Business Podcasts | Wolfgang Puck | Why Shouldn’t Take No for an Answer & the Daily Diligence You Need to Succeed + How to Build a Business That Has the Capacity to Be Profitable With You Being There 24/7

Get ready to enter the ThriveTime Show.

(Singing)

All right. Aaron Antis, on today’s show we’re talking about how to grow a successful company and specifically looking at the idea of what would happen if you were abducted by an alien for 30 days. What would happen to your business? Well, first off, you probably have bigger things to worry about if you did get abducted by an alien.

You probably wouldn’t be worried about the business at that-

But somebody might go, “Well, I wonder what’s happening with my business down there.”, or maybe the alien takes you down below the earth, maybe, “I wonder what’s happened up there!”.

Could be.

I mean, who knows?

It’s possible.

But the idea is, what if you disappeared from your business for 30 days, what would happen? Could the business run without you? That’s the idea. If you go to thrivetimeshow.com/millionaire, you could download all of the books I’ve ever written for free. You can download them for free, but we’re going to read specifically from this book called A Millionaire’s Guide: How to Become Sustainably Rich: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Successful, Money-Generating, and Time-Freedom Creating Business. And we’re going to page 54 of the book and then we’ll introduce today’s guest here. Here we go.

What if you were abducted by an alien for 30 days? I realize that asking you what would happen to your business if you were abducted by aliens may cause you to wonder, what is wrong with me, and if I have a firm grasp on reality?. However, just for a second, let’s suppose that you were abducted by aliens for 30 days who are focused on picking your brain, trying to figure out what the mullet is all about, why the heck Americans use a representative delegate system for determining the presidency of the United States, and why we are willing to exchange goods and services in exchange for paper fiat currency.

Now, you’re gone from your business for 30 days, and the question is, will your business survive? I’m going to walk you through how my businesses work, and I’m going to ask Matt Kline to share the same thing here, because you want to have a system for everything. I’m going to pull up a diagram because a lot of us are visual, primarily those that have vision. We’re going to pull this up here, and this is my new book here, and we’re going to go here in this book, up to page four of the book and just give you a diagram, a look into what a successful business should look like on page five, here we go.

Page five, there’s all these different boxes, the parts of the business that have to be in shape or in tune to work well. And if you have a business and one of these systems isn’t working, other things begin to fall apart. And so, we’re going to talk to Matt Kline specifically about Oxi Fresh. Matt Kline, first, why does every Oxi Fresh owner, everybody who buys an Oxi Fresh franchise, even though the business systems work very well, why do they as the owner have to know their revenue goals? Why do they have to have their goals and they can’t be Matt Kline’s goals?

I mean, if you don’t have goals, what are you shooting for? Your days are pretty unstructured if you don’t have an actual goal to get to, and that could be a yearly goal, a monthly goal, a weekly goal. But yes, goals are extremely important. If you just say, “I want to be successful,” it’s like, “All right, well what does that mean?”, it can mean a lot to different people. Some people’s success are absolutely other people’s failures. So yes, you’ve got to figure out what you’re trying to do and have a process to get you there-

There it is.

… and then dial that down to a daily activity.

Yesterday I went to a Whole Foods with my kids, and my kids know this, but every Sunday I try to extend my marriage for seven more days. So, one of my moves is I go to Whole Foods and I buy everything that my wife likes so when she comes home, it’s there. I do it every Sunday.

That’s a super move.

When you’re like me, you got to work hard to extend that marriage seven more days. You’ve got to have goals, folks. Now, breakeven numbers, Matt, you’ve got to know what it costs to breakeven. Now, because it costs me about 150 bucks every Sunday to keep my marriage going. I got to buy flowers, I’ve got to get her organic chocolate, and it’s got to be the chocolate with a story…

That’s your breakeven?

James, you know what I’m talking about?

Yes.

The $7 candy bar?

It’s got the story on the back, it’s written and made by some guy in Peru?

These candy bars were made by a man in the foothills of the Appalachians. Remember those? Have you seen that, Aaron?

No, I have not seen this.

You haven’t?

No.

James, you’ve seen it.

Of course, yes, they’re pretty funny.

Because for me I’m thinking, “Let’s get Reese’s peanut butter cups”. “No, no, you can’t…”.

They don’t have a story, they have a story too.

Justin’s peanut buttercups. They’re handmade by Justin who chooses not to use machinery, he chooses to use his own hands.

And therefore it costs $7?

He grows each peanut by himself and he hand roasts it slowly.

I went to high school with a girl whose grandfather invented the filling for Reese’s Pieces. It’s called Panucci.

That’s a story, right?

And not only does Justin hand make the chocolate, but he drills wells for people in Africa.

That’s it, $12, the brakes just went up.

So, you’ve got to know your breakeven numbers, Matt. You’ve got to know how much does it cost just to breakeven every week to keep the lights on. Matt, why is it important that all Oxi Fresh franchise owners know they’re breakeven numbers?

Because if you’re running a business, and you have a budget, and most people don’t have unlimited money sitting there, you’re going to have a certain amount of money in the bank, and then you’re either going to make money that week or lose money that week. If you don’t know what that is and you aren’t paying attention and every week you have a little less in that bank account, you either have a spending problem or your business doesn’t make any money, no one’s doing this to become poor.

Well, not everybody can hang with Matt Kline. I mean, some people don’t have a breakeven point that’s $40,000 every Tuesday. But Matt Kline, he is bling bling, that’s what he does. But seriously, everyone’s got their own breakeven point, you need to know that. Now, box three is you got to know the hours you’re willing to work. Now, I’m not going to offend everybody out there, just 90% of the listeners, that’s all right, because there’s still 10%. You’re my guys, you’re my people. So, in the Book of Genesis, which I like, I think it’s true, the Book of Exodus, which I like, I think it’s true. Both of those books advocate working six days a week and resting on the seventh.

Now, not to get political, but in 1938, our socialist president by the name of FDR, who was married to a lesbian, decided to roll out the Fair Labor Standards Act, which made a 40-hour work week possible. So, whether you like that or not, those are just the facts. That’s when it changed, 1938. So Matt, you played basketball at a very high level in high school, very, very high level. You led the state in scoring, was it your junior year or senior year?

My senior year, I led the state in the regular season.

How many points a game? Come on.

Led the state all year, about 29.

Sick. This guy’s got swine flu, he’s nauseated, send him to quarantine. He’s got syphilis. Malaria, Titsy Fly just bit him, rare disease. So Matt, when you were playing basketball at a high level, how often were you in the gym playing basketball or lifting weights?

Every day. My goal was to play division one college basketball, and I knew that at the level when I was maybe a freshman, sophomore, if I stayed there, there was no chance.

How tall are you?

About 5’10, 5’11.

How tall were you? Were you at 6’4 at that time?

I was about the same size, actually. I was an early bloomer.

What I’m saying is, there’s certain people that want success but they don’t want to put in the work. So, my whole thing, and people don’t have to agree with me, but I like to wake up at three, I work till six, I do it six days a week, I find I have time to get stuff done. Now, someone else you want to work nine to five, do it, but figure out the hours you need, that you’re willing to work and then talk about it with your spouse. So, my kids, they went to this cheer competition in Nashville, was it in Atlanta this weekend?

And guess who didn’t go? I didn’t go. Why? Because I don’t want to go, and I don’t feel bad about it. We’ve already discussed it. Now, somebody else in your family, you have to go to Atlanta to watch the cheer event, and that’s good. I feel your pain, I pray for you. But you as a couple have to figure out your goals because Matt, what if you got your Oxi Fresh rolling, it’s just balling out of control, but your husband’s not happy with your hours or your wife’s not happy with the hours or you can’t get on the same page? I’m sure you’ve never seen that at Oxi Fresh. Matt, why do you have to be on the same page with your whole team about how many hours per week you’ve got to work?

I mean, what is your ultimate goal? Is your ultimate goal to work forever and not have a good home life? I mean, you’ve got to have some sort of balance.

Controversial strategy.

It is. I mean, you’ve got to try to figure out what your balance is, some wives probably want their husbands to work all of the time, and then some want husbands to work no time. So, I do think it matters what your family dynamic is and what you’re expected to do. It’s like, if you want me to make 5 million dollars a year and you want me to never work at night or weekends, it’s like, “Good luck. I don’t know how you can do that”.

I’ve got to run drugs.

Kudos to you. But yes, you just have to figure out what your goals are, right? And if you have a family and kids, they’re going to take a certain amount of time for you, and if your goals align with your kids and your wife’s scheduler or whatever, they great. But most of the time that’s not going to happen. You have to have a conversation, you’ve got to figure out what’s going to happen. Put an actual plan into place. Your goals should be your goals, and that’s the same thing with your family. So yes, it’s tough for really successful business people to also have a really successful family dynamic.

If you’re a drug mule though-

You can work four hours depending on how long your colon is, you can work a shorter amount of time per month and still make a pretty good income.

There are options out there.

Now, if you’re going to do that, don’t.

Well don’t sneeze while you’re on the plane, not too hard. Because I’ve heard that’s deadly.

Why not explain that to us.

That’s what I’ve heard.

From my lawyer over here.

So, there’s a three-legged marketing stool, you have to have a turn-key way to get customers. Now, I’m going to let people know a secret and then everybody out there, you can write down my secrets. If you go to Elephant In The Room, our haircut chain, if you go to Tip Top K9, the dog training franchise I’m involved in, if you go to any of my businesses, I have a three-legged marketing system for every company. And I commit to three ways that work and I do them over and over again. I don’t have 407 ways, I have three or four ways that work and I master those things.

So, let me give you an example.

That’s a novel idea.

For Tip Top K9, it’s dog training franchise I’m involved with, and for Elephant In The Room, I want every single customer to be happy and I want to get a review to prove it. That’s thing number one, I want objective reviews from happy customers. You can’t get them unless you have happy customers. I want reviews and I will freak out if we don’t get. Just as recently as this morning, I was freaking out with one of my companies because the team was only getting reviews from one out of every two customers, I want a review from every customer. Second, I want to be top in Google. I would like to be top in the search results, “This just in, people are using the internet”. And then, third, I want my social media ads to be marketing and showing to the people that are likely buyers. Now, Matt Kline and Oxi Fresh, what’s so great there is Oxi Fresh has nearly… how many locations now Matt? You have two locations, three? What’s the total…?

Me personally?

How many does the brand have? How many locations does Oxi Fresh have? About seven?

Yes, we’re right up at 500.

Just a little outside. So, you guys are doing great and you already have a proven system, so if people go to oxifresh.com and they request to learn about a franchise… Matt, why is that a powerful thing, for potential franchise owners that you have already figured out what doesn’t work and what does work?

Because I’ve done this for a decade, and I’ve had thousands and thousands of conversation with people, and most people are good at some things, but very few people are good at everything. You might be good at sales because that’s your career, you might be good at management because that’s your career, you might be good at marketing because that’s been your career, but I very rarely run into someone that’s great at everything. And so, what they’ll find is if they try to start a business on their own, they’re going to be qualified to do about 40% of the work needed. So, what a franchise does, it allows you to step inside of the business. We assume, by the way, when someone comes on board they know nothing. And if we start at that base level and anything you bring as an individual is just a bonus.

So, when we start we know that we have marketing under wraps, if we’re reliant on you to be the marketing piece, we’re already going to be in trouble, so we don’t rely on you to be the marketing piece. In terms of the cleaning system, we’ve already had 16 years of experience in R&D, we know the cleaning system works extremely well. We don’t want you going out and trying to find a software package that’s going to link with us, we’ve been building a software package that’s specific to our business that gives our franchisees exactly what they need to be an efficient owner, and we’ve been doing that for 10 years.

And so, for us, we realize that people are going to be good at things, but we also realize that there’s going to be some big holes in some of their skills, and it takes everything to have a good business. You guys know this, you can’t just be good at one thing. If your organization is terrible, but you’re a good salesman, your business is going to fail because you can’t keep up.

Or if you scored 29 points a game, but you’re only 5’10,

There is a extremely limited window to your success there, because a lot of people do that.

Have you seen the movie, The Wedding Singer, back in the day, Matt?

I love that movie.

A lot of the time I think about that movie, by the way.

Well, this was an Adam Sandler movie. That was Adam Sandler was a very successful singer, he wanted to be a pop hit artist. It didn’t quite work out, so he became a wedding singer, and his band played a full set. But occasionally the band would have to break, and when they would break, they would cut, he would give the mic over to George, and George was his bizarre band mate, and George had one song he would sing regardless of the circumstance. Let me hit play here, folks.

(Singing)

Here we go, folks, get ready.

(Singing)

He had one song he did, and I think a lot of success is more about learning that one song than it is learning every possible song.

Didn’t Bruce Lee say, “I fear not the man that’s done 10,000 kicks one time, but the man who has done one kick 10,000 times”.

I don’t know if what you said is true.

It is, look it up.

Which part, the first part of the second part? Because the first part was not true.

I know you used the word, Juan, several times, I appreciate your bilingual sensitivity for our listeners. Now, improving the branding, we’ve got to have branding that’s acceptable. Now I’m going to get into some specifics here, and again folks, if you want to learn more about all this, you just go to thrivetimeshow.com/millionaire. This is what we do, we teach you how to do this. So, we’re going to go to oxifresh.com, and the website looks good. Now, the website, it looks good, that’s great. You don’t want it to look hood, you want it to look good. And so, if you look at your website and you go… If you’re listening right now and you go to your website and you feel like you have to explain yourself and justify it to someone, “You see, my cousin, Daryl, he came in from out town and he’s going through some website schooling online, and he was like, ‘I could make it’, and I was like, ‘Okay’. And then, I couldn’t find the password, so we made a Squarespace. Now, we do not rank in Google, but we are top on Bing. Because Bing is something that I use because I work at Microsoft at night”.

I mean, stop it. You have to have a website that ranks well, people can find, who use the internet on the planet Earth, back to the whole alien thing, “Well, aliens probably couldn’t find it. I’ll tell you why, because I don’t use Google. I am off the grid, baby”. You’ve got to make sure your website looks great, your business cards look great, your print pieces, your auto wraps, all these things, and they can cost a fortune to make these things. And that’s one great thing that Oxi Fresh does, is you guys provide turn-key systems for people. So Matt Kline, I’m going to have you land the plane there. If people go to oxifresh.com to learn about buying an Oxi Fresh, what does it cost? What does the process look like?

So, the process is we’re going to have an introductory call, you fill out the form, we get in touch, we have an introductory call, that call’s going to be very easy, 10, 15 minutes, I just want to know what you’re trying to accomplish, what your background is, what your financial situation is, and then we can answer some questions about Oxi Fresh, and then we’ll go through the entire in-depth process after that.

The investment is 41,900 to become a franchise that’ll give you your protected territory, all the equipment you need for carpet and upholstery, three months worth of product, the actual seven-year agreement, plus the training where we’ll fly you to Colorado and you spend about a week with us. Best practice is, once you’ve done that, you still want to have about 25,000 in operating capital because you want to be able to pay for things like insurance, local marketing, employee costs, monthly vehicle costs. So, 65, 70,000 all together, 41 900 come to us, the rest stays with you for operating. Simple as that.

Now, Matt, do people get to meet you? I mean, that’s the most primary reason why most people fill out the form, do they get to meet you?

I highly doubt that. But yes, I will be there the whole week, we have a very tight-knit group of folks here that most of us have been here at least a decade or more. We’ll start off with great breakfast with the team, get to know each other, break down the walls, and then we’ll get right into training right after that.

Is there any truth to the rumor that both for men and women, you do have to have a beard just like yours in order to be able to buy a franchise?

We are in Colorado, so yes.

When do you play basketball with them?

That attack at Eleanor Roosevelt.

We’ve got some game here, but it’s not basketball, we’ve got some game ping pong.

Matt, I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but you sound like you’ve been working there for 20 years, but you look like you’ve been there like a day, just a beautiful man. It’s like he finished his high school basketball career and then just started. Unbelievable. Man, I really do appreciate it. I encourage everybody though, seriously, if you’re thinking about buying a franchise, if you’re looking for a new career, a new way to support your family, a new way to own your own business, go to oxifresh.com and schedule a free assessment, a free consultation… Matt, how many consultations are you doing a week right now? I mean, are you doing one consultation a year?

I do about three consultations, new ones, a day.

Wow.

And I’ll do about three more in-depth, like hour long screen shares a day with people that are just in the process. And then, I’ll do probably two to three FDD reviews a week. So, I would say we’re pretty busy with that. We got some folks here in town right now going through training who have gotten to the end of this process, so we’re just trying to find the right folks to get us to the next level, and we’re very excited about the next one or two years. I mean, we see a lot of incredible potential with everything going on.

Matt, you’re sounding like you’re smelling terrific. You take care, sir. We’ll talk to you soon.

See you guys, bye.

See you, man.

Hey, how’s it going? I’m Thomas Crossing, owner and founder of Full Package Media in Dallas, Texas. I’ve been a coaching client with Clay Clark since the beginning of our business. We started about a year ago, August of last year, and I had no clients, no idea what we were doing, no clue what was going on. And now we’ve grown to where we’ve got six photographers, we’ve got office space here, I have an admin sales person that works for us full-time developing an online system, and a lot of that growth we attribute to Clay helping us. I mean, his stuff is not revolutionary, it’s not this crazy walk on hot coals and all this stuff, it’s just real stuff. Group interviews, we were totally against group interviews, we were like, “No, we’re different, we’re special, and we need to do one-on-one interviews so we can find good quality candidates”, and not just do this group interview thing.

We tried that and failed miserably. We did group interviews, now we do them every two weeks, and it’s awesome. It works good. We always have influx of new people that we can train, get going. He’s helped us a lot with our website graphic design, SEO. SEO is another thing that I thought before I started this business, and before Clay, that it was kind of a joke or something that only your Apples of the world and Amazon could get to the top of Google. But Clay said, “No, just do these things, follow these steps and you’ll get there”. And I think now we look today and we’re number two for Dallas real estate photography, if you don’t believe me you can look. So, we’re getting to the top of there, that’s really cool. It’s really awesome to get leads that people will call you and say, “Hey, found you on Google and we want to hear about your services”, so that’s really great.

I’d say there’s nobody out there that’s not a good coaching client for Clay. I mean, regardless of the business, it’s not about what the business is, what the specialty is, it’s about following the steps, doing what he says. It’s a good thing. An hour a week, it gets you on track and keeps you in line with what you’re doing and what you shouldn’t be doing, and it’s good to give you some flow and future goals of your business. I remember our first meeting, we set our goals and our goal was to do 16 shoots a week.

And at the time, me and my business partner/girlfriend Gretchen were like, “We’re never going to do 16 a week. That’s just crazy”. And today we’re doing nine, and we did about 54 last week. So he’s helped us grow, we’ve put in a lot of hours, a lot of hard work as well. But if you follow his steps and do what he says, there’s a lot of principles that he’s taught and instilled in us that help us. So yes, Clay Clark is the way to go. I wouldn’t venture out to find someone else, they’d be more expensive, a lot more fluff and no real actionable work, and things to get your business growing, so that’s the way to go. Thanks.

Hey Andrew, I have this idea…

All right, let me hear it.

We’ve got a little bit of downtime before we interview our next guest. So why don’t we cold call Wolfgang Puck and see if he actually picks up the phone.

Let’s do it.

All right, here we go. This old school rotary phone is awesome. Where did you find this phone?

How do you used this thing?

Seriously, previous to now, have you ever used a rotary phone?

I haven’t.

Have you ever used a phone that’s plugged into a wall?

Hello?

Are you Wolfgang Puck?

Who is this?

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. If this show dies, two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses… Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ThriveTime Show.

(singing)

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we have the incredible opportunity to interview this celebrity chef whose soup I bought for my wife last week, the tomato basil, Mr. Wolfgang Puck. How are you, sir?

Excellent, thank you.

Wolfgang, I’m not sure how much money you make per can of soup, but I bought two cans of soup last week. It had nothing to do with interviewing you, I just buy two cans of your soup every week for my incredible life.

Well, thank you. Now I can keep my kids in school for the whole year.

That’s nice. Well, you have had so much success, but I’d like to start off at the bottom and the very beginning of your career. I want to talk about your mother, your mother was also a chef. And I’d love for you to share about her love of cooking and how that influenced you, and now your love of cooking.

My mother was an incredible person, first, a great mother and everything. The only mistake she did in her life is marry my stepfather. I don’t even want to get into that, the stepfather was like a terrorist for us, for the family, and drunk and this and that, but my mother was like a saint. Now, every summer when I was 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, I spent time with her in the kitchen, in a resort hotel on a lake in Carinthia, where she used to work. And that’s how I got interested already first in pastries. You know if you are 10, 12 years old, anything sweet, if it’s ice cream, a chocolate cake, whatever it is, you get a little batch of it and you are happy. And then I used to help her bake cakes at home and things like that.

So, I got interested fairly early on and became friendly with some of the male chefs in the hotel where my mother worked. And little by little, I became 14 years old and then I had to decide what to do, to go to school, tech school or whatever it would be. I wanted to be an architect, but they only had one school in Vienna. So then, I talked to my mom and say, “Maybe I’m going to become a cook or a pastry cook”. And then, her boss found me a job in Villach at the Post Hotel, and that’s where I started, at 14. I left my home gladly because of my stepfather and I started to cook professionally at 14.

So, if you’re out there and you’re feeling sorry for yourself that you had to start working at 18, 19, or 20, I worked at Target, Applebee’s, and Direct TV all at the same time. I was working 60 hours a week on a slow week, 90 hours a week on an average week, if you feel overworked because you have to work as a young guy, I have a motivational quote for you from the incredible American philosopher, Adam Sandler.

Shut up!

I’d love for you to share with the listeners out there, we have so many Americans that listen to the show and they’re not familiar with your culture. Why at the age of 14 did you have to choose a profession or a technical school? Can you walk us through your culture you grew up in and why you had to make a decision so young?

I come from Austria, in the Southern Park, in the country, totally. They were only eleven houses, two farmers, and a few houses. There was no street name, only dirt roads and everything. If we wanted strawberries or mushrooms, we went up in the forest and picked them in the summer. The winter we ski, so it was in the rural Austria, we had no running water, or anything like that. The toilet was 100m outside in the garden end of the garden. So, I grew up fairly modest, I would say. We had meat once a week and early on Sunday. And then, my grandmother and my mother, they’re really good cooks. They cooked a lot of sweets, like a dish called palacinke, or kaiserschmarrn, or green schmarrn, all this famous Austrian hot pastries.

And I think Sundays we had dinner schnitzel or fried chicken, that was our big splurge. And I think I got lucky because it was all farm-to-table really. When my mother made vegetable soup, she went in the garden, picked up a leak, two potatoes, some carrots, cauliflower, maybe beans or peas, chopped them up, cooked them. And you say, “Oh my god, they taste so delicious”. And even today still… When I used to go when she was alive, I always told her, “Mom, make your vegetable soup”, and I went in the summer right from the garden, she made it and I said, “Oh, it reminds me of my childhood”.

So, your mom was the queen of organic farm-to-table food before it was a thing, before it was a category, your mom may have been the innovator of farm-to-table.

Yes, totally.

Now, when you were 17, I understand that you decided to leave and you went to France where you stayed for seven years.

Exactly.

What motivated you to move to France and stay there for seven years?

Well, we had a restaurant from Dijon called Aux Trois Faisans. They came to cook in our hotel for a week and cook the specialty of Burgundy. So, in Burgundy, the famous thing is snails with the garlic butter. And they brought the shells with it, and then I look at this, “Oh shit, here are the snails in the shell”, I see them in the garden sometimes when it’s raining where my parents live and they’re eating that and they making are making party, and they were cooking with a lot of wine. They made this big stew with red wine, and I don’t know how many bottles they used and everything. So, I thought this is really exciting, the way they cook. So I said, “I want to go to France”, so I wrote them a letter and they accepted me and I started to work there. And then, after one year, we got assigned to give Michelin, and I looked through the guide and there were one star, two star, and three star restaurants.

So I said, “I’m not going home to Austria, I want to work in this three star restaurant”, and the first restaurant who said yes was Raymond Thuilier at Baumanière. And I think that was my luck, because up then I wasn’t even sure if I’m going to stay as a cook, I liked it, but I wasn’t really passionate about it. But when I saw Thuilier at Baumanière, he was a chef and owner, the passion he had for the ingredients, the passion for cooking. I said, “I want to be like this guy”. And I still remember looking on the terrace and Queen Elizabeth had a lunch there, so he bought Pablo Picasso into the kitchen, and I said, “You know what? This is what I want to do”, on top of it, he had 3 stars and cooked amazing food.

I know the listeners out there are listening today and they’re taking notes, can you give us the recipe? How many bottles of wine do you have to consume before snails become appealing?

It depends where you grow up probably. It’s like people eat duck feet, the eyes of the fish, or the brain-

Duck feet?

… so it really depends how you grow up. You look at the Chinese, they eat everything possible.

Wolfgang, did you say duck feet?

Yes.

Wow.

Obviously, you clean them up all the outer shells really well, and then you cook them in a good sauce until they get really gelatinous. Obviously, before you cook them you cut off the nails and everything so it looks better, you don’t want dirty nails in there. And then you eat them, you say, “Oh my god, this is really delicious”.

All right. Now, my understanding is that you started hearing about Cadillacs, Chevrolets, American movies, and then you got inspired to move to the United States.

Exactly.

Do you remember that moment when you thought, “Okay, I’m going to go to the United States of America”?

As kids in Austria, we watched cow boy movies and we watched these movies about the cop chases in San Francisco and everything, and that was amazing. And then the pastry chef… I was working at Maxim’s in Paris. All at the beginning, when I just started there, and he just came back from Chicago, Maxim had opened an outpost in Chicago and he told me, “You know what? You are young, you should go to America, you’ll make so much more money, and it’s amazing…”, and this and that.

And he walked me into it, and then by accident a year later, a guy came to me, his name is Jean Denoyer from New York, and he needed a chef. We had the same friend, he lived in New York already, but he had a friend in Paris who was also my friend, and they talked and says, “You know what? I have this young Austrian who wants to go to America, let’s talk to him”, and so they talked to me and I got all excited and came to New York.

So, what was the first job that you landed in New York?

So, my friend Jean Denoyer, who is my friend brought me over to be a chef in his restaurant in New York called La Goulue. He’s just opened a new one, I think on 61st Street and Madison. But at that time it was 70th Street and Madison, and I walked into the restaurant and I said, “This is not the cooking I want to do”, they had this place where they had the steak fried and just simple dishes, good dishes maybe, but simple. But I cooked in three star restaurants, like Baumanière, Maxim’s, or Hotel de Paris Monaco and so forth. So I said, “No, I don’t want to cook here”.

And then, a friend of mine who owns La Grenouille in New York, Charles Masson, I knew him from Paris. I went to see him, maybe he had a job, and he says, “I don’t have a job right now, but let me call my friend in Chicago”. He called his friend in Chicago and they said, “We need a chef in Indianapolis”, and I said, “Indianapolis?”, my eyes lit up, because I know of the 500 mile race they have there every May.

And then, I said, “I want to go”, because I lived in Monaco. I said, “In Monaco they have to pick out the race”. And I said, “Oh, that will be similar to Monaco”. So, I took the Greyhound bus with the last $100 I had left, and took the bus from New York to Indianapolis, which took a day and a half or something to get there. And I got there and I said, “Indianapolis is nothing like Monaco”, but I had no more money and I got the job there as a chef in a French restaurant.

Now, who first inspired you or what first inspired you to become a restaurant owner?

When I came from Indianapolis to LA and I worked in a restaurant called Ma Maison. Ma Maison at that time did like $20,000 a month in business. I mean, that was in the 70s, and little-by-little we went to 50,000, a year later to a 100,000 a month, that was the total revenue a month. And then we grew, and grew, and grew. But Patrick, who was the owner then still didn’t trust me, he still had the manage sign the tax when he wasn’t there on everything. Even when I was a part owner too. They didn’t have the money to pay me, so he gave me 8 or 10% of the restaurant, and at that time it was 8 or 10% of nothing really, because we didn’t make any money. Everything was on COD. When I went to the fish market, I bought the lobster shells to make lobsters soap and some famous restaurant here bought the lobster meat to make lobsters lobster cocktail.

So, we had no money, but I became successful with the restaurant, people loved the food, it became one of the most talked about restaurants. I remember having Orson Welles come every day for lunch, and I used to sit and talk to him, even wrote a little introduction for my cookbook. So, we became very friendly with a lot of other people too, like Billy Wilder, the Austrian movie director and writer, and Jack Hellmann, and Susan Pleshette, so they all used to come two, three times a week to Ma Maison. But Patrick didn’t really trust me. And then I said, “I have to do my own restaurant. I want to be in charge. I don’t want to ask somebody for a raise. I want to decide what I’m going to cook”, even I did that there anyway. But if I wanted more money, if I wanted to change the plates, anything like that, I had to ask him because he signed the checks.

So I said, “I want to sign the checks, I want to be the one in charge”. And then, in 1981, I found the space on Sunset Boulevard. And in 1982, January 16th, I opened Spago and the rest is history.

My friend, how did you first get the money needed to open your restaurant and how did you market Spago?

I had a cooking school, and I had a lot of lawyers, dentist, some shrinks, and everything, who used to come to my cooking classes because I made it participation. So, they all were working, drinking… and I always had a case of wine there too, so I had 18 people in my cooking class. One day I announced that I want to open my own restaurant, but I don’t have the money, so I drew up a business plan with the lawyer and said, “Okay, we are going to get investors, we need $500,000, and hopefully we have the space on Sunset boulevard, and hopefully we can waste the money”. So, we waste the money, I went to the bank and I got $60,000 and we put together, I think, 550,000, and then I took the place, signed the lease, and built a restaurant.

And the funniest thing is, when I left Ma Maison Patrick told me, “You know, will be back crying for your job. You had a good job here, why you’re leaving? this and that. I said, “Well, I’m not coming back”. And as a matter of fact, we opened in January, Spago, it was a whole new way of a restaurant, new style of a restaurant with an open kitchen. We had a wood burning pizza open, a wood burning grill, now it seems like every restaurant has to have that, but at that time it was nothing in LA like that or in California.

We talk about this often, but probably not enough. If you’re going to open up a restaurant or any kind of business at all, you must be remarkable. And Wolfgang Puck just explained to you how his first restaurant, Spago. Was different than the other restaurants of its time, it had an open kitchen where nobody else did. It had an open wood burning stove and nobody else did, it was just a different kind of restaurant. And if you’re out there in this cluttered world of commerce and capitalism, and you want to get in front of your ideal and likely buyers and be successful, you’re going to have to be remarkable. But one of the byproducts of being remarkable is that nobody ever receives unanimous praise, ever. It doesn’t matter if you are the President of the United States, and you are President Obama, nobody receives unanimous praise.

Even President Obama, who had a very high favorability score at one point would only be approved by 58% of Americans, 57% of Americans. Even President Ronald Reagan, who was loved by Americans for a while there, his approval rating isn’t going to go north of 60%, 65%. Nobody receives unanimous praise ever, and you cannot afford to die the death of a thousand compromises with your business. You must absolutely fight for that purple cow that’s going to differentiate your business and make you stand out because if you are not memorable, you are forgettable in this cluttered world of commerce and capitalism. And now back to our interview with Wolfgang Puck.

We opened a restaurant and it became this immediate success, bigger than I ever thought. I wanted to have a little neighborhood restaurant, but it became huge. And I think it was the hardest thing, every morning I went to the fish market, I went to a farm down in Rancho Santa Fe, the Chino Farm, picking up vegetables. So, we used basic food and didn’t make it complicated, but we just used the best ingredients. And I remember I had customers like Johnny Carson, we made pizzas at that time. So, we made a smoked fennel pizza, duck sausage pizza, and things like that. And Johnny, every Friday, used to come and take 10 pizzas home. And I said to him, “Johnny, what are you doing with 10 pizzas? You have a party?”, he said, “No, I put them in my freezer and then when I play cards my friends, my housekeeper makes me a pizza and it’s just as good as yours”, he said, that’s not possible. And that’s how I started my frozen pizza company because he said he can cook them as well, so it ended up in another business.

So, Johnny Carson is the inspiration for your frozen pizza collection?

Yes.

I want to make sure we don’t skip over some powerful knowledge bombs that Wolfgang Puck is breaking down. One, he talked about every morning he would go out and pick out fresh vegetables, fresh produce, and fresh meat, every day he would pick out the freshest ingredients, every day. And as you listen to this interview, think about how hard Wolfgang Puck was working at the time.

You see, success is built as a result of daily diligence that is implemented over the design of a decade, over five years, it’s not about being diligent one time, it’s not about being highly motivated for one day or having that one big idea, it’s about being consistent. The diligence is the difference maker, diligence means the steady application of effort, and the diligent people always win. Now, I want to tee up this particular portion of the interview., I want to make sure you’re not skipping over this part.

He said that Johnny Carson and others would buy pizzas from him, bring them home, put it in their freezers, and then reheat them later. He noticed that people were doing this and then that became a product. You see, products just solve problems for your ideal and likely buyers at a profit. Again, entrepreneurs, business people, successful business entrepreneurs, all they’re doing is finding a problem that is being experienced by many of their ideal and likely buyers. And then they solve that problem at a profit, it is so important that you learn the process of finding a need and filling it. And every entrepreneur I’ve ever met who’s super successful, they have this ability to see the problem that the customer is expressing or speaking about, that nobody else really sees, they seem to be able to see the problem that Johnny Carson had. Johnny Carson wanted to have Wolfgang Pucks frozen pizza, but the product didn’t exist yet to fill that market need.

And so, Wolfgang, after he saw Johnny Carson routinely buying his pizzas and freezing them, he realized, “Wow, that’s a problem that the market has and I’m going to fill it. I’m going to find a need and fill it”, and that right there is why I’m so fired up about Wolfgang Puck. Grab a pen and a pad and let’s get back into the lab as we interview Wolfgang Puck.

Your life is a fascinating one, and I don’t expect you to do a bunch of research on me, but I did a bunch of research on you, and I grew up poor, it sounds like you grew up with very humble beginnings. I don’t know what it’s like to not be on my feet and to work 12 hours a day. I don’t understand that, I’ve never had a nine to five job where I take a break. I started my first business when I was 16 in my parents’ basement, I’ve been self-employed for a long time. Can I ask you, how many hours a week were you working when you launched Spago?

Well, let me just tell you how I started. When I interviewed somebody for a job, then they asked me how many hours they work, I told them, “12 hours is only half a day. If you want to work, half a day is fine”, so people look at me and say, “What are you talking about?”, I said, “Yes, isn’t 12 hours half a day?”, they said, “Yes”, so I said, “Well, you can work half a day or you can work more”, and you obviously update them and everything. So, myself or for sure never counted the hours.

Just for the benefit of our listeners, there’s about a half million people that just want to know, what time were you waking up when you were launching Spago? Were you waking up at four or five in the morning?

I woke up at 06:00, 06:30 in the morning I used to go to the fish market downtown, pick up the fish, and then come back to the restaurant maybe by 09:00 or so, have a coffee, maybe go home, take a shower, I didn’t lift that far away. And then, went back, talked with Mark Steele and Nancy Silverton, who were the chefs at the Pastry Chef, what we going to do that day. We looked at the fish I’d bought and everything, and then worked and finished the last customer maybe at midnight. Midnight, 12:30, and often I used to sit at the end of the night looking out the window and I said, “I don’t know how I going to run this restaurant”. People want to come, I tell them, “Come at 10:30. They said, “Okay, we’ll come at 10:30”. So, we were cooking from 06:00, the service was from 06:00 until 12:00, 12:30 at night-

Wolfgang was that seven days a week?

… behind the grill and everything. It was really crazy. I never thought we were going to be that busy. And I remember the second month we were open, we were positive, we made money.

Were you open seven days a week?

Yes.

I know you’ve never counted the hours, but I’m just, I’m going to help you here because I want the listeners out there to know. It sounds like you’re working at least 18 hours a day, and seven days a week. So, you probably logged 126 hours a week. I think that’s a fair estimate, that is awesome. And it’s so encouraging for somebody out there who feels like, “Man, I’m working so hard”, because now people look at you and say, “Wow”. But a lot of people don’t want to focus on the grind, the energy, and the effort you put in all those years to build this thing. Can you comment on… There was Japanese investors that reached out to you to open a Spago in Tokyo, and if I get the story correct, I think they said, “We would love to open up a Spago in Tokyo, we’d love for you to help us, but if not we’ll just open it on our own”. Is that correct?

Yes, exactly.

As you begin to scale your business, somebody is going to want to copy your business plan and your systems exactly, it’s going to happen. So, just go ahead and emotionally prepare yourself.

So, what happened is these Japanese people came over and because we got so much breath, so fast, the whole new sensation, an open kitchen, nobody had the right tablecloths restaurant with the kitchen open and there was a theater stage and everything. So, when they came over and they wanted to do a restaurant, and at first I said, “No, forget it, I barely can run one restaurant. How can I run a restaurant in Tokyo so far away?”.

So, they came back maybe three or four months later with the plans, with the kitchen layout, exactly what I had and everything. As a matter of fact, it was funny because just like Spago, it was up the hill a little bit from Sunset. They found this thing on the second floor of a little building that you had to go up some steps and they lined the kitchen up with the pizza oven, with their pasta cook, covered everything, the cold station, exactly like I had it. They took pictures of the furniture, they knew where to get the chairs, ready to get everything.

If you are an entrepreneur, I’m telling you, trust nobody. You have so many competitors out there, they’re looking just to copy your stuff. They’re going to want to copy all your business cards, your print pieces, your strategies, your processes, every checklist, people are going to want to copy it. So, once you begin to nail down your business model and the systems that work, now you want to look at copywriting and trademarking the things you’ve worked so hard to build and test in this marketplace. Again, get out there, try to sell it, get it in front of the marketplace, don’t listen to what people say about your product, but look at whether people buy your product. Don’t sit there and run your product idea by a bunch of your good buddies and they all say, “Yes, I’m definitely going to buy it”.

Go out there, market the product, and see how many people buy the product. And then, when people don’t buy the product, ask them what you could do to improve that product, service, restaurant, or business. And then, once you get that business model refined, that product refined, once you create something that the world likes and the world wants to buy, it is absolutely vital, as soon as possible, once you nail it down and before you scale it, that you take the time to trademark and copyright the core aspects of your business model that make it unique.

So, they basically told me that… And I didn’t copyright the name Spago or anything like that, so they told me, “We are going to open Spago with you or without you”. So I said, “Okay, let’s open it with me”, so they gave me one third of the business and then we went and the year after, in ’83 in April, we opened Spago in Tokyo, which was a trip. And I took the pastry chef with me, I took a chef with me, and the manager with me, and they all stayed there. I stayed there maybe two weeks and it was an experience for me I must say. I never thought that after a year I can open my second restaurant so far away. And then, six months later in September, I opened a restaurant in Santa Monica called Chinois, which was my version of a Chinese restaurant, and that came by accident.

So, somebody owned this little building there and they said, “We want a Spago in Santa Monica”, which is like 12 miles from the original Spago. And I said, “No, no, I don’t want to do another Spago. It’s too boring doing the same thing”, and he said, “So, what do you want to do?”, I said, “I want to do a Chinese restaurant”. So then, the guy said, “Okay, whatever you do, I’m sure it will be good”. So, we opened this Chinese restaurant, but I didn’t know about Chinese food, I’d never cooked Chinese food. I never cooked in a wok. So I said, “Okay, I want to do my style of Chinese food”, and it really became this sensation. And even yesterday there was Chinese New Year, we celebrated it at Chinois, a group of Chinese people who came from China and ate the food, the first thing they said, they said, “We’ve never had Chinese New Year, we’ve never had the menu like that in Beijing”, they were from Beijing, they said, “We going to come now for every Chinese New Year celebration you have”.

So, even the Chinese said, “You know what? This is really interesting”. Now, some local Chinese restaurant didn’t like it because we were packed, you had to reserve two weeks ahead of time, and their restaurant was maybe half empty and it was different. And they said, “A Caucasian cooking Chinese food, how can that happen?”, So there was some controversy with it.

I’m going to keep harping on this idea because it is so important that somebody out there gets this idea today. Seth Godin, the bestselling author of The Purple Cow, transform Your Business by being Remarkable writes, “If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you, that’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out”. Wolfgang was out there in the marketplace generating a buzz. He’s out there creating Chinese food, but yet he’s a Caucasian guy. And you know what happened? Certain people got upset with him. And what’s going to happen to you? Certain people are going to get upset with you because if you are remarkable, somebody won’t like it. Just read my iTunes reviews to see, nobody ever receives unanimous praise. It doesn’t matter how hard I work on this podcast, how hard you work on your business, what I say on this show or what I don’t say on this show, what you do in your business or what you don’t do.

Even if you do everything perfectly to the absolute best of your ability, you will receive criticism because the best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed, criticism comes to those who stand out.

You don’t look Chinese to me, do you have any Chinese ancestry at all there Wolfgang? Because you make some incredible Chinese food.

I tell everybody I’m half Chinese, that my mother was half Chinese, it’s just a joke. But no. I think today, you look in America, it doesn’t matter if you are from Africa, England, or wherever you are from, you can cook great food as long as you love food and have passion.

Now, we interviewed recently a man by the name of Shep Gordon, a man who I know you know very well. Could you talk to me about your relationship with Shep and the role he played in helping you to become the celebrity chef that you are today?

It’s so interesting because I know Shep Gordon for many years, so [inaudible 00:56:33] who passed away already. So, when Shep was in Atlanta, he was in the record business with Alice Cooper and all these guys, and we became very friendly because he likes food. I became friends with anybody who likes food.

So, one time he came to us, we did a whole thing in Hawaii. I think it was in at a big island of Hawaii, like a chef thing it was called The Bounty of Hawaii. So, we had different chefs from all over the country. And we were the main seniors, so then, when it was over the next day we were all sitting there for lunch, and I had my myself from Austria, which wasn’t a lunch for us. And then they gave us a bill. That was polite because we had some salads, but he actually went and made the food and then they gave us the bill and he said, “What is wrong with this picture here? You guys work here?”, he said, “Did they pay you?”, I said, “No, they gave us a free home and paid for the trip”, then he said, “Yes, but they talk to every customer and not even talk to you”. So he said, “You guys have an agent?”, I said, “No”. And he said, “Maybe we have to gather and planned it better”.

So, I called my friends, I called Paul, Alice, Anne-maria, Jonathan, and I don’t know how many we are, maybe eight or ten chefs, Mark Miller and Larry Forgione, and so then we all sat together in a restaurant in San Francisco and decided he should become our agent.

Now, at that time, I started to get really busy already. So, the chef really did a lot for Emeril, Dean Fearing. I was so busy because I owned all these restaurants already by then. I did consulting for an airline, I did consult consulting for The Mansion in Dallas, the Hana Ranch in Maui, for the Remington in Houston, so I didn’t need a chef to do work for me because I couldn’t go and cook in New Orleans, Dallas, or whatever and get $5,000 a day, at that time for us was a lot of money. But he helped a lot all these other guys who did not have DB experience, like I did the Johnny Carson Show, David Letterman Show, and Good Morning America from ’86 on.

So, I was already on TV at that time, and there are no chefs for us on TV as much as I was, but he helped a lot of other chefs and he did a great job with them. And we are still great friends. Now, did he influence my career? He did. Why? And what was really positive? He said, don’t sell yourself cheap. So charge enough money.

Now, your food, your name, your brand is synonymous with cuisine, gourmet, celebrity chef, why have you decided to put your name on all of your products? A lot of people pull back from that. Why have you decided to put your name on all of the products?

Curiosity, I am very curious about doing all the fun sides. So, in the 80s, a friend of mine told me, “Okay, we don’t have any good soups here, you have Campbell Soup and Progresso, but not really quality. Why don’t you devise recipes and make soup?”, so we went then and made a really delicious soup just like we made it in the restaurant. Now, we had to put them in cans too, but at least the ingredients were good. At that time, when you taste my French onion soup and their French onion soup of the other companies, it was like day and night.

So, that became pretty successful too, so I was always interested in different things. So then, I remember Lou Waterman came up to me and says that they built the Universal CityWalk and says, “Wolfgang, why you don’t build a Spago up there? We really need a restaurant”. I said, “CityWalk, the tourists are there, people don’t want to spend that money and spend that much time. They come and visit the Universal Film Studios”. So, that’s when I started the first cafe and now we have cafes like that in airports around the world, in Disney World and places like that.

So I think for me, when there’s something new, I really love it. And then, years later in the 9os I was friendly with George Foreman, and a friend of mine made up this grill, the Foreman grill, which became a sensation, and really successful. And then, the guy who left the church told me, “Wolfgang, why you don’t do something like that?”, I said, “Well, okay”, and then we started to make pots and pans, we tried to sell them off UBC, I didn’t know how to sell them, I think they were way too expensive.

So then, we sold them off at HSN. Then I talked with the people at HSN and we made a cheaper version of that, still good quality, but not as expensive, not this thick, the iron and everything. So then, that became a really good business all of a sudden. So, I stayed with it and I’m still there for over 20 years now. So, why do I do it? Sometimes I ask myself, “Why do you do all that stuff?”. Two years ago there was an article about me and then they asked, “Mr. Wolfgang you do all these things, what is your dream? What you still thinking of?”, and I said, “My dream would be to go to Harvard. I never went to high school, I never went to college or anything”.

Sure enough, a few days later the dean of Harvard Business school calls and says, “Wolfgang, I have the perfect thing for you. It’s called OPM, Owner/President Management. It’s about three months long, not in one course, it’s three times a month, you should try to do that. If you really want to if that is really your dream”. So, what did I do? I enrolled at Harvard, so I have four more month to go, so end of March, I going to graduate.

Well, pre congratulations, that’s exciting my friend.

I said, “Who would known? Where I come from, from this little village in Austria where the school had two rooms only, two classrooms, and now I went to Harvard”. To me it feels like a dreams, sometimes when I say, “Is it really true?”. It’s funny, but what it is really is my curiosity. I think I’m interested in so many different things, I’m curious with so many different things. So, that’s why I do so many things. And sometimes Gelila, my wife, tells me, “When you going to rest, when you going to see you’re not so young anymore for those things? You’re young, but you’re not that young anymore. Why you don’t just relax and don’t do all this stuff?”, I say, “Well, but I like it”.

My friends, you see, Wolfgang Puck isn’t in a rush to retire because he loves what he does. And I’ll never forget, years ago I was reading a book called Life and Death, which is written by Russell Simmons. And Russell Simmons is the legendary co-founder of a company called Def Jam. They introduced the world to the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Jay-Z, and other massive hip hop artists. He essentially is known as the father of hip hop, he also launched the Def Comedy Jam and he was the founder of the Phat Farm Clothing and apparel line. But he says, “The goal is to be able to live your life the way that Michael Jordan played basketball, or Marvin Gay sang a song, to be able to feel the way you feel when you laugh at a joke, but to feel that way all the time”.

Wow. What would it be like if you could build a business that would allow you the time freedom and financial freedom to do whatever you wanted to do on a daily basis, to pursue your goals for your faith, family, finances, fitness, friendship, and your fun? What would it be like if you could do that? Because once you get to a place in life where every day is a perfect day that has been perfectly designed by you, it is so exciting. Yes, there will be some interruptions and a few frustrations along the way, but that is infinitely exciting for me. And I can honestly tell you, that’s what I love about doing this show, is because I know that every time I interview these guests this is what the Lord wants me to do. I’m doing what I’m called to do, I’m helping great people like you.

And I know that you’re going to find that business model that’s going to create that time and financial freedom for you as well. Now, back to our interview with Wolfgang Puck.

I am 69.

Well, you look like you’re probably 34. Now, if I had to guess, you’re probably eaten all that organic stuff your mom taught you about as a kid, that’s probably what’s going on right there. Now, I want to ask you this because there’s so many listeners that are just infinitely curious about this, how do you organize the first four hours of your day and what time do you typically wake up?

So, I get up at 06:00 in the morning. At 06:30 I wake up my son, Oliver, and then I read the paper a little bit, I wake him up and then we have a trainer who comes and he exercises with me in the morning or sometimes he doesn’t exercise, when he has to go to school or whatever. But the school he goes to his five minutes away, so it makes it really easy. So then, after that I take a shower, get ready, and then I look what are my appointments for today which I have to keep? And then, by nine o’clock I leave the house and I go off to Spago, the Belair Hotel and look what’s going on there. Now, on Wednesdays I might go in the morning early, right after the exercises, 07:30 I go to the Farmer’s market in Santa Monica.

Sometimes I go downtown also to the fish market still, I don’t have to, but I like it. And then, at 12 o’clock, generally I go to Spago or the Belair Hotel, we have lunch, spending two hours there, then I come here to my office and look for all the things I have to do and plan new restaurants, and do all that stuff. And then, at six o’clock and sometimes at 04:00, 04:30, I go and play tennis for an hour, especially if I’m stressed about something, tennis it’s good because I can hit the ball as hard I want to and it doesn’t talk back. So then, I go through that and then around 06:37 I have dinner with my wife, Gelila, and my two boys, Alexander and Oliver, and right now Byron also who is training to be a chef, and then I go back to the restaurant maybe for a few hours.

Last night I was down at Chinois for Chinese New Year, and I sat with the Queen and with Dr. ElAttrache, who is the doctor for the Rams, and we talked about the Super Bowl, we walk in the kitchen and talked to Chef Rene for a while, and 11 o’clock I go home.

So, you went home at 11 o’clock last night?

Yes.

Now, you’re involved in a lot of things. You’ve got your own brands of food, you have books you’ve written, you have restaurants, how many different businesses, and maybe you don’t even know the exact answer, but how many different businesses are you involved in right now or different locations? How many different businesses?

To make it simpler for you, we have three divisions in our business, or I have three divisions in my business. One is called Fine Dining, we have 27 restaurants around the world, we are in LA, Las Vegas, Dallas, New York, Detroit, Washington, Orlando, London, Istanbul, Singapore, Bahrain, Qatar, and so forth, Maui. So, we have 27 of them and two more in the building process, one in Washington DC, and then one in Los Angeles, here at the Pentry Hotel that we going to run the whole food service, so we are working on that right now. And then, the most exciting process is, a few years away we are working to open a restaurant on the beach here in LA. So that’s going to be a big project, but it’s a few years away.

Now, two final questions for you, you have this restaurant in New York that you’ve launched, tell us about this newest venture, what it’s like, and why all the listeners should go check it out.

Now, you know what, Cut in New York, at the Four Season Hotel downtown is really a jewel in a way. It is a steak house restaurant, but with a lot of different options. If you are a vegan, you can go there and have the most exciting vegan meal. I was there and I had the risotto with celery and black truffle. I said, “You know what? I don’t need meat if I have a dish like that”. But we also have Turbot, which is my favorite fish, we also have black bass, which is great, and lobster. And then, we have meats from all over a little bit, but also a lot of local ingredients.

We use local deep and local land from New York state actually, and from Pennsylvania we get the duck and chicken. So, it’s really locally oriented, and it was designed by Jacques Garcia, who is really an amazing designer.

So, you can come to the bar and have little snacks at the bar, from the mini burger to a steak tartare, or some Asian influenced dishes, and we have little biscuits with cavi and smoked salmon, so you can have that or you go to the restaurant and there you have great appetizers, great raw fish dishes, things like that, salads. And then, if you love steak, one of my favorite one is the Double New York Steak cooked on the bone, and cook the bone really well done, so it gets really hot inside too. And then, just keep it simple. Put a little sea salt on top and maybe a little salt for my french fries. Because I love french fries and onion rings. And then, for the dessert I love pies. You know, one of the great legends in America is all these different pies, if it’s a pecan, key lime, banana cream, raspberry, blackberry, or blueberry pie.

So, I’m bringing this whole new idea so people can have a great steak and maybe a blueberry pie with some blueberry ice cream for the syrup, or maybe a pecan pie. So, for me it’s really exciting also to reinvent old school dishes and make them new again.

If you go to Cut, I think you can come to the bar, just hang out at the bar, have a drink and have some bar snacks, but really good interesting one. Right now, we have a great [inaudible 01:12:56] right there and we make a grilled cheese sandwich with black truffles and people say, “I’m just going to have a dinner with that, have a few glasses of red wine and that’s for dinner”, the grilled cheese sandwich with black truffles or people don’t want truffles, we make it without the truffles. But I think it’s really simple and really, really tasty.

For listeners out there that are taking notes, where’s this located again? You said it’s in the Four Seasons?

In the Four Season Hotel downtown on Church Street.

Now, my final question for you, listeners out there who won’t get a chance to talk to you one-on-one, if you’re sitting down there with a young entrepreneur today and they’re asking you, “Wolfgang, what’s the one piece of advice, If you could give me just one piece of the golden keys to the universe…”, talk to me, what’s the advice you would give all the entrepreneurs out there?

Well, I really believe if you are passionate about whatever you do, if it’s in the food business, in the tech business, I think you have to follow your dreams and don’t take no for an answer. There are so many naysayers out there who said, “You won’t be successful”. And when I told people 38 years ago that I going to make pizza, they said, “Wolfgang, you are crazy. Nobody going to come to your restaurant and eat pizza”, and then we invented the new style of pizza and it became all the rage. And it’s bond up hundreds of restaurants that they make different pizzas.

So, don’t take no for an answer, but also be patient. A lot of people think success is overnight. Success is like walking up steps into a big building. It’s one step at a time and I think that’s really important. But I tell all the young chefs especially to be patient, go to work and go to restaurant, make the mistakes there, learn there. And then, if you are ready you say, “Okay, I know cooking is an important part of the restaurant business, but you have to manage a lot of people, you going to have to make money because if not, you won’t stay in business”. So, it’s a lot of components to run a restaurant, or any business.

Wolfgang, it is an honor to have you on the show, hopefully this is not the worst interview you’ve ever been on, I thank you so much my friend.

Never, you know what? I really think. For me, if I can inspire some young people and tell them, “I started with nothing. I had not a penny left when I went to Indianapolis, I had to stay in a motel. I couldn’t check out. I had no money to pay for it. But I think at the end of the day, if you work hard and you think for yourself 12 hours is only half a day, I guarantee you, if you’re patient, you have passion, you will be successful”.

Wolfgang, thank you so much and I hope you have a great rest of your evening.

I know, I’m getting ready for the Oscars almost so…

Oh, wow! All right.

Thank you.

Well, you take care, sir.

Thank you so much.

All right, so if you’ve been listening to today’s show, there’s a lot you can unpack. There’s a lot of specific steps that Wolfgang taught, but I just want to recap a few of the knowledge bombs that I think that every listener out there should be very aware of. One, Wolfgang Puck was willing to work seven days a week to make his dreams happen. I’m not saying you should work seven days a week, but I think you should ask the question to yourself rhetorically, “How many hours per week am I actually willing to work to turn my goals and dreams into reality?”. Because Wolfgang Puck was willing to work seven days a week. Maybe you want to work five days a week, or six days a week, but you have to be intellectually honest about what you’re asking for. If you want to be great, you’ve got to be willing to invest great amounts of hours.

And if you want to be average, you got to put in average amount of hours and that’s just what’s required to be successful. Second teaching point, Wolfgang Puck talked about this, he said that he went out there and he raised money, he raised over half million dollars of investment capital to start his first restaurant, after he’d been working for years for other people. And I would ask you this, “What’s your risk tolerance? Are you willing to raise a half million dollars to start something you believe in, or maybe $10,000, 20,000, or $100,000?”, but you’ve got to be very self-aware about your risk tolerance and how much money you’re willing to bet on your big idea. Knowledge bomb number three, action item number three that I heard during today’s show is Wolfgang created a purple cow. When Wolfgang created his first restaurant, Spago, he created a business that was very different from any other business, it was the only restaurant that he knew of with an open kitchen and a wood-fired oven. It was the first restaurant that did a lot of things differently than everybody else, and that’s why he stood out.

When he started his first Asian restaurant, he was a Caucasian guy starting an Asian restaurant. Again, these are purple cows, these are remarkable ideas. And that is why his businesses stood out in the cluttered world of commerce and capitalism. So, I want you to ask yourself today, what are your goals for your faith, family, finances, fitness, friendship, and your fun? What are you willing to give up in order to achieve those goals? And if you enjoyed today’s show, I would encourage you to share today’s show with a friend or a family member. You’re listening to the ThriveTime Show on your radio and podcast download, and therefore we end each and every show with a boom because we believe that the big, overwhelming, optimistic momentum that Wolfgang Puck brought to his business on a daily basis is what you need to succeed. And so, without any further ado, 3, 2, 1, boom!

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

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

This is our old house, okay, this is where we used to live. Here you go. This is our old neighborhood. See, it’s nice, right?

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

This is our new house with our new neighborhood.

This is our new van with our new marketing, and this is our new team. We went from 4 to 14 and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome. But Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So, now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year.

In October 2016, we’ve grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now, it’s 2018, the month of October, it’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship. We’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand.

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

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