Committing to the Philosophy of Making Yourself Replaceable (with Wharton Business School Graduate Ari Meisel)

Audio Transcription

All right, thrive nation. Welcome back to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast. Download. On today’s business coach show is about burning the bridges and getting committed to when I feel like there are times in our life where a lot of us maybe decide we’re going to do something. We say, I’m going to do it. I’m going to start working out. I’m going to start my business. I’m going to start my insurance company. I’m going to whatever. I’m going to be a better dad. I’m going to. What happens is, is that we start and then something comes up. You know, it could be traffic, it could be the power goes out, it could be a. your kids have a parent-teacher conference, something happens and so you skip a workout or you skip a day of calls or you and what happens is you kind of start to feel almost like tomorrow.

I’ll skip that one too. And the next thing you know, you’ve skipped three days in a row and now you’re drifting away from the goal, and as Napoleon Hill eloquently wrote in a book called outwitting the devil, you begin to drift and then the, the momentum of the drift becomes so big that you begin to have a shift and now you’re known as a drifter amongst people who care about you, so they’re not going to say it to your face and they won’t really say it to anybody else. They just think about you as the great intender, the great pretender, the great the person who makes a lot of claims but never quite follows through. And if that’s you, we’re here to help you. Today, show is designed to be repetitive and not punitive. We’re here to teach you what you need to know to move beyond just surviving.

But if you’ve ever struggled to turn your intentions into actual results, you’re going to love today’s show because on today’s show we have amber and Charles Cola, the founders of co La fitness. These guys started a business out of $115,000 home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and they worked tirelessly from 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM every night, six nights per week, hoping people get in great shape to transform their bodies and their lives during the process and as a professionally trained stylist, Amber Church, her laundry room into a facility where she could cut her client’s hair. Charles turned every inch of the house into a training studio and they just grinded and eventually after years of doing this process, they were able to afford to open a commercial location at five, eight, four Southeast Washington Boulevard in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. And now if you go to La fitness, you can see they have three thriving locations, but it all started somewhere.

It all started with a seed and they watered that seed every day with diligence and commitment. They burned the bridges. They didn’t have a plan B and if they didn’t have a plan, but they certainly didn’t notify themselves and if they did notify themselves, maybe amber was strong when Charles was weak or Charles was strong when amber was weak with the two of them leave and cleave, they left their family, they cleave together as a couple. They encourage themselves and now they have a very successful company and I’m telling you, these are real entrepreneurs and they could be doing anything right now, but they’ve decided to give a couple of hours of their time to get on the today show and to teach us all about burning the bridges and getting committed to when Charles Cola, I want to ask you, sir, why is it so important whether you’re trying to, uh, into, into a maybe an addiction, a bad relationship, terrible habits. Why is it so important that you have to get a white hot commitment and you have to burn those bridges? If you’re ever going to have any success at all?

You’re right. Clay, um, you do have to, you know, get away from that. I, I, I personally have worked with probably around 5,000 people in the past Fars and fitness or nutrition related types of fitness training or just doing nutrition plan or you know, helping them reach their fitness goals. Um, and so through doing that you really have to kind of get somebody to have buy in and, and, and they see that you’ve done it. They can see that you’ve, you know, had the knowledge and the resources to do that and that you have a consistent work ethic. And, you know, for me, um, I’m a real steady kind of like actually kind of a slow but steady worker and uh, kind of like the tortoise and the hare and the tortoise. And so eventually if I just stay, keep going, um, you, you ended up winning a race where a lot of people, hard starters, bad finishers.

And uh, what I try to do is really like you talk about with job coaching is kind of maritime people’s lives. And um, with the, with the Diet is the main part for getting healthy and in shape. And I really tried to structure a nutrition plan that will work for losing fat and a toning up the body. And so planning a diet plan that’s around the clock 24 hours a day, like exactly what they’re going to do to stay satiated, satisfied and be successful in their plan. So I kinda make a life around a healthy nutrition plan that creates like food helps with their emotions and time blocking every three hours to be eating healthy helps them be structured in their life. So anyways, I met a time is really the big takeaway. Go ahead.

I want to get your take on this because you, you just mentioned being slow and steady. Want to get your wife’s take on this too, but you are a person who works out how many days a week right now? Currently Charles. I work out everyday. Seven days a week I. Yes. And you eat every methodical diet. So I’m going to go into your head and I would like for you to. We’re going to a restaurant together. Okay. Let’s say we’re going to the rib crib or Mcdonald’s two options. Either way, if you go into Mcdonald’s, what do you allow yourself to eat at Mcdonald’s, but up up, up, up. Charles, you’re slow and steady. You’ve made a decision, you’ve committed to something, but everyday you make these slow and steady decisions. What would you eat at Mcdonald’s? If you do go to Mcdonald’s?

Well, I would eat anything that’s a meat and a vegetable combination. And what about the buns and I would not eat the carbohydrate or the the no. The no refined starch or wheat or sugar? No guns? No guns? No buttons? No. But our French fries? No. No French fries. Ice Cream? No ice cream. But the meat? Just the meat and the vegetables. That’s basically.

Well, amber, can you vouch? Is this an actual thing? Does he actually go to McDonald’s and eat? Just the meat?

Yes, and I can vouch that if our children are listening. The second you said Mcdonald’s, they stopped the podcast. I know that for sure. Our kids have eaten Mcdonald’s more than any child on the face of the earth. That’s their least favorite place to go because that’s where we stopped on 100 percent of road trips. There’s always a McDonald’s every, every 20 minutes. Um, and yeah, we’ve, we’ve gone in and um, we do the devil hamburgers, ditch the buns, eat the meat.

Why do you ditch the bonds for somebody out there who says I don’t understand, why are you ditching the buns? I thought we was part of the food pyramid. I was told in high school, I was told in middle school the food pyramid. I’m supposed to eat grains and serial. Why? Why do I have to ditch the button?

Well, I’ve worked with so many people and I have personally been over 300 pounds myself. I lost 83 pounds through working with a trainer and through the course of my life and, and eight server, I don’t even know how many certifications and training I’ve had clients I’ve trained all diets fundamentally come down to a low glycemic. A meat and vegetable combinations are the ones that are most productive to force your body. We don’t know. Okay. Basically what I’m straight simple. Yes. The, my takeaway is, is, is, uh, most diets, whether they’re like maker’s diet, south beach diets, Paleo based diets, a lot of these diets that are trendy diets, all the ones that really, uh, in the way we’re created, we’re not created equal a refined carbohydrates and sugars. And when we do eat them, they, they raise a basically they absorbed very quickly in the body and store quickly. So I just, I’ve, I’ve learned that if I give clients and teach them exactly what the way that certain type of process carbohydrates in the body, they just stores fat very quickly.

Are you saying that if, if our listeners out there just eat meat, vegetables and water, they will lose a tremendous amount of weight?

Well, yeah. There’s no possible way for somebody to get fat off of Eaton lean meat, vegetables. Can I brag on one of our listeners who listened to a show that you and I did? You don’t know this. This is a win for you. This is a win for you. Aaron antice with Shaw homes. Who you guys know, you’ve met him, you know him. Aaron antice has lost, I believe, 20 pounds this month as a result of one of our shows. We did. Wow. He’s going just meet just vegetables and water and when you see Aaron antice with Shaw homes, I said, dude, what are you doing? He goes, I’m doing what you guys said on the show. I’m just doing the wheat or doing the meat. The vegetables and the water is. All I’m doing is I’m doing meat, vegetables and water. He’s looking good. He said for the first time and a long time.

He’s under a certain weight and he looks great. I, I, I don’t mean this in a weird awkward way, but he’s beautiful and I looked at him and I thought, can I hold you? He’s a, he’s a beautiful. Can I take a picture with you? He’s a great man. He’s been, he’s. He helps do all the marketing for the largest, a home building company in Oklahoma. He’s a client of ours is a good friend of mine, but I’m telling you, this guy is looking good. And the other night we were watching the browns versus the giants and I’m watching that guy. I’m watching, I’m watching like a hawk and I didn’t know about his new diet plan, but I noticed he’s eating ribs and he’s eating chicken, but he’s avoiding anything that’s not meat, vegetables or water. Amber. For the listeners out there, I’m not talking about the science of it.

I’m talking about the actual living of it. Why is it so important for you as a woman? You’re you’re passionate about fitness. You’re also passionate about helping our listeners. You’re passionate about your family and your business. Why is it so important that you resolve in your mind right now? If you’re a listener, that you really just need to have a bias for meat, vegetables, and water. Why is it so important that you just get clarity about that idea and can commit to it for at least the next 30 days? Well, like he said, we’re talking about making a commitment to win and and you’ve, you’ve to start, you went the results. And so you have to be intentional and it’s a simple plan. None of that’s bad. Find gummy stuff, it’s not going anywhere, just a stick to the meat and vegetables and you’ll start getting the results that you’ve always wanted.

You’ll start feeling better. You’ll have more energy, you’ll sleep better. You’ll start feeling and seeing the results and it will just continue to motivate you to continue to stick with that commitment to win. I just think it’s so incredible that one of our listeners, one of the our business coach clients who’s not a personal training clients, he does not work out at any of your three locations. You have a beautiful location in Bartlesville. It’s newly renovated. You have a great one. They’re into Pika one in Joplin. A guy who’s not working out at any of those three locations was able to benefit by just learning the concepts that you guys are teaching and we can get into the science

of it and you could. You could talk about Ketosis, but at the end of the day, he’s just doing it and it’s amazing how when you just do it and you commit to it, how it begins to change your life. Now there’s a Bible verse that isn’t a fitness verse, but it’s a burst about commitment, and Charles, I’d like to get your take on this before the break. Ephesians four, 22, 24, it reads, you were taught with regard to your former way of life to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires to be made new in the attitude of your minds and to put on the new self created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness. What does that verse mean to you, Charles?

Well, I think what you have to do is is you have to die to your internal desires and intentions that you know is not going to take you to where you want to go. Whether it’s fitness and you say, I, you know, I don’t want to get up in the morning and go to the gym, or I don’t want to follow my three legged marketing stool, or I don’t want to follow my Meta time or what, you know that the bottom line is that you have to put off the old self, the of, of lazy, or letting your emotions take you hostage and derail you from the true you that God’s created you to be. That you can do so much greater in your fitness and your family and your faith in all sorts of areas of your life. You can talk about the f six goals, which is I think the most awesome thing ever speak on.

But that stuff is really the part you’ve got to take off the old and you’ve got to make a commitment to new. And um, you know, like I’ve specialized in fitness and I truly care about people. I know a ton of stuff about working out and diets and I’ve done it for so many years. It the bottom line is, is is showing people you care, showing you have a pathway to do it, showing them that it’s very simple and I can teach them and tell them how to plan and prep it within 10 minutes, the night before and they can follow it, gives them hope, and then after about two weeks they get excited about it because they start seeing results.

Thrive nation, stay tuned. We’re talking about burning the bridges and staying committed. You got to burn those bridges and stay committed. Stay tuned.

Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the thrive time business coach radio show with Dr Zellner and Clay Clark

nation. If you want started from the bottom and now you find yourself still at the bottom. That’s not the way to go, but I can relate to that. Let me give you an example of a doom loop that I used to live in before I understood the concept of burning your bridges and getting committed to when this is the doom loop. This is what I used to do. It’s a confession. I’m sorry, I’ve got A. I got to get it out there just so I’ll share it between just and me and 100,000 folks that download the podcast every week and then if we could just keep it private between us and maybe your two or three closest friends, then we can just keep it private here. But I used to be a book buyer. Yes, I was a book buyer but I was not a book reader and so I would buy the book.

I remember a book I read back in the day was such a good book. I remember buying the book. I was so excited. I bought a book called the new imperialists news about Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates and the cover looked good and look good and the first chapter is good, but then the second chapter had so many words on every page. There’s no pictures. I’m thinking to myself, come on man, what kind of book is this? And so I got to about page two on chapter two. I stopped reading it and I kind of felt bad because people came into my dorm room like, man, you got a lot of books, man, what book you’re reading? And I’m like, Oh God, oh, God. I didn’t really read the whole thing. So then I had a teacher by the name of Amanda, don’t remember her last name because I’m a bad person, but she made a huge impact on my life and she said, Mr Clark, she was my teacher at oral Roberts University, the only teacher, by the way at Oral Roberts University that I believe who made an impact in my life, but ms dot Amanda said to me, she says, Hey, I.

I mean that sincerely. All my other teachers, I don’t know what they talked about, but Miss Amanda pushed me. She said, here’s the deal. I want you to read a book for the reading assigned. You don’t have to read catcher in the Rye or Lord of the flies. You can read any book you want, but it has to be a book about something you’re interested in. And I said, I’m mission. I’m interested in, in, in hip hop and Dj, and she said, well, why don’t you find a book about that? And I said, well, the only guy I know that has written a book about hip hop and deejaying is Russell Simmons. She says, well, why don’t you read his book? So I read this book, life and death by Russell Simmons, and it’s the first book that I’d ever really read. It’s about how he grew up, stuttering and how he started the, what is now known as hip hop music.

How we introduced the Beastie boys and run DMC and hip hop music into the world. How we started def comedy jam and Phat farm and basically created a genre or introduced the world to the genre of rap. He signed Jay z. He was a huge part of that whole movement. And, uh, I remember reading the book and going, there’s so many things I’m learning. And so I took the regimen that I learned about Russell Simmons. I took the routine that Russell Simmons did every day. And I thought, well, if it weren’t for him, it’ll work for me. And I used his proven system, his proven strategies to grow my company, Dj Connection Dot Com. And so Russell Simmons went door to door, passing out flyers to dance parties. I went door to door passing out flyers to my dance parties. Russell Simmons started a record label. I started a DJ company. He started out of a dorm room with Rick Rubin.

I started out of a dorm room by myself and we and I, I just started implementing what I was learning. And Amanda said, did you highlight the book? And I said, what? She goes, you haven’t fully read a book until you highlight every page you need to underline everything in the book. That means something, any word that you don’t know, circle it. Take a time out. Have a dictionary next to it next to your book and Ask Yourself, what does that book read? Look it up. What does that word mean? Find that word. Find out what it means. That’s how you read a book, dog ear, the pages that you love, right? The quotes and the column next to it, right? What does this mean? If you don’t know what it means, right, a question and come back to it later and then when you get done with the book, a report, not for me, but for yourself of all the action items you need to implement as a result of the book, and man, I got to the end of that live, that life and death book and that’s where Dj connection started was as a result of that book is unbelievable and all I can say is that if you’re out there and you’re an intender in some area, maybe it’s fitness.

You get the yoga pants. I got my yoga pants, I went to Lululemon, I got my yoga pants. You got the yoga pants, you got the membership. If you’re a guy, you’ve got the little sweatband you’re wearing like, so you’re like, let’s see. It looks like you look like Lebron James. You’ve got all the accoutrements. Charles, I’m sure you’ve seen this in the gym. You’ve got guys who swag it up, man. They got like the hypertension sleeves, right? The hypertension bands, armbands like all the stylish clothes. They got like the shorts, but they’re wearing the lebron tights under the shorts. Yes. They’ve got the tight. They got a shirt that repels. Sweat helps the body cool faster. Yes. They’ve got. August is your fat to make you look like muscle, right? They’ve gotten. They’ve got the newest beats headphones on. The ones with their cordless color every day though.

Yes. Oh, they’re ready to go and they go in that gym and the only thing they don’t do in the gym is workout. Or maybe you’re a dad and you want to be a good dad, but when you come home, the first thing you do is you don’t be a good data. As soon as you come home, you immediately get back on that laptop and you start working. If you’re a pastor and you’re feeling dissonance because you’re not reading the scripture before your sermons like you should be. If you’re out there and you’re a human, there’s some area of your life I ask you, is it your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, or your fun? What is an area where you are not going all? In what scenario where you’re not burning the bridges, what’s an area where you’re not truly committed?

Charles Cola, I go back to you on this, my friend, if you’re a fitness program, works the one you’ve written about your newest book, your upcoming book, the cf 30, which will soon we’ll be on Amazon. People can get it if your program works for fitness so well, if you just follow the simple diet and the simple workouts, if it works so well, how come everybody’s not doing it? How come you’ve only trained 5,000 people? Why aren’t there 5 million people doing it? If it works so well, it’s simple but not easy. And the takeaway from that is, is most programs out there, it’s all fundamentally very similar to each other. But uh, the problem is, is the user lacks the uh, the commitment and the, and the motivation

and a, in a lot of it is a, well first off they don’t know. And then once they do what they do learn, it’s hard to change somebody who’s had a habit for say 20 years or 40 years or 50 years and you know, change the way they eat, the way they look at food and so on. And so the big part is where we want to educate them and then get them to be committed enough to follow it for at least 30 days. And then they got a good representation of what could happen in the next six months. But most people, their body is a reflection of what they’ve done over the last six months, not just a day or two or somebody will start and then they’ll quit because it doesn’t work in three days or whatever.

I, I have found this to be true that you’re either all in or you’re not in at all. You either 100 percent committed or you’re not doing anything.

I call those the hard starters, bad finishers. And uh, when I would basically be a fitness coach and a trainer, I would kind of remind them to say, you know, it’s a marathon and not a sprint. You know, it’s, it’s what you’re doing is you want to find a sustainable program, and what we’re doing here is, is eating low-glycemic foods, slow to absorb foods, meat, vegetables, and uh, um, there’s some other things to it too that go into the plan. But, um, you can make it very, very, very simple and it can be very easy to follow. You’re never hungry, you’re always satisfied. But once you kind of get about two weeks and your cravings quit and you really start dropping, and that’s where you feel like it’s worth it.

When we come back from the break, I want to get amber, amber, Co laws take on this about the lack of knowledge, the lack of accountability and the lack of motivation that people often struggle through a when they’re trying to burn the boats and commit to something they feel like they struggle with a lack of knowledge, a lack of accountability or a lack of motivation stage. And is the thrive time show

you are now entering the Dojo of Mojo and the thrive time show.

All right, thrive nation. I asked you today,

what is keeping you from going all in as it relates to achieving your goals? And I find that one of the things that keeps us all from going all in is we don’t want to burn the bridges. We wouldn’t have a backup plan. We don’t want to ever really commit because we would like to say this. This is what a lot of people say. They’ll say, you know, Charles, you know, amber, I want to do your personal training program and so I’m going to try it out for 30 days and see if it works for me. And I’m not a personal trainer. But if I was, I’d say to the person, hey, you know, the science behind Kurtosis, the science behind strength training, the science behind blah blah, blah. That is proven. What’s not proven is whether you’re all in, if you’re all in, it will work.

If you’re not alone, it won’t work. So don’t do it if you’re not committed because you are like a walking billboard and if you just kind of start and stop people go, where were you working out? And if you don’t get in shape, people are like probably not a great trainer. So again, I mean you guys know your system works, but I want to. I want to talk to amber about these three areas. Amber, I’ve noticed there’s three areas where a lot of people struggle as relates to either a getting in shape with their physical fitness, but also getting in shape with their wallet, with what’s getting in shape with their marriages, their faith, their family, their finances, their fitness, their friendships are fun. The first year is lack of knowledge. I think a lot of people, amber, don’t recognize that suites we alcohol will make you fat. I think a lot of people just don’t know that. I think, amber, I think people think, you know, I love you. No less sweets than I used to. Less wheat. Now they’d be realized that suites, weeds and alcohol will make them fat. I don’t think they realized that meat, vegetables and water are the healthy move. Can you talk to me about lack of knowledge and how big of a part that is when it comes to getting somebody in great physical shape?

Well, I totally agree with you. I think you’re exactly right. Um, in fact, I talked to a girl does earlier today. Um, and she said, I have been to the doctor. I’ve got these two physical issues that are causing me to gain weight and I’ve been trying to diet over the last few months and I have been just doing no meat and I’m just trying so hard and I just thought that you’re headed the wrong way on the football field, you know, that’s not going to get you the results you want or you could just tell from all of her responses to me that she didn’t have the knowledge that she needed. Nor had she probably thought that knowledge. Um, but I, I do agree with you that the lack of knowledge, we talk about that in her book, the lack of knowledge, accountability, or motivation, I think the, some of these things is that they’ve never.

People would probably never been consistent in any area in life, or maybe they’ve never started anything that they’ve had to be consistent at. Um, maybe they’ve never known how to set a goal. No one ever taught him no one ever encouraged and they’ve never seen goals written down and lived out in front of them. Um, but I know like you had talked about when you would read books and your teacher had said, yeah, you’ve got to highlight the book. You’ve got to write a report on the book. You have to take action to gain knowledge. You’re not just going to randomly come up with knowledge or you know, you have to seek it out, but you have to follow steps to become knowledgeable.

So once you learn what to do, that’s step one. Can I get that bed, that knowledge? But I think a lot of people are amber need that accountability. They need that accountability to apply the knowledge. And I’ll just give you an example of someone who needs accountability. So here’s the accountability that I have. I have committed to recording seven podcasts a week. Who did I vow to do that, to, to, to do that for who did I, who did I commit to? A one. And this might sound crazy to you guys, but, uh, I remember saying to God said to God, I think God can hear no matter if I look up or not, but I did commit. I remember saying I’m going to do seven podcasts a week every week for the rest of my life until you tell me to stop and I feel like I’ve been called to do this for at least 10 years.

So let’s do it. And so we started that and as we’ve climbed up higher and higher and the itunes charts and the podcast is become better and better. Um, and we’ve moved into now your six of producing content a year, three of the podcast people say, where does that motivation come from? I committed to God to do it. Then I committed to my partner Dr Zellner to do it so that I committed to scripps radio to do it. And I can say, you know, clay, what’d you do it if you didn’t commit to those people? Um, because I’m 37 and because I’ve been in a positive loop for years of making a commitment to myself and doing it, I think I have a very high ability to motivate myself now. They have a positive self moment, a moment. Tim. I don’t have a lot of dissonance in my life.

I think I make promises to myself and I keep them. So I have a good momentum going in, a good confidence going. But um, when I was 18, could I have done it without making a commitment to a, to another party? No. When I was 22, no, 23. No, I needed a third party. A lot of us need a third party. We need an accountability partner. There’s areas of my life where I needed accountability partner and uh, that’s my wife. I think my wife is my accountability partner. But can you talk to me, amber, about why in the areas of fitness wine area of fitness, why most people do need an accountability partner or a class they go to or some type of third party kind of leaning in on them, encouraging them to actually implement what they’ve learned.

I think part of it is it’s something new and starting anything new and making a commitment to something new that you don’t have a lot of knowledge about because you’ve never done it before. Um, makes it more difficult. Um, but like for example, a Charles, his dad is an amazing pastor and he’s pastored for so many years, like over 40 years. Um, and he just recently has dealt with some health issues where he needs to go to the gym at least three to four a week and get in at least 20 minutes of cardio for his heart health. And he’s finding that he’s got all this discipline and all these other areas as a pastor, Rincon disciplined himself to write sermons and study scripture and commit to that. But making that commitment to go to the gym three to four times a week to get that cardio in has been a struggle for him.

And it’s not because he’s not as smart person. It’s not because he doesn’t have the desire. Um, you know, he’s trying to start something new. It’s something that he hasn’t done before. Um, and he has that accountability and he’s, he is reached out to family for that accountability. He knows all of us love and care for him and we care about his health and he knows we’re going to check in with them now. He could have kept all of that to himself and, you know, bypass the accountability from family. But we’re all able to, to reach out to him as a how are you doing? Are you, are you still making the three to four times a week? Because we care and we love him.

Yes. And uh, of course, like I was going on earlier, I’ve worked with a lot of people with training and a lot of people don’t do it for themselves, but they do it for you because they see how committed you have been as a trainer or a coach and they see your drive and your energy and your enthusiasm for let’s say, business for you, clay or fitness for me. And a lot of times your client actually tries to rise up to your level of energy and you’re boom, you’re big overwhelming, optimistic momentum, what you talk so much about. And so they aspire to to do that. I think a lot of times because they want to do it for me first. And then through the course of that and that relationship, you build with them, they end up learning a lot of new concepts. They learned that it’s really not that hard and the after you actually just do it, like really just doing it on a repetitive basis for about two or three, four weeks, just like the 30 day system. You actually then established new disciplines, a new routine, and you then in your brain established a new, a new pathway to be successful.

You created a new habit and now you get inspiration as the reward. Stay tuned. Thrive time show on your radio. Get ready to enter the thrive time. Show

it

from the bottom. Now we’re on the top. Knew the systems to fixing something. Hooks hopper, the books brick and some wisdom and the looks. That’s why, so if you see my wife and kids, please tell them. Now. Three, two, one. Here we go.

Thrive nation. Welcome back to the conversation. Today’s entire show is focused on helping

you to get on stuck. How do you get committed? What

you have to burn the bridges we’ll collate. What does it mean to burn the bridges? Well, will thrive nation. I, I have this belief that I share with amber and Charles Co law that yes, you have to get the knowledge. Then you need the accountability and they need that motivation. Now, here’s how I got my motivation. I was so motivated to start dj connection. I was like, I’m not going to grow up with limited finances. I’m not going to be limited. I’m going to do it. I’m going to start the company. Yes. So I had three jobs. I’m working at target. I’m working at direct TV and working at applebee’s. Great things are happening. I left that summer. I went to work construction. Things are going good. I’m working in concrete, make it a lot of money. I buy all the equipment and my phone doesn’t ring and I’m thinking to myself, what the heck?

I got my equipment, I got my equipment, I got my vision, got my equipment chick. Why isn’t my phone ringing? And that realized nobody cares, and so I bought a big yellow page ad, the biggest yellow pangea, the yellow page ad that I could afford and I noticed the first time I got a call I booked the deal with Jeff Ramsey. Jeff Ramsey, Jeff Ramsey, big shout out to you a booked Jeff Ramsey who worked at t mobile at the time. I booked the wedding because I had to. Oh, I had to because I had no. I had no backup plan of Jeff Ramsey didn’t book. I mean I couldn’t afford the ad and then I booked the next ad. I looked at it and I started booking, booking and I started so I increased the size of mine soon. I told Vanessa, so Vanessa, I think we should turn off the air conditioning and the heat because it’s $2,500 a month and we can be the biggest yellow page advertisement in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

We could dominate the competition and she says let’s do it. So we turn off the air conditioning. We turn off the heat. I’ve got a funny picture in the office about this, but she’s wearing like a robe and a notre dame sweatshirt and gloves and like a Hoodie and she’s just trying to stay warm because it’s like 30 degrees outside and it’s. Our apartment is 30 degrees and it’s just so cold. I remember got down to 20 degrees. My brother-in-law Justin stayed with us and my dad was visiting and it was literally 20 degrees in our home were freezing, but we had a big yellow page ad. Let me tell you this. Nobody books their wedding during December, so we’ve got that ad go in. We bought the ad, I want to say yellow pages came out in like November or December. January though everybody gets engaged, everybody gets engaged, you know, during Thanksgiving or Christmas, but they don’t start booking Dj’s until January.

Everybody gets engaged. If you’re a man out there listening, this is it. The only times of the year that you should get engaged, you get. You can get engaged during Thanksgiving because it’s clever. You get engaged during Christmas because no one’s thought of it and you get engaged or Valentine’s, so really all the bookings. People start booking wedding djs after they booked the venue. So people start booking in January, February, March, the bookings start coming in. Oh my. We’re booking everything and I like to p two systems to g, D to DJ systems. I had system number one in Ezekiel. He took had system number two. Then I thought I got to get crazy. I get system number three. It’s got system three now. Well then I remember getting a call for the fourth wedding of a weekend. I didn’t have enough equipment, so I went ahead and on faith booked it didn’t have enough djs or equipment, so I went ahead and booked it not on like a spiritual faith just on blind faith.

Then I went to guitar center with my discover card. I had an interest free 18 month term, bought the equipment, started training Djs, another call came and booked the fifth, but I think my second or third year I end up having like six weddings booked and only three sets of equipment. I bought it on interest free credit card and I remember telling Vanessa as long as I book out every weekend for half the weekends, I can pay for it with no interest this year. Boom. And I kept that going because no one’s going to lend money. No Bank is going to lend money to a disc jockey. I mean, come on, what are they going, what kind of collateral would we have? Speakers, cds, whatever. So then the next summer I did it the next summer. Pretty soon, no exaggeration. I had like 18 disc disc jockeys in 18 sets of equipment and I think Vanessa could ask, could clarify here, but I think I booked 25 weddings per weekend with only 18 sets of equipment, 18 djs and I bought all on credit cards and I was guitar center’s favorite customer and we go down to Dallas and buy my equipment from David Brown who would give me the VIP treatment because no one would come in there and buy 70 grand of equipment at one time, but me, I’d go in there, buy a ton of stuff, get as much credit as possible, pay it off, and I kept doing that and that’s how I did it.

But my white hot motivation came from that. I had to work. There was no backup plan. It was like apollo 13 every weekend I had to land that thing. I mean, there’s no backup plan. So amber, I want to talk to you about this. When somebody decides to commit to fitness, why is it so important that they don’t have a backup plan if they want to sustain that white hot motivation needed to actually get her done? I thought you said hot life night. I probably meant that.

I got that. I’ve got the. I probably did meet. Charles does have that slip, so that was my motivator.

Okay. See, I don’t. I don’t even remember the question. Why do you have to burn the boats to have that white hot motivation? I mean you and Charles, when you moved into your first big location, I mean you guys, did you have a backup plan when you

first I’ll tell you, I remember we have to get cra. I was trying to get equipment. I had a little home gym and we were running about 160 clients out a week out of our home gym with five trainers and about 30,000 in sales and I just worked my tail off in my living room and she’d do here in the back. And I literally actually that first little universal machine I went and, and used every dollar we had, it was like $3,200 and Ryan school filled with pioneer strength equipment. He actually helped me get all that put together. So shout out to Ryan School, Phil. He was awesome. Ryan schoolfield and he helped me get that and I started a little studio in my house and started running it. And I remember I had to train, I think it was like 38 clients just to pay my bills.

And uh, I remember like I remember putting out an ad and it was like I had like 30 on the book. So. So I mean like putting a $120 ad in the newspaper, that’s like the size of a quarter, you know, and praying that you get something out. And honestly it’s was like boom, calls started coming in, so I, everything you’re saying it’s like totally relatable and I remember going to like try to get a, a line of credit to buy some more equipment and they gave me like a 28 percent interest rate. So I bought $19,000 of equipment that ended up costing me like almost like 60 or $70,000. So it was awesome. So. So I, yeah, and I, and I never missed a payment and I was always, always did it. And I always honestly was like I got to do it. I gotta wake up at four in the morning and I got to get ready for my 5:00 appointment. I got to train all the way till 10 at night. And it’s, that’s, that’s the, you burn the boats. And so with, with fitness, I tell people, you got to get rid of everything in your house. All of the suites, all the sugar, all the things you desire. Get that out.

So when do we get rid of it? Slowly over time.

Well, when you feel like it, no, you’ve got to just do it. So it’s action over emotion. And so when you burn the boats, and I’m coaching somebody, I said, if you know that’s your struggle, then get rid of it. Get rid of it. And if you know that, like say if you’re an alcoholic, don’t go to the bar, you know, if you know you go to the bar. So I mean you just got to know that there are certain things that you have to put if it’s a stumbling block in your life, if you’ve got friends or family or anybody that’s going to demotivate you from following your fitness goals, you have to get them out of your life. Um, and, and sometimes that’s family. Sometimes that’s, sometimes it’s your friends. Um, and so you have to surround yourself with people that will help you be successful and believe in it. The systems are proven just like clay systems are proven and you got to follow that stuff and stick to it. And before they take action over emotion, you’re always going to have your emotions try to derail you and consistency and being planned and scheduled to follow through with it. That’s the win.

I would say this for anybody out there listening who says, well, I want more examples. I don’t know what Charles said. It’s true. Uh, I can think of a lot of past examples. I can think of some current ones. So a past example would be with elephant in the room. The whole goal of the business from the very start was the franchise with my partner Jonathan Barnett. We wanted to build another franchise. Oxi fresh did well and we want to do another one. And so, uh, from the very beginning, I mean our build out for elephant in the room was designed to be urban minimalism. It’s designed to be a modern urban minimalist look. It’s designed to be a rustic, modern, minimalist decor. Looks like Soho, New York. It’s a look that’s never out of style because it was never in style. It’s like

reclaimed brick, reclaimed barn wood. Then everything about our call center, all the systems was all built with the with the end in mind to franchise. The way we do every aspect of that company was designed to franchise and so the reason why we’re top in Google, the reason why we answered the phones where we do the reason why the call recording system, we use the video recording system. It’s all designed to franchise and so seven years into it we’re there for opening up Oklahoma City, but I can’t tell you how many times people have said along the way, like, Bro, you’ve been in business for like four years. You only have two locations. What’s going on? Well, I mean I know I have to, but I got to get them refined, opened the third because the third should be twice as easy as the second and then when I had the third one opened, they’re like, well, how come you’re not franchising? I’m like, well, because I’ve got to work out the kinks to open up the next one. And so if you’re out there and you’re saying to yourself, gosh, I just need some encouragement, I encourage you to burn the boats, make it where you don’t have a plan B, go all in and come out. Stay tuned. Thrive time. Show on your radio

who attend the world’s best business workshop, led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on itunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing is proof that you did it, and your contact information to [email protected]. All right, thrive nation. Welcome back to the the boats

and get committed to when edition of the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. For anybody out there who’s yet to attend our in person, thrive time show workshops. If you want to attend the workshop for free for a limited time, we have an offer for you. Are you going to do is subscribe to the thrive time show on itunes. Just subscribe to the thrive time. Show on itunes and leave us in objective review as thousands of people have done and you will get a free ticket to our in person workshop. You subscribed to the podcast on itunes that’s free. You’ll leave us an objective review that’s free and you email us to [email protected], and we will give you free tickets to our next in person. Thrive time show workshop. All you gotta do is email us proof. You wrote us an objective review on [email protected], and we’re going to give you free tickets.

What does it mean to burn the boats? To burn the boats simply means to be all in. You shouldn’t flirt around with the idea of owning a business unless you’re all in and Napoleon hill eloquently wrote about this in his book, think and grow rich that he wrote as a result of being commissioned to do so by the late. Great Andrew Carnegie in Nineteen Oh eight. And in this book, thinking grow rich. I want to read a passage from the book and then I want to tee this up to Ms Dot Amber Cola, the cofounder of [inaudible] fitness as to why it’s so important to sign your goals, to print your goals, and to live those goals, to print them out. Then to sign him and to live up. So this is what Napoleon Hill writes. He writes a long while ago, a great warrior faced a situation which made it necessary for him to make a decision which ensured his success on the battlefield.

I wonder what it was he was able. He was about to send his armies against a powerful foe who’s men outnumbered his own sounds like starting a business. He loaded his soldiers into boats, sailed to the enemy’s country. It sounds like he’s going after an industry that there’s already a big competitor. He unloaded his soldiers and equipment, then gave the order to burn the boats that carried them. I’m sure the guys who were burning the boats thought to themselves, this is the trick. This is probably a genius move. I wonder why we’re burning the boats addressing his men before his first battle. He said, you see the boats going up in smoke. That means that we cannot leave these shores alive unless we win. We have no choice. We win or we perish. Seems pretty intense. They want every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat only by doing so can what that means. You be sure of maintaining the state of mind, the state of mind known as a burning desire to win, which is essential to success. Amber, why do you have to print out your goals, sign those goals and live those goals. If you want to have success in the areas of fitness or in business,

well, you have to visually be able to see that goal and be reminded of that daily. Um, and I wouldn’t go back to Ephesians four, 22 that you had talked about. You’ve got to get rid of that former way of life that’s burning the bridges. You’re being corrupted by those deceitful desires. So part of it is you’ve got to make the change and that first commitment to yourself and getting it written on paper so you can visually see it and it not only holds you accountable, but you also make a statement to everyone else in your life, everyone else around you, that those are your goals. That’s the win and that’s your desire and that kind of tells everyone else around you that you’re burning the ships.

Charles, I want to get your take on this because once you’ve signed the document, you put it on your frigerator. You put it on your mirror, whether it’s about growing a business or getting in shape. Once you’ve committed to something, then you’ve got to resolve in your mind. You’re going to commit to the next four weeks. You got to say, Hey, if I’m going to do this whole fitness thing, I got to commit to four weeks in my mind. I’m not going to worry about 50 weeks. I’m just not gonna. Quit for the first four, we will not

die. You will live. Food will still be there. You can still be successful. Top of mind awareness, print it and put it right in front of the mirror. Then when you get up and get ready in the morning so you see it every day, so the first thing you do is you see it right when you wake up, right when you get ready and you see it everyday staring in the face if you have to copy it and put it on the fridge, so every time you walk to the fridge or the Pantry, you gotta, you gotTa. Get that top of mind awareness, that reminder that you have committed to four weeks. You have burnt the bridges on your former self, that you are a new creation and you are going to be successful regardless of what it takes. You will not die. You will still survive and food will still be there and you can be successful.

Yeah, George Washington carver who was a man who was born a slave, but who went on to become the most celebrated botanists and he’s. He’s the man who taught newly freed former slaves how to sustainably and profitably farm using sweet potatoes and peanuts. He said, Charles, 99 percent of failures come from people. Come from people who make excuses. Well, that’s God because that’s about other people. He said, 99 percent of failures come from people who make excuses. Charles, what does it mean to make excuses and why can you absolutely not make excuses? If you want to become a successful person

and entrepreneur, your biggest person is the man in the mirror. When you’re looking at yourself, sometimes your biggest struggle, you’ll always try to project your opposition or why you can’t do it on some plan that didn’t work or a diet plan or a muscle and fiction book that you’ve read or some other person that, uh, wasn’t successful at. The biggest struggle is your, your you and yourself and, and your motivation. And really what motivation is, is, is, is, is, is you try to get yourself in to feel like you want to do it, but that’s the wrong move. You have to honestly just take massive action. And as you’re going through the day, as you’re following the meals, as you’re on your fourth or fifth or sixth day of working out on the idiot proof plan, you will start to feel more motivated as you’re doing it. So action over emotion and so that man in the mirror. And that is the biggest struggle. The biggest thing is you’re always your battle with as a business or, or, or, or in your, in your, in your fitness, or in your faith or where you’re at in your marriage. It’s always your own struggles, your own demons. And so what you have to do is you have to get a plan. You have something,

Charles, here’s the deal though. I need, I kinda, I Kinda need some really intense coaching right now. I’m, I, I have been a lifelong drifter. Someone might say, someone might be listening saying, I have always been the kind of person who intends. And if you were personally coaching, maybe, maybe I can’t afford to hire you right now as a personal trainer cause you don’t even do it anymore. But if you are meeting with me one on one and I’m just like, I just always start and stop, give me that rude or that intense coaching that I know you’ve given to thousands of people. I just need it. I’m ready. I got a helmet on and read. I can take it, I can handle it.

Well, you know, being in shape is probably not for you. It’s probably, you know, for you, it sounds like everything you’re emotions are so attached to every single thing. You probably just need to stay in a fat, unhealthy body that you’re unhappy with and you’re depressed about. So the bottom line is, is it’s not for everybody. Maybe it stopped for you.

Oh, okay. Now amber, amber, you’ve, you’ve seen Charles, you have that talk and it just seems terrible. It’s the same talk I give people about making sales calls and I explained to real estate agents as recently as today, explain to a real estate agent. She’s one of our coaches is working with her and she’s a great lady and I explained to her, if you call 200 for sale by owners with the script I’ve given you and the recorded calls to prove that it works, you will only get one and the one and a three people you talk to to commit to meeting with you and have the one out of the three that you meet with. Only half of those will actually come in, so for 200 calls a day, you’re only going to get one deal. Now, if you make 100 calls a day, you get a deal every two days, so if you want five listings a week, you got to make 200 calls a day and that takes eight hours.

If you want 100 calls a day, then you’re going to get one listing every two days, which is two and a half listings a week. There’s no other way. That’s the process that you probably don’t want. It’s like you’re reading as I was reading your notes, you’re reading mine. I’m like, then you probably just don’t want it. It’s no big deal, just just don’t do real estate. Why does it seems mean to people when they hear the reality sometimes, but he. Why do you have to give people the reality of the pain and the gain of their goals? Sometimes the hard truth is what actually motivates people and it’s really hard to be family and deliver that to someone. It’s really hard to be a spouse and deliver that to your spouse and so it’s good to find someone who’s not in that circle of friend or family that can tell you the hard stuff you need to hear and and the funny thing is a lot of times we’re already telling ourselves that, that we don’t want to believe it.

You don’t thrive nation. Here’s the deal. There’s one thing that is is it’s a. it’s a mindset that will it as really as relates to fitness. If you will just stop eating wheat, sweets and alcohol, you will lose tremendous weight. If you just only eat meat, vegetables and drink water for the next 30 days, it’s amazing how much weight you can lose. Now, if you don’t want to become skinny fat, you should also work out and so what does that mean? I promise, don’t overcomplicate it. Just eat the meats, the vegetables, drink the water. It works. Now we come back from the break. We’re going to have a guy on the show, but the name of Ari Ari is a prestigious Wharton School of business graduate and he’s a self described overwhelm ologist. He wrote a book called less doing the art of less doing. It’s all about the replaceable founder and how you can actually get more done by doing less when you take the time to optimize, automate and outsource everything.

This guy is super smart and he battled Charles. He battled crones disease and by radically changing his diet, he changed his life. He’d gotten a diet that he received the diagnosis that Crohn’s disease was his new way of life, but by radically changing his diet, red was able to change his life and he also learned how to optimize his businesses and it’s a really neat story. But Charles, can you as somebody, somebody out there listening, they say I have Crohn’s disease or type two diabetes. Is that something we have to accept or can we change that?

Well, 80 percent of diabetics are type two and far as in for diabetes and I think what did, I can’t remember the exact statistic, but 80 percent are type two and I think almost like another. I don’t know what it was presented that the vast majority, it’s reversible with diet and nutrition. So almost what I’m trying to say is a good chunk, let’s say 70 percent. I don’t know exactly because it’s been awhile since I’ve looked at it, but I have worked with a ton of people that like 70 percent of diabetics do not have to be on Metformin and insulin, insulin pump. A lot of those guys can actually do it. I’ve worked with, uh, does and probably maybe 100 or more diabetics specifically through diet and working out and they take, got completely author metaphoreman. They’ve reduced their insulin pump to barely even running at all, don’t even happen to use it.

And we can actually see it, track it. We see how much they’re using. We check their blood sugar after every meal. I did that for years with several clients. Um, so it is possible. And then you were talking about Crohn’s disease. There are certain foods that really don’t agree with people and their digestive system. Crohn’s disease is the intestinal track and uh, and, and, and a, a problem with that. And so the foods that you eat directly affect it. And when I was a trainer, I would research it a lot of it and then try to figure out exactly foods that would agree with them. And if I didn’t know, he said, I don’t know right now, but I do have several doctor friends and we’re going to try things out within the next six months. We’re going to have a plan that’s going to get you a whole lot healthier.

And like I said, we just follow a simple plan and almost every time it works, if the problem is is when people are inconsistent, they don’t have routines, they don’t measure their life, they don’t met a time, their life is planned and scheduled their life plan and scheduled the food and they don’t autopilot that stuff. Once you get that stuff stuff and you have repeatable schedule, you become successful in all of the f’s that clay talks about, your faith and your fitness in your friendships, in the fund and all the finances and all that other stuff, but you’ve got to get that stuff into your life. If you don’t have it in fitness, follow the idiot proof 30 day plan.

Now thrive nation. To learn more about co La fitness, go to [inaudible] dot com today. And if you’re looking for a proactive

accountant who can help you simplify your finances, I encourage you to visit the website of one of our proud show sponsors. That’s hood CPAS DOT com. Once again, that’s hood CPAS DOT com. Stay tuned. It’s the thrive time show on your

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You are now entering the Dojo of Mojo and the thrive time show

thrive nation. Welcome back to the conversation. It’s the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. Now, on today’s show we’re talking about is burning bridges, how to make yourself truly replaceable. What does it mean to burn the bridges? Burning Bridges? Concept number one, it’s where you are all in. You’ve totally committed to your goal, to your mission, to whether it be your fitness, your finances, your friendship, your fun, and we just had to be coal laws on the show. Uh, the, the founders of co La fitness where they went all in, they burned their bridges and they built a company out of $115,000 home in Bartlesville. These guys work from 5:00 AM to 9:00 PM every single day, six nights per week to help people transform their bodies. Eventually they had an and enough customers, they were able to open up a gym and move out of their home, and then they made enough money to be able to open a second, Jim and a third, Jim and Marshall, is that the kind of a crazy part for me is the more money that they make, the less hours they now work so there are actually able to make less money now and they are, they’re they’re, they’re able to make more money now but work less able to make more money and work less.

It’s the more money they’re making, the less hours that are working. How’s that possible? A lot of business owners, as they continue to grow their business, the amount of time that they have to spend operating the business, working on the business, managing humans, that always goes up, but for them, they built the business in such a way that they could actually employ other people to do the things that they used to be doing. So if you’re in that place right now where you’re starting to make a lot of money, you’re starting to make enough. This is how I would describe entrepreneurship to people when you start a company, the first and the most stressful part of the business, Steve, is just trying to make a profit and that requires, you know, 70 hours a week, 100 hours a week, but then once you make profit, now you have to work on the business which is building the systems, the checklists, the call scripts, uh, building the second.

So I get it cool off fitness. They now don’t have to think about what kind of equipment dwindle by every time they have a master rollout lists, they have call scripts, they have systems, they have the logo already created. The print pieces already made. The website’s already made, the workflows already made, right? But if they never sat down and took the time to make the logo, the website, the print pieces, the scripts and all the systems they would never get out of working the front desk at the business. Can you talk to the listeners out there, Steve, who are stuck in that place where they have a profitable gym or a profitable business, but they haven’t taken the time? Like the [inaudible] have to sit down and make the scripts, the processes and all the things that allow them to create time freedom mean why is it so hard for people to get out of working on, on a job where they’re making a hundred grand a year? Well, why? Why do most people get stuck, Steve?

Yeah. I think the, uh, my favorite book that talks about that as the e myth revisited and it really talks about I’m taking some time to focus on your business rather than just in your business. And I think the people that are stuck in that, that’s what they do. They just do all the things that they need to do a in the business to keep it running, you know, take care of the customers, call the clients, train the client, whatever that might be, but they don’t really put in the calendar any time to work on their business so that they can implement those systems and call scripts and all the things you talk about.

One thing I want to point out, Marshall, I want to get your take on, this is a Michael Gerber he wrote in his book the myth revisited that Steve just referenced, he says, if your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have a job and it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic. I know specifically when I built the DJ come, my first company Dj Connection Dot Com. I found myself in a place where I made a ton of money, but I had to answer every phone call because they didn’t have any scripts and I never written a script before and I call this the the blank page phenomenon, but the hardest part for me about making the script was sitting down and making the script because it was stressful. Trying to sit down and write a script. Having never done it before.

It does. All right. Why is it so hard to make a screaming? Now I look at it and go, that’s easy to do, but why is it so hard for many of your clients before they get coaching to make a sale script, beautifying the time to do it? Because for me, I feel like I’ve never had the time to do it. Well, it’s because there’s a part of that process that they’ve never done before. It’s a, it’s uncharted territory. And so if you’ve never made a sales script and you don’t know what a sales script should look like or an effective sales group should sound like, it’s a, it’s really a daunting. And so number one is blocking off the time, uh, oftentimes we’ll say, hey, we need to get this done. And we’re like, yes, absolutely. This needs to get done. This is very important.

And then it doesn’t get done that week in the reason why it doesn’t get done. It’s not because somebody doesn’t recognize that it needs to be done, but rather we haven’t blocked off. Not a time, not sometime, but a specific time. You have to block off a specific time for all of the priorities in your life. And I’m going to talk about the DJ script, just to give you an example with the script for Dj connection. No exaggeration. I probably spent 40 hours on the making of the first version of it. Just the first version. It was like every morning I’d set my alarm for four or five in the morning I’d get, I’d make my script and then the next morning I’d wake up, edit my script. Next day I go use my script next morning, edit my script next day, use my script next day, edit my script, and I had to use the script myself before I gave it to somebody else. Now Steve, that part was hard was because I was very good at sales just naturally intuitively having done it forever, it was really hard for me to hold myself accountable to following my own script. Steve has ever been a struggle for you to follow your own script?

Yeah. Because just like you said, when you’ve been selling for a long time and you’re a seasoned, trained professional, you kind of have the tendency to like go to your toolbox in your head, uh, to, to sell. And when you realize that that’s not scalable, that’s when you start figuring out how to get a get on that script and able to, you know, being able to duplicate yourself. Um, and the only way you’re gonna be able to do that is to get a script that works. And the other thing that a lot of people skip is, um, they write a script or get a script that someone else wrote and they don’t call it themselves

and they enabled it and they’ve never read it.

Yeah. And then they hand it off to a salesperson that works for him and then it doesn’t work. And the salesperson knows that and the business owner knows that, but they haven’t really taken the time to vet it and read it. I’ve got a working in mortgage. I’ve got real estate agents that will hand me scripts that written by the company they work for in 2000. And it’s part of some sales thing that they do and they think they can buy the weather. It’s like 19 pages long.

And, and they’ve never read it in the script was written by somebody who it was written by somebody who’s not in a leadership position at the company. Right? So it was like a bad script or to somebody that’s never sold anything. Right? Right. So if you’re out there and you’re saying to yourself, I feel stuck, I feel like I just don’t know how to get time freedom and financial freedom. You are going to love our next guest. He’ll be on today’s show and tomorrow’s show, his name is Ari. It’s Ari and my Zell. And you might say, well, what? Why, why are you going to be on the show? Who is this guy do? He graduated from the Wharton School of business and he describes himself as a, as an overwhelm ologist. What he does is he wrote a book called the replaceable founder and he helps people just like me and you to build the systems needed to escape the business of the day to day aspects of running a company, I guess name is Ari Mizel.

He’s a graduate from the Wharton School of business. You can google them real quick during the break at a r I, that’s Ari, and then my xcel is m e I s e l m e I s e l check him out. You’re going to absolutely love this guy. He has a lot of knowledge and wisdom is going to bring to each and every one of you, but before we go to the break, I also encourage you to go to onyx imaging.com claim that’s going to require work, me clicking and the whole deal. Why? Well, if you go there, we’re going to give you a free printer or copier free copier printer. You know you get the three copier printer Combo and why would they give that to us? What’s the catch? Because they want you to auto ship your office in printer supplies with them. You can save both time and money with onyx imaging.com. Check it out today

to claim your tickets to the thrive time show today, interactive business workshop for free. All you have to do is to subscribe to the thrive time, show on itunes, leave an objective reviews, and send us confirmation and input. Thrive time show.com. To claim your star in the national star registry, we can’t help you thrive nation. Welcome back to the thrive

time show on your radio and podcast download. My name is Clay Clark. I have five kids, 40 plus chickens, one Turkey and nine cats. I believe I’m pretty positive. I have nine cats and today we’re talking about. We’re talking about burning the bridges and how to make yourself replaceable. What would I want to make myself replaceable? Sounds like a weird show up. Well, you got to burn your bridges. What does it mean to burn your bridges? You gotta commit. First part of the show, we talked about that. We had the founders of co La fitness and I a hundred percent endorse the idea of committing to starting your business. If you’re gonna start a company, Steve, why do you have to commit and burn your bridges so you don’t have a backup plan? Why can you not just try it for a few months as a real estate agent to see if it’ll work out?

We’ll take Drz. says, I think it’s his number two rule of business. Maybe the third. It’s a b, the Pigott breakfast, not the chicken, right? And, um, you know, chicken makes a deposit to breakfast and a pig gives his life to breakfast and I think you’ve got to give your life to your business if you want it to be successful. So that’s the same concept of burning the bridges. You can’t put your toe in the water. You got to jump in now, the next part of Your Business, once you’ve committed and you and you make 100,000 a year, the first challenge is working hard enough to make 100,000 dollars a year. But then this is where it gets crazy. I’m Marshall as an example. Um, you’re working with one business venture right now where you have invested both time and money into building a new brand that’s going to do very well.

It already is doing well. There’s multiple locations. It’s doing well, but when you’ve got money coming out and no money coming in, um, as the business starts to get up there, you’ve got your job. Let’s say that’s funding your business, right? The cool thing about the business, so the business doesn’t require your time, but the job does, right? I think a lot of people get stuck at the place where they start to fund the business, which doesn’t involve their time. When you start to fund a business where it doesn’t require your time, it’s going to lose money, which means you’re working at your job and the money you’re making it. The job is going down the proverbial toilet. If you’re not smart about it, if you don’t, you’re not. You don’t have the right mindset that you’re, you’re building the foundation of selfies. How I, how I visually, this is how I visualize all consigned my mind when I start a business is that I feel like I’m drilling or digging a hole deep into the earth because I’m going to build a big skyscraper, so I’ve got to put down, I.

have you ever seen, have you ever seen the creation of a big skyscraper? You gotta dig down what, 10 stories down and it would appear to somebody or you’re going backwards. They’re like, what are you doing, man? I thought you’re building a skyscraper. Don’t you have to go up Marshall? I thought you had to build it up, man. Why are you building now? You gotta. You gotta lay the foundation. You got to lay the foundation and the deeper that you go, the stronger the foundation is going to be. So some of the aspects of the foundation I want to get into, and then I’d like for you to comment on these. Okay? And I’ll put them on the show notes. Okay? But these are some of the aspects you’re going to have to build the foundation one, you’re going to have to build call scripts, anything to call scripts.

Marshall, why do you have to have call scripts and got to build call scripts? Because without call scripts, there’s not going to be a consistency between all of your different salespeople and you’re not going to be able to bring new people in a to continuously sell at the level that you might have sold at in the past, and so you got to be able to hold them accountable to something and that’s why you have to have call scripts. Now. Why would you have to install call recording step to actually record the calls, not just have scripts, but actually install clarity. [inaudible] DOT com. See, our calls are recorded, so the clarity voice is a powerful tool. I just had a client install this last week in next week. Story. It is entirely overhauled the in all of his sales. He is now. He’s like, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I’ve been doing this entire time. He loves this call recording and it keeps his salespeople accountable and it keeps him accountable.

Oh, I was there and I heard him whispering, oh, you just continue telling the store. Nothing weird going on. I just, I just get. I get going. Tell me more hardcore. So you’re making it weird now. You just keep talking about this. So, so this gentleman, he installed the call recording and with the call reporting, he was able to find out where he’s like, where the call is getting weird and he’s like, why did I say that? And uh, and it allows him to improve the script that allows them to hold people accountable. Overall, it’s just been a very powerful tool for measurement for virtual. Are you saying that’s a virtual? It’s online. Hey, how many? Uh,

okay. How many of his team quit when he turned on that call? Recording? Yeah. He, he immediately had somebody. They’re like, oh no. This is just one example. It makes everybody replaceable because when you install the call recording, this just happened last week or two weeks ago. The elephant in the room, we put it in the call, Rick. We haven’t had. We’ve had, we’ve always had the call recorder installed two weeks ago. We had an employee came in. We’re a suit dress sharp, had an unbelievably nice resume and set verbal bouquets to me. Every time he came into the building, I pulled his recorded calls and the guy was straight up mailing it and this is my imitation of his call through your. What did he attempt to say something there? What was that we were going to live with when you’re going, okay, I’m not exaggerating. And then they would say, yeah, I’d like to get a haircut.

But then like when you talked to him, he’s like, what’s going on man? How’s it going? How are you? I’m on the phone. He’s like, because he is he making walkie sounds with the crap. So we were fired. The guy after wedding them know transparently, calm down, calm down. Pretty the non entrepreneurs out there. Calm down. We let him know first. Okay. Within and Lynch him, I don’t know, three times we wrote them up. Then we, we, we’ve, we fired him. We put that. I replaced him with somebody else. Who when you talk to this person, you would think they’re not very energetic, but on the phone they’re killing it and call recording. Let you know what’s going on. But Clay, how long, how long did it take you to train the new person? Like three hours. Three hours? Yeah, because I sat them down and said we are manager, sat down in the new rep in front of the new call script and said, here’s the call script, and as your training, I want you to go ahead and put on some headphones and listen to 10 successful calls.

This is how it should sound. Then within four hours you’re on the phone and that’s how we do it. That’s how you do that. Hey, so you have to have that. That’s just an example. You have to have call scripts. You have to have call recording. You’ve got to have a workflow. Marshall, why do you have to have a workflow and what is a work flow? You got to have a visual process up on a whiteboard, a big whiteboard, a huge whiteboard. You gotta have the operations of the business. So where does the customer experience start? It’s, you know, out with the advertising. What is your three legged marketing stool you got to have visually? How does the customer flow through the entire process and what specifically happens and it has to be visual so that you can point to the spot on the workflow where the bottleneck is.

Well, thrive nation, when we returned from the commercial break, we’re gonna have ra, my xcel, the founder of a business that’s dedicated to making a replaceable founder. It’s a business that’s focused on helping you replace yourself. He’s a graduate from the prestigious Wharton School of business and he has a lot that he can teach everybody out there about how to create duplicatable and repeatable processes, but before we go to break, I would encourage you to check out our good friends at Paul hoods, CPA, CPA.com, hood, CPA.com. You might be saying, well, why should I check out hood? It’s a CPA’s, plural, by the way, hood CPAS.com. There’s more than one CPA. Why should I check them out? Well, because they a focus on being a proactive accountant. They’re going to help you design your life proactively so you don’t find yourself chronically on your taxes and financial planning. Check them out today at hood

CPAS, CPA.com 10, the world’s best business workshop, led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on itunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing is proof that you did it. Your contact information to invoice

time, show.com. All right, thrive nation. Have you

found yourself stuck in the business? If you find yourself stuck in your business where you just simply don’t know how to optimize or automate or outsource anything, you’re exchanging all of your time for money. If that’s you, you want to grab a pen, grab a notepad, take some notes because the note takers are the moneymakers. Let me take the note. The note takers are the money makers. It’s impossible to learn passively. You’ve got to learn actively. If you. If you’re not taking notes, it’s really hard to implement what you’re learning. If you don’t write it down and ask yourself, how can I implement what I’m learning now? Thrive nation? Without any further ado, back to our exclusive interview with Ari Mizel, a graduate from the prestigious Wharton School of business, a self described overwhelm, ologists and entrepreneur who helps people like you to build the infrastructure and systems needed to make yourself replaceable in your business.

Yes,

Mr. Welcome to the thrive time show. How are you?

I’m great. Thank you for that wonderful and warm introduction.

Well, sir, I’ve been spying on your reading as much as I possibly can about you to get myself coached up for today’s interview and one of the things I read about you was that you actually started experiencing just terrible pains and were actually diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. Can you share with us about this experience and how this eventually led to you founding your own business?

Yeah, sure. So basically I was working in construction in a real estate development projects and upstate New York and I was, among other things, living a very unhealthy lifestyle and I was just stressed out in my mind and when I was 23 I was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. And for those who don’t know, it’s a. it’s a chronic inflammatory condition that affects the digestive tract, it’s considered to be incurable and it’s very, very painful and quite debilitating. So I was, I had been working like 18 hour days for three years straight pretty much. And suddenly I found myself in a situation where I could barely do like an hour of work a day and through a long journey of self tracking and self experimentation, I was able to overcome the illness. And a big part of that was overcoming stress, uh, because of the nutrition supplements, the fitness aspect.

So those were all a prescriptive in a sense, meaning like, you know, you can tell somebody what to, what pills to take and what foods to eat and hopefully that’ll work for them. But if you tell somebody to manage the stress, that becomes a lot harder to really put into words almost. So I responded to that by creating a new system of productivity, which I would call less doing as in less doing more living. And I just did it because I needed to get more done in less time. So the overarching methodology is to optimize, automate and outsource everything that you do and that started out as a personal productivity methodology and it grew over time into one that now applies to businesses all around the world.

You’re talking about stress just to, just to personify what what stress means. My first business I grew (before I was a business coach) was called Dj connection.com and we did about 4,000 events a year, mostly weddings, birthdays, that kind of thing. Before I sold the company and that one of the stresses I had every night a, and I’m not kidding, every single night I would wake up hoping that we didn’t Miss Somebody’s wedding. You don’t like the one of our djs wouldn’t show up late or missed the wedding because we’re doing 4,000 of them and I’m not kidding, like panic attacks. What kind of stress were you experiencing before you develop these systems and processes? What kind of, I mean when you say stress, can you kind of give us some examples of where that anxiety or stress was coming from?

Probably the biggest one was when I was 23. I had accumulated $3,000,000 in personal debt.

What were you doing? Where were you? How did you accumulate that much debt? Were you really into baseball cards and casinos or what? What happened?

Yeah, horses, actually, no, it was some real estate development project that I underestimated how long it would take to get out. And I did eventually get out of it, but basically I was 20 years old. I went to visit a friend in this city and he showed me these buildings and I made an offer to buy them that day and I got a million and a half hour on unsecured credit line from a local bank because it was a big project at the time. Wow. And you know, that’s a really bad idea to give to a 20 year old. And the second line of code is an even worse idea. Uh, and you know, it, it, it accumulated the, there were things that we hadn’t foreseen in the project. There were delays in selling units and so it was 23. I got to $3,000,000. And not to mention I’ve been living in this just really unhealthy physical lifestyle. I mean, I’ve been working really hard. I was eating fast food a couple times a day. I was smoking a pack of cigarettes a day I was drinking. I mean I was, I was not treating my body particularly well.

You know, you, you in your best selling book, the art of less doing, you teach entrepreneurs

a lot about your, your system of, of doing less. And I think a lot of people listen and right away when you hear about doing less, you start to think, this is another woo idea. This is theoretical. This is hypothetical. This is no way it could possibly work. How could I possibly, if I’m already working every hour of my day, how could I possibly make more money and achieve more time freedom as a result of doing less? Can you give us an example or walk us through, um, your, your, your processes and your systems for, for doing less? I think we all want to do less, but I think there’s a lot of people listening who say how is it even possible to do less, but to get more done.

So as I said, the methodology is optimized, automated outsource, and that’s really the lens that I use to apply to everything that I look at, whether it’s personal or with things with businesses, and it’s an important water because I’m sure a lot of people listening right now have outsourced something and a lot of those people have had a really bad experience. That sort of thing, and a lot of times it’s because they outsource first and the problem with doing that is that if you take an nutrition problem, something that you don’t want to do, don’t like to do or don’t do well, and you suddenly drop in somebody else’s lap and they have less context, less inflammation, less experience, and you magically expect it to be this amazing result. It’s setting everybody up for failure, so you really have to start with optimization and without the foundation.

We’re really just shining a light. We’re looking at how you do the things that you do and how you do all of them in your personal life and your business, and while that may sound simple, every one of us has been guilty of saying, you know, somebody says, why don’t you do things the way you do them? Why do you, why do you do payroll that way? I want to use this company. And while a lot of people will have the experience of responding and saying, well, that’s how I’ve always done it. Right? That’s how I’ve done it for six months. That’s how I’ve done it since I hired this guy or since I signed up for this software and that’s a really bad reason to keep doing things the way that we’ve been doing them. So it’s more of an excuse if anything, for people to just not look harder at the inefficiencies in their own businesses and use a business coach.

So we start with optimization and looking at the steps involved in every process we go through and the resources we use and the misallocation of those resources. Really. Once we’ve done that and we’re ready to to. So that alone is a really, really big step for a lot of people, but then we can look at automation and we can automate things now that a week ago a person had to do and it’s amazing what we can do with machine learning and things like Zapier trigger automations between various services. You can literally create a company based on automating the interaction between five or six free pieces of software and build a really big business coach off of that now. And it’s amazing. So we want to automate as much as we can and at that point, if there’s anything left over, which hopefully there isn’t, that’s the first time we would ever look at outsource through this. Some sort of specialist or general. So a lot of people do it

first nation on tomorrow’s show. We’re going to have more with Ari, my a graduate from Wharton School of business who focuses on helping entrepreneurs like you to make yourself replaceable and to create both the time freedom and financial freedom that you are seeking. But before we wrap up today’s show, I want to do a big shout out there to Williams contracting. They’re one of our proud show sponsors and Marshall, you know, travis on a firsthand basis, why is travis such a good guy and why should all of our listeners consider using Williams contracting for their next big commercial building projects? He’s just a standup guy. They do incredible work. A lot of Christian values at the company and uh, the, if you’re looking to add onto your building or put up a new building or you’re looking to expand your vast empire of your business, then he would be a great fit over at Williams contracting, uh, to, to hire for some construction management or general contracting a bit.

Okay, so that’s Williams contract. You can check them out at will dash [inaudible] dot com. Also, if you’re listening today and you would like to attend our next in person, thrive time show workshop for the low, low price of free, all you have to do is go to the find the thrive time show on Itunes, can find the thrive time, show on Itunes, and then subscribe to the podcast. So subscribe to the thrive time show podcast on itunes and leave us an objective review. And then we will email if you earn, if you email us proof that you did it. So subscribe to the thrive time. Show on Itunes, leave us an objective review. Email is proof you did it to info at thrive time. Show.com. And then we will send you two free tickets to our next in person. Thrive time show workshop. My name is Clay Clark, that’s Marshall Morris, business coach, and Steve Currington. Steve Currington, the mortgage guy without any further. I do three, two, one. Boom.