not satisfied with just enough. No, never. For somebody that’s thinking about doing it, they’re on the fence. Maybe they’ve come to a conference, but they don’t know whether or not to start coaching. They’re like, are these guys for real? Or should I do this? Or what advice would you give to somebody who’s on the fence? I’d say if you’re on the fence, I would say just to do it. What I like about you guys as a coaching program is there’s no risk involved to do it. You’re not asking people to sign up for a one-year contract deal. It’s a working relationship. It’s got to work well for me. It’s got to work well for you. And that’s what I like about it. It’s money well spent. You might feel like it’s a big investment. It is a big investment. You can’t deny that. But the ROI on it is well, well worth it. I mean, you spend, and I know for me, I’ve spent way more money than that on bad employees, bad marketing, all sorts of things that I can’t ever even get back and didn’t get anything out of. So I’d say just do it. It’s a no-brainer. Bam. Bronson, you’re the man. Andrew, you see this on a daily basis, but we can only accommodate 160 clients. Right. Can you explain the team that we have and the kinds of people we have working for us in terms of their positions? We have graphic designers, videographers. Kind of explain the office and the team we have supporting our coaches. So the team that we have is a really solid team of diligent doers. We have web developers. We’ve got graphic designers. We’ve got people who do videography, who do photography. All those people are executing the action items that our clients need to get done. So it’s like when the coaching session is over, the client leaves with action items, our team leaves with action items, and then we both set deadlines on it. We agree to get it done. How old are you right now, Andrew? I am 20 years old at last count. Has it been shocking to you how fast a company can grow when they diligently implement the systems? It is incredibly shocking, considering I’ve seen other companies fail, it’s incredible how fast you can grow if you actually do implement systems. And has it also been shocking to you, people that want to pay a fee but then actually won’t come to a weekly meeting? Right. Which is why our coaching program is week to week, it’s month to month, it’s a thing where I, if you reach out today and want to schedule a 13 point assessment, you’re going to have an assessment with one of our coaches, sometimes even me, and we’re going to decide if we think you’re a right fit for the program. As long as you can commit to getting to the one hour meeting we have per week over the phone or in person and being mentally present during that meeting and executing the action items that you get assigned, you’re going to have a lot of success. But if you just want to learn a bunch of things, kind of like watching TED Talks where you get some good ideas but you don’t implement them or you want to just go to a seminar but you don’t implement it, then we’re really not the right program for you. The reason why we can only handle 160 clients with no real goal on growing is because we have to hire a back-end team to support everybody. We have full-time employees in the office that implement. The idea is if you’re a business owner out there, you don’t have to go hire a full-time graphic designer, photographer, videographer. It’s like business coaching and consulting but with the back-end support to help you actually implement what you are learning. But if you’re out there today and you want to take your business to the next level, I would encourage you to take an action step today and to schedule your attendance at our next in-person Thrive Time Show workshop. We’re having one here. I’m not sure when you’re going to hear this podcast, but we’re having one here in two days, so it might be a little bit late for that one. But if you go to thrivetimeshow.com and you click on the conferences button, you’re going to learn all about the in-person workshops right there. I promise you that the only reason we’re doing this is we want to mentor millions. We want to help you become successful. I’m 38 years old now. I have time freedom. When my dad was 38, 37, 36, 35, here we have a man who was a high school valedictorian from Waco High School in 1971. He was the valedictorian, top of his class, Waco High School, 1971. He was near top of his class when he graduated from Oral Roberts University, a private university. And if you take my dad when he’s 37 and me versus 37, it’s night and day in terms of the business success that I’ve been able to experience, not because I have chosen to learn from mentors and not mistakes when possible. So we’ve distilled all of the things I’ve learned over the years, all the systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used to build 13 multi-million dollar companies. And we’ve distilled it all, we’ve put it all into a book called the Boom Book. And that Boom Book is what we teach at our in-person workshops. And if you want a bigger version, the really like the text book for the Thrive Time Show coaching program. That book is called Start Here. We want to help you, but we can’t help you if we don’t get a chance to know you. Book your tickets today. Now, Andrew, without any further ado, we’d like to end every show with a boom, which stands for big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. That’s big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum. And now, without any further ado, here we go. Three, two, one, boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! I’m doing great, Clay. Thanks for having me. So, I have to ask you here, do you have a recent success story of a business owner that you’ve been able to help to save some money? I do. I have one from yesterday. I have one from yesterday. It’s a freight company. So, they do a lot of shipping and things like that, but we’re going to save them about $1,500 a month in their credit card processing. Operationally, everything’s going to stay the same. For them, it was more about, they’ve got a lot of large tickets. So we’re going to be able to implement level three credit card processing, which is just a discount that the card brands give for transactions that are over $10,000. We’re going to help them implement that and they are going to save, you know, a little over $1,500 a month. Now what I find is whenever I tell people about you and you talk to them, I hear virtually every time. People say, Clay, I have not compared rates in years and I didn’t realize how much money I was wasting. Can you talk to us, when you meet with a new customer for the first time, how often is it that the entrepreneur is such a busy person that they haven’t really compared credit card rates in maybe years? It’s the norm. I mean, very rarely do we meet with someone that really knows exactly what they’re paying. I mean, most people know what the effective rate is. They’re all in effective rate, but they don’t really understand what the fees are that kind of build into that in the entire process. And so it’s our job to come alongside them and not only help lower those rates and fees, but also educate them so that when someone else comes in and tells them the same thing, they’ve got an idea of, hey, here’s what we’re paying, here’s why we pay this, here’s why we use IPS. You know, we come alongside them and really educate them. How much time does it take for somebody to compare rates with you, to figure out whether they can save some money or not? About a five or 10 minute phone conversation. So let’s walk through the process. If somebody goes to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card, thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card, they fill out the form, what happens next? Yeah, so I get an email, somebody here at the IPS team will reach out to them, you know, we’ll let them know, you know, kind of who we are, what we do, I’m sure they’ve, you know, they’ve already figured kind of that out. And then from there, we just go down the list of like what they do operationally, how they process those credit cards, if there’s anything that’s a pain point for them, if there’s anything they wish they could do. And then we really get into the rates and the fees and we provide them with a detailed comparison. It sounds easy, yet I know somebody’s listening to this show right now and they’re thinking, I don’t want to waste my time. I don’t want to fill out a form and have a whole sales team calling me all day, every day. I don’t want to be high pressured. I don’t want to be upsold. I don’t want to be screwed. And I’ll just say this, I’ve worked with you for years. For years I’ve worked with you guys to handle my payment processing. And your program, though, continues to be month to month. Talk to us about the month to month nature of what you do. Why do you insist and consistently do a month to month offer for all of your clients? Yeah, because we want to be proving ourselves every month. We don’t want to sign someone to a long-term contract, and then if we’re not upholding what we said we were going to do, you know, then they’re stuck with us. So we do it month to month and we prove to them every single month who we are and, you know, and why they’re doing business with us. And to go back to your other question that you asked during that, you know, we don’t do, you know, pressure sales. So when we talk to a person and we provide them a comparison, we’re not going to be calling them every single day, hey, you need to move forward, hey, you need to move forward. Yes, we’ll follow up and we’ll see where things are going, but we’re going to provide them with all the data, everything that they need to make the decision. And then ultimately at that point, it’s their decision. If they want to move forward and do business with us, great. If not, they have a comparison saved to be able to see what’s out there in the future. So for anybody out there who’s watching the show right now in closing, I encourage everybody to go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card, thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card to learn more about integrated payment services. I’ll give you the final word. What do you want to say to all the listeners out there that are eagerly taking notes there, sir? Yeah, I mean, we’re saving customers on average $300 a month. So, I mean, give us a call, let us take a look. Like I said, I mean, worst case scenario, right? You know, you take that comparison and then you just, you keep it in case you want to make a change, but you know, five or 10 minutes to maybe save $4,000 a year, that to me is a pretty easy, pretty easy thing to do. It’s a no brainer and I really do appreciate you carving out time for us, Tyler, and we’ll talk to you. Always. Thank you. I had on my original website, I had maybe one or two testimonial videos, but with your suggestion, we’ve got dozens and dozens on there now, and that just shows credibility of all the great things that we’ve done. Not to boast my, toot my own horn and all that. But we are the number one college planner in Arizona, if not the West Coast. And that’s all due through the search engine optimization, the ad role and the video proof, all of those things are instrumental in helping our growth double and even triple. This last month, we’ve had the most incredible month that we’ve had, and that was August. And now September 2024, we’re on track to doing the same revenue that we did last month, but probably even more than August. And that just trend seems to continue. Well, folks, on today’s show, we’re interviewing somebody who provides a solution that I believe most of the people watching this show, you’ll probably need at some point. This guy helps kids to earn more scholarship money. He also happens to be a long-time client. J.D., welcome on to the Thronic Time Show. How are you, sir? I am doing fantastic, Mr. Clay. How are you? Well, I’m excited to have you on the show, and I’ve got a plethora of questions for you. First off, how do we properly pronounce your last name? Wysolik. J-D Wysolik. How do you spell that for people out there? We got a lot of academics watching this show, and they’re right now going, I don’t know how to spell that. Every other letter is silent. So it’s W-Y-C as in cat, Z as in zebra, A-L-E-K. Wysolik. Sounds just like a spell. Now how did you originally hear about us there, sir? I went to one of your Awakening tours in Phoenix, Arizona. And I’m like, ah, kind of like, you know, what intrigued me was General Flynn and Eric Trump and some of the other guest speakers that you had there. And then, like any stalker, I just started looking you up and found out you do all this other stuff on the side. You know what’s interesting is that, you know, whenever we do podcasts and broadcasts, I put these podcasts and broadcasts out to kind of like messages in a bottle to help people. And I never know who we’re going to help. And on part two of today’s show, we have a listener that claims he’s listened to our show for nine years before he reached out and asked for help. Now, we’ve helped him triple the size of his business in 12 months, but he had been listening for nine years. And so I was just curious, what was kind of your tipping point where you thought, you know what, I started the business in August of 2007 and when I launched the business I had several coaches that helped me out with that. And eventually I just kind of grew out of their need and probably in the last two or three years I started figuring out, you know what, I probably need to get some additional coaching from some other different angle. And that’s how I kind of stumbled on you. I did some research on what you did and attended one of your business conferences and decided, you know what, this is the right move. And I started, well, probably about a year or so ago. Now from a growth perspective, one of the things that I’ve been tracking on your particular, I call it a file or account or project or your business, is you guys have azcollegeplanning.com, azcollegeplanning.com. You have a lot of value that you offer that was kind of hidden a little bit. You know, it’s like a lot of value and it makes a lot of sense to hire you if people get it. But if they don’t get it, it makes zero sense to hire you. So could you talk about some of the things that we’ve been able to work with you on to get that value more top of mind for your potential ideal and likely buyers? Yeah, well, if you’re interested in learning how to not go broke paying for college, then then go to azcollegeplan.com and fill out one of the contact forms and I’ll reach out to you and schedule a consultation and see how we can help you. And what I figured out, I’m getting back to you in a roundabout way. What I figured out is that if there’s an upward trend in any category that’s ranked, in the ranking system, the ranking system is extremely important to colleges. And you’ve probably seen a dozen different publications. This college is ranked number one in this category. This college is ranked number 12 in this category, et cetera. If there’s any category that has an upward trend in the ranking system, that attracts attention. And more attention means more application and more application fees. So one of the things that we do is we show students and parents how to properly market themselves to the colleges so that college says, yes, we need you, we want you. And that’s kind of what you’re doing in a business sense is showing businesses how to properly market themselves to gain clients and customers. And one of the areas that really helped is I had always been using scripts and with you and your team, we’ve recrafted the scripts to be even more powerful. And from that, we also did some optimization on the website and now I’m getting at least three or four leads every week, which is great because, yeah, it’s just great. Now I’m pulling this up because I want people to look at your website. One of the things about a website, if you own a business, I want you to think about this. It has a purpose. What’s the function of it? Let’s do an example. Let me throw an extreme example, a teaching moment for somebody out there. Paul Graham. Paul Graham is a person that nobody really knows about, hardly, but he’s one of the most successful people on the planet. You say, who? Paul Graham. Somebody out there right now, you’re watching this, you’re going, who is that? This is the guy credited to being like, as being one of the founders of the online shopping cart. Okay, so it was his idea, ViaWeb, which was sold to Yahoo store and became the first online shopping platform. It is he who started Airbnb, Dropbox, Reddit. He’s now credited, this is Paul Graham, someone says, who is this guy? Paul Graham, with having the most number of successful startups known to man, 1300 of them, including Stripe. What? Yes, I mean, this guy, including Reddit, including, who? Paul Graham. You say, well, what’s his website? Look at his website. This is his website. People say, why won’t he update his website? Who built that website? What’s wrong with this guy? Who built this website? And he’s explained this during multiple interviews that his website does not exist for me or for anybody out there that thinks he should update it. It exists for Paul Graham. And Paul Graham made his website so he could write his essays. So you go to the website, everything he knows, he writes it out in an essay form and he puts it on the internet and he sees no need in updating it. This is the same guy, folks, who’s behind Airbnb. Look at Airbnb. It looks like a beautiful website, state-of-the-art website, Airbnb. Wow, an incredible website. Look at Airbnb. Dropbox. Someone says Dropbox. Look at Dropbox. Look at Airbnb. These are sites. Sorry, it’s loading slow here, folks. Dropbox, Reddit, these are big companies, huge companies, and these companies have beautiful sites. I’m not sure why this is loading slow here, but he doesn’t feel the need to update his own website. And someone says, well, why not? Because he understands the function of his website. And the function of his website is so that he can write essays for his own personal use. And I just want to get your thoughts on this for a second. Your website exists to generate leads. Somebody out there who’s trying to pay for their kids’ college without going broke, that’s what you do. And so we wanted to pack your website with value so that more and more people would reach out to you, not just visit the site, but that people would actually fill out the form. And I think I heard you say you’re having between two and four leads a week now from Google. Can you talk about some of the things that we’ve helped you to do that have helped to increase the lead volume on your website? Besides the search optimization, you and your team rebuilt the entire website. I think my original website looked a little bit like Paul Graham’s. It was dated from 2007. So thank you for doing that and the graphics just all pop and all that stuff. The search optimization is really one of the big tickets there. And then also AdRoll. AdRoll was huge by adding that in there. I didn’t have that in my previous website. So I’m getting a lot more clickbacks because of AdRoll. Now AdRoll is a tool that follows people around on the Internet. So if you’re watching this show and you have a kid, you want your kid to go to college, you go to the website azcollegeplanning.com and then AdRoll, the ads keep following people around. So when they go to different websites, they keep seeing advertisements from your business. That’s a powerful tool. Also on your website, we wanted to make sure we gathered objective reviews from real customers. You have real customers that like you, we want to gather those objective reviews, put those front and center. Also you offer a free consultation and a free workshop, which is powerful for people that are thinking about hiring you. Very few people in your space offer a free consultation or a free workshop, and you do. And making that button, those buttons prominent there, the red buttons on the site, talk to us about that. When people reach out to you now, how often is it just, is somebody reaching out to you because they’re wanting the free consultation or because they want the free workshop? I mean, how often is that the no-brainer that pulls people in? That’s 95% of the time. Anyone who is reaching out to me who is a prospect, they’re either asking for information about the free workshops that I host, and those free workshops are typically held at least once a month. They’re also asking about the free consultation. And in the free consultation, we talk about their specific needs and come up with a plan on how to save them tens of thousands of dollars off the cost of college. If we look at in-state costs, we’re looking at about $35,000 a year. If we’re looking at private colleges, we’re looking at like $90,000 a year. And what my goal is, is to help these students get into some really great colleges and get some amazing scholarship packages at colleges that they want to attend and make it less expensive for them to go to an out-of-state private college than it would be for them to go to an in-state college. And that’s all done through azcollegeplan.com. You know, one thing, again, that we helped you do that I’m going to pull, I’ve got some notes here of some stuff is you had so many success stories. There’s so many people that you have worked with over the years to help them. And you know, when I remember doing our 13 point assessment with you, I could immediately visualize the success we were going to have because you weren’t a charlatan and you actually offer people real results. And so I was thinking to myself, we’ve got to get these testimonials and these success stories documented on the website. We’ve got to create success posters and video testimonials. And we have to gather real proof from real clients about the real results that you really did generate. And I say the word real a lot because there’s in a world of shamockery and a world of bogusness and a world of jackassery, there’s a lot of people that have bogus offers, bogus claims, bogus solutions, just bogusness. But you have so many success stories. Can you talk to us about how adding those success stories to the site has helped you to increase your growth and the amount of success that you’ve been able to have as a business? Those are all real videos. And it was very simple to ask, can you make a one-minute video on how we helped you? And 100% of them all said, yes, I would love to do that. And 100% of them have all sent me referrals. So we’re doing some really great things for those families and we want to do some really great things for your families as well. That was all done through your suggestion I had on my original website. I had maybe one or two testimonial videos but with with your suggestion we’ve got dozens and dozens on there now and that just shows credibility of all the great things that we’ve done not to boast my My toot my own horn and all that but we are the number one college planner in, Arizona if not the West Coast. And that’s all due through the search engine optimization, the ad role, and the video proof. All of those things are instrumental in helping our growth double and even triple. This last month, we’ve had the most incredible month that we’ve had, and that was August. And now September, 2024, we’re on track to doing the same revenue that we did last month, but probably even more than August. And that just trend seems to continue. So if you had to describe in kind of two sentences or less the impact that having somebody coach you down a proven path has made on your business, how would you maybe describe that? I would describe that as freedom and income. So what do you say to somebody who’s, you know, I offer free consultations as well as you, so what do you say to somebody who’s, you know, they’re going to Thrivetimeshow.com and they’re going, well, you know, do I schedule a free consultation? Because most people, they go to the testimonials button and they look at thousands of testimonials, which I’ve gathered methodically since 2005. So they look at it and they go, wow, you guys have so many success stories. OK, but what would you say to somebody who’s on the fence about scheduling a free 13 point consultation with myself? That’s where I started. Was I scheduled that 13 point consultation because I wanted to know more, and if you want to know more, the only way to know more is by scheduling that consultation. And as I learned more about you from that consultation, as I learned more about you by checking out all the different things that you’ve done online and watching some of the other video testimonials that you have on your website, I’m like, yeah, this is a positive move. And from there, I decided to jump on board, and it’s been a great thing. So let’s talk about your business for a second. Final question I have here for you. You know, people out there are busy listeners. I don’t want to waste anybody’s time and I don’t want to waste your time. So for somebody who goes to azcollegeplanning.com, kind of explain to us how your business model works and, you know, how you make money. When people go to azcollegeplanning.com, you know, how do you make money? How does the customer win? Just kind of explain to us the win-win so people can at least conceptually understand what you do for people. So in the free consultation, and please go to the website azcollegeplanning.com, click on the contact form there, and I will reach out to you to schedule that free consultation. In that free consultation, I’m going to ask you and your students some questions. And then from there, we’re going to come up with a game plan and when I did talk with you about the free consultation, I will be very, very frank with you and say, yes, I can help you or no, I can’t help you. If I cannot help you, I’ll point you in the right direction and say, this is what you need to do, go and do these things. If I say, yes, I can help you, I already know that if your student follows my proven plan and proven path, I’ve got a roadmap. Follow this roadmap. And if your student does that, your student is going to receive at least $35,000 in scholarships. And it could be as much as $280,000 in scholarships. Wow. And again, folks, that’s azcollegeplanning.com. azcollegeplanning.com. J.D., I really appreciate you joining us, sharing with us about your business, clarifying how to pronounce and spell your name. Thank you so much, sir, and we’ll talk to you soon. Thank you, Clay. Bye-bye. JT, do you know what time it is? 410. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Roseland, baby. Tim TiVo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the two-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 two-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 You know over the years we’ve had the opportunity to feature Michael Levine the the 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 gonna 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 have 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 have 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? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the Request Tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it. And I 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 thrive timeshow.com you might say well who’s speaking we already covered that you might say where is it gonna be it’s gonna be in Tulsa Jerusalem Oklahoma Tulsa Jerusalem it’s I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa Jerusalem sort of like the Jerusalem of America but if you go to 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! I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at ThriveTimeShow.com and again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford and we do have some select VIP tickets which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things and those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russell, and 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 do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever, and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person two-day interactive business workshop, all you got to do is go to ThriveTimeShow.com to request those tickets and if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy, at King’s Point in New York, acta non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Harvard Keosak University Radio Show. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re close, but they’re completely different worlds. And of a special guest today, a 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. 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. He said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? I said, no. 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, but I just want to tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. 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.