Business | Clay Staires Shares How Clay Clark Helped Him to Become Successfully Self-Employed At the Age 47

My name is Clay Stairs. I am the founder of claystairs.com and the Leadership Initiative. Growing up as I went through middle school and as I went through high school, I was pretty much a big fish in a small pond, and so I felt I had an over-inflated sense of self. So once I graduated from college, I might have been like a lot of folks graduated from college, terrified. So I ran to ministry, ran to the church really quick. From there, I jumped into being a school teacher, but all the while I knew there was something more inside of me.

I took over Shepherd’s Fold Ranch, which was a summer camp and retreat center. But then once again, now here I am at about 47 years old and I’m feeling like it’s time, there’s this shift beginning to go on, okay, at this place I’ve done what I’ve needed to do. It’s time for me to expand, it’s time for me to grow, but I didn’t know anything about how to run my own business.

As I made that shift from being the executive director of a nonprofit organization into running my own company, I found out really quickly where my weaknesses were. I’ve got to know something about sales and marketing and all those things that terrified me. And so it was about at that time when we were doing some fundraising for Shepherd’s Fold Ranch that I met a young man named Clay Clark.

Clay would tell me, it’s just a formula. Do these things and out comes production, out comes money. I just didn’t believe them. Yeah, it was probably just there in the first month, maybe six weeks with Clay that I got my first speaking engagement. But when we started talking about money, I totally locked up and just said, “I’ll just come down and do it for free.”

But after that first few months, it was like I stepped off a cliff and all of a sudden everything stopped. And so Clay started talking to me about making phone calls and beginning to do that and making a hundred phone calls a day. It was like, are you kidding? No one has ever done that. In the history of man, thrive has provided this confidence that I didn’t have before, and as a result, I’ve been able to turn a 2,500 or a $3,500 deal into $10,000 or $12,000. Through working with Clay and working with Thrive, I’ve been able to look through the lens, not of my capacity, but I’ve been able to look through the lens of my destiny.

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My name is Taylor Hall. I’m the general manager of the Tulsa Oilers Professional Hockey Team. Our goal every night here at the BLK Center is to try to fill the seats with lots of people and create an exciting environment so when somebody comes to a game, they want to come back.

Working with Clay and the staff at Thrive, they’ve really helped us in many, many ways. Website and graphic design and video production, and a lot of things that go along and a lot of businesses, including ours, doesn’t have a staff or a full-time videographer or a graphic designer. But the biggest thing that we noticed was the needle mover, more sales, more attendance, more successes in business.

We had a record year last season working with Clay for the first time. Our average attendance is higher than it’s ever been, so there was a lot of really cool things that we did and they worked. That’s the nice thing about working with Clay and the team over there. It’s just not one person. You get the entire team if you need video design and editing and production, they’ve got that. If you need graphic design, if you need some coaching, your salespeople and call scripts, PR, they offer all that. Clay was instrumental in helping guiding us and getting us on the right track so that we could really raise the bar and become ultra successful. So it is been an amazing experience for us.

My name is Nick Smith and I’m an agency owner with Farmers Insurance. I grew up in a middle-class family all the way up until I was about 13, and then my dad lost his job and then all of a sudden he was gone and I was being raised by my mom by herself. She was probably making 20 grand a year. In order for me to have a car, I had to pay for the car, I had to pay for the gas. I had to do everything on my own. So the independent thinking had to come early if I wanted to do anything. A couple of years ago, man, I was stuck in a rut. I really honestly was, and I couldn’t see it. Not because I was doing it wrong, it’s because I didn’t know any better. Rates were not good. Selling was difficult.

Staffing was just unbelievably difficult to keep good staff in here. I was having a ton of turnover and I was about ready to hang it up and sell out. I was just done. And that’s about when I got introduced to the concept of the Will of Wealth and Thrive.

Some of the specific things I’ve learned about running my business is systems and being organized. Before, I think I just kind of shot from the hip a lot of times, but man, since I started this whole journey and I’ve developed systems for each of the employees, but not just the employees, but for the position. So the fear of wondering when I’m gone, wondering if things are being done, I don’t have to worry quite as much. Business-wise, finally got over the hump and we’re actually growing again. Whereas before we were just declining, declining, declining, and now we’re back up and we’re back over what we were a couple of years ago now.

The training’s ongoing even to where I’m at now, I still feel like I need to get further. The training itself is just it, it’ll rock your world. It really will change the way you think and look at business. So all those things just kind of culminated into this big successful business that I feel like I have now. All that stuff has just been life altering.

All right, Clay’s awesome. He’s very entertaining, very energized, does some quirky, unique ways to get engagement with the audience. So really pleased to have Clay do our keynote today.

Well, I think it was being willing to take some risks on stage, taking some risks relative to how to set the audience up. I think that kind of created this sort of what’s going to happen next, and so just risk-taking sort of created a unique tension that I think ultimately resulted in a great experience.

Well, I think Clay would be an awesome presenter for a number of groups. One, I think that the material that he delivers is spot on, but he also can deliver some additional products and services to the organization even beyond just the things that he does on stage.

My name is David Drucker, the president for UPS Stores Canada. Also, a member of the AFA board, an honorary position. So okay, kind of a crossover with both sides.

I thought it was great. I thought Clay did a wonderful job. I think anytime you’re able to get a diverse group together to start finding the commonalities, you’re starting to pull the threads together that are going to make something for the future. I think that was the objective for today, and I think Clay was really able to pull that out.

I thought Clay was really good at shifting speeds. He was fast when he needed to be fast. Detailed when he needed to be detailed, was able to read the room. Every so often if we started drifting off too far to the left or too far to the right, he was right there to rudder us back on course. So I mean, really, I don’t think we could have chosen a better guy for the day to lead us.

My impression of Clay was his energy and just the energy that he had on stage and how passionate he is about his message, and I really felt like I could connect with that because it was very genuine and believable and sincere, and I really appreciate the sincerity of it all.

So the lesson nugget is in fact the action nugget. It’s like you can think of things all day long. You can read books all day long. You can do whatever you’re going to do as far as business planning, but if you don’t implement and actually take action, then it doesn’t mean anything.

It is all about taking the steps and standing up and going forward and engaging in an action activity.

Well, what was so different about this is the sense of humor. The really great sense of humor, very lively, very engaging and interesting, and a lot of presentations you just kind of sit there and go, “Oh, no, no,” but this was fun. This was fun and interesting and engaging.

Oh, I love Clay. Very funny. You never know, right? With a keynote speaker, you don’t know. So you got to kind of open up, he’s got a good sense of humor. I like the video at the beginning. It started out perfect. I’m like, “Oh, great. Another speaker that’s been to a million corporations.” I liked it. It was really well done. The guy’s good.

Clay’s fantastic. I mean, the guy is hilarious, captivating, kept the room moving. I mean, I love the fact that he got everybody up and moving. The fact that you could get John Taney up dancing in his seat like that is worth the price of admission right there. That’s awesome. It just reinvigorates, you hear somebody talk about how, you put it in systems into your business, how you got to seize the day. I mean, all that stuff is stuff deep down you should be doing, but those reminders help, and it really, it’s the right time if you’re open to it. I mean, that’s what it’s all about.

Because I’m a product of the 90s. I liked his notorious BIG rap a little bit, but I get it, man. He is exactly right. I got a ton of buddies that are sitting around playing PlayStation every day and they’re not studying success. And I think that’s the thing, because to me, the one thing I really take away from that conversation is poverty is our baseline. Everybody knows poverty. You don’t need to teach poverty, you need to teach success. And the fact that he said that was like music playing.

I think he just is, I mean, just really gets our industry, you get a lot of realtors that try and be motivational speakers, but he truly is a motivational speaker. He’s a businessman. He’s obviously been around the block and done a lot of things. And I think all those applications, because real estate at the end of the day is the business of business.

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