Business | How to Raise Money to Start or Grow Your Small Business | The BunkieLife.com Success Story | The Bolt On Bedroom Boss Joins Us to Share How to Raise Money to Start Your Small Business

Yeah, yeah. I know that the credit cards are maxed. Yeah. No, I’m not going to ask your dad for money again, okay? Listen, I know this is going to work. I got a good feeling about this one, all right? Okay, I got to go.

Jim.

Hey.

Hey. Bob.

Okay. Nice to meet you, Bob.

Hey, we’re here to get you some capital for your business today.

Fingers crossed, Bob.

Like that. Well, let’s just dive in.

Sure.

And we’ll unpack it. Tell me about your business.

Yeah, Bob. I just feel like I’m really sitting on a powder keg right now, and this industry is about to blow. All we have to do is like the match. You want to light it with me, Bob?

Well, let’s see.

Sure.

What is this business?

Yeah, it’s the party business, but more specifically it’s the pet party business.

Like for animals?

Yeah. Dogs, cats, fish. We’ve done a couple ducks.

So, you throw parties for pets.

Birthday parties, weddings, graduations, anniversaries, office parties, proms. We do it all.

Okay. Okay. So, what can we do for you?

Really, Bob? We’re a young company, but my phone’s blowing up. And I probably get a call about once a month and I can only see that doubling in the future. So, I need a massive building that I can call my call centers.

That’s what the capital is for?

Right.

Call centers?

Let me tell you this is that there are 180 million pets in America and all they want to do is party. That’s it. And who are we to stop them, Bob? One call center away.

Okay. Have a few standard questions for you.

Bring them on.

Yep, there you go. Okay. What are your net earnings?

Netted? You know, they’re very netted. I net them myself, so it’s all good.

What I mean is how are your profits?

Oh, yeah, yeah. We’re rebounding.

Rebounding? So, you’re losing money?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But I say it’s addition by subtraction.

Jim, do you have any real figures that you can show me?

I do. Figure this, Bob. I’m not trying to sell a product here, okay? What I’m trying to sell is the American dream. You can’t put a price on that.

Do you have a cost analysis?

No.

Balance sheet?

No.

P&L?

I don’t know what that is.

Do you have anything you can show me today?

A can-do attitude and it’s right here. You’re looking at it.

We need a little more than that, Jim.

Okay, time out. I thought this might happen, so what I did is I brought a satisfied customer. Say hello to Pebbles. Hey, now Bob, give this guy the capital he needs.

What are you doing?

Come on, Bob. This business is perfect.

Thanks, Pebbles. And a pun. You’re so funny.

You’re talking for the animal. Come on, Bob, let’s party.

Get out.

What if we renamed it Party Animals?

Get out, get out.

All right. Thrive Nation, on today’s edition of the Thrive Time Show, we’re going to talk about how to raise money to grow your business. And so on today’s show, you’re going to hear from the founder of a company called bunkielife.com, bunkielife.com. They build bolt-on bedrooms for people like yourself, and that’s bunkielife.com. The boss of the bolt-on bedrooms will be joining us today to discuss how he raised the capital needed to build Bunkie Life.

Then on part two of today’s show, we’re going to introduce you to Bob Healey. He’s a longtime client of mine. We helped Bob to take his idea for the GrillGun, which is like a flamethrower, a commercial flamethrower. And to turn that into a multimillion-dollar company, we helped Bob raise all the money on Kickstarter. We helped Bob to do all of his branding, all his marketing, all these print pieces, and we’re going to share with you his story, the grillblazer.com success story.

And then on part three of today’s show, I’m going to just share with you everything you need to know to raise capital to start and/or grow your business. And so now without any further ado, this is how to raise money to start your business. So, how to raise money to start or grow your business with the boss of the bolt-on bedroom, Bunkie Life. Here we go.

All right. Well, have you’ve ever had your in-laws visit or extended family visit and you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Self, I wish we had a place these people could stay at that isn’t in my house, but it could be near my house”. Or maybe you’ve thought about adding on a guest room, but you don’t really want to add on the fulk, and you’re in that spot where you’re saying, “We have family visit and I want to have a place for them to stay, but I don’t necessarily want to spend 400 grand to remodel my entire property to make it happen. And I don’t want to pull a permit, I just want to get it done quickly”.

Today’s guest may have a solution for you. He’s the founder of a company called Bunkie Life. His name is David Fraser. Welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir?

I’m doing fantastic, Clay. Thanks so much for having me.

Now, David, I’m going to go to your website so people can follow along and look at what you offer there. What is your web address? So people can go there right now and see what you have to offer.

Awesome, it’s bunkielife.com. That’s B-U-N-K-I-E life.com.

Okay, bunkielife.com. I’m pulling up bunkie, B-U-N… Okay, Bunkie Life. I’m pulling up here, bringing it over, bringing it over, feeling the flow, working it, Bunkie Life, hidden inner. Here we go. Okay, so this is Bunkie Life. Now, walk us through. What is Bunkie Life?

Well, essentially they’re small log cabin kits called bunkies, right? They’re little… Basically, if you remember Lincoln Logs as a kid or Lego kits, they’re like a DIY set of prefab, precut, prenotched, everything’s ready to go, logs that you put together.

And what does it look like inside of this? How can we see what it looks like inside one of these bunkie buildings?

So, if you click on any one of those models there, there’ll be a 3D tour that you can actually explore around inside some of the ones we’ve staged here at the factory, as well as see client photos, different cool things they’ve got. So, they look like a beautiful log cabin on the outside and they also finish beautifully on the inside right away as you can tell they’re from the photo.

Wow. So, I’m looking here. The $14,000, is that a pretty accurate number there? 14,000?

Yep.

Okay. And you’ve got… This one’s fun here. This one has a darker finish to it. Now, if somebody buys this, do you ship it to them or how does this work?

Yeah, all our stuff flat packs and we can ship all across North America. So, basically what arrives is a flat packed skid of lumber essentially. And you’ll take off the pieces and put them together using the build video or the instruction manual that comes with it.

Who is primarily buying these things from you? Who your ideal and likely buyer at this point?

I hear this problem all the time. “Dave, help me out, my family is getting bigger and my cottage or my house is not getting bigger”. So, what we are is a bolt-on bedroom and they’re so quick and easy to build, you can put them together like this week. You can literally have this shipped to you, have it finished this weekend so that you have enough space for the in-laws when they come.

So, it’s a bolt-on bedroom here. And when did you start this company?

Back in 2015, I had the exact problem myself. I lived in the country, just a little bit outside of Toronto, Canada, and we had our first kid and it was, “Where are we going to put mom and dad?” And so the bunkie was the solution for our in-law issue when they wanted to come see the grandkids. And then it spiraled from there. I started renting them out an Airbnb and they were a smash success. And then I started making them for other people.

And if somebody buys one from you, do they have to put it together themselves? Or do you recommend local contractors? How does that work?

All the above. We have a network of contractors across Canada and quickly growing into the US as well. So, if you don’t have the inclination or the time, you can hire someone local or even just if you have a handy man in the family or someone you know, get them to come over. And most of our kits can be built in one to two, maybe three days for the more complicated ones.

Now, what’s the most commonly asked questions that people ask you? Because I’m sure you get a lot of emails, a lot of questions at bunkielife.com. What are the most commonly asked questions?

All right. Number one, at least for people up in the Northern States, is can I inside these, can I use them all winter? And the answer to that is they come as is about three, three and a half season. So, here in Canada I can use mine really very comfortably from about now until Christmas time. And then if you want to bring it up to four season, there’s a couple simple steps you can take to insulate the roof, insulate the floor, and get yourself up to call it 3.99 seasons.

Now, do you have to pull a permit to put one of these bolt-on bedrooms next to your big home?

That’s a question for your local mafia ultimately, Clay, but here in most places in North America, we’ve discovered our stuff is small enough that it fits under the permit required size and a lot of jurisdictions. But obviously contact your local mafia.

And as far as your history again, when did you start this company?

2017, we started selling kits to other people.

And what was the process of selling your first one? Do you remember your first one you sold?

Yes, it was to my mom.

Okay, so you sold the first to your mom.

But after her. Yeah, so after the immediate friends and family. I just started listening to them really on the local buy and sell sites and people were really excited about it. And then people were staying in my Airbnbs. At this point, I built four for myself and I was renting them out. And the natural progression is, “Oh, I’ll make me one of these things”. And so it grew from there.

And then in 2018 we took the crazy step of giving a bunkie away on the internet and that went viral quite quickly. And that was the real launch of Bunkie Life in the start of 2018.

And so you’re based in Canada, is that right?

Yes, but we ship all across coast to coast, across Canada and now into Michigan. And then soon the entire lower 48.

What percentage of your playlist is comprised of Brian Adams and Justin Bieber songs?

0%.

On the pie chart of life, what percentage of your pie chart is filled up with hockey thoughts? Thoughts about hockey?

105%.

Really? You like hockey a lot?

I’m a fan. Yeah, I’m a fan. I used to play. I played all through high school, I even refereed hockey in university, it was like a side gig for me while I was paying for university.

I knew there would be a Canadian stereotype that would eventually ring true.

Yes.

Tell us about the mounties in Canada. What’s going on with the mounties? What is that all about?

Honestly, I’ve never even seen a mounty in real life. I think they’re just a fictional character, like a leprechaun.

Okay. Now, if people go to bunkielife.com and they go here today to look into purchasing, what does the process look like? Do you request a free quote then you hop on a phone? Or do you buy it all online? What’s the process like of actually buying one of these?

Yeah, I would highly suggest setting up… Either you can do a 3D tour if you’re far away. If you want to come see us at the factory, that’s fine. But if you’re far away, which most listeners will be, you can just set up a virtual Zoom tour. We can take you through the models virtually online, figure out what the best fit is.

But, Clay actually set up something just for Clay Clark listeners. If you go to bunkielife.com/clay, I’ve set up a little questionnaire. It’s about 10 quick yes/no questions, takes five seconds, and then we can determine, are you ready for the Bunkie Life? And that’s got some good questions that basically figure out how much knowledge do you have about your local situation, how likely are you to be able to build this yourself. Do you need a contractor? Those type of things.

So, bunkielife.com/clay, is that where to go?

Should be, but if not, I can make sure I reset it up, Clay.

No problem, no problem. And if anybody else…

It’s working on my end, try in lowercase. Maybe it’s lowercase, Clay. It’s working on my end.

Let me try it now. Here we go, bunkielife.com/clay. There it is. Okay.

Here we go.

I’ll put that on the show description too so people can find it. And you no longer charge people more money if they use promo code clay, right? You don’t charge people more money. It’s not a thing where, “Oh, you’re a Clay listener, we’re charging you more”. I mean, that is not a thing. You’re not charging people more, right?

No. I’ll make sure that actually they get a little bit more service, a little more high-fives from me. Or maybe even some other little fun, funky cool bonus. If you fill the quiz, then you actually get a free copy of my book.

And how did you originally hear about us? How did you hear about the Thrive Time Show and that which we do for businesses?

So, my best friend since I was two years old is a drywall company owner. He’s a really, really good guy. We helped each other with business all throughout our friendship. And he was gotten to the Thrive Time podcast. I started listening and I’m, “I got to talk to this guy. This is my jam.”

Well, brother, I’m excited for what you’re doing. When we talked on the phone right away, I knew this fills a need for a lot of people. I just know a lot of people in my own life that are looking for that bolt-on bedroom. It’s really the best way to say it. And I think a lot of people are looking for that. And this is something where you can take the hassle out of renovating the castle. I mean, this is a quick thing. It’s just, boom, bolt-on bedroom. So, I encourage people, if you want to learn more, go to bunkielife.com/clay.

And we’re going to be having you on the show each and every week for a while here, Dave. We’ll be talking about some business systems and processes each week as we get to know a little bit more about your business and that what you do. And so I’ve got one business question for you, and then we will wrap up today’s edition of the Thrive Time Show.

When I built my first company, djconnection.com, which I no longer own, and I sold it over a decade ago, but when I built that business, I had this idea. Wow, I could provide worldclass entertainment for weddings and parties and proms because I saw a problem that people would leave early if the entertainment wasn’t great. And so I had this idea that I’ll DJ your event for a dollar and then if you’re happy, you can pay me the remaining balance. And if you’re not, then you just throw out a dollar. So, that was my value proposition. It was almost a kamikaze style capitalism, and I only got taken advantage of a few times, but by and large, it allowed me to really book some big time events at a young age.

But to get the capital needed to fund it, I tried to go into local banks and they’re all going, “No”. If a banker says, “So, sir, are you looking to raise money for your business?” Yeah. “What are you doing?” If you say, “I’m a disk jockey”, the banker goes, “Ah, no”. Because it’s just the word DJ, it translates to no. And so I went to the credit card companies trying to get a credit card. I tried credit lines, I tried all the different moves, and eventually I recognized I’m going to have to work at Applebee’s, Target and Direct TV. That’s what I’m going to have to do. I’m going to have to work at Applebee’s, Target and Direct TV. That’s how I’m going to do it. That’s the only way I can do it because no one wants to fund this company that I’m going to build. I can see it in my mind. I saw the opportunity, but I had to work at Target, Applebee’s and Direct TV, and then I worked to doing construction during the summers.

So, I’d like to ask you, how did you first finance the creation of the initial Bunkie Life bolt-on buildings?

Okay, great question. I have a similar background. I actually owned a wedding band and DJ company for a while as well. So, really Bunkie Life is really my third, fourth business. I was able to fund it through savings from previous businesses, but I started as a professional musician and entertainer, took a credit card loan to buy the sound system and paid it off in the first month. That actually is the only time I’ve never fully paid my credit card, was that first month of business then.

I could dive into it, but basically I built the first three bunkies on my property, my backyard, started renting them out, and the cash flow from that was the first basis of Bunkie Life. And then I started selling them and I would take a deposit from the client and I would use that deposit to build a bunkie, so it started a cash flow itself basically from day one.

So, again. If you’re out there today and you’re saying, “How do I raise capital?” On the rest of today’s show, I’m going to walk you through a lot of different options to raise money. Maybe, perhaps they sound more traditional some of these. But I’ll tell you, as I meet successful entrepreneurs all across the country, I found that the vast majority of the successful entrepreneurs I’ve met in both Canada and in America, they delayed gratification, they saved up money, and they did whatever they had to do. And so when you look at the success of Bunkie Life today, just know that they too had to start with whatever tools they had available. And I really do appreciate you, David, for joining us, and I’ll harass you next week on the Thrive Time Show. Thanks again, sir.

Thanks, Clay. Appreciate your time, man.

Take care. Bye.

Gentlemen. Let me introduce you to the GrillGun.

Oh, I would [inaudible 00:16:47] that anyway.

I need that.

Welcome back to [inaudible 00:16:49] everything guys. As you can see, I have a new toy.

Check it out.

Hello?

Hi. Hi, honey. It’s mom.

Hey, what’s up?

How are you?

I’m good. I’m at work, so I’m busy right now. Maybe I could call you later.

So, you know how to do a Facebook?

What do you mean do a Facebook? Do you actually mean make a FaceTime phone call?

No. Is that what they call it?

Well, I’m not exactly sure what you’re talking about.

Well, where you can see what you’re doing.

That still sounds like both of them.

When people see your pictures.

Okay, that’s Facebook. You’re talking about Facebook?

Yeah, I’m talking about Facebook. Can you copy Facebook into my new computer?

Mom, you don’t put it in your computer. It’s on the internet.

What do you mean?

Wait a second. Mom, you have a Facebook account. I know this because you like almost every picture I post instantly.

I do, but I want a new one for my birdhouse business.

Okay, just log into your account and make a page.

I have done that. I log in, I put in all the information, I put in all the pictures, and then the next time I go back, it’s all gone and I have to do it all over again.

When you get on, are you signing into Facebook or signing up?

Yes. Wait, what’s the difference?

All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s edition of the Thrive Time Show, we’re going to be doing a show about internet marketing. And I’m going to show you a case study of an actual client that we’ve helped to grow his business dramatically. And that company is called Grill Blazer. Grill Blazer. Blazer. Grill Blazer, like a Star Wars theme. Blazer, Grill Blazer. Not Faser, not laser. Grill Blazer.

It’s like a grill gun. It’s almost like a flamethrower for searing meat, for starting charcoal grills. And what happened was is that Paul Hood, who’s an accountant, he calls me and says, “Clay, I know this guy named Bob”. And Bob, which is the same name if you spell it backwards, it’s still Bob. Bob calls me and he says, “Clay, Bob is going to call you. He has an invention for a GrillGun, it’s like a flamethrower thing. And he wants to sell them. And he currently has never sold any of them at all. And he needs you.”

And people who are accountants, a lot of banks, accountants, business owners, they know there are two different ways to get rich. One is you’re a genius. You have the ability to dribble a basketball in a way that makes the crowd cheer. You’re a great singer, that’s what you do. God gave you a certain set of talents and you’re exchanging that for compensation.

And then there’s a different way to make a lot of money and I call it a non genie ass. Now, what am I saying there? It’s a non genie, like a genie, “I wish I could be successful”. And so that genie, and then it works with genius. So, there’s genius. It’s wow, God gave you a certain set of talents and that’s how you became rich because God gave it to you. And you just woke up one day and you could dribble a basketball, and you’re rich, and you’re seven foot two, and you’re great at basketball and that’s great.

But then there’s another group of people that can’t sing and can’t write music or can’t whatever. And God gives us all certain talents, different skill sets, and I am what I would call a non genie ass. So, I’m somebody who doesn’t wish, I just turned my goals into reality by grinding. So, Paul called me and said, “This guy needs the non genie ass. That’s what he needs. He needs to go from the idea to the execution of the idea. He’s never sold any of these products at all. And I know that you can help him to sell millions”, which is true, which is true.

So, Bob called me on my phone, actually, he sent me a text. And by the way, if you’re listening right now and you want to get ahold of me, you can text me at (918) 851-0102. That’s my phone number. (918) 851-0102. However, just because you text me doesn’t mean I have to answer, so a lot of times I block people. People that text me things that are nefarious or angry or just ridiculous, double-minded people, I block them, primarily globalists. I block those people or nefarious people.

But you can text me and then a member of my team will schedule a 13 point assessment with me so I can rendezvous with you to talk about how to grow your business. And so I booked an appointment to talk to Bob about his Grill Blazer. He did not have a website, he did not have business cards, he didn’t have packaging.

And I’m going to let you know everything they used to know about it. Check it out.

Hi, I’m Bob Healey. I’m the inventor of the GrillGun and the Su-VGun, and I’m going to do a short video here today to show you how to properly connect them to the propane bottles.

He did not have a website. He did not have business cards. He didn’t have packaging, didn’t have a print piece, didn’t have pricing, didn’t have funding, didn’t have funding, didn’t have funding, didn’t have GoFundMe set up, didn’t have videos, didn’t have a instruction manual, didn’t have insurance, didn’t have scripts, didn’t have any sales, no org charts, nothing.

But he had the idea. And he had a prototype. And if you have a prototype, I could do something with that, but if you don’t have a prototype, that’s a different conversation, don’t call me. But he had a working prototype. And so I took Bob into my office and I said, “Bob, show me how it works”. And he fires it up and I’ll show it to you in just a second. He fired it up. And I thought, “Well, I never want to own one of those because it’s so dangerous, but I know people that would. And I think that you’re going to sell a lot of those if we follow a proven system”.

So, I taught Bob all the systems and now Bob is a super success story, and that’s the story. So, on the rest of today’s show, you’re going to hear Bob talking about his super success and how he went from the idea into the prototype. He did that himself. He went from the idea to the prototype. You have to take your idea and turn it into a working practical model.

But from there, I just helped him nail it and scale it. And so I want you to hear Bob Healey’s story. Bob Healey’s a great American, you’re going to love him. His website is grillblazer.com, grillblazer.com, and you’re going to see how we got Bob featured on the Dude Perfect Show, how he got Bob featured all these media outlets. Last time I talked to Bob, he was selling like $40,000 a week of these products at a 50% margin and he was able to a arrange a relationship.

And most of my clients I worked with for five and six years. And so in Bob’s case, we worked with him for years and then Bob was able to bring in an investment partner as he wanted to. And that was the end of my coaching, which made room for another client because I only work with 160 clients and that’s how it works. And I only work with diligent doers.

So, if you’re listening right now and you’re perpetually lazy, don’t call me. I can’t fix that. That’s a life coach, that’s a pastor. But if you’re somebody who’s willing to put in the work and you just needed to go from a prototype to an actual successful company, I can help you do it. And without any further ado, here’s the Bob Healey story, factory direct from me to you, to your ear.

All right, this is Clay Clark here, and what you just saw was my longtime client, Bob Healey’s company, the GrillGun, featured on the hit YouTube Show called Dude Perfect. So, the question is, how does somebody go from a product idea like the GrillGun and into a successful company?

Well, there’s a lot of details that go into that, so I thought I would walk you through specifically what we did to help Bob Healey to grow from a startup to a successful company. So, I’m going to take just a few minutes to walk you through this, and that’s what we do. People always ask me, what do you do? How do you help clients? So, this is specifically what we do, and I’m going to walk you through the steps that we took so that way you, as a listener out there, if you want to become a business consulting client, you can know what we do for you and what we don’t do for you.

So, step one is we had to define Bob’s goals. We had to define the goals. What are the goals? How many sales are you looking to do? Define the financial goals, step one.

Step two, we had to figure out, we had to determine how many GrillGuns need to be sold each week to achieve the financial goals. So, we had the step one, we had to figure out the financial goals. Step two, we had to determine how many GrillGuns need to be sold each week to achieve those goals, all right? Step two is we had to refine the branding.

So, step three, we had to create a world-class website. Now, someone could argue about what that means, but we wanted to make a website that wouldn’t be embarrassing. And when we first met Bob, he didn’t have a website that looked good. He was a great guy, but his website wasn’t existent. And so we had to build a website that looked good.

The next thing we had to do is we had to create an About Us video. Well, what was it About Us video? We had to create a video that talked about the company in a way that other people who are not Bob could understand. So, we had to create an About Us video. That’s really important. If you’re out there listening today, you want to have an About Us video or a My Story video because you have to have a video that explains to people what your product or service does.

Step five. [inaudible 00:26:09] for Bob what we had to do. We had to create world-class branding, create world-class packaging. Well, what does it mean world-class packaging?

So, step one, we had to define his goals. Step two, we had to determine how many GrillGuns need to be sold each week to achieve the financial goals. Step three, we had to create a world-class website. Step four, we had to create an About Us video, an Our Story video. Step number five, we had to create world-class packaging.

Step number six, we had to create world-class… We had to do all these things. A world-class autoresponder email. What does it mean world-class autoresponder email? Well, it’s when someone actually buys something, we want to have some notification that goes to people when they buy something so that they know that the actual product was shipped.

Step number seven we had to do, we had to create an online shopping cart. It took an online shopping cart for Bob Healey and his company, the GrillGun.

Now, after that, we had to create a tracking sheet. What? We had to create a tracking sheet. Now, why would we have to create a tracking sheet? Well, a tracking sheet allows you as a client and us as a consulting company, to point out that you are in fact doing well or you’re not doing well. We want to track the numbers.

And so when you create a tracking sheet, at first, it’s not going to be very impressive because you’re seeing, “Well, we spent this much on advertising and we had this many clicks, and we sold this many guns, and so it cost us $19 and 40 cents per gun we sold”. Then you see, weak or line four here.

The next week we spent $232 on advertising. We had 41,000 impressions or people that viewed the website for the first time or saw the ads. We had 3,448 clicks, and we sold 31 GrillGuns for a total of seven dollars and 40 cents per gun. That’s what it cost us. It cost us seven dollars and 40 cents per GrillGun that we sold.

Then the next step, we had to spend $236 the next week on ads. We had this many impressions, 39,114 impressions. We had had 4,440 clicks. We sold 25 GrillGuns at a total of $9 and 44 cents per a gun sold. Well, over time you’ll start to see that the number of sales we’re doing goes up and up and up. We go from seven GrillGuns sold to 31 to 222 to 180 to 240, and you start to see real growth here.

So, the question is how do you go from selling seven guns? When I first met Bob, he was selling zero guns, by the way, and we got him to a point where he was selling hundreds of guns per week. So, how do you do that? All right, so step number nine, great question by the way, step number nine, we had to create what I call core, repeatable, actionable processes. We had to create the core…

We had to create the core repeatable, and this is the part that I love that most people don’t like. I love this. Most people don’t like this. We had to create the core repeatable, actionable processes that are needed to achieve success. We had to create the core repeatable, actionable processes that are needed to create success. We had to do this. What are the steps you had to take every week? Well, one, we had to reach out to our Dream 100 list. We had to reach out to our Dream 100 list. Someone says, “What’s the Dream 100 list?” I’ll come back to that. Next, we had to gather objective Google reviews from actual buyers, and then we had to gather video reviews, video reviews from actual buyers. Then finally, we had to track sales and track customer service feedback.

This became our thing we did every week. Every week we’re reaching out to our Dream 100 list. Every week we’re gathering objective reviews from our actual buyers. Every week we’re gathering video reviews from actual buyers. Every week we’re tracking sales, and every week we’re tracking the customer service feedback. Now, there’s a lot of other details that went into this. I’m just trying to give you an idea of what we did to help Bob.

What we did is we started reaching out via the Dream 100. We made a list of all the top influencers in the world that we thought would be likely to enjoy his product. We reached out and we sent, we called these people, we emailed these people. We reached out primarily via email and calling because some of these personalities, some of these big YouTube channels, they’ll have a way to get in touch with them.

Sometimes it’s harder to find those people, but we reached out to them consistently and this was one of the first people to respond to the email we sent him and we said, “Mr. T-ROY Cooks, we love your show and we wanted to give you a free Grill Gun. We wanted to give you a free Grill Gun so that way you could experience what the Grill Gun is like. The Grill Gun is a way to cook your food. It’s a way to sear steaks. It’s a way to quickly light a charcoal grill, and we wanted to send you a free one to see what your thoughts would be.” Watch what happened here. Here we go, folks, and…

Appreciate you joining us. Today I’m going to show you a brand new device to help you out on your grill.

This particular commercial or feature took the Grill Gun from good sales to really good sales. Now, did this person reach out to us? No. Was Bob doing any sales before he met him? No. Did Bob have a great product idea before he met us? Yes. To go from the idea to a profitable business requires the execution and the implementation of proven processes and systems. That’s what I do. That’s what we do. That’s what I do. How do you go from an idea to a super successful implementation of the idea? This is how we do it. We reach out to him, here we go.

The Grill Gun, right here, it’s mobile. It operates off a one pound tank or it comes with a hose you can attach to your 20 pound tank if you desire. I like this mobile setup best. Just a little one pound tank. Turn the valve on top here, pull the trigger, you got fire. All right. You can adjust the flame here. I ain’t turning it up all the way. If you need an immediate kick on the handle right here, it’s another valve. How about that?

He features-

This thing is so cool. It feels balanced.

He featured the product.

If you need to, pull the handle.

He talked about it to his audience, and guess what? Sales increased. What did we do next? Guess what we did? We continually, without emotion, without getting all worked up, no one’s crying. We continued to reach out to other restaurants, other influencers, other media influencers, other people with massive YouTube channels, other grilling experts, other people with big channels. We reached out to this guy, Sous Vide Everything. Watch this. Now again, before we met Bob, he had a great product. It was called the Grill Blazer, the Grill Gun. It was patented, it was ready to go, no sales. I remember Bob coming in showing us the demo of the product and there was no sales. A great product, but no sales. How do we help somebody grow? This is specifically what we do.

Welcome back to Sous Vide Everything, guys. As you can see, I have a new toy. Check it out. I’m going to let you know-

We just keep doing this over and over and over. What did we do? One, we defined the financial goals. Step two, we determined how many Grill Guns needed to be sold each week to achieve the financial goals. Step three, we had to create a world-class website, which we do for our clients. Step four, we had to create an about us video, and our story video. Five, we had to create world-class packaging. Six, we had to create a world-class autoresponder email. Seven, we had to create an online shopping cart. Eight, we had to create a tracking sheet. Nine, we had to create the core repeatable, actionable processes that are needed to create success.

One, we had to commit that every week we’re going to reach out to that Dream 100 list. That’s what we did, and we helped Bob to go from a startup to a very successful company. Step two, we had to gather objective Google reviews from the actual buyers. Step three, we had to gather video reviews from the actual buyers. Step four, we had to track the sales. Step five, we had to track the customer service feedback.

Now step six, okay, we had to launch and we had to track the online advertisement. We had to track the online advertisement. Again, most people who have a big product idea or have a business or a skillset, maybe you’re good at building cabinets or building houses or maintaining vehicles. If you don’t know how to do these skillsets, it becomes a digital divide that keeps you from achieving your ultimate success. Everything you see here on grillblazer.com, that’s what we helped Bob to do. Although it is exciting and people want to celebrate the success of Bob’s Grill Blazer being featured on Dude Perfect, I don’t know that a lot of people know the behind the scenes, all the work that went into getting Bob’s product from an idea into super success.

I can just say working with Bob over time, you started seeing, we were doing $26,000 of sales, $40,000 of sales, $42,000 of sales. As you’re growing and growing and growing, then we had to install, yep, we had to install a call recording system. We had to install a call recording system. Why? For quality control. I have a company that I actually like called clarityvoice.com. It’s called clarityvoice.com. You can use whoever you want to use, but that’s who I like. We had to record calls to make sure that the customer service team was doing a good job. We had to do that. We had to install the call recording system for quality control, and then we have to listen to the customer feedback and continue to improve that experience.

Then we created a post-purchase wow system. There’s a lot of details into that, but the idea was if you bought a product, are you going to be wowed after you bought it? I mean, imagine you bought a product online and you received a call from the customer service team to make sure that you were happy. We had to do that. We had to create a directions manual, an instructions manual that made a lot of sense. Because people receive this new product, it’s kind of like a flamethrower. Some people struggled to figure out how to use the product properly. These are the details we had to do. There’s a lot of details there.

Then we had to create a Google map for the business. Okay, now why do we have to create a Google map for the business? We had to create a Google map for the business, because whenever you have a product or service, guess what? Most people will go onto Google and they’re going to type in Grill Gun, and they’re going to read reviews. They’re going to look for reviews and read reviews. If you don’t have reviews, people are going to then just sort of be unsettled as to whether it’s a good purchase or not. We had to help Bob get those reviews.

How do you get reviews? Well, what we did is we invited Bob to bring his Grill Blazer product to our conferences, and then we let people, our conference attendees, try out the Grill Blazer to see if they liked it so they could give him a review. What did we do? We invited Bob to bring his product to our in-person workshops so that our attendees could review the actual product themselves and give Bob product feedback. Here’s Tim, a former consultant with us here.

This is Tim Redmond and I’m from Tulsa, Oklahoma. I love the Grill Gun. This thing is so easy and it’s so powerful.

This is what we did. We had to get Bob reviews and he didn’t know a lot of people that would give him reviews, so we-

My name is Clay Steers, I’m from Skiatook Oklahoma.

We brought Bob’s product to one of our Thrive, actually many of our conferences, and we let the attendees at our events buy a Grill Gun at a deeply reduced price. Now remember, this guy had never sold any products at all, and we helped him to go from a complete startup into a very successful company. How did we get those video reviews? We brought him to one of our in-person workshops. We encouraged him to sell his products at a deep discount and then to let people give him feedback. Here’s Clay Steers giving him feedback. It

It makes me feel good. Well, I just lit up a chiminea in about a minute using the Grill Gun. I have just recently bought the not a Grill Gun, but a little starter from the store. It’s the only one I could find. The guy said at the True Value, I guess I can probably say that, he said, “It’s best one we got.” It’s dinky and it doesn’t work.

Then we had to help Bob create all these FAQ videos because over time, more and more people began asking the same questions over and over. How do I properly use my Grill Gun? How do I set it up? How do I clean it? How do I store it? We got with Bob, and each week we would record these FAQ videos.

Hi, I am Bob Healey. I’m the inventor of the Grill Gun and the Sous Vide Gun, and I’m going to do a short video here today to show you how to properly connect them to the propane bottles and to have them work correctly.

We had to record these. Now, this is not an event, this was a process. Every week we began creating, we create the FAQ or frequently asked questions videos. This is a process that we took him through over time. Again, we went from a brand new startup where he’d never sold any Grill Guns at all into a ultra successful company. We want to help you do that too.

Let me walk you through how we do that. If you want us to help you, what you want to do is you want to go to thrivetimeshow.com, and we have workshops that we do every two months. As workshops, you can, it’s $250 or you can pay whatever price you want to pay, so $250 or whatever price you want to pay. Since 2005, I’ve been hosting workshops. These two day interactive workshops, we’re going to teach you everything you need to know to start or grow a successful company. Marketing, branding, sales, search engine optimization, web development. Our events, they offer practical, step-by-step business training, hands-on business conferences. They’re two days, they’re interactive. We teach you all the systems.

There’s no upselling and you’re not going to be hardcore sold at the end of the event. We’re not going to push you into buying some magic money program. What we do have available, if people want ongoing consulting, we do offer business consulting. Now, how does that work? Since 2005, I’ve been consulting businesses, and since 2006 I’ve been providing graphic design, search engine optimization, branding, print media, photography, videography, all of the work needed to implement and to grow a successful company. What we do is we charge people $1,700 a month, 1-7-0-0, $1,700 a month on a month to month basis to help them grow their successful company.

What’s awesome about it is that we start it off with a free 13 point assessment to see if it’s a good fit. Then if it is a good fit and we like you, you like us, it’s a good fit, I actually go over the plan with you in the meeting. On that first call, we actually go over the plan so you’ll know exactly what the plan is. Then for someone like Bob, I mean, he’d been working on this idea for years and his accountant kept referring him to me and people in Tulsa kept referring him to me. He kept finding me on shows and he was saying, “All paths lead back to you. Man, you must have like a Midas touch. What is your skillset?” He actually listened to us daily on a talk radio show as well. It’s not that I’m a genius, I just know the proven systems needed to start and grow a successful company.

I’ve been self-employed since I was 16 years old. I know how to start and grow a successful company. That’s what Dr. Robert Zoellner and I have done. Between he and I, there’s one of the state’s largest and most successful optometry clinics, one of the most successful men’s grooming establishments. I’m involved in a dog training brand called Tiptop K9, started by Rachel and Ryan Wimpey. I’m involved in a marketing company. I’m involved in an outdoor living company. We’re involved in an auto auction. I mean, I go on and on listing all the businesses, but I’m telling you right now, you have the capacity and the tenacity needed to achieve massive success. You can become the next super success story. To quote Napoleon Hill, “The time will never be just right. You must act now.” If you want to become the next super success story, you want to become the next Bob Healey, you can do it.

Then now on part two of today’s show, I’m going to play some more audio so you can discover that Bob Healey is in fact a real person and that we did really in fact help him grow his multimillion-dollar company. My name’s Clay Clark, reminding you that you smell terrific.

On today’s show, we find ourselves at the intersection in entrepreneurship as we interview the founder of the Grill Gun product, Mr. Bob Healey. This engineer of over 30 years has invented a product that combines the look of a gun and that shoots fire, so that you can light your charcoal grill within just 60 seconds. Before we talk about Bob and his beautiful, glorious Grill Gun, let’s talk about the products that I’ve almost invented. Let’s talk about the products that you’ve almost invented. Let’s talk about the ideas we’ve all had that we have not acted upon.

Jason, I couldn’t sleep all last night. I had this awesome idea.

Oh no.

Check it out. This idea’s going to change the world. Are you familiar with babies?

I used to be one.

Okay, so babies spend all their time doing what?

Crying, eating, pooping.

Crawling.

Ah.

Sure. They crawl, right?

Yes.

What if we converted their onesie, you know how they wear like one thing?

Oh yeah.

The onesie where it’s like the top and the bottom.

Yeah, it’s like a baby sock.

What if we turned that into a mop? It could be called the baby mop, so your baby’s moping the floor.

They just clean as it go. Oh.

Yes.

That’s probably the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.

What? I thought deeply about that for several minutes. That idea was going to be my path to financial freedom and riches. Okay, fine. You want to rain on my parade? I have another idea. I thought about this last Tuesday. It’s incredible. Men like to do what? They get kind of older. They have some success, they’re looking to relax. They want to-

Get a prostate exam.

18 holes. Well that’s out. They want to go-

Golf.

Right, and guys often have to go to the bathroom, right? When guys go to the bathroom, typically they do what? When they’re going to the bathroom, they’re looking for a magazine.

Right, they read.

They read now, but what if they invested the time they normally spent reading and spent that time perfecting their putting game? Jason, it’s so easy. We could just take the floor around the toilet and turn that into a putting green. No one’s thought of this.

Yeah, because it’s a bad idea.

You could practice putting while pooping.

That is the worst. Please stop.

It’s the poop putt. That’s it. The poop putt.

Well, hey, this idea is special because it is in fact the worst idea that anybody has ever had.

What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. Two men, eight kids co-created by two different women. 13 multimillion-dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. (music)

Yes, yes, yes and yes. Thrive Nation, welcome back to another exciting edition of the Thrive Time Show on your radio and podcast download. Dr. Z, today’s show guest deserves some cowbell.

Oh, and you got four yeses too. I know when you fire off a show with four yeses, you are fired up and ready to go.

Now see, I wanted to allow this listener to be introduced with a kind of subtle hype intro.

Yes. Okay.

I brought my megaphone with me, and so we’ll go ahead and tee it up here. Let me get this ready here. Here we go.

Here we go.

All right, Thrive Nation. On today’s show we have the inventor of the Grill Gun, Mr. Bob Healey. An engineer with over 30 years of experience, he’s the founder of this great new product. Bob, welcome on to the show. How are you? Wow,

Wow. Megaphone.

Oh, I’m just fine, Clay, thank you. Thank you both, Dr. Z and Clay, for having me on today.

Well, tell the listeners out there who are not familiar with the Grill Gun. I think anybody out there, if you’ve ever wanted to be an inventor, it’s a tough road to go down. It’s a tough road, and all the listeners right now, if you’ll go to grillblazer.com, that’s grillblazer.com, you can see this product. You can check it out while he’s talking. You can look at it and marinate on it and see it. Talk to us about this Grill Gun and when did you first get the idea to make the Grill Gun?

Oh well, so the Grill Gun is a high powered torch. It’s designed to be able to conveniently light charcoal, charcoal grill, in just minutes rather than tens of minutes or half an hour at a time. Something like that. It’s really not even a tool or a type of tool that people have been or could be familiar with because it’s entirely new, both in its purpose and in its appearance. What you do with the Grill Gun is you use it to light a charcoal grill and it’s designed to fit in your hand comfortably and use safely while you actually light the charcoal almost instantly, warm up your grill, sterilize the grates, start cooking over your charcoal or your smoker, your wood smoker, offset smoker, in just minutes.

The whole notion of lighting a charcoal grill pretty much instantly is not something that people have done. I know there are a lot of YouTube guys that are out there and people like me who we really like the idea of starting a charcoal real fast and not having to use a lighter fluid or wade around on a charcoal chimney or any of the other things that are done for it. When you light a charcoal with a 400,000 BTU torch, you’re basically setting that charcoal on fire and you’re cooking off all the debris that’s on the grills, and at the same time you’re bringing the whole grill up to temperature. You basically are doing it in just, when I go grilling, I’m cooking in two or three minutes after I start the process. It’s a year round activity.

Bob, you’re feeling like a man. Yeah, you feel like a man. Rambo of the grill.

I mean, come on now. You just feel like a man, it’s a man gun.

Well yeah, it’s pretty amazing watching people, their reaction to it, because it does hit that Y chromosome pretty hard. You’re feeling like a man. You’re out there, it’s 25 degrees, you light the grill. You can run back in the house where it’s warm, but it doesn’t matter. You can grill year round. It doesn’t have to be an outdoor summertime activity, even though that’s how a lot of people like looking at it.

Now my understanding is, okay, so we have a Grill Gun here. This thing can help our listeners light their charcoal grill in 60 seconds and it’s fun. Z, it’s fun.

Oh, it’s fun.

It is fun, but what does it look like, the Grill Gun? I mean, I’ve seen some pretty, I don’t know the technical term for it, but I’ve seen some pretty weak versions of what Bob’s just created. I’ve seen people who’ve tried to create a grill torch, but it’s kind of like-

Try again.

Some of these products have the class and quality of the Chinese finger locks, the paper locks.

Oh, don’t kid yourself. That’s very-

Talk to me about, what does it look like? What does it feel like? Does this feel like a man gun or does it feel like a…

I think one person we interviewed, or actually reviewed it, said he felt like he had seen Prometheus for the first time. Just it was so intense, a feeling of looking at a torch that looks like a pistol, like a 45 or a Glock or something like that. A semi-automatic slide action pistol that has a long bell on it. It’s about 22 inches long in order to get the barrel away from you so that you can use it without burning yourself. It looks like a gun. It feels like a gun. It shoots fire. You hold onto it, it fits nicely in your hand, it’s well-balanced, and you use it to really just basically flood the grill with the heat that you need in order to bring it up to the temperature you want to cook in just under a minute.

Now see, I want to get into the businessy kind of thing, because this is a business show.

It technically is a business show.

It’s business school without the BS.

Come on, now.

Bob, you made the product. See, that’s step one. You got to have your product.

That helps.

Step one, you have the product, it’s a product idea. Step one. Step two, nobody, Z, I’m talking about almost nobody ever goes to step two, and that is make a prototype.

Oh, prototype.

He has the prototype. He’s got the idea. He’s got the prototype.

Yes.

Step three, we got to try to sell something.

You got to sell it, baby.

Sell something, sell something.

For more than you make it. That’s the key.

I want to ask you this, talk to us about if someone wants to buy this thing, can they buy it? What’s been your road like of seeing if someone wants to buy it? Because I know you did a demo at the Thrive Time Show conference for our attendees.

Oh yeah.

I think about one third of the people in attendance, I could be wrong, but I think about a third of the people in attendance said, “I definitely want to buy one of these right now.” How can the listeners get ahold of this? How can they buy one? Tell us about selling something.

Okay, so the process of putting this out on the market is, when you’re trying to bootstrap something up from the bottom without having venture capital or something like that step in and say, “Here, you need this money, let’s go for it.” You actually have to determine whether or not people want what you have, what they’re willing to pay for what you’ve got, and then how are you going to get it made. I had to figure out, first off, there’s torches. You can get a torch today if you go down to the hardware store. You can buy one, it’s long and it’s got a long hose and it goes to a 20 pound tank and you can look like the dork like I have done for the last 10 years, standing back and flaming up my charcoal grill. If you want to do that, knock yourself out, go ahead and do it.

Like I said, I’ve been doing that for a long time and I decided to make something that really did the job right. It’s the same sort of technology in that you’re putting high intense fire on a grill, but how do you make that into something that people want and how do you get it in front of them? If your listeners have gone to grillblazer.com, they’re already taking a look at this. They can see what it looks like, but they can’t hold it in their hand.

Why?

The reason they can’t hold it in their hand is because it’s on a computer screen and they need to order one in order to get one. In order to do that, that’s the hardest part about launching this endeavor is where are you going to come up with the capital to make it happen? I decided to go the crowdfunding route. What I’m asking people to do is to go to the website and entertain themselves, figure out if this is for them and if it’s not, move along. If it is for them, then take it on good faith that what I’m doing in crowdfunding is I’m using that tool, that whole platform. There are a couple of them out there. I’m looking right now pretty hard at Kickstarter. You use that platform to allow people to come out and say, “I want one, I’ll back you, and when you make them, you send them to me.”

The process is pretty straightforward. You basically are pre-selling them. You say, “I’m going to make them. If I hit the minimum threshold that I need to have in order to be able to have the finances to make it work, then I can build them.” That’s really my business. I’ve done this all my life. I’ve made things. The easy part is for me, it’s my wheelhouse to create a product and figure out how to build it and how to make it a high quality product. The new part, my new venture really is being out on the sales edge and on the financing edge. How are you going to fund it? How are you going to turn it into a business that everybody wants to get behind?

In order for them to get their hands on one right now, they really can’t. I’ve got a dozen of them that I’ve made that are prototypes. I’ve sent them out, people have used them. They kind of rotate around in a pool of Grill Guns that can be used for the purpose of promotion. It’s a four to six month process to actually get them in your hands. If I were to, for instance, today with this podcast with your audience, if enough people actually went out there and said, “I want to do this, I want one of those things.” They simply said it in my little get yours now page on the website, if they were to say, “I want to support this, I want to do this.” Then before Christmas, even before Thanksgiving, they could be in production and in your hands. That’s the beauty of crowdfunding. The direction that I’m taking it here is that I can launch it, I can have it in people’s hands and we can be going down the road.

Bob, for the listeners out there who maybe are pondering, they’re going, is this guy delusional? Is this guy [inaudible 00:56:54]? You are a man with an engineering background. How many years have you been an engineer?

Right. Let’s see, I’m going to give away my age here, but it’s been almost 40 years.

How many of these people do you need out there right now to say I want to buy one before we can get this thing in the hands of America?

Well, the way crowdfunding works is you actually set your deadline, your minimum that you absolutely have to have. I absolutely have to have 1400 people, that’s 1-4-0-0, say, “I want to have one.” I’m a tent of the way there after having just a few weeks of just doing advertisement on Google and Facebook. The whole Kickstarter community is bigger than that, and so it seems like a real doable number. If people were to actually just believe that it will happen, if they like it well enough and they say, “Yeah, I’ll support you.” Then what’ll happen is when I see that I actually have people up over that number, then I’m going to just email everybody. You’d want to put in your email and your text number and then I’ll just do a broadcast to everybody.

… I’ll put in your email and your text number and then I’ll just do a broadcast. Everybody say the Kickstarter website’s up, it’s live, go fund it, and soon as I see it, that actually is happening, it’s funded, then I can actually start the manufacturing process going.

Bob, what made you come up with the grill gun? What were you thinking? Did you fall and hit your head?

On the toilet seat.

Yeah. Did you have a bad accident as a kid from a burn? Did something-

Ice cream. This yogurt is curdled.

That’s crust.

I feel sick.

[inaudible 00:58:34]

Oh God, I just drew with my vomit, it’s the Grill Blazer.

How does that happen? Did you have a dream? And this mythical grill gun came to you in the dream and said, make me? What happened?

All of the above.

I was outside talking to the horse. This is what he said to do.

Like I’ve been saying I’ve been doing this for a long time and putting up with buying torches that… A weed torch, a torch that puts out that kind of heat, 400,000 VTU is, it’s going to burn up fairly quickly. And so I’ve gone through several of them over the last decade and I thought, nobody does this. And people come over and they watch me grill. I grill every single week or smoke something. And so lots of friends and stuff are used to coming over and they hear the roar of the jet engine as I like to grill and start hooking things in just a minute or two. And they think it’s really funny and really cool, but they don’t see themselves with this giant long torch, hosing down a grill. So it was a year ago in December 2018 that I was out there grilling and I thought, if I’m either going to put up with this nonsense for the rest of my life or I’m going to do something about it.

So I just said I didn’t know what a grill gun was. I hadn’t ever seen one before. I thought, well, something is better than this and what is it going to be? And so I went to some friends and my family, got sons-in-law and sons that are opinionated and I liked the opinions. And so I basically started asking them questions and informed a list of what we need to have. And then I got busy modeling it. So that was December and it’s probably in February everybody said, oh, you’re on to something here. And then by May I had it, I mean a year ago, May, so not quite a year ago, I actually had prototypes in my hand. And I didn’t started going down the other channels of, okay, how do I build this? How do I get this cost-effective so that I can make it and people can buy it for a reasonable price?

And utmost important was the quality of it. So I’ve designed this to where I’m going to be proud to use every single grill gun that I have for years, not for once or twice or for half a season before it burns up. So it was just a process of saying, I don’t know what it is that’s going to make my life better, but I know when I see it I’m going to like it. And so again, if you’re on the website and you or your listeners have listened to and gone to the website, they know what I’m talking about here. It’s pretty appealing design and it’s really durable, really well-designed.

So Bob, you’re basically a big pyro. I mean that’s really what it boils down to.

Oh yeah.

I mean, you’re a big pyro.

Well, I’m not as much a pyro as the people that want it. I mean, I’ve heard a lot of people say, this is all kinds of stories about how I’ve been a pyro my whole life and that sort of thing. Not me. But I can appreciate that there are people that fire a whole lot.

Now let’s talk about this grill gun. See, let’s get into the rough questions now, the rough ones.

The tough ones.

All right.

Will this blow up? If I turn it on, boom. What are the chances I turned it on…? What are the chances I incinerate myself?

Well, pretty small. I mean, you’d have to be deliberate wanting to do that, because what you’re working with is propane gas and propane gas is explosive. So you could do things that I warn you not to do. You could turn on the grill gun inside the house and just let it run like that for a while and then say, okay, I think I got enough propane in the air and then light it. I wouldn’t advise that.

That’s not a best practice move.

That’s not a top three thing to do.

Not a top three.

No. And so the real problem in trying to design and sell something like this where you’re handling that much heat, I’m dealing with the same sort of thing that every torch manufacturer out there has. You’ve got to build something that’s safe and then you have to warn people about how to use it, because the nuts and bolts of it is you have a propane source, a small one pound can, or you can tie it into a 20 pound bottle and you’ve got to screw that onto the bottom of the grill gun. And now you’ve pressurized the grill gun and that affords the opportunity for the gas to come out the bell. And so when the gas comes out the bell, you want to light it when it comes out so that you’re not just expelling propane in the air, which is explosive, because if you burn it while it’s coming out the bell, you don’t have any danger.

And there’s nothing about the gun itself or the design of the self where it’s going to pocket enough propane to explode on its own. It couldn’t do that. But what it could do is you could vent it into an environment where the gas is itself explosive. But this is not new. The grill’s gun itself is some really innovative new technology, but the notion of taking gas out of a gas container, propane gas out of a bottle and lighting it on fire is tried and true for decades. So I’m not doing anything there that’s in any way dangerous that would create a problem for anybody to operate on.

What have been, and see, I’m now going to ask Bob the really tough questions.

Are you going deep?

As you’re building the grill gun, which you could learn more about at thegrillblazer.com. It’s grillblazer.com, see that’s grillblazer.com. And for all the listeners out there who are going onto the website right now, they’re looking at it. What’s been the toughest part of trying to take your idea that you are, and I mean this in a nice way, you are passionate in a way about this product that doesn’t make sense to most people. See, most people like to grill.

Oh yeah.

And most people want to light the grill in 60 seconds, but most people aren’t willing to invest this kind of money and time into coming up with a solution. Bob, as you’ve been trying to provide the world’s best grilling tool possible, what has been the most challenging part of doing this?

Really everything except for designing it and setting up the manufacturing. I mean, it’s hard to actually pin that down to one thing, but getting in front of people who can help influence or charcoal influencers and getting them to pay attention and helping me promote this notion, it’s basically you can have the best tool of anything, whatever you want. And if nobody knows about it, you’re just sitting there holding them. I could make 5,000 grill guns and put them out in my garage and then next year I still have 5,000 grill guns out there. So it really is trying to get an audience that wants to buy them. And so it wouldn’t make any sense for me to just get excited, 1,400 people excited to buy one and then launch my Kickstarter campaign. And then crickets. Nobody wants any. So it’s the whole aspect of marketing and sales. That’s the hard part, because everything else is pretty straightforward.

Zee, you’ve told me for years, I’m one of the best tools that the world has not heard of yet.

I have and I promise you, Bob, if you put 5,000 those in your garage, you’re going to end up with 4,999. Because I’m going to come over and see my point of him. So there you have it.

Zee, what tough question do you have for Bob about the process? Because there’s so many listeners out there who want to be an inventor. They want to launch a product. He’s done step one. He had the idea. Step two though, he made the prototype. Step three, he’s got to try to sell it. As he’s in that pre-selling phase and it’s a weird deal, because you got to sell enough to get the money needed to produce a lot. Zee, what rude question do you have for Bob? What strong advice did you have for Bob? What do you got there?

How much money do you need right now?

I need $100,000 and if you want to write me a check Zee, I will drive into town.

What are you willing to give up for a 100,000 dollars? I mean a like a kidney?

Well, obviously I’m willing to give up whatever it would take in the form of a loan and I would also be willing to negotiate on a piece of the equity of the company for whatever the investor thinks that it’s worth.

Well, there’s-

So that’s always a negotiation point.

Yeah, there’s a 100,000, tens of thousands of people that be listening to this podcast, IE radio show, and somewhere someone’s going to get on there and look at grillblazer.com, which I have been looking at now for the entirety of the podcast, looking at it and remembering my experience with-

It’s a cool product.

It’s a cool product.

That’s cool.

And I’m sitting out there thinking there’s probably somebody out there that does this. They’ve got their money in a savings account, drawing nothing. Maybe they’ve got a few thousands in the stock market.

And they’re willing to put a 100,000 on 10 different businesses and hopefully one hits.

And hopefully one hits. And they go to themselves, they go to their website and they go, okay.

How much, what do I get for a 100,000?

So how does somebody contact you? What’s the best way to contact you? Somebody’s listening out there, going, you know what? I may want to, it depends on the equity piece you give up. It depends on a lot of things, but still that’s negotiable. We don’t want to go into that right now in the air, but how does somebody contact you and start that process?

Well, the most directly that’ll get to me is [email protected]. And if you don’t know anything about the internet and you don’t have email and you do have a rotary dial phone, then you could dial (918) 960-9690.

What’s that number again?

(918) 960-9690. I think I might have said that wrong the first time.

No. You said it right.

(918) 960-9690.

Yeah, it’s on your website.

Yeah, Bob, as we wrap up today’s show, what final question do you have for Dr. Zelner? Dr. Zelner is a, Zee, you’re a guy that people shark tank you all the time. They’re always wanting to pick your brain for business tips. Zee, is it okay if he asks you any question?

Absolutely.

Okay. Bob, what question do you have for Dr. Zee as we wrap up today’s show?

So do you, Dr. Zee, have an impression just having seen the grill gun and you’ve seen people’s reaction to it? Do you think that this is something that is a thing that is going to go?

Okay, first of all, I do have an impression, I do. I do Forest Gump fairly well. “That’s my boat, Jenny.”

“Jenny.”

“Jenny, I was just running.”

“Just running.”

“We were like peas and carrots.” So I got a couple of impressions that I do number one on sidebar, you probably don’t want to hear all of them today.

That was a good one, though.

Thank you.

Can I do this? As you’re formulating your answer, I’m just going to cue up a little motivational quote that you once, this is a voicemail and I think it came from you to me.

Oh, it did.

And this was then during that phase of our career in life where you called me Happy, that was my nickname was Happy. I’m just going to cue it up.

Okay, good.

And I’ll cue it up as you formulate your answer. That way your feedback you give Bob will not either be super euphorically awesome or soul crushing. We don’t want that Simon Cal moment to happen without a lot of premeditated thoughts. So here we go.

I got two thoughts on that.

You got to rise above it.

You can write on it.

Energy. Block out the bad. Harness energy. Block bad. Feel the flow, Happy. Feel it. It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse, it goes up and down and around, circular, circle with the music, the flow, all good things.

All good things.

Okay. All right.

Two things, Bob, to answer to answer your serious question. That is, yes, I think it’s pretty cool. And I do think there’s a market for it. I don’t know how many times people look at me and say, there’s nothing to buy. What do you buy the man who has everything? A grill gun?

Agreed.

Number two, I would do my best effort to approach Hasty Bake, to approach Oklahoma Joe’s, to approach some barbecue places that barbecue, IE is grilling by almost definition, right? Anymore. I would maybe do a co-sponsorship, maybe it’s the-

But what if they steal my idea?

Well then that’s just what you have them sign an NDA before you approach them and then you talk to them about co-marketing, co-branding this.

But what if they say no?

Then you go to the next one, you knock on another door.

Who do I call?

Ghostbusters? No, I’m sorry. You start off, you make a list, you make your top 100.

Got it.

You make a top 10.

Got it.

Top 12. Top 50.

Got it.

Okay? People that might be interested in co-managing this with you. Now you’re going to have to give up some of the juice.

Some of the sauce.

You already said, hey, for a 100,000, I’m going to give up some equity position anyway. So maybe you go to somebody who themselves are in the grilling business.

How much would you be willing to give up? You see, if you were in Bob’s shoes, let’s say, and you get a deal, Hasty Bake says yeah, we love it. Let’s do it. How much equity would you be prepared to give up on a product that would be stillborn essentially without funding? How much would you, Zee, advise a young man to say, hey, I’m willing to give up? You should be prepared to give up to this much of your company for that funding.

Well, it depends on the amount and it depends on what I feel like I’ve already put into it personally. I don’t know how much money you’ve put into this already, but you have put some money in. You have put some time in. I would be able to document that and I’d be able to get that a reasonable-

Here we go.

A reasonable amount of money for that. Okay? How much is the invention worth? Reasonable. How much time have you put in reasonable? And how much physical money have you put into it? These are all reasonable numbers that a businessman would want to see. And so then if a 100,000 is a third of that, then I would say it’s giving up a third of the equity. I mean money is money, cash talks.

So you’re saying if Bob put in a 100,000 of his own money and Hasty Bake says, hey, we’re going to put a 100,000 in, you said you might be willing to give up 49%.

Correct. I mean at the most you want to negotiate.

But I mean at the most.

At the most, you’ve got to be ready for that, because-

You got to be ready for it.

Right. It’s kind of like, well, okay, you got a 100,000 in. If I’m putting a 100,000 in, why are we not more equal? Why are you only going to give up two percent of the company? Don’t be stupid like that. You watch Shark Tank at all, those guys come on there with these ridiculous asks.

So Bob, does that feedback help you? And do you have any final closing question?

Just drill into that question a little bit deeper. It really wasn’t so much how much to give up as you see Dr. Zee, you see a lot of stuff. People try and shark tank you all the time and I’m just curious if I were, not that I’m going to do this, but I just mean on the quality of the kind of product that comes across your desk. Is this the kind of thing that you see that has legs or is this the kind of thing that you say next, let’s go do something else?

I think it has legs. I think it’s kind of fun. It’s kind of a fun novelty, but yet useful gift.

It’s a gun.

And really, your final price point on it is going to be roughly what? What are you thinking?

Oh, well just for easy talking purposes, a 100 bucks. But that includes shipping.

See I think 150, I think 150. I think a guy would pay 150. This is a completely unnecessary item.

Well that’s the fun of it. I think though you keep it 99.99.

Really? 99.99?

Yeah.

What if it was in the shape of an Uzi or an AR? I mean, for an AR themed one.

It looks pretty cool. Looks like James Bond would go and take over the country with this.

But I mean if they had an AR version, I mean, would you spin up to 150?

You might have different, you could have a rifle. You could have a little 22 version. Little bitty flamed for your cigar lighter, you want to light your cigar. The Grill Blazer, the grill gun could be, you can have different variations. Down the road you could have the, I’m serious, I’m going to pump up the fire.

Or you could have a product that’s always fun. You give the gift and it’s the Grill Blazer line of landmines.

Yeah, that’s sounds so fun too.

So it just randomly starts.

You just blow it up.

I buried that in your yard and at some point it will emit flames.

And for a 100 dollars, I’ll tell you where it is. If not, good luck.

I don’t need you on my marketing team, Clay.

No, you do. You do my friend. It’s so good.

Great tagline. It can grill charcoal in 60 seconds and squirrels in 30.

Have landmines in the yard.

Take back control of your yard for a 100 dollars.

Grill a squirrel or charcoal in 60 seconds.

Yes, I do think it has legs. And like I said, it’s a fun gift, because it works. It’s clean, it looks good. It’s well-built. I fired the trigger myself. And I think, like I said before, it kind of gets into that, like those catalogs you flip through on the airplane that has all these gifts for dudes?

Oh, it should be on that.

Yeah.

A finger hook catalog.

Oh, yeah.

Get myself a recliner with a back scratcher.

Oh yeah.

And then get myself a Grill Blazer.

Grill gun.

Get myself a whole collection of Chinese finger locks.

And then I’m set.

That’s all I need.

For the guy who has everything, now you have your grill gun.

The grill gun.

Yeah.

You can grill a squirrel or charcoal in under 60 seconds.

Guaranteed. Endorsed by [inaudible 01:16:49]. That’s right.

Okay, Bob. I appreciate you.

And Chuck Norris.

Bob, it’s grillblazer.com. Our listeners out there, I know they’re going to go check it out, grillblazer.com, check it out. Zee, you could be one of the first 1,400 people in America to buy this beautiful item. You’d be real-

The Grill Gun endorsed by Chuck Norris. I think that’s the tagline.

By the way, if Chuck did endorse this, wouldn’t it be over for him? If you got a celebrity endorsement from Chuck Norris?

That’s one of the moves.

That’s a move.

That’s a move.

That’d be a great move.

Oh, Bob, I appreciate you so much and Zee and I are going to go pontificate about the NFL upcoming draft. We’re going to be talking about all things NBA. We got a lot to cover here, Zee. So thank you so much, Bob. Have a great day. Jason, have you sincerely ever had an idea to invent something?

Yeah, but they’ve always been bad. They don’t really like service a need.

Okay. This is just more of something that you’ve had an idea, thought about it for maybe half a day, then you move on?

Yeah.

Okay. Well, if you’re out there and you sincerely have an idea or an invention that you want to refine and you want to get launched and turned into something that could make money, that could become a business, I would highly recommend that you start by thinking of problems that real people have and look for a better way to solve that problem, or a way to solve the problem that people really have.

That’s why I think that the grill gun will do well, because men like to grill and they sincerely want to use charcoal, because it typically tastes better. But now you can use the grill gun to delight your charcoal grill in just 60 seconds.

And I’ve used it and it saved me so much time. I don’t have to taste lighter fluid. It’s awesome.

And it’s a lot of fun.

Oh, it’s so much fun.

It’s a like a gun shaped torch. It combines grilling. You got the fire, you got the gun, the hold. It’s a fantastic gift. I encourage you to check out the website today, again in case you missed it earlier, it’s called grillblazer.com. And if you’re interested in learning how to become the best inventor you can possibly be, I would recommend that everybody goes out and purchases a copy of the book called Secrets From an Inventor’s Notebook by Maurice Kanbar, the creator of Skyy Vodka. And a guy that is the holder of an incredible number of patents. The modern needle protector, that’s Maurice Kanbar’s invention.

Oh wow.

The Skyy Vodka. That’s his invention.

It’s huge.

You have the modern traffic lights. A lot of people don’t realize this, but the modern traffic lights, a lot of them are using Maurice Kanbar’s patented invention that makes a strobe light, that strobes so fast that the average person doesn’t see it strobing. But it dramatically reduces the amount of electricity being used, because it’s not on the whole time. It’s strobing.

Interesting.

This guy’s got a ton of inventions and he wrote how he did it, how to do it, how to invent things, the process. It’s not a random thing he’s doing here. It’s a proven process he’s done time and time again. And you can get that book today, it’s called Secrets From an Inventor’s Notebook by Maurice Kanbar, the creator of Skyy Vodka. And it’s an incredible book. Everybody out there should own if you’re looking to become an inventor. And we like to end each and every show with a boom. And so now without any further ado, three, two, one. Boom.

Want to attend the legendary Thrive Time Show business workshop for free? Subscribe on iTunes, leave an objective review and send us confirmation at [email protected] to claim your tickets. Want to live in a van down by the river? Come by and see us at our River Walk offices and we’ll be able to make your dreams come true.

All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio in podcast download. And we’re answering the question that was emailed to us from a Thriver who writes, “What is the best practice for raising capital for a developer?” And this was sent to us from a Thriver in the Dallas, Texas area. So I’m going to go through the steps for raising capital for a developer, but there’s a lot of them. So I need you to be prepared to take a lot of notes. And please understand that all of this will be on today’s show notes, which is available at thrivetimesshow.com. And if you click on the podcast button. Step one, you got to prepare for the rude interview. So if you’re going to ask somebody to invest in you, either be prepared for them to ask you, what is your credit score? What’s your net worth?

Let me look at your personal certified financial statement and what is your collateral? And if you’re not prepared to answer those questions, then you really shouldn’t do anything else. Marshall.

Boom.

You see this all the time.

Yeah.

People that want to start a business, and I love the people that want to start businesses that are involving a daily service. This is one of my favorites. They want to start a business that involves daily something. Like we have a daily radio show, or you might want to do a daily blog or a daily publication or a daily, I don’t know, daily online education platform for multi-levels. A daily something. And when you want to do something daily, Marshall, you have to do it?

Daily.

Right.

My gosh.

And consistency reveals integrity and lack of consistency reveals a lack of integrity. And so you’ll have people that’ll say, I got this million dollar app, baby. I just need you guys to fund the app, because this is going to be huge. And if you ask them, okay, well, before I look at the app, I want to look at your credit score, your net worth, your personal certified financial statement, and your collateral, they usually run for the hills. And Marshall, why is that.

Here’s the big thing, is what is your collateral? Okay? What are you willing to put up as a guarantee for getting the money? Now, if you’re unwilling to bet whatever it is, whether it’s a home, whether it’s assets in the business, if you’re unwilling to do that, then you’re not committed to this whole business idea.

So as an example, with Thrive, every time I put in a dollar, Dr. Zee matches the dollars. What’s really cool is we don’t have to put dollars in anymore.

But we, for like three years in a row, we put in hundreds of thousands of dollars every week, putting in 2,000, 5,000, 4,000 every week, because we wanted to build the world’s best online mentorship experience. We had to shoot thousands of videos, we had to make tons of podcasts. We’ve had to do a lot of work. And the thing is that both of us were willing to do it. And every time I talk to investors, they’d say, well, how much money have you put in? I’d say, up to this point, 280,000 or whatever the number is. And they’d go, okay, cool. And they just want to see that. But if you’re not willing to show your credit score, what your net worth is, letting people look at your personal financial statement and what’s your collateral, everything else won’t work.

You got to be all in, right?

All in.

I’ve got a client right now who, she’s sold her house.

Yes.

She sold her house to start her business 18 months ago, and she’s rocking and rolling, but guess what? She’s living with her mom right now.

And I applaud. I applaud that person and anybody out there doing that. Now, step two is you want to prepare the perfect pitch deck. It’s the perfect slide show. A pitch deck is what they would call in the world of venture capital, it’s called a pitch deck, but you’d call it in the rest of the world, a business plan or a PowerPoint slideshow. But there’s an actual format that you want to follow. And Naval Ravikant, the founder of AngelList, has listed the perfect business plan or pitch deck, and I have put an outline of it. You can find on page 55 of the book called Pitching Hacks, and this is all available for you right here for free on the thrivetimesshow.com podcast note.

You can find it. So I’m going through a lot, but it’s all available for you right there. All right, so these are the steps. These are the things you need to have. Page number one needs to include your logo, your tagline, and your complete information. Now, if you don’t have a logo, a tagline, or your complete information, then that’s the point. They don’t want to see your presentation. Now the summary, you got to summarize the key compelling facts of the company and make sure you cover all the topics that are in your elevator pitch. People that don’t have a summary of their business with compelling facts, yet again, you shouldn’t pitch and you’re going to be rejected. Then Marshall, you have to have a highlight of your team. Page three, the team and their past accomplishments of the team, because it’s likely that if someone’s been successful in the past, that they’ll do it again. Marshall, why do you have to have the team on your pitch deck?

You got to do this, because they’re looking for other people that have vetted and decided to come on board with you before they choose to. And so it’s social proof for your business idea.

In the problem, you’ve got to describe step number four, page number four, you’ve got to describe the customer, the market, the problems that you address without getting into your product. Just emphasize the pain and the inability of the competitors to satisfy the need. It is absolutely important that you do that. Move number five, page five, introduce your product and its benefits and describe how it addresses the problem that you’ve just described. It goes on to say, God help you if you have nothing to show here. You want to show a screen cast or a demo, you got to do that. Now step number six, page number six of the perfect pitch deck, the perfect business plan. You’ve got to describe the technology for your solution. Focus on how the technology enables the differentiated aspects of your solution. Page seven, marketing. Who are your customers? How big is the market? You’ve got to summarize all this and elaborate the details. How are you going to-

You got to summarize all this and elaborate the details. How are you going to acquire customers? Step eight, sales. What’s your business model? If you have sales, discuss how many sales you have in your pipeline, how many sales you’re going to have. You got to break that down.

Move number nine, you got to describe your competition. Who’s out there competing for the same dollars that you’re competing with? And if you’re saying to yourself, we don’t have any competition. Our biggest competition is ourselves. Then you’ve been watching too many Tai Lopez videos because you have to know who your competition is. It disturbs an investor. By the way, what kind of person is an investor? Somebody with money to invest. Turns out you can’t get rich quick. So somebody who’s built their fortune isn’t a jackass.

Move number 10, you have to declare the milestones. Describe your current status and your prospective milestones for the next one to three quarters. Then you have to have a conclusion on page 11. And on page 12, Marshall, you have to write about your financing, the dates, the amounts, and the sources of the money raised. How much money have you raised so far? It’s so important that you put that all on the pitch deck. All the notes are available for you if you go to thrivetimeshow.com and you click on the Podcasts button you can find the notes. But Marshall, why do you have to believe that level of detailed if you’re going to raise money?

You got to have this level of detail because it requires you to think through the entirety of the business. What is the actual business? What is the problem that it is solving? And then what is the ask? At the end, you got to put the financing. What is it that you’re asking for investors?

I have never written a business plan that took me less than 40 hours to write.

So it’s going to take some time.

40, at least. Because you have to write it, then edit it, then write it, then tweak it, then fact check it, then cite it, then assume you’re wrong, run it by somebody, have an editor look at it. It has to be right or you will be rejected. And my friends at the Thrive Nation, that is how you raise capital for your business.

Want to attend the legendary Thrive Time Show business workshop for free? Subscribe on iTunes, leave an objective review and send us confirmation at [email protected] to claim your tickets. Want to live in a van down by the river? Come by and see us at our river walk offices and we’ll be able to make your dreams come true.

All right, Thrive Nation. Welcome to another exciting exclusive podcast edition of the Thrive Time Show. See, the podcast edition, it’s a little bit wild because we don’t have the encumberments, we don’t have the restraints. We don’t have to stick within the guardrails of the radio.

The man can’t hold us down, man.

Well, we have a lot of great sponsors on the radio show. And so sometimes we might refrain from saying certain things.

Sometimes.

We don’t have to stick within the boundaries of certain time limits.

Federal regulations on airways.

Right. So we can say pretty much whatever we need to say. So this segment can be very short, very long, very crazy, very sane. We don’t know what could happen.

We just don’t know.

Clay, he just wants to curse. I can see it in your eyes, you just want to say curse words.

No. Pastor Brian Gibson over there at River City Church has been working with me through-

You doing better?

It’s more of a shame approach.

Electric shock.

No, but I’d prefer not to curse on the podcast, unless we have to.

Okay, right. Making a point.

Right. So-

Okay.

Now, Mr. Charles Colaw, you have three multi-million dollar gyms and you have no plans on stopping. You’re going to be opening up more, potentially franchising or opening up more corporate owned stores. For the listeners out there, just to give you a little context into the life of Charles Colaw, he and his wife Amber, started a fitness company called Colaw Fitness. Out of a home worth 115,000 people in the thriving metropolis of Bartlesville, Oklahoma. You worked out of that home, stayed in that home, lived in that home for over 15 years, if I’m correct.

Yeah, I think it’s 14 years.

14 years. And so here you are, you’ve had a lot of success. I think you’re just at the beginning of your success. You’re not even near the plateauing, you’re just at the beginning. Look up Charles Colaw, look up Colaw Fitness, you can see the physical locations. I mean, these are multimillion dollar facilities. And yet, you still have the curiosity to want to grow your business. And so here you are, you get a chance to ask the man, the myth, Dr. Z, my mentor, any business question possible. I’m excited, see, it’s a double blind study.

This is awesome.

I’m a little nervous. I’m a little nervous.

I’m kind of sweating a little bit.

Here we go. Charles, what do you got?

Well, first off, I was going to say, thank you for this opportunity to talk to Dr. Z here.

250 pounds.

The Z master.

Wait, I’m anticipating your question. What I can bench press. I can’t press 250.

Right.

Well I was going to say-

I’m anticipating lying to your question.

Yes. Well first off I was going to say is for you, I think a lot of Thrivers out there want to know what, as far as in financing to get them to start a business, what kind of recommendations or moves do you know of or you would recommend for certain people that want to get started? Like for me, because I know it’s such a grind to get started. What’s kind of your take on helping businesses that want to start up? Or somebody who’s currently in a business wants to grow their business to get financing?

So, the question you’re asking, just so I get this.

It’s the money question.

The money question. Are you asking what’s Z’s take on funding businesses?

Yes.

Or his advice to somebody out there who wants to get funding?

Yeah, basically somebody who’s needing funding to probably start a business. I think most of these people are starting, a lot of these people are in Thrive.

What I’m going to do is I’m going to go first-

Okay.

So he can one up me and show … I’m going to go first because I want him to one up me on this because this is something I want to make sure we’re getting this. If you’re listening out there and you don’t have the money needed to start a business, please listen to the background of Dr. Z before he gives you his answer. So this is the background. He went to NSU, Northeastern State, right? Northeastern Oklahoma State University.

Northeastern State University, yes.

Okay, NSU. And there you study mathematics and optometry.

Correct.

You did not come from a wealthy home. You had a lot of kids and a little money.

Correct.

Very little money, a lot of kids in the family. And you had a vision to start your own business someday.

Correct.

And you went to work for iMart and rose up in the company to become the president of the company. And you ended up getting fired, the only job you’ve been fired from, right?

Correct.

And then you got rejected by every single bank you went to in Tulsa, when you’re trying to get the financing.

You’re a touch backwards on it, but that is accurate. But it’s before that. Anyway, go ahead.

I guess in the timeline of your career, you’ve been rejected by all the banks.

That was before I went to iMart.

And you got fired from a job where you were the president of something.

Correct.

And then you worked seven days a week to turn your dream into reality.

Correct.

So if he gives you some advice here, and it might sound harsh, I’m just telling you, my man has worked seven days a week for years in a row to build … he’s the master of delayed gratification. So see, what advice would you have for the entrepreneur who says, “I’m trying to get funding.” What advice would you have?

Step one, you’ve got to make sure you have a war chest. And how do you get a war chest? You live below your means. You get a thing called a job.

Job that sounds offensive.

You make some money, you might even get two jobs. You say, “Hey listen, I’m not doing anything on the weekends. I’ll do a third job.”

Are you talking about two jobs? What about life balance though?

Yeah, you’ll have time for that later. Okay. You got to get a war chest. Because if you go to a financial institution, the best place to get money is the bank. You can get the cheapest you can get there. You go to a venture capitalist, if you’ve got a great idea, they’re going to want a little bit more than the bank’s going to want. SBA loans, they can walk you through that. But you’re going to have to have part of the money upfront.

Yes, I have a question real quick. Yeah, when you were saying getting two jobs, I was thinking about just the whole life balance with thing. Because I think a lot of times I often work like 40 hours a week and I’m just thinking my idea’s just incredible. And I just wanted to see, do you always have to work multiple jobs? I mean, you have to save money. I mean, does that have to happen?

Yes. I would challenge you, the average American US citizen is watching five hours of TV a day. Take that five hours, go get a job. How much can you make in a year with those five hours working?

Yeah, that’s how I stay relevant is by watching the TV. I do a lot of that. I really know a lot about Ricki Lake, she’s got some really nice topics.

The reason why the average American only has $400 in the bank in savings is because they’re living above their means.

That is more that I have currently, I just want to say that.

But you’re very relevant.

They’ve got 10 bills and they can only afford nine of them as it is right now. And they’re out buying more stuff.

But you hear that a lot. People say, “I can’t work two jobs right now. I’ve got kids, I’m in college, I’ve got a lot of going on. I mean, my idea’s so awesome.”

No, you have to, I remember back in college, the only job that I could work into my schedule was I was the overnight dishwasher at a truck stop.

That.

I went at 10 o’clock at night and got up at six o’clock in the morning on the weekends. I was the weekend-

Attention customers here, we’ve got shower number three open, shower number three open and-

Sorry, Clay, Zoners in there washing dishes right now.

Pump number two on, we’ve got pizza ready for you.

And I planted where I was grown and I did a great job. And I remember the owner, he was always paying me in cash. He was always tad bit shady.

Were you in one of those-

And he would always come up … he would always kind of feel bad when he paid me, he goes, “I have no idea what you’re doing working here, son. But you’re the best dang dishwasher we’ve ever had.”

Were you one of those shady truck stops where it offers certain products in the bathrooms? I mean, were you at that kind of a truck stop? Was it like a truck stop where-

It can’t be a truck stop if you don’t offer certain products in the bathroom, are you kidding me?

Like a foot massage?

I’m just saying, there’s certain ones at vending machines that offers certain-

Yes, yes. Of course.

That kind of class

I guess, yeah. It was a classy place, of course you’re going to.

You didn’t serve pizza in a buffet style?

I mean, as an entrepreneur, that’s how an entrepreneur thinks. Where does the guy need in the bathroom? I’ll separate a little vending thing and they put money in, I’ll sell it to him, okay?

So your step one is you would say, you just got to get-

Get a job. You’ve got to get some money in the bank. If you go to a banker and you’re trying to do a concept and they say, “Well, how much skin can you put in the game?” You go, “Well, I don’t have any. Because quite frankly, this is such a great idea. I mean, don’t you see the value in funding this?” They’re going to look at you and go, “Yeah, yeah, not so much. Bye bye.”

So you’ve got to get a war chest. And the way you do that is working and living below your means and just automatically saving money. And then number two, the best place to get money and like I said, is an SBA loan through a bank. The government then does a 90% guarantee to the bank. The banks love them. And some banks are a little bit more business friendly than others.

Let me just make sure we’re getting this, Thrive Nation. If you’re listening right now and you want to get an SBA loan, here are some of the technical things, the big five, you have to have ready to go, pitch that deal to a bank.

Pitch it.

One, you have to have a credit score that is respectable. So I’m going to just tell you, you have to have like a 725 or above or don’t go in that door.

Don’t go in there.

Don’t go in there with a 500 score, they’re going to reject you and your business and you’re going to feel-

And they’re going to laugh at you on the way out.

Barnes, this is hilarious. Did you see this jackass coming in here today with a 400 credit score?

487.

That’s hilarious. So anyway, they use those business plans as toilet paper, that’s what they’re doing. So just go in there with at least a 720 or so. The next thing, have some collateral because the banker’s going to say, “And what do you plan on putting up for collateral? Your house? Your car? Your car, your house?” And you’d say, “I don’t want to want to risk anything.” No, you’ve got to have some collateral.

Skin in the game.

Burn the ships.

I see so many entrepreneurs that say, though, “I’m not willing to risk up my-” I mean, Charles, you just built a massive facility. You’ve built massive gyms. I mean, multimillion dollar gyms. Have you ever been asked to put up some collateral?

Yeah, every time.

No, I don’t want to put-

Shocking.

It’s so funny.

Your word is very good, we’ll just take that. Yeah, exactly.

Well, it’s so funny. That’s where the rubber meets the road. I see so many entrepreneurs that say, “I love my business idea. I’m just not willing to put my house up for it.” Come on, it’s not going to work. I mean-

That’s the opposite mindset of a successful entrepreneur.

Yeah. So that’s, again … this is very normal. The third, you have to have a business plan. And Chup, we can put it on the show notes, but we have an outline for what it’s called, the perfect business plan that we’ve laid out for you. It’s actually compliant with what banks want. And you can get it as a downloadable by going to Thrive Times Show, click it on the podcast button, you can get it right there. And the outline was created by Bessemer Venture Capital. And it lays out specifically what you have … you have to have a business plan. You can’t be shocked when they ask you for these things. All right?

The fourth thing, you have to have a team. This is the thing, if you’re a startup, people don’t want to hear like, I’ve never started a business before and I’m going at it so low. And they want to see like, okay, who’s on your team? Maybe having a partner would be helpful, maybe having some kind of advice. And the fifth, you have to have a firm knowledge of your numbers. I mean, Z, if someone asks you your numbers and you go, “Numbers? I mean, the idea’s so big, the numbers don’t even matter.”

It’s a billion dollar concept.

10% of a billion is a lot, right? Right.

Bro, this coffee shop.

My imaginary friend will vouch for me.

Yeah, those coffee shop bros can redefine coffee, man.

It’s going to be like meta coffee.

If you just gave me like 250 K, bro, I’ll conquer. Look at Starbucks, man, they’re like on every corner.

I’ll give you like 5% of my brain.

They say my coffee’s better than Starbucks. Well, the coffee I’m going to make going be better.

In my mind, I can picture the coffee being more of-

[inaudible 01:40:51].

It’s not even so much coffee, it’s more like a movement.

Mine’s not so much Starbucks, I’m going to name my Moonbucks because it’s just so good. So much bigger.

Moonbucks.

The moon’s bigger than a star, don’t you know, bro?

And if you think about a buck, typically you’re not wearing pants. They’re always mooning you.

I might name mine Moon Two Bucks because it’s going to be twice.

Have you guys ever seen Uncle Bucks? It’s awesome, bro.

It’s awesome, bro.

Bro, back to the business plan though, seriously.

Seriously, man. It’s just going to rock.

John Candy, have you ever watched him in movies? He was so good, bro.

One time I was down in Mexico and had a great little cup of coffee and I said, that’s be awesome, man.

So here we are, united. You know what? Things just don’t happen by accident, bro. And so we’re here together … I got to tell you-

There’s a reason why we’re both here, bro.

I had a guy who literally came to the offices at 16th and Boston, this is before a Thrive. And he tells me, “You know why we’re here right now? God does not make accidents. We’re here by divine appointment. And we’re here for disappointed moment because this fuel additive that I have right here, this is going to change the game.” And I’m going, “Okay, I’d like to see a business plan.” And he goes, “God doesn’t make accidents.” He goes with the whole God card, and he was dead serious that God doesn’t make accidents and we’re here for a divine appointment about his fuel additive. And all he wanted was a million bucks.

That’s all? That seems reasonable.

No, he’s like, “All I’m asking for is a million dollars.” I mean, you come in there-

And you can own 4% of it. I love Shark Tank. Those guys get on there, they’re all so … it’s like, dude, you haven’t sold anything yet and your business is worth $10 million. It’s kind of like, are you crazy?

So Chup, if anybody out there, because we have a lot of great people listening, and I think a lot of the people we coach with are existing business owners. I’d say that’s probably 90% of the folks we work with are existing business owners. So they get it, they get raising capital. Am I missing something there? Am I?

No man, I think that’s it.

Charles-

Redo those-

I think you did really good.

Run through those five for me real quick, one more time.

Yeah, okay. I just want to make sure we get this. You have to go in, you cannot go in for a business loan without a decent credit score.

So if you’re just low, fix it and there’s things you can do to fix it.

Reach out to a credit repair specialist. You just have to do it, if you’re not doing that, it just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to do that. So just go in with a good credit score, don’t go in with a 400 credit score, I’m just telling you, it’s not going to work. All right.

Exactly.

The second thing is, go in with the mentality that you’re willing to put up every physical asset you have. Everything. I mean-

Everything. All in, baby.

Your mutual fund, whatever-

Shove all those chips in.

Your grandfather left you. A lot of people have an inheritance they were given. You have cash, you have land. I mean, you got to go all in.

We talked about this on a previous show, but I’ve got a client right now who did that. She sold her house a year and a half ago to start her business. She did a half a million dollars of business her first year. And guess what? She’s still living with her mom.

Can I-

She’s making money, but she’s delaying that gratification.

Delay it.

And going to save and do the right thing.

You go, girl.

I don’t want to rip on your client and I just want to make sure you get this.

Yeah.

I don’t know of a single example of any of the autobiographies I’ve read on my shelf of any of them who did not put everything into the business. I can’t think of a single example. I mean, Walt Disney lost it all twice. Thomas Edison lost it five times. Elon Musk, 10 years of his life invested in Tesla. I mean, I can go on and on, every example. I mean, Sara Blakely was down to her last $1,500 before she built the billion dollar company, Spanx. T.D. Jakes was working at a bus plant making buses while offering free food as a way to trick you into going to church. I mean, seriously, these are the things … this is how it happens. I mean, if you have a backup plan, you’re going to lose, Z.

I know. And I know, you know what? I believe you because I know you’re the world’s best business coach. I’ve seen it, I’ve felt it, I hear it and I know it. So-

First, you got to do it.

You got to do it.

Now the next thing, you got to have a business plan. You got to go in there with a business plan. If you don’t have a business plan, again, we’ll make it available for you on today’s show notes. You can click the link for the perfect pitch deck, which was created by Bessemer. Bessemer Venture Capital. We’ll put it on the show notes. It was also distilled in a book called Pitching Hacks by Naval Ravikant, one of the early investors in Facebook. He’s the guy who started AngelList, the website for venture capitalist. We have it there for you.

When someone says, do a business plan, it’s very intimidating. Very intimidating. I remember the first time I was like, “Oh my gosh. That’s a business plan. What business plan? What business plan?”

I got to plan my business. I don’t have a plan, just got to run [inaudible 01:45:23].

We’ve made it easy on you. So it’s going to be on today’s show notes.

Yep, I’ll put it on there.

Okay, yeah.

We’ll put it on there for you.

The link.

The next move, you got to have a team. I mean this, I mean this. I mean, you got to get this. You have to have a team. And when you read the perfect business plan outline, you’ll see this. So as an example, if I went into a local market to start a gym tomorrow, I have no experience owning a gym, I’ve coached clients that own a gym. But if on the-

I’ve walked in a gym before.

If on the pitch deck it said on the business plan, pitch deck and the word business plan are synonymous. If it said that my partner in the venture was Charles Colaw, he’s serving on the board and he’s a half a percent owner or whatever it is, but he’s on the board. I could say, “Oh, by the way, he’s owned three multimillion dollar gyms and he’s the one advising me on all of the equipment I’m buying.” Wouldn’t that make a comforting kind of a feeling come over the [inaudible 01:46:22].

Absolutely.

Really? You’re not going to just guess? You’re going to have someone advise you? That’s great.

And the final thing is you have to know your numbers. And I will just say this, that most entrepreneurs don’t think at all about the numbers. But you’ve got to have someone in your camp, someone on your team helping you look at those numbers. Otherwise, you’re just going to get laughed at when you go in for a bank loan. The banks are just going to … they probably won’t laugh to your face, but I mean, Z, you’ve invested.

They’ll smirk, they’ll smirk.

You’ve invested-

They can’t help it.

They’ll smirk.

You’ve invested in a bank and you guys invested as a team into Regent Bank.

Yep. We bought the bank.

Which was formerly the Bank of Nowata. You bought the bank, the bank’s doing very well. Oklahoma City.

Very well. We just opened up Springfield, Missouri.

Really?

Yeah.

Springfield. Springfield.

Wow. You’re doing well.

Yes.

And so you have served on the board.

Yes.

Where you had to hear about these people, these unfortunate folks who didn’t know these five moves. And you have to run it by the board, sometimes the ideas are good. But if you don’t have these, you’re not even going to listen to it.

Most banks out there, they’re default is no. That way they don’t have to worry. Just no, just no, just no. But please leave. So you have to be compelling and you have to have your stuff together. And those five moves that Clay just outlined are the moves. Because whenever you can go into a bank and get a loan, you know you’ve done your homework right, you’re getting the cheapest money out there and the best deal for you long term. So you don’t have to go to a venture capitalist and have someone own 48% of your company to give you whatever it is you’re looking for. If you get your act together, do the moves we just taught you on this podcast. You can go out there and secure a loan and start your business and roll on with it.

Our business coaches can help you write this plan, we do it very often. Revolution Health, it’s in Tulsa, RevolutionHealth.org. I wrote the business plan for him. All right. I mean, this is a real example. There’s so many businesses out there we’ve done this for. I promise you, we can help you, we have the templates, the systems. But we can’t help you if we don’t get to know you. So go to ThriveTimeShow.com today. Schedule your one-on-one business coaching consultation and see, we always like to end this thing with a three and a two and a one and a boom. Do you want to lead us out, my friend?

Absolutely.

Here we go.

We ready, Thrivers?

I’m ready.

All together now.

Three, two, one. Boom.

Three, two, one. Boom.

Three, two, one. Boom.

Three, two, one. Boom.

Is it time to say, boom?

Wait.

Boom?

I think I missed it.

Boom.

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