Michael Gerber | The Best-selling Author of The E-Myth Revisited | How to Create Time and Financial Freedom (Part 1)

Audio Transcription

Clay:
Yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, today is a very special occasion because you never know, Josh Wilson, who you were going to meet at a Trump hotel room. You never know. When you go to the Trump hotel in Chicago, you never know who you’re going to meet there. And I met the man and the myth, the guy who’s behind the E-Myth series of books that absolutely changed the way that I approach business. Michael Gerber, the author of the E-Myth. I met him there in the Chicago hotel, and I asked him if he would be on the show. He made a poor life choice, and he’s decided to be here with us. Michael Gerber, how are you, sir?

Michael Gerber:
Delighted to be here.

Clay:
Oh, wow. You are just absolutely a living legend and your book helped so many people. But before we get into your book specifically, chapter five of your book, could you share with the listeners where you grew up and kind of your background, just so they know that you weren’t born at the top of the mountain?

Michael Gerber:
Well, hear me, nobody is born at the top of the mountain. I certainly wasn’t. I was born in New Jersey in Elizabeth, New Jersey, of a couple of beautiful Jewish parents and part of a growing family. In 1936, in the heart of the Depression just as the horror was taking place in Europe and just before the Holocaust was to take place in Europe, I grew up as a little boy in that season, without any understanding of what was going on in the world around me. My parents decided to move from New Jersey to California in 1947. And we did move to Anaheim, California. And I was raised in Anaheim, California, and my journey started in Anaheim, California, and my journey continued for the rest of my life to the point where you speak to me here today. And I could go into all of that, but it is such an uninteresting story about Michael Gerber, where he was, what he did, how he did it, why he didn’t do it, what he could’ve done.

Clay:
So let me ask you this. When did you kind of start to figure out what you wanted to do professionally? What age were you when you had that idea?

Michael Gerber:
I didn’t. I never focused in on what I wanted to do. I was a jazz saxophone player. I was an encyclopedia salesman. I did this, I did that, I did that, I did this. All the time that I was doing that I was reading and reading and studying and studying philosophy, spirituality, music, jazz, all this stuff anybody would ever be attracted to until I hit the age of 41. Now hear me. All of this started, Clay, then. At the age of 41.

Clay:
41.

Michael Gerber:
And at 41, friend of mine who owned a small advertising agency in Silicon Valley, California asked me if I’d meet with one of his clients who is having difficulty converting leads that my brother-in-law’s ad agency was creating for him into sales. And I told him my brother-in-law Ace, that’s his name, that’s still his name. God bless him. I said, Ace, “I don’t know anything about business. And I certainly don’t know anything about high tech business.” He said, “Mike, you know more than you think you do. Just meet with the guy, let’s see what happens.”

Michael Gerber:
So Ace dropped me off to meet with a guy. We’ll call him bob. Bob had a high tech product. He had sales engineers having difficulty selling that product. And Ace dropped me off and said, “Bob, Ace, Michael, guys get to know each other. I’ll be back in an hour.” So obviously Bob said to me, Michael, “What do you know about my business?” And I said, “Nothing, Bob,” because I didn’t. And he said, “Well, what do you know about our product?” I said, “Less than that, Bob.”

Michael Gerber:
And obviously he was looking at his watch and thinking, “I’ve got an hour with this guy. He doesn’t know anything. What in the hell am I going to do with him?” But instead he said, “So if you don’t know anything about my business and you don’t know anything about my product, how can you help me?” And I said, “I haven’t a clue, Bob. But we’ve got an hour to kill. So let’s start. So I can ask you some questions.” And that’s how all this started. I began to ask Bob questions. And I realized despite the fact that he owned a small business, despite the fact that he was the CEO of a small business, despite the fact that he thought of himself as an entrepreneur, starting that small business, every answer Bob gave me was anecdotal. There was no facts underlying anything he said. So I’d ask more, than I’d ask more, and then I’d ask more, and then I asked more. I suddenly realized, I did know something about business. I knew that selling is a system. And I knew that Bob didn’t have one.

Clay:
Thrive nation, that deserves a quick time out right there. That is absolutely huge. In order to create time freedom and financial freedom. Again, in order to create both time and financial freedom, you must create systems that are both repeatable and quickly learnable. You have to create sales systems that other people can implement, who are not you. And that way you can quickly train new members of your team how to create a repeatably, predictably successful system for sales. Otherwise, again, it always comes down to you doing the selling. You’ve got to create repeatable systems that wow the customers each and every time. So I would ask you today, specifically when somebody calls your business phone, how is the phone answered? And if you don’t know the answer to that, make a call script for answering your phones. You need to have a call script for answering your phones.

Clay:
You need to have a prewritten email that you send to new potential clients. You need to have a frequently asked questions script. So that way, when anybody calls you and asks your new hire frequently asked questions, they’re going to have all the answers you want to think about every aspect of your system. And you want to make it scalable and repeatable. You want to make sure that your on hold music is music that is going to wow the customer each and every time. You want to make sure that every interaction with your customer is in fact scalable. It is repeatable. And that it does wow the customers.

Michael Gerber:
And I told Bob without a selling system, you’re not going anywhere with this. He said, “What’s a selling system?” I said, “Just think of it as a script. First, you say this, then you say that, then you say this, then you say that. First he does this, then he does that, then he does this, then he does that.” And in the process of doing this and doing that and saying this and saying that something happens and you can predict what that’s going to be after you’ve gotten it down, really gotten it down into a groove.

Clay:
Into a groove.

Michael Gerber:
Into a groove. And he said to me, “Well, can you create that for me?” And I said, “Of course.” So when Ace came to pick me up, he said, “What happened?” I said, “I just got a job.” He said, “What do you mean a job?” I said, “I’m now a consultant.” He said, “What do you mean a consultant?” I said, “I’m now consulting Bob on creating a selling system.” He said, “What do you know about that?” I said, “I guess everything.” And that was the beginning of it. And that was the beginning of this. That was the beginning of E-myth. That was the beginning of everything I’ve done since that point in time.

Clay:
Remember, keep this planted firmly in your mind that entrepreneurship is simply solving a problem for your ideal and likely buyers in exchange for compensation. Again, entrepreneurship is simply solving a problem in exchange for the compensation that you seek for your ideal and likely buyers. Think about all of the problems that you can solve for your ideal and likely buyers. Make a list of all the problems that you can solve for your ideal and likely buyers and offer your customer, offer your ideal and likely buyers those solutions in exchange for the money you seek. And you will create both time and financial freedom. It is that easy. My friends, it is unbelievable. Find a problem that you can solve for your ideal and likely buyers, and then make the system repeatable, make it scalable and make sure that it wows your ideal and likely buyers. Make sure that the business can work without you. And you shall experience both time and financial freedom.

Michael Gerber:
So you might say I didn’t come to the realization of why it was here on the planet until I turned 40.

Clay:
40 years old. Let me ask you, the age of 40, you began to have these epiphanies discovering that many of the people out there, most of our listeners, most people on the planet, we have bought into this thing called the E-Myth, where we’ve bought into this wrong mindset to business or this wrong way about looking at business. Can you explain for the folks out there that don’t know what the E-Myth means? What do you mean when you refer to the E-Myth?

Michael Gerber:
It’s based upon the assumption that everybody believes anybody and everybody who starts their own business is an entrepreneur. And the fact is they’re not. And what I learned with Bob and then with Mary and then with Judy and the various little companies that I worked on behalf of Ace’s ad agency, until the point it became obvious that I was going to do this on my own, not in Ace’s ad agency, because Ace didn’t believe in what I was saying either.

Michael Gerber:
But I came to realize that none of them were entrepreneurs. They were all what I came to call technicians suffering from an entrepreneurial seizure. All they did was create a job for themselves. So every small business is a job for the idiot who started it. And now they’re working for a really big idiot themselves. And they’re saying to themselves, “Yeah, but this isn’t working.” And of course it’s not working because they didn’t design it to work. They didn’t build it to work. They didn’t launch it to work. They didn’t grow it to work. How to do that, design it, build it, launch it and grow it is what the E-Myth is all about.

Clay:
If you’re out there today and you found yourself creating a business that has created financial freedom for you, but you don’t know how to escape the wage cage, and you don’t know how to actually create time, freedom to go along with that financial freedom. That’s why we have our in person workshops and the one on one coaching to learn more, go to thrivetimeshow.com. That’s thrivetimeshow.com and click on the conferences button. And there’s no upsells at our workshops. You’re going to be seated by real entrepreneurs. People that actually own successful companies who are now where you once were. These are real entrepreneurs that needed to learn how to create both time and financial freedom. And many of our conference attendees come back year after year, because now that they have created time and financial freedom, they want to refine the systems to make them even more efficient.

Clay:
So they want to receive a refresher course. Maybe they want to get reinspired, but it’s really awesome because you’re going to be seated by real entrepreneurs, just like you, who own a company that is already doing well, but they just want to create both time and financial freedom at this point. And so I would encourage you to check it out today, go to thrivetimeshow.com and then click on the conferences button and book your conference tickets today. And don’t let finances be an obstacle here. If you’re in a tight spot, we have scholarship options available. Essentially, we’ll meet you where you’re at financially to make sure that the finances, the financial obligations of purchasing a thrivetimeshow.com ticket are not going to exceed your ability to pay for them. And so, without any further ado, back to my interview with Michael Gerber.

Clay:
What I find is that some of us think that we know what we’re doing. So some of us, we think, so when I was building my first company DJ Connection before Brent Lawless gave me your book, I was having quote unquote success. I was selling a lot of wedding packages with DJconnection.com. I was booking thousands of events. I was winning awards. I was being told I was the best entertainer. My company was great. And I read chapter five of your book, you mentioned that I was creating a job and not a business. And I started contemplating, “Well, what’s the difference between busy-ness and a business because they’re, they’re spelled slightly differently, but busy-ness, there’s the y in there. And I don’t know why I’m in business when I’m busy-ness. Busy-ness means I don’t know why. And then business means a business exists to serve me. There’s an i in business, a business exists to serve me, okay.”

Clay:
And I had to read that chapter over and over and over. And you challenged me in the Chicago hotel room at Trump Hotel. You challenged me to read the chapter again. So I read the book again. I read it. I went through all my highlights and I took photos of them. And I sent it to your wife because I wanted you to know that I’d read it again. And so I would like to go into, if we can, to chapter five of your book, and to page 51, we’re going to open up the book. E-Myth revisited, where you wrote, “Every adolescent business reaches a point where it pushes beyond its owner’s comfort zone.” For me, it was DJconnection.com. “The boundary within which he feels secure in his ability to control his environment and outside of which he begins to lose control.” That’s why I wanted to DJ 250 events, Michael, before your book saved me, I literally did 250 events in one year.

Clay Clark:
The events, Michael, before your book saved me, I literally did 250 events in one year. I personally made the playlist for every wedding. I did everything. Tons of money, no time to spend it. It was awesome and terrible at the same time. And the world kept cheering, help our listeners out there that are stuck in this adolescent phase, where we want to control everything. Or we want to abdicate and assign items to members of our team who are poorly trained and then we never follow up. So we either want to do it ourselves, or we want to assign the project to somebody on our team who was poorly trained and poorly equipped to have success. And then we do a poor job of following up. Help the listeners out there, my friend.

Michael E Gerber:
So the evolution of a company from infancy to adolescence to maturity, it’s an absolutely universal process. Most small companies, we’re talking about small companies, we’re talking about a hamburger stand. We’re talking about a meat market. We’re talking about anything and everything that depends upon somebody doing some work. The butcher does the work, the gardener does the work, the hair dresser does the work, the poodle clipper does the work, you understand what I’m saying?

Clay Clark:
Yeah.

Michael E Gerber:
There’s work to be done. There’s work to be done in every single business on the planet. Now some of that work is very unsophisticated, some of that work is very sophisticated, but despite whether it’s sophisticated or unsophisticated, every single small business owner who starts a business is actually that technician. The hairdresser starts a beauty shop. The guy behind the microphone starts a thing behind the microphone. A chiropractor starts a chiropractic practice and so forth and so forth. Well, of course they do, because that’s what they do. That’s what they know how to do.

Clay Clark:
You’re correct to everybody. Everybody starts that way. A hundred percent agree with you.

Michael E Gerber:
Yep. So infancy is that startup, infancy is the very beginning. Infancy was that joyous time, Clay at the very beginning of what you were doing behind that microphone where you just shined. And you remember that?

Clay Clark:
Oh yeah.

Michael E Gerber:
You just shined.

Clay Clark:
Oh, it was awesome. It was a new idea and it was exciting. I did it myself and people cheered. I got tipped.

Michael E Gerber:
You got up every day-

Clay Clark:
Tell me this story.

Michael E Gerber:
And did this and did that. Absolutely. Just like the woman in the beauty parlor, she gets up every day and she goes to work. She takes out her brush and her needles and everything and she goes to work on a lady that comes in and then the lady who follows and then the lady who follows and they schmooze and they talk and they dance and they play and they do whatever they do. And the lady who comes in loves her and the other one loves her. The other one loves her and so forth and so on. And then she gets busy, busy, busy, busy. That’s where adolescence steps in. Your company grew beyond just the beginning phase.

Michael E Gerber:
So suddenly you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do this because if you stop doing this, you’re out of business. That’s the deal. If you stop doing this, you’re out of business. And that’s where adolescence begins to take its toll. In other words, you’ve got to get this done. You’ve got to get that done. You got to get,… and you can’t do everything anymore. There’s too much to do, too little time to do it. And also you don’t know everything that needs to be done. So you got to learn everything that needs to be done. Now you’re stretched, stretched, stretched, stretched.

Clay Clark:
Quality is going down. You’re stretched thin, the quality is going down. You’re dropping the ball. You’re making money, but now you’re kind of offering shoddy work, shoddy quality. You start to lose the excitement about your business. You feel trapped in your business, Michael, right? I mean you feel trapped.

Michael E Gerber:
Yeah. And your kids begin to wonder, “Where’s dad? Where’s dad? Where’s mom? How come you’re never home? How come you’re always working?” “Well, I got to work. I got to work. I got to work. I created this thing that depends upon me because I’m the star.” So I understand it’s that star issue. I’m the star. It won’t work unless Clay Clark does it. It won’t work unless Michael E Gerber does it. I’m the star. That’s when the business begins to fail and it begins to fail big time.

Michael E Gerber:
And what happens is instead of doing this and doing that and doing this and doing that, instead of all of a sudden having people doing it, but they’re not doing it as well as you do it, you had to bring people in. You had to bring people in, you had to bring in a bookkeeper, you had to bring it a whatever. They’re not doing it as well as you did it. So finally you realize they don’t work as well as you do, so you let them go.

Clay Clark:
Let them go.

Michael E Gerber:
And when you let them go, now it is still there waiting to be done.

Clay Clark:
And now you get to do it yourself again, because you’ve created a job and not a business.

Michael E Gerber:
Right. So what do you do? You get small again. And that’s what everybody does. They grow and then they shrink. And then it goes to adolescence again and then they shrink. And finally they’re through. So last year there were roughly 550,000 small companies that shut their doors in this country. 550,000 small businesses shut their doors. Not because of the pandemic. You understand the pandemic. Yeah, that’s a problem. But understand the problem I’m talking about is a pandemic and has been a pandemic for generations.

Clay Clark:
It’s worse than a pandemic. What you’re talking about is worse than a pandemic. This happens every year, every decade, over and over and over. And what I find, and I’d like to dive into this with you. I have a lot of people that I have been friends with over the years who they start hiring everybody, like you were just talking about. They began hiring people and then they begin to abdicate, but they think what they’re doing is to delegate. They think that they’re delegating when they’re actually abdicating. Could you talk about this? I see it with accounting almost a hundred percent of the time where people, they bring in someone to do their accounting and they do not follow up with them because they’re supposed to be the expert. I mean, can you help the listeners out there and maybe tell us what the difference is between abdicating and delegating?

Michael E Gerber:
Very simple advocation is where you turn over responsibility for something and there is no system. You turn over responsibility for results, but there is no system. There’s no method by which that result is intended to be produced. You understand when McDonald’s was first formulated, the very first franchise store, the franchise prototype is Des Plaines, Illinois, Ray Kroc went to work on that McDonald’s hamburger stand to perfect the systems in that hamburger store. So that whomever he hired would master the system. Master the system. The system was the solution, not the person person he hired. In every case you’re talking about where we abdicate accountability, we’re effectively turning over the responsibility to produce a result to somebody who’s going to do it whatever way they do it. And every single person we turn it over to does it differently. So there is no way we do it. And if there is no way we do it, there is no in quotes McDonald’s, there is no franchise. There is no turnkey system. There is no evolution of a methodology that identifies a brand from everyone else.

Clay Clark:
When you talk about a system, this might sound mean, and Michael, please feel free to argue with me if you need to here, you can straighten me out here. But I know people that say to me, business owners, who I meet at conferences or who I meet in my building, they’ll say, “Clay, the system is Kara. The system is Steve. The system is Josh.” They are assuming that a person is the system because the person does the job. And then that key person who has been with them since day one, or maybe day 10 or maybe month six, they move on. But I have found since implementing your approach to business, working on a business, the E-Myth approach, I now am no longer dependent upon personalities. So when somebody feels like it’s time to move on, I can encourage them to move on with great joy. I mean that, I can be happy for them. I don’t have to hold them hostage and they don’t hold me hostage.

Michael E Gerber:
Because the system stays here. Because you own the system. You own the brand, you own the methodology. You own the ability to produce the result that you have designed your company to produce again and again, and again and again. So when people tune in, when people come in, when people come to the store, when people go online, no matter where it is online, offline, it doesn’t make any difference. It produces exactly the result they came to get because it is an intelligent system. That’s the key to the E-Myth, that’s one of the critical keys to the E-Myth. It’s the system stupid.

Clay Clark:
I have a… Before I let Josh ask you some questions, Josh, with Living Water Irrigation is here. Now I want to brag on Josh. He’s grown a business from $300,000 in revenue to he’s on pace to hit 3 million this year. But last year, Josh, what were your sales last year? What did you end the year at?

Josh:
One eight.

Clay Clark:
$1.8 million. He’s been a client of mine for a long time, and he’s probably been tired of me referencing you. He’s probably tired of it. He’s probably saying, “Stop referencing, this guy doesn’t even exist probably.” He thinks you’re probably like a mythical person, but I show him the book cover. He Googles ya. He verifies. He knows you’re real now. And now he’s here with you and he has some questions for you, Michael. So Josh, what questions do you have for the great one, Mr. Michael Gerber?

Josh:
Well, Michael first and foremost, thank you so much, it really honestly is an honor to speak to you. Due to you and all the coaching from Clay, it’s truly sincerely changed my life and the trajectory of it. So first and foremost, I’m thankful and grateful sir. Beyond that my first question would be what is the easiest way for us as a company… we’re having some pretty exponential growth and we’re really excited about it, but what’s the easiest way for us to define our biggest limiting factor? And for other business owners out there, what’s the easiest way to actually define that, Michael?

Michael E Gerber:
Well, your biggest limiting factor is what keeps you from producing what you hoped to produce. Your biggest limiting factor is what keeps you from producing what you intend to produce, what you hope to produce, what your dream says, you’re there to produce. And so everything starts with a dream, a vision, a purpose and a mission. That’s the most critical thing you have to do at the beginning of all of this. I have a dream. I have a vision. I have a purpose. I have a mission. In 1977 when I started this thing that I’m so crazed about. When I started in 1977, we started with a dream, a vision, a purpose, and a mission. Our dream them literally in quote, was to transform the state of small business worldwide. Our vision was to invent the McDonald’s of small business consulting.

Michael E Gerber:
Our purpose was that every single small business owner who was attracted to our paradigm and implemented it could be as successful as a McDonald’s franchisee or even more. And our mission was to invent the business development system that made our dream, our vision, our purpose possible. So we started our company… We started with the dream, a vision, a purpose and a mission. So the first thing I would say to you, what’s your dream? What’s your vision? What’s your purpose? What’s your mission?

Clay Clark:
That is phenomenal.

Michael E Gerber:
Until you then can say our dream is… Our, not mine, our dream, our vision, our purpose, our mission, and explicate them clearly to every single person you who joins you in your company. You’ll not truly begin to grow it to the degree it’s waiting to be grown.

Clay Clark:
So you want our listeners to define their dream, their mission and their purpose. Am I correct, sir? The dream, the mission and the purpose?

Michael E Gerber:
Dream, vision, purpose, mission. Step one, step two, step three, step four. The first four steps of what I call the eight fold path. First, my dream. My dream is the great result we’re here to produce. Second, my vision. My vision is the form our dream is going to take place on the street. Our purpose. Our purpose must truly transform the state of our individual customers-

Michael Gerber:
… Form the state of our individual customer’s mindset about who he or she is and what he or she can expect from an economic, social, relational, familial life. And finally, our mission is to invent the system and it’s always to invent the system. The mission is always about this system at the heart of our great, growing enterprise. So you see what I’m saying is if you take this little business of yours, just that I’m saying there’s a little business of yours, where you’re behind the microphone, where you’re reaching out to your audience, et cetera, and so forth, and you take that dream vision, purpose, and mission, you can immediately begin to see that the end result is always worldwide.

Clay:
When you were growing the E-Myth program and the book and the team, the movement, and you defined your dream and your vision and your purpose and your mission, and you began to craft the book to write the book, to work with clients, to do your research. How long did it take you, Mr. Michael Gerber, to go from consulting your first client at the age of 41 to pinning the E-Myth Revisited book? How many years was that?

Michael Gerber:
The first E-Myth book, called The E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work And What To Do About It, was published in 1985. I started my company in 1977.

Clay:
It’s eight years of data and reserach.

Michael Gerber:
Before that book would ever been written, I had to do it. And so the first years from 77, 78, 79, 80, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I was working on the Michael Thomas Corporation to design, build launch, and grow our turnkey capability to transform the state of small business worldwide.

Clay:
The first eight years you were working on the business? The first eight years and-

Michael Gerber:
Well, the first eight years then every year after that. So you got to understand, you do this, you do this, you do this, you do this. Everybody wants to get it now. Everybody wants to get it now. Everybody wants to get it. Can I do this in a year and a half? Can I do this in six minutes? Can I do this tomorrow? Everybody is simply stupid, stupid, stupid, Clay when they think about this because you can’t do anything right, right now. It takes time to absorb what, in fact, the implications of what you’re setting out to do really are because if I’m seriously saying, I’m going to transform the state of small business worldwide, that means by doing what we’re planning on doing, the business failure rate is going to decrease exponentially. The business success rate is going to increase exponentially. The experience of people inside of companies is going to be transformed radically. Lives are going to be transformed in the process. That’s how big this is and that’s why it can’t be done in a minute.

Clay:
I do not want to be even slightly negative. I want to just be very practical.

Michael Gerber:
Be as negative as you want to be.

Clay:
I want to bring this up because I know that you look like you’re 22 years old. You’re a young man, but you’ve been doing this a long time and there are certain people who do what Thomas Edison once wrote. He calls it hallucination. Thomas Edison once famously wrote, he said, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” “Vision without execution is hallucination.” What percentage of the time do you sit down and meet somebody? Do you find yourself saying, “I wish they would just implement?” At what point do you say, “I just wish they would implement.” Is it a third of the time that people seek knowledge and they don’t want to implement? Is it a 10th of the time? How often do people seek the knowledge? You give them the knowledge but they don’t want to implement because I hear so many E-Myth success stories. I just want to know what percentage of people get the knowledge and they don’t want to implement?

Michael Gerber:
You have to understand. Anybody can come to me at any point in time, and they do, and they get to say, “I want to do this or I want to do that.” And I say, “Absolutely extraordinary.” And I said, “And the good news is there’s a process for doing that. And the better news is, it’s a universal process, meaning you don’t have to invent it. It already exists. It’s what I call the eight fold path. Step one, step two. Just like I’ve just done.”

Michael Gerber:
Now what happens at that point is what shapes, what happens next? Because what happens that point is person might say, “Yeah, but I don’t want to do all that stuff. All I want to do is, all I want to do, all I want to do.”

Clay:
All I want to do. I don’t want to do that stuff.

Michael Gerber:
I say, “I hear you, I hear you. You don’t want to do all that stuff.” And I said, “You have no idea what it takes to do what you just told me you wish to do, but I know exactly what it takes. And the wonderful news is we’ve got a method to make it possible for you to mature in the process of discovering the truth about what it is you’re setting out to do.”

Michael Gerber:
Step one, step two. And I go back, and back, and back. What they do in that process will tell you everything you need to know.

Clay:
Do you know Phil-

Michael Gerber:
Do they have the patience? Do they have the discipline, et cetera? That’s it.

Clay:
Josh, we have the great one here with us. What other questions do you have about growing your real business, Living Water Irrigation?

Josh:
So Michael, my next question would be, we hear all the time from people, these are the three things you should do to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Clay:
Three moves.

Josh:
Yeah, I guess my big question for you would be, what advice would you give to entrepreneurs to avoid? Not the things we should do, but what do you think are things that we should absolutely positively avoid at this adolescence phase or this phase of growing?

Michael Gerber:
The most important thing for us to understand is there is a way to do this. So I don’t care who the ‘entrepreneur’, who the creator, who the technician, who the small business owner, who the gardener, who the philosopher, who the pastor, who whatever they are, they got to go to school first. It starts at school.

Clay:
On page 56 of your book, the E-Myth Revisited, there’s somebody out there and you talked about it on page 56 of your book. You write, “The most tragic possibility of all for an adolescent business is that it actually survives.” So you see these people that are now 50 and they’ve never built systems and they’re running around going, “I don’t have time to make systems. I don’t have time to go to bootcamp. I’m working on my fifth divorce and my third bankruptcy, I’m working through right now and I’ve got to get this loan to save the business. I’ve got to get to this conference to save the business. Everything is urgent. Everything is aggressive. There’s no plan.

Michael Gerber:
And the answer to them is, you don’t have any idea what needs to be done. None. You’re ignorant. You look at the world, you look at the universe, we haven’t a clue. We haven’t a clue what all this is about. We haven’t a clue about how everything works. We haven’t a clue about what a great growing system is. We haven’t a clue about how technology truly works and why, in fact, in many cases, technology is the last and the worst thing to have working in our company. We have no idea. Got to go to school, but not the school that your kids go to. Not the school that everybody’s kids go to. Those schools are a horror show, a horror show because the teachers who are teaching in those schools were taught all the wrong things and all the wrong reasons.

Clay:
Could I ask you? Could I implore you? Could I beg you on behalf of my five kids, on behalf of all the listeners out there who have kids, please continue to deepdive into what you mean by this? Because I agree with you. I feel like you can articulate it better than I can, but I feel like when my kids get home from school, sometimes I have to help them unlearn what they were taught. The person who’s teaching has never built a business. They’ve never managed a team. They’ve never sold anything. They’ve never done accounting and I feel like I have to sit the kids down and say, “Step one, after you pass the test, forget everything you memorized to pass the test.” Please talk about the horror show that is education today.

Michael Gerber:
Well, the horror show of education here is that it’s been formulated through a social model. That and our country has gone through the process of socialism. We’ve become a socialist republic. By becoming a socialist republic, we’re essentially suggesting to every single member of our community that everything here is being done for you. Ergo, you must create a school. You must create a government. You must create a mindset in which everybody simply lets go and allows it to be done for you so that you don’t have to take responsibility for you, we do. Now hear me, when that occurred and that occurred way back in the depression.

Michael Gerber:
When that occurred, the seed was sown for the tragedy we’re experiencing today. We get to change that. But you understand the only way we get to change that is to take responsibility for our own life. Not for their lives, not for hers, not for his, not for its, not for the community, not for the state, not for the government, not for the federal, not for the international. Our life, my life. I’ve got to go to work on my life. Trust in exactly the way they went to work on me in bootcamp. Now hear me. I got to put myself into bootcamp and I’ve got to get all of the bullshit out of me so I can suddenly discover what truth means. We don’t even know what the word truth means.

Clay:
Well, truth is offensive. It hurts. The truth is something that people can’t handle. When you sit down and you explain to a young whippersnapper… Some people come to our conferences and they want to know how search engines work. So you sit down and you explain to them how the Google algorithm works and you show them examples and they go, “Well, I don’t want to have to do all of that. Is there an easy way?” I won’t get too nerdy into it but you tell them, “You have to have the most original HTML content. You have to have a canonically compliant website. You have to have the most reviews and the most mobile compliance. There’s four variables.” And they say “Canonical, that’s multiple syllables.” It’s-

Michael Gerber:
You have to hear me, Clay. It’s not you have to, it’s it has to. So understand not you have to, it has to. What you have to do is to come face to face and understand how little you actually know. So if you were to take the average human being in these United States today, if you were to take everybody out there on the street who’s burning everything down and have them take a test. I’m not talking about a hard test. I’m talking about a simple test.

Clay:
Simple test.

Michael Gerber:
I’m talking about your ABCs. I’m talking about your 123s. If you were to put them through that process, the vast majority of them would fail. Absolutely abject failure. And then you’ve got to say, “If you don’t even know that, what leads you to presume that you could tell me how to live my life?” Time for bootcamp.

Michael Gerber:
So my point is one of the greatest things that anybody could possibly do for America, is put everybody into bootcamp. Everybody goes to bootcamp. You got to have a bootcamp on whatever you decided to do. Got to have a boot camp because that’s where people demonstrate who they are and what they know, and what they do and what they don’t.

Michael E. Gerber:
People demonstrate who they are and what they know and what they do and what they don’t and what they’re not willing to do. Bootcamp, bootcamp, you got to open them up.

Clay Clark:
“Tears are weakness leaving the body,” as my uncle used to tell me. I think what you’re telling us is mind-altering for some people and I want to respect your time. I had a couple more questions on part one of this interview. I wanted to ask you specifically on page 67 of your book you wrote something to me, the reader, to all the readers, you wrote this to us. You said “You did the best you could. It’s time to get on with your life, to build your business in an enlivening way.” What does it mean to build your business in an enlivening way?

Michael E. Gerber:
What does it mean to enliven? Is that what you’re asking?

Clay Clark:
Yes, because it’s a word that I don’t hear people use.

Michael E. Gerber:
Well, it means to bring true life to it. In short, when folks come to work, they’re coming to invest their life. For a particular period of time, to engage in work with the intent of producing a result. It’s going to add value to every single person associated with that work. That means your customer, that means the guy at the desk next door, it means the guy you report to, it means the woman in the accounting department. It means everybody and anybody who’s joined here, come here every day. It’s like a prayer at the beginning of the day, every day to enliven the experience to come closer to God.

Michael E. Gerber:
I’ve been given to say of late, if we’re born in the image of God and in Genesis it says we are, then it means we’re going to create. God is the creator. So if we’re born in the image of God, it means we’re born to create, to create what? To create a world fit for God. What would a world fit for God look like? Well, you can begin by reading the 10 Commandments and you suddenly begin to see that we can engage in a way to enliven our experience of being committed, zealously engaged human beings, creators all, here to create an experience that we can experience as we do it and after we’d done it and before we do it that literally brings life to everything I’m doing. Imagine that and then you see what I mean by that.

Clay Clark:
You have given me an enlivened existence where I was able to escape the rat race. So today while we’ve been talking, I think my team has probably cut … We have three stores. It was five stores that are open that cut hair and I don’t have the ability to cut hair, so the barbershop there’s five stores open we have, so there’s probably 200 people that got their hair cut in the last hour and a half, two hours, about 200 people getting their haircut.

Michael E. Gerber:
Wait a second. Wait a second, Clay. That’s not true what you just said.

Clay Clark:
Oh, sure.

Michael E. Gerber:
You said, I don’t have to do anything. Now, hear me. You have to be something.

Clay Clark:
True.

Michael E. Gerber:
At the heart of what you’ve created is your energy and at the heart of your energy is a love for God.

Clay Clark:
True.

Michael E. Gerber:
At the heart of your love for God is your determination to transform the state of every human being you connect with in whatever way is possible, economically, socially, spiritually, relationally. What an extraordinary thing to possess as Clay Clark possesses it and what an extraordinary thing for Clay Clark to pursue, to pursue with every bit of energy you’ve got.

Clay Clark:
I appreciate you saying that. I want you to know you unshackled me personally. It was a thing where you allowed me to get away from the DJ microphone at these weddings, to get a way from the day-to-day operations and the reactivity, to be able to build proactive businesses, so now we can hopefully together mentor millions of people and you have helped me and I would love to give you the microphone to share what you’re working on now, because whatever you’re working on now deserves a Harry Caray, “Holy cow.”

Harry Caray:
Holy cow.

Clay Clark:
We met in Chicago, so whatever you’re working on now deserves a Chicago Harry Caray, “Holy cow.”

Harry Caray:
Holy cow.

Clay Clark:
Tell us. What are you working on now, sir? What are you doing?

Michael E. Gerber:
Well, hear me, I want you to think of university spelled Y-O-U-niversity. A university called Radical You, Radical Y-O-U. I want you to imagine awakening the entrepreneur within every human being on the planet. Every human being on the planet capable of studying, capable of working. That’s what we created. We have created a university, an entrepreneurial development university to take out to the world and to transform the state of entrepreneurship worldwide to a degree that’s never been accomplished before. Our university is five years long. Our university is devoted to what we call the eight fold path.

Clay Clark:
Wow.

Michael E. Gerber:
Every student in our university will discover their dream, their vision, their purpose, their mission, their job, their practice, their business, their enterprise. An evolution of an enterprise from a company of one to a company of 1000 called Beyond the E-Myth: The Evolution of an Enterprise From a Company of One to a Company of 1000.

Michael E. Gerber:
Here’s the best part and you can promote this, promote this, promote this, promote this, Clay, until you’re blue in the face. But every person within the sound of your voice needs to understand this, that we’re giving the first year of Radical You away for $10.

Clay Clark:
$10 bucks, the whole year?

Michael E. Gerber:
$10 bucks for the entire year. 52 weeks, 52 video sessions online right now and every single person within the sound of my voice or who can see my face or see my Panama hat or see your jacket, whatever it is, every single human being, I’m inviting them to join us in Radical You.

Clay Clark:
83-

Michael E. Gerber:
When those people join us in Radical You, Clay, we’re going to bring folks like you, folks like the other gentleman who just said [inaudible 00:49:49], folks like every person you’re connected with who wants to become a teacher of creativity. You’re going to come and join us at Radical You and you’re going to teach something and they’re going to teach something and I’m going to teach you what to teach. But hear me, that’s what we’re working on. 5 million students within the next three years. Then guess what’s going to happen.

Clay Clark:
What’s going to happen?

Michael E. Gerber:
Apple, the company is going to acquire Radical You and convert it from 5 million students to 5 billion students throughout the world. Get it?

Clay Clark:
I believe you, that is 83 cents a month. So, nobody can say they can’t afford it. I mean, that’s $10 a year, 83 cents.

Michael E. Gerber:
$10 once.

Clay Clark:
Once, one time.

Michael E. Gerber:
For the whole year.

Clay Clark:
One time, $10 bucks. Now, I have to ask you this there, Josh has one final question and Josh you typically [crosstalk 00:08:49]-

Michael E. Gerber:
Yeah, I just heard my wife say something.

Clay Clark:
Josh typically paints our guests into the corner with the final question. Josh, if he hangs up, we know it wasn’t a good question. So feel free to ask Michael, whatever you want to ask.

Josh:
Michael, I guess, my final Capstone question would be what, besides your books that you’ve written, what book would you recommend for a guy like me just wanting to grow and learn and continue to press on?

Michael E. Gerber:
Well, you want to read the most important book I’ve ever read. It’s a book called I Am That.

Clay Clark:
I Am That. Okay.

Michael E. Gerber:
The author, though he didn’t write it because it’s simply recordings of his engagement with students of his in India. His name is Sri, S-R-I, Nisargadatta.

Josh:
Whoa. I got it.

Michael E. Gerber:
Nisargadatta. Just look up I Am That, you’ll see him. Nisargadatta and his last name is Maharaj.

Josh:
I see it here.

Michael E. Gerber:
Pick up that book. You’ll read three pages. It’ll blow your mind.

Josh:
Yes, sir.

Michael E. Gerber:
You read two more pages, it will blow the mind you already blew.

Clay Clark:
A lot of explosions will be happening there. Explosions everywhere.

Michael E. Gerber:
I Am That, you got it?

Josh:
Got it.

Clay Clark:
We got it. Now, Michael, I want to respect your time. I know you’re probably taking your wife on a great date tonight.

Michael E. Gerber:
I got to go.

Clay Clark:
Thank you. Thank you so much, my friend. I really do appreciate you.

Michael E. Gerber:
Clay, see you in Oklahoma.