Donald J. Trump & Robert Kiyosaki | The Art of the Deal & How to Achieve Massive Success + An Interview With Sam Walton’s Right-Hand Man, Tommy Smith + Join Eric Trump & Kiyosaki At March 6-7 Workshop

Audio Transcription

Well, I wrote a book in the late 80s called The Art of the Deal, and to this day, it’s the biggest selling business book ever written. And it doesn’t change. I mean, the times have changed, the world has changed, business has changed, but it doesn’t change. And to a certain extent, it was about negotiation. And a lot of negotiation is about honesty. Be honest, because the other side, you’re dealing with intelligent people, they’re going to see it. But have an idea, make sure

it’s the right idea, and never, ever quit or give up on it. And be straight, be honest, because you’re going to meet a lot of these people all throughout your life. And if they respect you, and if they do more or less what you want them to do, you’re going to have to show that great degree of honesty. So the Art of the Deal was a great honor for me because of its wonderful success. I remember when it first came out, it went immediately to number one on every list.

And it was a lot of fun. But it hasn’t changed very much, and it probably won’t. If we go 1,000 years into the future, if we’re here in the sense of nuclear weapons and all the kind of things that are being bandied about today, that’s the big risk. I mean, beyond what Robert and I talk about is the big risk of is this world of ours going to be blown up by some maniac or some idiot that doesn’t know what they’re

doing. But let’s try and assume, which is a pretty big assumption that we are all going as a race. We’re going to be around. We’re going to be here. The human race. It won’t change. Negotiation will never change. It’s always going to be the art of the deal. It’s always going to be you to pick up that

book in a thousand years. It’s not going to change. It’s going to be the same.

And if I could say, you know, like what was 80 1986 started a deal came out and I ran out and we bought your book and I said, wow. That’s why it was such an honor to come and talk to you and all this. Because that book really straightened me out when I was so down. The art of the deal says I can still think bigger. It doesn’t cost any money to think bigger. And so that was, it is what you say, a very powerful book. I just love the story of the woman rink.

And Kim loves the story of Norma. You know, Norma became a star after that. But it is a very powerful book. And it’s more than just negotiation. It’s how you think. It’s how you approach your problems.

It’s how you elevate yourself. So I personally thank you for that book because, like I said, it pulled us out of our little funk we were in.

Well, you know this, it’s a great honor when you have a book that goes to number one on the Times list and every list. And not too many people can say that. Many brilliant people write books and many people write books,

but not too many people can talk about being number one. And it really is, it’s a great, it really feels to me as a great honor to have had numerous number one bestsellers, but in particular, the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the

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the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the art of the And we both love real estate.

But you have big buildings and I have small buildings. But the thing we got together as teachers, and I think that’s why you write your book, is to share what you know and to give to more people knowledge. That’s why financial education is so important because, as you know, money doesn’t solve the problem a lot of the times. A lot of times you give a person money, you feed a fit man for a day, but if you teach

them they go on forever. That’s why books are so powerful, is because people learn, they can share, you can share your knowledge and they can come up. I think your best book, though, of all was The Art of the Comeback.

And I love that book because I think that’s the book today, given the state of the world economy, is we gotta come back. And if we all give up, if the world gives up, we don’t come back. And I think that’s the greatest lesson we, I think you imparted was can you come back?

Do you have the strength to stand back up dust yourself off and step forward again?

Well, the word you use strength is very important. You have to have that strength and I don’t know if that’s God-given I don’t know if it’s something you’re just born with or you develop it and Frankly, it’d be wonderful if you could develop it But I’m not so sure you can But you need strength and I had a great time writing the art of the comeback because I knew I was doing well but a lot of people didn’t think so.

And I knew what was happening so I’m writing a book and I know things that nobody else knew and when I did come back much bigger and better than ever before in the 80s, I mean to a point where many times it was like fun for me. So I had a great time writing that book. It’s interesting when I make speeches, you talk about education and life and everything else, but when I make speeches, people say, why do you do it? Thousands and thousands, you’ve seen it, thousands of people show up.

We’ve had 55, 60,000 people show up. And I really do it because I love education. And I have learned a lot, both good and bad. And if I can impart that to a lot of people sitting before me so that their lives could be made easier and they can have just a better life and you know it sounds terrible say make more money but making more money makes your life easier. You don’t have to worry so much about education and doctor’s bills and so it does make your life better. You see the number one course reason for divorce is lack of money. Right. Which was surprising I saw it the other day.

There are many more people getting divorced today because they have financial trouble than two or three years ago which is amazing to me. I never thought in terms of money and divorce. But making money sounds basic and sounds almost crude, how to make money.

But if we can help you in the making of some money, it’s going to give you a better life.

I think the most important thing that you pass on and I want to pass on is the spirit to go on, the spirit to stay strong. I was remembering this book about the Jewish people. They’ve survived 4,000 years. What kept them going was faith. All the persecution, the things that were wrong, they said the number one thing they had was that faith.

It was a personal belief that they could be flexible enough and adjust and keep going no matter what. I think that’s what you pass on, that’s what I want to pass on to people. I can remember from your book, it said, stay alive until 95. That’s a good one.

That’s true.

It’s a great statement.

Right. And that kept, I know it kept me going. It just kept me going because it wasn’t an immediate comeback. When I lost everything, it was six years for me. It was only a million dollars. I know that sounds pathetic.

I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s, I know your story very well and I think it’s a fabulous story. Well. Thank you

But it was it was worth everything it was worth fighting back paying off my bills and Coming out stronger on the other side You could be anywhere doing a lot of different things, but you chose to be here

and You chose to go somewhere you said man I can go and I can get better I can go and I can learn I can go and I can maybe go from where I’m at to where I want to go But one of the most important things that you will ever do or not do in your life is to value and seek wise

Counsel to be coached hard means you have to be willing to be uncomfortable

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show But this show does in a world filled with endless opportunities. Why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time show starring the former US Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zillner.

Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses.

We started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here Started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom, now we here

We started from the bottom, and now we’re at the top Teaching you the systems to get what we got Colton Dixon’s on the hooks, I break down the books He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks As a father of five, that’s why I’m alive So if you see my wife in camps, please tell her hi

It’s the C-N-T up on your radio.

And now, 3, 2, 1, here we go.

We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and 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.

On today’s show, we have an exclusive opportunity to interview Sam Walton’s right hand man, Tommy Smith.

First of all, his desk was wobbly. It had a cylinder block on one corner of it. It was press wood. It was like desks you buy at these cheap office furniture stores today. That’s kind of what his desk was. And then his couch, the couch in front of his desk was an old vinyl couch.

Tommy Smith shares with us about the character, the drive, the intentionality, and the management style that allowed Sam Walton to build America’s largest big-box retail store. Sam Walton was famous for flying his own private plane from point A to point B as opposed to flying commercial and the man who rode with him on those flights was none other than Mr. Tommy Smith, today’s guest.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thriving Times Show.

Now, three, two, one, here we go!

♪ Started from the bottom, now we’re here ♪ ♪ Started from the bottom, let me show you how to get here ♪ ♪ Started from the bottom, now we’re here ♪

Yes, yes, yes, and yes! Welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download.

Dr. Z, I want to ask you a question, and I don’t want you to play the game with me. I want you to be direct with me.

Well, I’m going to give you an answer. If you ask me a question, I’m going to give you an answer. the hot question number one. Have you ever been to a Walmart? Yes. Okay. Wes Carter. No BS. Let’s not pump up our guests too much here. Have you ever heard of the company Walmart? I’ve heard of it. Okay. Well, on today’s show, we have the guy that got who helped you create the Walmart super center concept. This man worked directly with Sam Walton for nearly

nearly 20 years and Tom Smith, I am so honored to have you on the show. How are you, sir?

Hey guys, I’m doing great.

Good to be here. Appreciate you all having me and look forward to discussing the journey we have.

Well, I want to ask you, I’m just going to start at the bottom and at the beginning. I’ve read Sam Walton’s book called Made in America. As my wife can attest, one of the few books I’ve ever read that when I got to the end of the book, I cried like I was at a funeral. That book is just so good. When did you join Walmart and what was your role when you first joined Walmart?

I joined Walmart, I guess, in the fall of 19, I think it was 1980. And I was hired by a guy named Jay Parker, and he hired me on a management training program, I guess, in the summer, fall of 1980. And my first job was I went to a store, Store 280 in Jasper, Alabama. The store was not open yet. It was a dirt parking lot that had the roof partially on, but we were unloading freight.

You have to understand the Walmart story is you did whatever it took. It didn’t matter if you were the store manager, the vice president, or the stockman, you clean toilets, you did whatever needs to be done. But I was unloading trucks, unloaded trucks from, I guess, daylight to dark and put merchandise up, but my first paycheck, my job was to answer your question, I was a management trainee.

And that was a, you can take a, at Walmart, you can take a title and a quarter and buy yourself a cup of coffee. My first paycheck stub for two weeks was $115 for two weeks.

You’re just bragging now.

That was a lot of money to me.

Tom, I want to give the listeners some context who are perhaps not as aware of the Walmart story as you are or As I am as a result to the research here Walmart today has approximately 11,000 690 plus stores I say approximately they’re always building something. They’re always optimizing stores and in Walmart was started in

1962 by Sam Walton and his brother Bud Walton. What was your, when did you first interact with these guys? Because you were joining Walmart with store 280, and the company now has 11,695 stores. So that was kind of early on. I mean, what kind of access did you have with Sam,

and how did you first meet him?

We actually had, when I went to store 287 in Jasper, Alabama, there was, we had, I think there were 216 stores in the company that were actually open. We had 216 stores when I joined, and I first met Sam Walton at Store 287, Jasper. Sam traveled, Sam was his own pilot. He flew us everywhere, and he and I have been together in that plane for many, many hours. But Sam flew himself everywhere.

We had grand opening day. We always open stores on Tuesday. And so the store manager was Don Getz, lovely friend of mine. Steve, keep in touch with him today. But the store manager and assistant managers, they had heard that Mr. Sam was coming.

You never knew where Sam was. Sam would fly in unannounced, borrow your plane at the airport, at the FBO, and drive in and surprise the store. He never wanted anybody to know where he was. But we knew where he was that day, Grand Opening Day, store 287 Jasper.

And old Roy was alive. Sam had been quail hunting. He was a huge quail hunter. Well, he and Jack Shoemaker, Jack was the president of the company at the time. We called him the Big Shoe,

because he would come down on you with a big boot and he would fire you or set you straight with the boot. So, I remember, and I was a trainee so I wasn’t invited to be with the group, so I wanted to meet this man named Sam Walton. We only had, like I said, 215, 216 stores. So I remember them saying, here comes Mr. Walton.

Well nobody in the store had met him because it was brand new. The store was brand new so he comes walking in and Old Roy was with him. Old Roy’s dog food in the store was named Old Roy. That was actually a real dog. Old Roy was a long-haired corner and one of Sam’s quail dogs, his best quail dog, and I’ve hunted behind Old Roy.

Well, Old Roy was with Sam and Jack, and they came walking up through the parking lot. And Old Roy comes in the door, and Sam stops and shakes all the management hands. Well, the very first counter in the store was a Brock, B-R-O-C-K, Brock candy counter, and old Roy walks right there, hikes his leg and pees on the counter. I swear to God, so this yellow dog pee’s

all over the candy and running on the floor, and I reach back behind the counter to service desk and grab a roll of paper towel, and I’m wadding this big roll of brown paper towel up, and I’m putting my hand on the floor to wipe up the dog pee,

and this big, huge hand goes right on top of my hand. I look up and there’s Mr. Sam on one knee. He said, son, I’ll get that. And so I shook Sam Walton’s hand, but he had dog pee on his hand and I had dog pee on my hand and we shook hands and that’s the day that I met Sam was the grand opening date of store 287 in Jasper, Alabama.

287 in Jasper, Alabama.

You said something that I think the listeners could easily miss if we don’t spend the time to dive on this, a deep dive on this. That Sam had big hands? Well, one, I think we could deep dive on the fact that they shook hands for the first time while covered in dog hair.

Well, he said it was a big hand.

It was a big hand.

Sam was a, yeah, not many people know this, but Sam was a quarterback at the University of Missouri.

Well, there you go.

See?

So he was a leader. He’s always been a leader. He was a quarterback of a football team and he had big, big hands. You never wanted to hear those hands wrap the table or hit the table because you knew when those hands hit the table that he meant business. But yeah, he had big hands, he really did.

Now Sam Walton in his book, Made in America, it’s discussed that he believes one of his competitive advantages was that he literally could fly his own plane. And he would do it. And he said he would fly out over to the edge of a city, and he’d look out the window, and look at where the edge of the development was,

and he’s like, well, that’s where we probably need

to put another store right here. Yeah, and where it was growing to.

So he flew his own plane. This is not a, something we could just skip over here. And you’ve flown with Sam in his plane. How many times do you think that you and Sam flew together? And do you have a favorite story, a favorite trip that you went on where you thought,

wow, that was a trip? We flew together umpteen times. I don’t know, I can’t give you a number. Probably 70, 80, 100 times. But Sam always flew with us. He wouldn’t fly on a plane that the pilots, our hired pilots flew. He flew with us on a plane. The call number of his plane was 313J, a 313Juyet. It was a twin engine, Degas Cessna 318. And so he flew his own plane. We put a hush kits on it for his Christmas present one year and he got mad at us because we spent too much money. But, and he would take all of

the seats out of the plane. It was like a six seater, maybe eight passenger. He took on during quail season, he’d take all the seats out of the plane and put dog boxes in there so he could haul old Roy and Katie and Molly and he’d haul all the bird dogs back and forth down to Fowl Furious to go quail hunting. And he didn’t believe in having a plane detailed like you clean your car, that plane stayed full of dog hair for 12 months. But I flew with Sam just numerous, numerous times. Sam was a, the airplane

was one of his many competitive advantages. You never knew where he was. Not many people knew this about Sam, but Sam, he may have had an instrument rating, but he didn’t know how to use the instruments. Sam followed highways. He would take a highway map.

I’m glad I heard.

I heard he did this. He would actually not read the instruments and just follow highways while flying.

He didn’t know how to read those instruments. He would look down at the highway and he would follow the highway and where the highway turned, he may take a shortcut going over to the highway over there. He knew how to read the altimeter, he knew how to read the fuel when you was getting close to empty gas, because I saw him tapping on the fuel thing a couple of times. I was going, oh my God, we’re going to crash. But he would get out there and he would fly to the outside of town, he would look in and he would check if

there was a confederate in town, say if there was a Kmart store, he would buzz the parking lot and turn his wings, just go vertical with the parking lot and he would count the cars, the customer cars in the Kmart parking lot and he would go and buzz the Walmart store and he would count the number of cars in the Walmart parking lot and I’ll tell you, if the, God bless the manager who had less cars than Kmart because visit that store because our responsibility to the customers in America was to lower their cost of living every day.

And if we delivered the quality service, the quality products at a lower price every single day with smiling faces and you spoke to the customers, there was no reason they would go anywhere else. So if you had a store that had less cars in your competition, that was a problem, and he would stop and fix that problem. That’s when he would land in the town. Nobody knew where Sam was.

Nobody knew where he was. That kept everybody in the United States on their toes.

There were so many associates, so many people that worked there, thousands of people. How did you break out of the clutter other than covering your hand in urine as a way

to attract the attention of Sam Walton?

I just worked. You know, Wal-Mart, Sam told me one time, people ask me still today, and it’s been a long time, people ask me today. A lot of people think they know what the success of the secret to Wal-Mart was, whether it’s distribution, whether it’s IT, whether it was the replenishment cycles. Everybody has this grandiose darn idea about what the success of Walmart is.

The success of Walmart was its people. Sam believed in every single person. He never shook a person’s hand that he didn’t believe in. He never shook a person’s hand. He didn’t look them in the eye. He never shook a person’s hand that he didn’t care about. And those associates knew it. And the management knew it. And I knew it. But the key to Walmart, Sam told me one day we were when we were starting this thing called a

super center. And I’ll tell you about that here in a minute. We didn’t know what we were doing. Sam called me in his office one day and he said, Tom, I got this crazy idea.

I said, what is it?

I was a, I was a regional vice president. I had Oklahoma and Kansas and part of Missouri and Sam, we’re in a meeting in Bentonville and I look up and I see these big old hands. He threw a window. He’s motioning me with his finger to come there. And I opened the door and I said, yes, sir.

And I thought I was in trouble. I said, yes, sir.

Miss Sam.

He starts walking back to his office, we go back to his office, and in his office, Sam never had a door on his office because of the open door policy, any associate anywhere in the company could walk in his door in his office anytime, anywhere.

He didn’t have a door?

Wow.

No, didn’t have a door in his office, no, you walk right in. So, and then his couch right in front of his desk, first of all, his desk was wobbly, it had an old cylinder block on one corner of it. It was press wood. It’s like you buy, you know, those desk you buy at these cheap office furniture stores today.

That’s kind of what his desk was. And then his couch, the couch in front of his desk was an old vinyl couch and the vinyl was split and peeling off on the side. And he had linoleum tile floors, a linoleum floor in his office. And he was the wealthiest man in the world.

But.

You know, Sam told me one day he said Tom and I was going to say we went in his office and he said, Tom, I got this. I need you to help me. And I said, what is it saying? He said. I want to sell groceries and I thought he’d lost his mind.

I said, you want to sell what? He said, I want to sell groceries and I need your help. I said, what do you need me to help you with, Sam? She said, Tom, I want you to help me find a way to convince a lady to put a white blouse on top of a piece of red meat. And that’s how the super center started.

And I thought he had lost his mind. And I said, well, Sam, I you know, what else you going to tell the chairman of the company? No, you’re not going to help him. I said, I’ll help you. So I gave up my job. I said, I looked at him.

I said, Sam, I’ve worked my whole life since I’ve been with you to get promoted to be a regional vice president. I said, you want me to give up this job? And he didn’t hesitate. Said, yep. I said, OK, I’ll do it. So we were in the play.

What did your title become at that point? I know titles don’t matter at Walmart, but what was your title? Were you the super manager of the super center? Were you the protege of the man? Were you…

What were you? The white blouse on the red meat. Yeah, white blouse and red meat guy with the urine on the hands. I don’t really, you know what, I don’t know if we had a title. We didn’t, just being slammed. We took off, it’s kind of funny, after I said yes the next morning, you asked me about a funny story with Sam. I’ll tell you one about me flying with him. This happened the very next day.

So I said, yes, Sam, I’ll help you. He said, great, meet me at the airport in the morning. I said, okay. Loretta Bals was his secretary, and Loretta, she was just about to retire. She called me and said, Tom,

Mr. Sam wants you to meet him at 4.30 in the morning. I said, yes, ma’am, I’ll be there. So we made it to the airport at 4.30, get a cup of coffee. They pull Sam’s plane, because you never know when Sam, I’ll tell you this, in his book, people said they tried to beat Mr. Sam to the office. Nobody could ever beat Sam to the office.

He was, whether you got there at 4 o’clock, 4.15, 4.30, he was always in his office working. But so we pulled, they pulled Mr. Sam’s plane out and everything and so it’s probably 445 and Sam when I get in the plane And Sam cranks it up like you get in your car in the morning You crank it up just put it in reverse and back out of the driveway Sam crank the plane up crank the the engine to the right because we got in the door on the left He cranked the engine to the right

he was already in the in the pilot seat I closed the door and he’s already taxiing out to the end runway. He doesn’t run any checks. He don’t do checklists. He didn’t do anything. It’s just like a car. You push the gas and it runs. So we’re taking off on my first morning in the Supercenter. I was a division director of the Supercenter. So we take off down in Rogers, Arkansas, and we’re just hauling butt down the runway about to take off and Sam pulls back on the yoke and the damn pin is still in the rear flaps. He forgot to take the pin out of the flaps. He went, uh-oh. He reached and shut the engines down and we turned around,

actually turned around to the end of the runway. Sam got out of the plane, pulled the pin out of the flaps and we took off.

You?

Hey Tom, where did you guys open up your first super center?

Well, we started the test.

The thing was a test. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know how to get in the food business. We partnered with some guys. He was a mayor, actually the mayor out of Dallas. And it was, oh, I want to say Tom Thumb.

I forget his name.

He was a mayor. He passed, I heard he passed away now. Really good guy. We started with three, what they call Hypermark USA. We opened the first, those were three really huge stores. The first one was in Garlington, Texas.

The second one was in Arlington. The third was in Topeka, Kansas. Those stores are like 240,000 square feet. So I would charge to the buyers in Walmart and a buyer, this was a buyer’s, you know, they’d died and gone to heaven. But to buy products, upline products, much higher scale products to attract as many people as you could get into a store,

because it was a laboratory. Those first three stores were a laboratory of how to generate A, traffic, B, revenue, and C, how to handle the freight and what kind of volume you could produce. There was only really one combo retailer of any count in the United States at the time and we studied them.

That was Carrefour. There were Biggs and Biggs out of Cincinnati and we studied those guys a lot and kind of tried to emulate some of the stuff they did because Sam was always, he would take, if you were good at something, he would beat you at it without you knowing about it. But when you found out he beat you, then he was already better than you. And but we’ve opened these three stores and Garland, Arlington and Topeka

did tremendous, tremendous by that was also our first entry into the fuel gasoline. We opened those three convenience stores and found out that we could sell more gas than refinery could deliver us. We found out we could sell more groceries than the trucks could bring in. But we didn’t know how to make any money. We were losing money, really. You know, we were losing a lot of money.

And I remember going over to Sam and Helen’s house every Sunday morning. Sam would go over to P&L’s and stuff like that. We’d go over there and I was all depressed because I’d never lost money. But Sam said, son, just keep your head up.

We’re going to figure this thing out. So after about a year, maybe, I don’t know, eight months, we figured out kind of what little bit about what we were doing. We were partnerships with a guy in Dallas. Walmart’s not a good partnership. Anybody ever asked you to go and partnership with Walmart?

Just walk away. Because Walmart likes to dominate partnerships. You got to get along. Walmart dominates at the time. So we opened had a store in Washington, Missouri, I think it was store 63. And we relocated that store from one side of the road to the other side, it was a 60,000 square foot store. I think we built 120,000 square foot store, we doubled the size of the store, moved it across the street, opened a super center, and grand opening day,

I think that store did right at a million dollars grand opening day. And it had gone, I think that store probably did, I think Washington did 20 million a year before we relocated it. The year that we relocated it, it went from $20 million to $73 million. We knew then we had a winner.

I have a question for you that I think a lot of our listeners want to ask you. You spent hundreds of hours, I mean you spent a ridiculous amount of time with Sam. You’re with him on a consistent basis. There are just so many hours you spent with the man. What was he really like? You know, you saw the Barbara Walters feature where they’re asking him about being worth

a billion dollars. You’ve heard the myths, which have turned out to be true, Z, about the driving the old beat up truck, having the beat up couch. What was he like up close and personal, and what was your relationship, how would you describe what your relationship with Sam was like?

I love Sam more than I did my father. Sam was like my dad. Sam was like all of our dads. He would bust your butt when you didn’t perform, but he’d put his arm around you and tell you thank you when you did. Sam told me one day, and we were talking about the secret of Walmart, here’s the secret of

Walmart, guys, is people. He told me one day when we were losing money and I was all disappointed and everything, he told me one day, we were walking to the store, I think we were in, I forget where we were, it may have been Wagner, Oklahoma.

We were walking to the store one day and he said, son, let me tell you something. And I looked at him, I said, yes, sir. He said, you got to remember something. We’re not in the retail business. We’re in the people business.

And we just happen to be selling merchandise. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. I said, damn it. You know, this man’s right. And then later on that afternoon, he said, did you understand what I said? I said, yes, sir, I did.

He said, Tom, let me tell you how to be successful in this business. And I looked at him, I said, yes, sir. He said, Tom, hire below average people, pay them an above average wage, treat them with dignity and respect,

and they’ll be loyal forever and will always be with you.

Could you repeat that again? Wow. Because that right there was really, really good and I’m just trying to marinate on that. We’re trying to take notes on that. Could you repeat that again or paraphrase that again?

That was good.

Sure, he said, you know, he said, son, do you want to know how to become successful in this business? I said, yes, sir. He said, son, if you will always hire below average people, pay them an above average wage, treat them with dignity and respect, they will be loyal and with you forever.

That is gutsy. That is a knowledge.

That will sell. That dog will hunt and it’ll be on your candy.

Yep. Yep.

And you look around the country today, dude, nobody, you know what, some of us old guys, me and Ed and Aggie and a lot of the guys, my buddies that, you know, have left, we still talk every now and then. Hell, we thought about getting together and putting a retailer together. We’d kick everybody’s butt because nobody practices that anymore today.

Yeah. What would you name it?

Tom Mart?

Hell no.

I’d probably name it… I don’t know what we’d name it. You know what name we’d give it? You’ll have to give me some time to think about that. I know you could name it Z-Mart.

There you go.

That’s a name.

That’s a good name.

Now, Sam Walton, he’s a guy who led a certain way. And you can take this as far as you want. In my opinion, we’re right now, we’re on the Tom time show. So you have the floor here. When you left Walmart, right? Because when Sam passed, I would like for you to share about what it was like watching your dear friend and father figure battling to the end. What was Sam Walton like during those last couple of years? And what were

you going through as you were watching him fight for his life?

Well, I can give you first-hand knowledge of that. Not many people can. At that time, we had grown the Supercenter division. I don’t know, we had maybe a hundred, a hundred and fifty Supercenters,

and I had gotten to a point where I was ready to do something different. And And I went, I took over the state of Texas. The state of Texas, I want to say, I forget how many stores we had in the state. I want to say there was 381 or maybe 400 stores in Texas.

And so I went from, I ran the whole, developed the whole Supercenter concept division and all that kind of stuff. And then I went to Texas and Sam, you heard me say earlier that Sam had 87,000 acres. Well, I didn’t tell him any acres,

but Sam got 87,000 or had 87,000 acres and found for years, Texas. And that was the quail hunt. He would always take his management down there. He would take, uh, you want to know how keen Sam was before he hired a, hired an executive from another company or anywhere, he would take them quail hunting. You can find out a lot about a man with a gun in his hand.

Is he cautious? Does he think before he shoots? Does he protect the dog? Does he just shoot and aim or does he aim and shoot or does he look at his surroundings? That was Sam’s interview. Then you sit around the fire and you talk to a man about his wife and his family and

his church sitting around the fire, you’re going to find out a whole lot more about him than you are sitting in a steel shirt sitting around an interview table. So everybody we hired, they basically went quail hunting with us. But Sam had that hunting land down there. I basically took care of his land. Sam got sick. You know, he, everybody, he tried to, and I’ll tell you the day he found out he got sick, we had been hunting down at the ranch. And we sent everybody home. We hunted for like three weeks straight. He would bring vendors down, he would bring the regional vice presidents down and then the divisionals come down and I’d stay there and help him close up the camp and

Load all the dogs up close it up when bird season was over every year and Sam had

Climbed he left his keys

To the old go red truck you come up. I’ve been at many times, it’s in the museum, I’m not in Bentonville now, but he left the keys to the truck inside the ice room. In the ice room, everybody left with quail. He’d freeze it and he’d clean it and freeze it and everybody left with a cooler of quail packed on ice.

Well, he had left his keys in this ice house and he looked over and it was locked and he saw them laying over there on top of one of the cougars. And he broke the window of the ice house, which I had to get fixed, but he broke the window and he climbed through the window of the ice house to get his keys. Well, they had a sound always wore, if you see in his pictures and in the books and

stuff, he always wore a dog whistle when he was hunting to call his dog. He had a dog whistle and he, when he climbed through the window, he thought that the whistle pressed against his sternum and his chest and he thought he just bruised the bone in his chest. Well, it continued to hurt and I saw him press on it a couple of times in the next two or three, four weeks. What it was, that’s when the bone cancer started.

So that’s when he found out he better go to the doctor. That’s when the bone cancer started, but then you move forward, you know, two or three years. I had Texas and Sam, we brought Sam to, Sam had all kind of experimental treatments all over the country, all over the world for that matter. We brought him to MD Anderson and Sam and Helen stayed at MD Anderson. And when Sam began to get really sick, you got to understand, he visited stores every day.

Y’all don’t understand. He loved his associates with all of his heart, with all of his might, and he loved his customers. And because the better an associate could do, the more they could benefit their family, the more their family, you know,

we could lower the cost of living for the customers and everybody won. But when Sam got really sick, I was down there. Sam was a very, very modest man. And, uh, I remember going to MD Anderson and, um, Miss, Miss Helen, but I asked me if I saw Tom, do you mind to give Sam a bath today?

Cause Sam didn’t, I mean, he was just very modest and I’d help Sam take a bath. He’d look at me, say, okay, boy, we’re going to go visit some stores. Miss Helen would beg him, Sam, please don’t go visit these stores, please. You’re not strong enough. Well, you know what we did? I think his name was, uh, I forget the guy’s name was in the pharmacy division.

Wesley, right. Wesley, right.

Steel living.

He’s a great guy.

You’ll talk to him. He’s an awesome guy. I think it was Wesley that helped us make a belt for Sam to wrap around his little old waist. I could put my hand behind his coat and hold him up. That was putting my handle, a Velcro type handle. We would walk Sam through stores and when he, his knees balked a little

bit, we just hold him up. We walked him. He was so sick. We walked and he had a pump on his side. It was pumping that experimental sheep blood. I think was what they would do in testing some stuff.

We’d walk Sam through the stores and he’d go to two or three stores in a day and he would just look at me and shake his head when it was time to go. Then I would get him, take him back up to MD Anderson. But you know, the book doesn’t do it justice. He loved his people. He loved every single one of us.

And, uh, I remember Rob Walton, his son, Rob, who ended up being the chairman of the board, Rob called me. I want to say it was a Thursday afternoon. He called me and said, Tom, are you in Houston? I said, yes, sir. And he said, we’re coming to get dad.

And Rob had bought Rob bought a citation. I think it was a Citation 5 or something. Sam hated to spend money, good God of money. Sam always wanted, the only thing he’d let us buy was prop planes, turbo prop planes. Rob his son goes out and buys a Citation. He was really mad at Rob for buying a Citation because he thought he spent too much money.

And Sam was on the front cover of every magazine in the world, the wealthiest man in the world, and Sam was pissed off because his son bought a jet. He called me and said, ìTom, weíre coming to get dad.î So I remember being with the Houston West Lakeside Airport. It was about 6.30 that night. Rob landed, Rob was flying the plane.

plane, we went and they brought Sam in an amulet and we loaded him up in Rob’s plane and flew him back home. That was close to the end. Sam went home and he couldn’t stay home long. He went down to the hospital down there in, I think it was Springdale. I guess the next week, that’s when President Bush came and we were there when he got the Medal of Freedom.

I was standing right there and saying Medal of Freedom. He was in a wheelchair. He couldn’t stand up. And what do you call this folks, FBI, CIA, whoever they come through and make sure they sweep the building. Yeah, they were trying to, you know, tell us what to do. Hell, they didn’t know there was a Walmart. We did what we want to do, not what they want us to do. He, uh, Sam was standing up or Sam got on the stage and, and I still have the

videotape and you can Google it and watch it where president Bush breaks up when he’s talking to Sam about him giving his speech about the presidential medal of freedom and Sam stopped him. He put his hand out and he stopped him. And Sam looked over at his wife, Helen, and he shook his head no at her.

And then he grabbed ahold of that wheelchair, those arms of that wheelchair, and he stood up by himself. He didn’t want any help. He stood up. There wasn’t a dry eye anywhere. It was like, that’s the man, that’s what he always did.

He stood up for us, he fought for us, he fought that cancer and that stuff just got him. But you know what, that doesn’t matter. His spirit lives on, it lives on today in me, it lives on today in a lot of us across this country. Unfortunately, you know, the people that never met Sam,

they work at Walmart today, the folks that know Sam and know his beliefs and his heart and how we built, listen, when I went to work for Walmart, we didn’t have a modular, we didn’t have a schematic, we didn’t have, we had to order our own merchandise, we had to unload it off the trucks,

we had to get those damn green ticket guns and put green stickers on it, and then we had to take it and put it on the shelf, and then we had to go up front and run the registers, and you know, the three-foot rule, you know what that three-foot rule is?

No.

If any customer ever comes from three foot of you, you do three things. You look them, you smile, you look them in the eye, and you greet them.

Oh, nice.

Wow. Every single, oh, and if you got caught not following the three foot rule, you just, hey why not? Dude, because the customer is the only reason we were there.

How is Walmart different, how is it different now than it was when you were there?

Man, if I had one word to say how different, I mean what’s different about it, it’s people. People was our strength back then and I think people is the weakness today. Walmart has all of the systems, they got the trucks, they got all the technology that money can buy. They can buy all of the merchandise that they want, they can buy it at the cheapest price, they can buy it from China, they can buy it from Indonesia, they can buy whatever. Money is not an obstacle to Walmart.

Walmart can buy all the real estate they want. They can hire all the contractors they want. They are the king of whatever you want them to be the king of. But what’s holding them back today is the lack of focus on people. Because you say, I don’t care. People talk about these millennials with all these tattoos and all this.

And I hear these things, young people, they don’t get it. Well, let me tell you something. People are people today, just like they were people in 19 and the eighties, just like they were in the 1950s. If you treat people with dignity and respect, they’re going to respond and they’re going to do what you asked them to do.

They may speak a little bit different language and they may look a little bit different than we did back in the, you know, 60s, 70s and 80s, but they’re still red blooded, God-fearing Americans for the most part. But Walmart has gotten away. They think that the, these, I don’t know what you call them, PhDs and all these folks with all these damn computer degrees are smarter than a store manager who’s out there with the associates on the sales floor every day. You know, how many jack sets, jumping jacks should I buy? Oh, the store managers in Walmart today

can’t buy any merchandise. A human being inside a Walmart store today cannot order any merchandise, a computer doesn’t. Back when we were coming up, when we built Walmart, we ordered every single piece of merchandise in there. Wasn’t no computer ordering nothing,

it was all ordered by people. So every item has a season and every season has an item. So you sell more jacks in when? July? Or you sell more coloring books when? In June when you’re going to…

Everybody buys coloring books and colors and take in the car when you’re on vacation so the kids will shut up. You know, when do you sell the most hairspray? You know? You know, when do you sell the most plastic worms? If proficiency’s on a computer,

don’t know that damn stuff. People do. So the difference today in Walmart, whether it’s, it’s all over the place. It’s not just Walmart, guys. I’m not picking on Walmart.

I love Walmart, but it’s people. They’ve lost the emphasis of people and they are hiring people based on their degrees versus their people skills. It’s all about people, guys. I don’t care whether you’re selling merchandise

or real estate or cars or you’re selling computer equipment. It’s all about people, because you know what, it takes people to push the buttons. You know, what I’d like to do, just to pile on,

and I want to kind of tee this up here. I’ve got two final questions for you. I know Z has a great question for you and Wes does. After Walmart, you went on to have a continue, a very successful career. Could you share with the listeners your next role, the next big retailer you went to work with after Walmart?

Yeah, I left Walmart and went to work for Home Depot. I got a phone call one day from a guy, I didn’t know the guy’s name was Bernie Marcus, and he called me and he said, Hey Tom, it’s Bernie Marcus. I said, I’m sorry Mr. Marcus, I don’t know who you are. I’m Tom Smith. He said, Yeah, I know who you are.

Sam always said you were one of his best ones. I’d like to know if you would come to Atlanta and talk to me and Arthur. I didn’t know who Arthur was. I said, Who’s Arthur? He said, Arthur Blank. He and I were the co-founders of Home Depot.

I said, Well, sure, I’ll come talk to you. So they came and picked me up. I flew to Atlanta. We went to Chops in Buckhead that night. And they offered me a job. The question they had for me was, Tom,

they knew I had done the super centers. And they said, Tom, how does Home Depot continue to grow in through the year two? This is kind of funny, it tells how old I am. How does Home Depot continue to grow through the year 2020 if we’re only serving MSA populations of 500,000 or greater, which that’s, you know,

serving cities? They knew they needed to get in smaller markets across the country, and I said, I don’t know, but I’ll find out. So I took the job with Home Depot and created a new division of Home Depot called the Crossroads. A crossroad, I don’t know if you guys are city slickers, you really don’t know what a crossroad is. Anytime where a road meets, that’s where an intersection is. That’s how county seats were formed, where farmers could get to town and get back home on their horse and buggies before the sun went down. And that’s where county seats and so forth where roads cross or where people meet.

So we created a new division called Crossroads at Home Depot and that division was up and running. Uh, we ran it, I don’t know, maybe three or four years and then it was folded back into the Home Depot because we figured out how to run it and fold it back in the Home Depot and after Home Depot, I, I met these, uh, these, I call them surfer dudes, John and Randy Fry, they kept trying to get me to come

out to California for, I don’t know, three, four, five years. And I kept saying no. I’m a southern guy, I’m a gentleman, I open doors for ladies and I say yes ma’am and no ma’am and thank you and please. I wasn’t, California wasn’t for me. Well, I guess it was. I went out to California and was the CEO of this company called Fry’s

Electronics. We had, I think, seven or eight stores at the time. We grew that company from time to time. I think we were doing $100 million when I got there, and when I left, we did $2.8 billion. I was there for, I guess, five years, right at five years. And then I had the opportunity to go to a company and I’d never, I’d always been in successful companies. And I got a phone call one day from a headhunter

that used to do work for me at Walmart. And she wanted to know if I wanted to go to Boston. Well, hell, you know, you go from San Jose, California, Boston, that’s about as far as you can go. I’ll go talk to them. I went up there and I caught a red eye and flew to Boston and I met with these guys up

there and they offered me a job and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, today, but they’re like the target of the Northeast. They were an upscale, kind of like higher than Walmart. They sold higher quality goods at Walmart and they were in bankruptcy, Chapter 11. And we, you know, I kind of put some programs and some people in place and brought some people with me and kind of retooled that thing and had some good

leadership there. And we, you know, got Bradley’s back on the NASDAQ. It was on New York Stock Exchange, got it released on NASDAQ. Did that for a few years. And I got a phone call.

Boston is a wonderful place to visit, not to live. I don’t like cold weather. It’s just cold up there, guys. And on April the 17th, it snowed 19 inches. And it took me two hours to get five miles. I got home and my wife said, are you ready to get out of here? I said, hell yeah, I’m ready to get out of here.

So anyway, I called that headhunter friend of mine, Elaine Erickson. And hey, Elaine, if you’re listening. But anyway, and I ended up with an interview for a place called WH Smith. Never heard of it. They were the largest, the oldest retailer in the world. Wow. Based out of London, Manchester, England.

There in all the hotels and airports around the world. And you’ve seen them in airports and hotels, W.H. Smith bookstores, Smith booksellers. And so I took that job as, I ran North America, which United States, Canada, Caribbean Islands, Dominican Republic, Hawaii.

And we acquired a couple of companies in South America, Santiago down there. And that was great, dude. I’m going to take some people. A really, really fun deal. And, uh, nine 11 here. Well, you’re in a travel business and planes, flambeau towers,

and they shut travel down, the world changed. So after 18 months of after 9-11, trying to get the business back, W.H. Smith sold the U.S. operations to the Hudson? Yeah. Yeah. That’s that that is that’s W.H. Smith. Okay. All those stores are W.H. Smith. I did that for I ran those stores and we sold out to Hudson News. Well, when we sold out, I played golf for about six months, eight months. My wife told me I was losing my mind because I needed to go

back to work. Well, I told my wife I wanted to go home. I’m originally from Meridian, Mississippi. I grew up in this metropolis area called York, Alabama. The whole population of the county is 3,200 people, and I loved it.

Oh, wow.

Overpopulation is a danger.

Yeah, and I, you know, the old saying, you spend the first 18 years of your life trying to get out of your hometown, you spend the rest of your life trying to get back to your hometown. I wish, you know, I’d love, it was the best place in the world to grow up as a kid and a child. But originally from Meridian, grew up in York, Alabama, and I told my wife one day, I said,

baby, I want to go home. And my wife, Ellen, is from Chicago, inner city Chicago.

No, you don’t want to go back home there.

You don’t want to go back home there, right?

You don’t want to go back home?

Yeah, and she, right, I mean she grew up looking at Wrigley Field on Dover Street, and I said I want to go home, and she looked at me and she said, Mississippi? And I said, yeah baby, I want to go home. So, bless her heart, we ended up back in Mississippi, 16, yeah, over I came here and I knew that I was done with the corporate world. After 28 years in the corporate world, almost 29 years, I started looking around the state of Mississippi to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

I knew I wasn’t going to work for anybody else. I had done that for 27, 28, 29 years.

You figured me out.

You figure me, I’m pretty blunt by now, but I don’t mean anything disparaging about this, but I went in trying to figure out what I was going to do around the state. I always had a keen interest in land and real estate, but I’ve always been an outdoorsman, a hunter, a fisherman. I’ve always loved the outdoors. I went in 30, 40 real estate offices from across the state, northeast, south Tennessee line

to the Gulf Coast. And about 95% of the folks I met in real estate were dumber than a bucket of rocks. And I told my wife, and Ellen’s got her masters from Pepperdine. She owned a couple of businesses

and we had sold them along the way. I’m a businessman. My wife is a businesswoman. And I told Ellen one night, I said, I think I figured out what I want to do. She said, what is that? I said, I want to get involved in real estate because there’s a huge opportunity in

the state of Mississippi in real estate. And Ellen looked at me, she said, you know, I do too. I want to get involved in real estate. I said, why had you ever told me that? She said, because you’ve never asked me that. Well, 16 years ago, we both got involved in the real estate business.

And here we are. We operate Tom Smith. We own Tom Smith Land and Homes. We got the largest. We sell more land than anybody in the state. We’re probably one of the top five largest land companies in the southeastern part of

the country.

Can people see photos of you there too if they go there right now?

Yeah, yeah, they can, unfortunately.

Fine looking man, I’m looking at it right now.

See, that’s why people are going there. People are going there for the eye candy. Now see, I want to ask you this here. You have the floors that you can ask, you can ask Tom, I ask you this. What is the tough question you have for Tom? Well, I’ve got kind of a fun question. Thank you, first of all, for your time and your story. It’s been delightful and, you know, that’s a little bit of American history right there. I mean, Walmart is, I mean, that’s American history. Sam Walton and all that insight, that’s awesome.

It’s really fun. But you said you opened up approximately 100 super centers before you kind of went off to the next thing. What was the most successful one? Which one made the most money? Do you recall off the top of your head, or one of your top producers?

McAllister, Oklahoma was really good.

Really? Down there in the prison? Well, that’s nice.

McAllister was really good. God, there’s a bunch of them, dude.

People would think that’s a small market. McAllister’s probably what? I mean, that’s not all people get this early thousand people who will get discharged from prison they want to buy all the coach they want to

buy it yet to be a prison I got it by all the snow the accoutrements that

makes sense I’m excited what we find what we found was and it didn’t take a rocket science is all these college graduates didn’t figure this crap out but you you take you you take the Walmart we you know how we figured out we did it by the old-fashioned way we took the checks that people used to write by hand, we’d take the checks and we’d go through and write them all down where their address was and figure out where people were driving from, how far they would drive.

So when we opened the super center, we did the people back in the cash office and the system managers, we’d write all this stuff down and we’d figure out that folks were driving as far as 100 miles away to come buy groceries.

Yep.

Wow. So our trade territory went from about 20 miles, 30 miles up to 100 miles. So you were getting three times of the population coming into a store is what you normally would get with a normal Walmart store. Because everybody’s got to eat. Don’t everybody have to shoot squirrels on Saturday afternoon?

That’s true. But everybody’s got to eat. So whether or not your sporting goods department got bigger or not, you add food to it, you’re going to sell more sporting goods because you’ve got three times or twice as many people. So three times as many people shop in the same size sporting goods department, you’re going to sell three times more guns, you’re going to sell three times more rifles, more

shells, you’re going to sell three times more of the fishing rods. And the same is true for arts and crafts or domestics or underwear or whatever. Because when you bring that much in, so it took us a while, but you know, the successful stores, we didn’t have, let me put it to you this way. We didn’t close any stores. Well, Walmart, we only closed one store that I was ever, ever associated.

Really, when Sam was alive, we only closed one Walmart store and that was Robstown, Texas. And that’s the reason. It was called Robberstown. That store never made a profit because it was so much stuff going on. It was the highest-stuff store in the United States. And we tried and tried and tried, but we never made a dime profit out of that store.

We closed it after, I guess Robstown was open probably 15 years before we closed. We lost money for 15 years before we closed. I’ll give you the most fun story that I can about a super center.

Perfect.

Wagner, Oklahoma. You probably don’t even know where that is.

Oh, I went to high school 20 miles from Wagner.

The Bulldogs, you kidding me? It’s just not far from Tulsa, where we are right now.

Dude, you’ll enjoy this. Wagner, Oklahoma was a bottom mountain. Wagner, Oklahoma had the smallest Walmart store in the United States of 29, 808, 29,808 square feet. That’s the smallest store we ever opened. Well, Wagner had one.

Kali, the man manager’s name was Joe.

Oh, it just hit me.

I see his face and that’s been 40 years ago, Joe, golly ball headed Joe. But anyway, so whether,

whether Rob’s,

whether it was Christmas week or January, the second week in January Wagner, the volume really never changed. It did. Y’all gonna laugh at this, but I remember it. It did $30,000 a week.

Wow.

Whether it was in December or whether it was in January or June, basically Rob’s, I mean, uh, uh, Wagner did $30,000 a week. You do the budgets for Wagner. Oklahoma did a, a million fives a year. Well, Sam would, would wind people up prior to quail season. Do you understand what I mean when I say wind people up?

Did he serve them Red Bulls before Red Bulls were legal or allowed or around? He would challenge you.

He would tell you that he thinks you can do more.

And telling us at that time that we can do more, that’s like telling the football team that, you know, they’re a bunch of sissies, they’re going to run over you. Well, Sam would wind us up before quail season. Well, Sam had told me, he said, Tom, I think we got something here. He said, we know we can do business in these bigger markets. We know we can triple our volume. We’re doing 60 million, 70 million.

He said we just about got it figured out. When he said the word just about, my ears perked up. And he said, I wonder how small of a market we can open a super center in. He shouldn’t have said that. So Sam goes off quail hunting. Tom C. was in charge of real estate department at the time. He was the senior vice president of real estate. We’d go off and we’d buy 18 acres of land in Wagner, Oklahoma, right across the street from where the store was, right on the corner right there.

It’s probably still there today. I hadn’t been there in 30 years, or 20 years. What is it, 30 years?

It is.

So we opened a Wagner, a super center in Wagner, Oklahoma. The store was 29,808 square feet. We built a 140,000 square foot building in Wagner. I thought Sam was going to stroke out. That’s the only time I thought he was gonna fire me. I really did.

I thought, man, I am gone. So we had the grand opening and it was a joke amongst the company. People said, Smith, you’re gone. This thing’s never gonna be successful, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Let me tell you something, guys. I’m there to get this as long as I live and I’m gonna tell on myself. If Sam were living, he would kind of laugh. Oh, we opened that store. We had the grand opening at eight o’clock in the morning.

And by 930, I kind of snuck outside and I went around behind the garden center back where the truck wheels were and I got to tell you, I’m not going to lie, I was smoking a cigarette, I was sneaking a smoke. And because I’m thinking, you know, I’m going to be fire. Well, at 930 in the morning, we had traffic. They had, we had state troopers were directing traffic.

We had every sheriff department directing traffic. We had traffic back up to Tulsa just about.

Wow.

And the parking lot was full and I’m sneaking a cigarette and I feel this hand on my shoulder and I look over and you gotta understand, Sam hated, he hated two things. He hated tobacco and he hated alcohol sitting there with it hit my mouth that cigarette he’s threw it down and he

looked to me said son pick it up you need to he said you need to enjoy that

hmm well tell me there’s people around the world right now to our podcast in Oklahoma is 8904 people. That’s 2017. More square footage than people. That’s a… Oh yeah. Now think about this. There is still, I’m looking at it right now on Google Earth, there’s a Murphy USA there, there’s an Arbust Bank over there, there’s a Armstrong Bank. That’s the key, you gotta get two banks right there. You gotta get the money somewhere.

You know, Arbust of course is kind of a branch of Walmart. You’ve got a McDonald’s there?

Oh yeah, the McDonald’s right there on the corner.

I remember specifically growing up in Muskogee, everybody loading up in the car to go to the Super Center in Wagner. Really? Because at that time, I don’t believe Muskogee had one. Did you see Tom smoking a cigarette in the back?

I did not.

Did you catch that?

Let’s go to the big Walmart.

Yeah, let’s go to the big Walmart. I’m not going to say that you owe Tom a thank you, but, you know, let’s throw that out there. Tom, thank you.

Okay, so Wes, what is the…

Hey, you said Muskogee, Oklahoma.

One of my real good friends, Terry Farr, was a store manager in Muskogee. He’s a great guy. I don’t know where he is. I don’t know if he’s still living. He was a great guy, I remember Terry. Yeah, Okie from his home.

But yeah, I didn’t know Wagner had a McDonald’s, dude. They’ve gotten big time now, but… Yeah, it’s right there.

It’s on the outline parcel at the super center. Now Wes, what is your final tough question for Mr. Tom Smith, the man who helped Sam Walton to create the Walmart super centers?

Well Tom, I always try to glean maybe a little bit of practical advice. So I’m wondering, in all those years of Walmart, then you went to some really cool companies, you had to do a lot of hiring. You saw Sam doing hiring. For those of us that don’t have thousands of acres to go quail hunt. Any tips you can give our listeners for characteristics

or personalities that you saw that made those better employees or anything that you looked out for when you were hiring new people?

Absolutely, it’s three things.

I mean, you know, I don’t care what kind of degree you got, I don’t care where you’re at. And you know, I sit and I look at our company we got today and I, you know, I’ve got, we’ve got the best team, we’ve got a family here. We think these guys and gals got each other’s back.

They look out for each other. We laugh together, we cry together, we make money together. And you know, it’s just, it’s all about family. But there’s three things. You know, you find out in about 15 minutes,

if you’re sitting and talking to somebody, if they got three things lined up, and are they right in their face, are they right with their family, and if they’re right with their employer and they’re honest, God-fearing people, I’ll give them a chance. You know, I’ve given people a chance. Some of the most successful people is these folks coming home from the military.

All they need is a chance. And you give them a chance and they’ll perform like you’ve never seen. But you don’t need a college degree to be successful. And if you got a college degree, that’s great and wonderful. I’ve got one of those too, but you know, it’s never helped me make a dime,

but it’s, it’s all about looking people in the eye. You can tell that somebody’s honest in about 30 seconds and they ain’t got to say a word, you look at them. And it’s just about finding the right folks with the right heart that want a chance. And if you motivate them, you show them that you care about them, you got to care about their family, get out of their way. You know, I’ve always believed in letting people make mistakes. People make mistakes every day.

We all do. But don’t make the same mistake twice. I don’t know if I answered your question or not.

No, that was great. Yeah, I mean, you’ve been actionable. Yeah, I mean, so get right with your faith, your family, and your past employer, your current employer.

Now, I have my final question for you. Our listeners love to read books that can help them, books that are very practical. You have come across as a very well-read man. You’ve had a career that spans multiple decades. You’re doing well now in another career, really doing well in real estate out there. Is there a specific book that you would recommend for all of our listeners?

You know, I’m throwback, I’m kind of an old type guy. I believe in basics, I believe in things that work. And I guess, I recommend two books to anybody, I don’t care what business you’re in, whether you’re running airlines or flipping McDonald’s, is Seven Habits of Effective People.

True, it’s a good one. I don’t care who you are. Successful people have successful habits. Unsuccessful people have unsuccessful habits. Don’t care who you are. Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, that’s by Stephen Covey.

And another one of the best business authors and motivational authors that you’re ever going to read. I don’t know if Tom’s around anymore or not, but those are two hellacious books you ought to read. They’re good business books, and for any leader listening to them around the country or around the world, they need to read those two books because those are two books that

I hang my hat on.

Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to be here on today’s show. You have blown my mind many, many times. I know Z appreciates you being here. I know Wes does. And our listeners loved hearing these stories.

Thank you again so much. And we hope you have just an awesome evening.

And hit the road, but don’t hit it too hard. Right. Yeah, I appreciate you.

I hope you have a great evening. Take care.

And we’re off. Tommy, as soon as this show gets edited,

I’ll send you a link so you can share it

Hey, I’m Ryan wimpy I

Went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business, and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us and getting everything out on paper and documented is really

important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place. So having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards. It’s pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning

atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side.

I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark.

Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us.

This is our old house. Right, this is where we used to live. This is our old neighborhood.

See, it’s nice, right?

So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy.

This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into

manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year.

In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship

and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you times a thousand.

So we really just wanna thank you Clay and thank you Vanessa for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys.

All right, and now ladies and gentlemen, I’m gonna bring up my good friend Ryan Wimpy, my good friend Ryan Wimpy, and his dog, Odin, this dog has the ability to eat me, so I’m sort of concerned. I’ll pass the mic to you, and Odin, you can have your own mic if you want, whatever you

want, Odin.

Okay, I’m a little bit afraid of Odin.

Hi, I’m Ryan Wimpy.

And I’m Rachel Wimpy, and the name of our business is Kip-Tock.

Our business is a dog training business. We help people with behavioral issues and teach their dog how to listen. When I was learning to become a dog trainer, we didn’t learn anything about internet marketing or advertising or anything at all. Just dog training.

And that’s what’s so great about working with Clay and his team because they do it all for us.

So that we can focus on our passion and us training dogs. Clay and his team here, they’re so enthusiastic. Their energy is off the charts. Never a dull moment.

Very bright.

We’ve been working with Clay and his team for the last five months, two of which have been our biggest months ever. One, our biggest gross by 35%. Clay’s helped us make anything from brochures to stickers, new business cards, new logos, scripts for phones, scripts for emails, scripts for text messages, scripting for everything.

How I would describe the weekly meetings with Clay and his team are awesome.

They’re so effective.

It’s worth every minute. Things get done. We’ll ask for things like different flyers, and they’re done before our hour is up. So it’s just awesome, extremely effective.

If you don’t use Clay and his team, you’re probably going to be pulling your hair out, or you’re going to spend half of your time trying to figure out the online marketing game and producing your own flyers and marketing materials, print materials, all the stuff like that. You’re really losing a lot as far as lost productivity and lost time. Not having a professional do it has a real sense of urgency

and actually knows what they’re doing when you already have something that’s your core focus that you already

know how to do.

You would also be missing out with all the time and financial freedom that you would have working with Clay

and his team.

We would recommend Clay and his team to other business owners because they need to be working on their business, not just trying to figure out the online game, which is complex and changing daily. So no one has a marketing team, too. Most people don’t, and they can’t afford one,

and their local web guy or local person that they know probably can’t do everything that a whole team and a whole floor of people can do in hours and not just weeks or months. There’s a definite sense of urgency with Clay and his team. I used to have to ride other web people,

I mean, really ride them to get stuff done, and stuff is done so fast here and people there’s a real sense of urgency to get it done.

What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system And it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around They’re the ones that people can work with on a day-to-day basis Hi there, my name is Stephanie Pipkin. I am 24 years old and I own Black River Falls Cleaning

Services. We opened in April of 2019 and it is now mid-June of 2020. So I wanted to talk today about the success and growth I have achieved by implementing the Proven Path with Clay Clark’s team and my business coach Luke from Thrive Time. It has been insane to say the least. I started working with them in mid-February of this year so we’re about four months in of working together and it has completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet. So I’m gonna check my notes here. So in four months my leads have

tripled. I was getting probably like two leads a week, now I’m getting more in the like 10 to 15 leads a week. I have doubled my number of employees. I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company, week to week it seems like. We went from about six appointments today as our highest in February to now 14 to 15 appointments a day. And hiring quality employees has become much simpler and less stressful by using their systems for hiring. I typically only get maybe

two complaints a month if that and everybody shows up to work. I just have really high quality employees now, especially in something people typically consider a high turnover type of work, you know, cleaning houses, cleaning businesses. I have amazing employees now and I get rid of the ones who are not so amazing and bring on new ones because of you know group interviews and higher interviewing every single week. It’s just been great and such a I don’t waste as much time on low quality candidates anymore.

I have successfully gained our second largest commercial client and this was during COVID. So again, I started working with Luke and Clay in February and then COVID hit in mid March or so. So for the entire month of April, we were shut down residential, April and May, I believe. And so despite that, and again, being a new business

and all this stuff, I mean, we came out of COVID like stronger than ever and now hitting our highest numbers in the history of the company. It just leads, just piling in and the beauty is when people call us, they’re already sold because of our Google reviews, our online presence, the no-brainer offer that we now give to our clients, which is, you know, if they book their second appointment within a month of the first, they get 50% off and again

they’re just ready to book. I hardly have to do any work. It feels like sometimes to actually book people. So that’s amazing. So every week I meet with Luke, and it’s awesome. Obviously, I’m in Wisconsin, he’s in Oklahoma, but we have a great time. I know I can text him at any time, call him at any time with any issues I’m having, especially when COVID did hit. They were so helpful in helping

me get the PPP grants and everything settled away there and really pushed me to make sure I was on the ball and getting all of the grants that I was possibly able to, which was amazing. So they’ve just been such a wealth of information and when I’m freaking out because you know a burning fire is happening, Luke’s there to calm me down and you know back me off the cliff edge and it’s just awesome to have him you know as a resource there.

So every week we meet and we have a big tracking sheet. So we track all my leads, we track my numbers, where the leads are coming from, any complaints. I love my tracking sheet. I know it’s probably a little extra, but I love it because I can see everything that’s actually happening in my business. And this is so important because it’s not like I’m just saying, well, I feel like it’s

busier. I know if it’s busier and I know are we making a profit every week? Why or why not? It’s just amazing. And then I’m tracking my Google reviews, tracking my competitors’ Google reviews,

and Luke is always pushing me to get more reviews, even though I was not very comfortable with that at first. It felt just pushy, but now I’m seeing the effects of having a lot of Google reviews, a lot to me at least. It’s not very high compared to others,

but people are finding us on Google and they’re already ready to book because of our review. So going for those reviews has been so integral in having basically easy sell leads. So tracking has been just so vital and I really enjoy it actually.

So anybody who is skeptical about working with Clay or Luke, you know, the whole team at Thrive Time, I was definitely skeptical and to me, again, new business, it seemed like a lot of money, but in comparison to other business coaches, especially like specific to the cleaning industry,

like I’m in, I mean, you’re talking like $10,000 a month. And honestly, I feel like I get like that much value out of Luke, just my meeting with him once a week, it’s amazing. And it has just transformed my business in every single aspect. I mean, I always aspired to be a successful business owner. And now, I mean, it’s not even a question that this business is going to be successful,

even if a pandemic happens and you have to shut down. I mean, if I can make it through that and directly because of them, it is absolutely because of them. Obviously, you know, I’m a hard worker, blah, blah, blah, all that.

And, you know, I was made to be an entrepreneur. However, having them as like the guiding light of this is what you need to do. And it’s very straightforward. Doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it is very straightforward of what needs to be done.

And I like that. I like having that step-by-step process and I love having the accountability because there’s a lot of stuff that they have me do that I don’t want to do. It’s not fun but it works and that’s, you know, having that discipline to just do the things week after week regardless if it’s dull or boring or you don’t want to do it. Luke really pushes me to do those things which I love. I mean I hate it at the time, but I love it because I can see how it’s affecting my

business in a positive way. And you know, I don’t want to be just good. I want to be the best. And I see them as an integral part of that. And I will not be the best if I don’t have them with me. So I just, I love having them on my team.

And it just feels like the best decision I ever made in my business. And I know I’m still really small and things like that but there’s a reason I reached out to them when I was small because I want to be big and I want to Not grow and then collapse because I grew too quickly without the correct systems in place So it’s just it’s been amazing and I would suggest anybody who’s willing to put in the work and do things that make you uncomfortable Reach out to them

But if you are not willing to implement a no-brainer, if you are not willing to ask for Google reviews, if you are not willing to write content, really, really boring content for your website so the Google bots find you, then don’t reach out. You need to be willing to put in the work as well. Your coach will hold you accountable, which I love.

Again, the tough love is really great. Luke is like a stern father figure, but he’s also nice, but also stern when he needs to be when I’m being lazy and not doing the things that I know I need to do because I don’t want to do them. So that’s just great. Worth every penny. I mean I’d pay him a million dollars a month if I can and maybe someday I’ll be able to but I would just say go for it if it seems like a good fit just go for it. Do what they say even if you think

it’s stupid or ridiculous just do what they say because it’ll work. You know people when they look at my business, you know, people in my town, they think I’m lucky, they think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me. And you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work, and you know, perseverance, and, you know, working till you cry

sometimes. That’s just being an entrepreneur, which if you’re a business owner, you understand that. But it’s having this, the systems in place of, you know, of course I’m going to be successful. It’s an absolute because I have all this stuff in the background happening and I have Luke and Clay and everybody on their team working really hard to make sure that I’m a success and I can tell that they are just so excited every single week when I’m having all these

wins and things like that. They’re so excited for me. So it just, it’s the best thing ever and I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long-winded reply, but I just had so much to say and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are. But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there, everything you guys have done

for me and I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching.

What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system and it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day-to-day basis. That simplicity brings power with it. It shocked me how simple some of the stuff is. At times I’m like, why didn’t I think about that?

Workflow creation, systematic marketing, and coaching has helped our church so much. You know, the workflow creation is what it really is, is they’re going to look and see every moving part of your church, of your ministry, what needs to be done. And it’s going to go up on a massive board. And so now what it does is it takes what you know needs to be done

out of your heart and out of your head, really takes the pressure, the stress off your shoulders, and it puts it on the board where your entire team, your ministry, can see exactly what you want them to do every day. So they know this is the playbook, this is what we’re doing. And then there’s laser sharp accountability with a meeting afterwards, did it get done

or not? I’ll tell you, it’s changed the way we execute as a church so fast. And it’s produced really an excitement because people, people, they want to get done. If they know what they’re supposed to do, a good person wants to get it done. It’s been massive for our team. The systematic marketing has really been like this. In the past, we used to market and we would try something. I’ve

done everything, billboards, ads, mailers, internet, Facebook, but we would run something for so long and then we wouldn’t see that it was producing the results we want. Instead of staying consistent, we would jump to another horse. Then we would jump to another horse. What systematic marketing does is it makes you pick some things and stick with it. And then the coaching is massive. And I think having a coach that looks and sees what you’re doing and can come help you make small adjustments. I

believe those small tweaks, once he gets everything set up, those small tweaks can make massive differences. And a great coach doesn’t even have to play your sport, right? Doesn’t even have to do what you do. A coach has an eye to see things that you can’t see or to see it from a different angle. Just having that extra eye on what I do and just, hey have you thought about this, it’s making all the difference in the world. What Clay Clark and his team can provide for your church that you can’t do in house and I can’t do in house,

what’s been massive for me is that search engine optimization, how to get to the top of Google, taking care of transcribing all of my sermons to drive me up the list on Google, stuff that I don’t think about and I don’t have time to do. I’ve got all these things I have to do as a pastor, right? I have sermons to preach, I have a staff to manage, I have a budget to take care of, I got sick folk to see about, I have a team that has to do that.

You know how it is, you got to marry people, you got to bury people. We’re never going to stay in a dark room with a keyboard optimizing our Google presence. And these guys do that kind of thing for you. Also, if you’re at a couple hundred member church, I remember how hard it was back in the day to take care of the website needs, to come up with graphic design. And these guys are available to you for sermon slides, getting that kind of stuff done where you can have a sharp looking presentation of the gospel.

And it takes it off you and puts it on them at a very reasonable price. I really believe Clay Clark and his team can help a church with limited resources in a big way. I know what it’s like to be a church of limited resources. My wife and I, we walked into a town where we didn’t know anybody. We had a Bible and we just had a few bucks in our pocket.

Somebody introduced us to a couple of families. We started going there. I know what it’s like to be a church of two, and I know what it’s like to be a church of 2,000 in two different campuses now, 1,000 apiece, and everywhere in between. I love churches at every level. I believe God wants them all to grow.

I think about the needs I had back in the day, the lack of direction I had. I mean, I was working 80 hours a week all the time, but a lot of times I was a shotgun instead of a rifle. I think when you start, you can really hone in with the right coaching. You can get a lot of your different needs met in one place.

Instead of having somebody on marketing, and somebody on showing you how to do systems, and somebody on graphic design, Thrive can do a lot of that for you at a very reasonable cost. I think it’s a great place to invest in the life of your ministry.

I’m telling you, I think you can get the results you want with the coaching here faster than any other way.

Clay Clark is here somewhere. Where’s my buddy Clay?

Clay is the greatest.

I met his goats today I met his dogs I met his chickens I saw his compound he’s like the greatest guy I ran from his goats his chickens his dogs so this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen right his entire life

clay Clark his entire life is marketing okay Aaron Antis on March 6th and 7th March 6th and 7th. We’re going to be joined by Robert Kiyosaki, Robert Kiyosaki! Best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, possibly the best-selling, or one of the best-selling business authors of all time, and he’s going to be joined with Eric Trump. He’ll be joined by Eric Trump. So we’ve got Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki in the same place.

In the same place. Aaron, why should everybody show up to hear Robert Kiyosaki. Well you got billions of dollars of business experience between those two, not to mention many many many millions of books have been sold. Many many millionaires have been made from the books that have been sold by Robert Kiyosaki. I happen to be one of them. I learned from the man. He was the inspiration. That book was the inspiration

for me to get the entrepreneurial spirit as many other people. Now since you won’t brag on yourself, I will. You’ve sold billions of dollars of houses, am I correct? That is true. And the book that kick-started it all for you, Rich Dad Porter, the best-selling author of Rich Dad Porter, Robert Kiyosaki, the guy that kick-started your career, he’s going

to be here. He’s going to be here, I’m pumped. And now Eric Trump, people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. There’s not 50 employees. The Trump Organization, again most people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of

employees and while Donald J. Trump was the 45th president of these United States and soon to be the 47th president of these United States, he needed someone to run the companies for him. And so the man that runs the Trump Organization for Donald J. Trump as he was the 45th president of the United States, and now the 47th president of the United States is Eric Trump. Eric Trump is here to talk about time management,

promoting from within, marketing, branding, quality control, sales systems, workflow design, workflow mapping, how to build. I mean, everything you see, the Trump hotels, the Trump golf courses, all their products, the man who manages billions of dollars of real estate and thousands of employees is

here to teach us how to do it. You are talking about one of the greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint. I mean who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand? I mean look at it and this is the man behind the business for the last pretty much since 2015. He’s been the man behind it so you’re talking we’re into nine going into ten years of him running it and we get to tap into that knowledge.

That’s going to be amazing.

Now, think about this for a second. Would you buy a ticket just to see Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump? Of course you would. Of course you would. But we’re also going to be joined by Sean Baker. This is the best-selling author, the guy who invented the carnivore diet.

Oh yeah. Dr. Sean Baker, he’s been on Joe Rogan multiple times. He’s going to be joining us. So you’ve got Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Eric Trump, Sean Baker. The lineup continues to grow, and this is how we do our tickets here at the Thrive Time

Show. If you want to get a VIP ticket, you can absolutely do it. It’s $500 for a VIP ticket. We’ve always done it that way. Now, if you want to take a general admission ticket, it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay.

And the reason why I do that and the reason why we do that is because we want to make our events affordable for everybody. I grew up without money. I totally understand what it’s like to be the tight spot. So if you want to attend, it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay. That’s how I do it. And it’s $500 for a VIP ticket. Now, we only have

limited seating here. The most people we’ve ever had in this building was for the Jim Brewer presentation. Jim Brewer came here. The legendary comedian Jim Brewer came to Tulsa and we had 419 people that were here. 419 people. And I thought to myself, there’s no more room. I felt kind of bad that a couple of people had VIP seats in the men’s restroom.

Oh, no, I’m just kidding. So I thought, you know what, we should probably add on. So we’re adding on what we call the upper deck, or the top shelf. So the seats are very close to the presenters, but we’re actually building right now,

we’re adding on to the facility to make room to accommodate another 30 attendees or more. So again, if you want to get tickets for this event, all you have to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com, go to Thrivetimeshow.com, when you go to Thrivetimeshow.com, you’ll go there, you’ll request a ticket, boom. Or if you want to text me, if you want a little bit faster service, you say, I want you to call me right now, just text my number, it’s my cell phone number, my personal cell phone number, we’ll keep that private between you, between you, me, everybody.

We’ll keep that private. And anybody, don’t share that with anybody except for everybody. That’s my private cell phone number. It’s 918-851-0102. 918-851-0102. I know we have a lot of Spanish-speaking people that attend these conferences.

And so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 918-851-0102. That is not actually bilingual. That’s just saying Juan for a 1.

It’s not the same thing.

I think you’re attacking me. Now, let’s talk about this. Now, what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show workshop? So Aaron, you’ve been to many of these over the past seven, eight years.

So let’s talk about it. I’ll tee up the thing, and then you tell me what you’re going to learn here, OK?

OK.

You’re going to learn marketing, marketing and branding. What are we going to learn about marketing and branding? Oh, yeah. We’re going to dive into, you know, so many people say, oh, you know, I got to get my brand known out there, like the Trump brand.

Right. You want to get that brand out there. It’s like, how do I actually make people know what my business is and make it a household name? You’re going to learn some intricacies of how you can do that. You’re going to learn sales.

So many people struggle to sell something. This just in, your business will go to hell if you can’t sell. So we’re going to teach you sales. We’re going to teach you search engine optimization, how to come up top in the search engine results. We’re going to teach you how to manage people.

Aaron, you have managed, no exaggeration, hundreds of people throughout your career and thousands of contractors. And most people struggle with managing people. Why does everybody have to learn how to manage people? Well, because first of all, you either have great people

or you have people who suck. And so it could be a challenge. Learning how to work with a large group of people and get everybody pulling in the same direction can be a challenge. But if you have the right systems,

you have the right processes, and you’re really good at selecting great ones, and we have a process we teach about how to find great people. When you start with the people who have a great attitude, they’re teachable, they’re driven, all of those things,

then you can get those people all pulling in the same direction. So we’re going to teach you branding, marketing, sales, search engine optimization. We’re going to teach you accounting. We’re going to teach you personal finance,

how to manage your finance. We’re going to teach you time management. How do you manage your time? How do you get more done during a typical day? How do you build an organization if you’re not organized? How do you do organization?

How do you build an org chart? Everything that you need to know to start and grow a business will be taught during this two-day interactive business workshop. Now let me tell you how the format is set up here. And again, folks, this is a two-day interactive 15… Think about this, folks. It’s two days. Each day it starts at 7 a.m. and it goes until 5 p.m. So from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m., two days. It’s a two-day interactive workshop. The way we do it is we do a 30-minute teaching session,

and then we break for 15 minutes for a question-and-answer session. So Aaron, what kind of great stuff happens during that 15-minute question-and-answer session after every teaching session? I actually think it’s the best part about the workshops,

because here’s what happens. I’ve been to lots of these things over the years. I’ve paid many thousands of dollars to go to them. And you go in there, and they talk in vague generalities, and they’re constantly upselling you for something, trying to get you to buy this thing or that thing

or this program or this membership. And you don’t, you leave not getting your very specific questions answered about your business or your employees or what you’re doing on your marketing. And what’s awesome about this is we literally

answer every single question that any person asks. And it’s very specific to what your business is. And what we do is we allow you as the attendee to write your questions on the whiteboard. And then we literally, as you mentioned, we answer every single question on the whiteboard. And then we take a 15-minute break to stretch and to make it entertaining when you’re

stretching. And this is a true story. When you get up and stretch, you’ll be greeted by mariachis. There’s gonna probably be alpaca here, llamas, helicopter rides, a coffee bar, a snow cone. I mean, you had a crocodile one time. That was pretty interesting. You know, I should write that down. Sorry for that one guy that we lost. The crocodile, we duct taped its face. Right? We duct taped it. It was a baby crocodile.

Yeah, duct tape around the mouth so it didn’t bite anybody, but it was really cool to pass that thing around. I should do that. We have a small petting zoo that will be assembled. It’s going to be great. And then you’re in the company of hundreds of entrepreneurs. So there’s not a lot of people in America today. In fact, there’s less than 10 million people today,

according to US Debt Clock, that identify as being self-employed. So if you have a country with 350 million people, that means you have less than 3% of our population that’s even self-employed. So you only have three out of every 100 people in America that are self-employed to begin with.

And when Inc. Magazine reports that 96% of businesses fail by default, by default you have a 1 out of 1,000 chance of succeeding in the game of business. But yet the average client that you and I work with, we can typically double this. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. I have thousands of testimonials to back this up. We have thousands of testimonials to back it up.

But when you work with a home builder, when I work with a business owner, we can typically double the size of the company within 24 months. And you say, double? Yeah, there’s businesses that we have tripled, there’s businesses we’ve grown 8x, there’s so many examples you can see at thrivetimeshow.com. But again, this is the most interactive, best business workshop on the planet.

This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. And then you add to that Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, you add to that Eric Trump, the man that runs the Trump Organization, you add to that Sean Baker. Now you might say, Clay, is there more? I need more. Well, OK, Tom Wheelwright is the wealth strategist for Robert Kiyosaki.

So people say, Robert Kiyosaki, who’s his financial wealth advisor? Who’s the guy who manages, who’s his wealth strategist? His wealth strategist, Tom Wheelwright, will be here. And you say, Clay, I still, I’m not going to get a ticket unless you give me more. OK, fine.

We’re going to serve you the same meal both days.

True story.

We cater to food. And because I keep it simple, I literally bring in the same food both days for lunch. It’s Ted Esconzito’s, an incredible Mexican restaurant. That’s going to happen. And Jill Donovan, our good friend, who is the founder of Rustic Cuff.

She started that company in her home and now she sells millions of dollars of apparel and products. That’s rusticcuff.com. And someone says, I want more. This is not enough. Give me more. Okay. I’m not gonna mention their names right now because I’m working on it behind the scenes here. But we’ve got one guy who’s given me a verbal to be here. And this is a guy who’s one of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma and nobody really knows who he is because he’s built systems that are very utilitarian that offer a lot of value he’s made a lot of money in the… it’s where you rent… it’s short term…

it’s where you’re renting storage spaces. He’s a storage space guy. He owns… what do you call that? The rental… the storage space? Storage units! This guy owns storage units, he owns railroad cars, he owns a lot of assets that make money on a daily basis But they’re not like customer facing most people don’t know who owns the mini storage facility or most people don’t know who owns the warehouse That’s passively making money. Most people don’t know who owns the railroad cars, but this guy He’s giving me a verbal that he will be here and we just continue to add more and more success stories

so if you’re out there today, you want to change your life, you want to give yourself an incredible gift, you want a life-changing experience, you want to learn how to start and grow a company, go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Go there right now. Thrivetimeshow.com. Request a ticket for the two-day interactive event.

Again, the day here is March 6th and 7th. March 6th and 7th, we just got confirmation. Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad. He’ll be here. Eric Trump, the man who leads the Trump organization. It’s going to be a blasty blast. There’s no upsells.

Eric, I could not be more excited about this event. I think it is incredible. And there’s somebody out there right now you’re watching and you’re like, but I already signed up for this incredible other program called Smoke Your Way to Thin. You think that’s going to change your life? I promise you this will be 10 times better than that.

It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

Don’t do the smoke your way to thin conference. That is, I’ve tried it, don’t do it. Chain smoking is not a viable, I mean it is life changing.

It is life changing.

If you become a chain smoker it is life changing. It’s not the best weight loss program though. Right, not really. If you’re looking to have life changing results in a way that won’t cause you to have a stoma, get your tickets at thrive timeshow.com. Again, that’s Aaron Antis, I’m Clay Clark,

and reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two-day interactive Thrivetimeshow workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you, it will be a life-changing experience. We can’t wait to see you, right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Whoa. I have to honor you, sir.

I wanna 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. I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. 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. I just want to take a moment to tell you thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump, but I just want to tell you thank you, sir, for

changing my life.

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. That’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers.

Yeah.

So anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books.

Yeah.

That’s the greatest thrill for me today. Not a thrill, but recognition is when people, young men especially, come up and say, I read your book, changed my life, I read your book, changed my life, I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this.