Business Coach : Follow Your Passion
My name is Clay Clark. I’m a business coach and the visionary of Thrive15. com. Today we have the pleasure of being joined with Arthur Greeno of Chick-fil-A, and we’re going to be teaching his success philosophies. Every successful entrepreneur and business mentor I’ve ever met has some sort of bedrock foundational success philosophy.
And today we’re going to learn the success philosophy that keeps Arthur Greeno going. Today’s training could be worth a lot of money to me and to you simply by learning a few success philosophies that we could apply toward our life. Remember at Thrive 15 dot com, we believe that knowledge without application is meaningless. So don’t make today’s episode more meaningless than a personalized autograph from your uncle Vinny by taking the time to ask yourself what can you do to uniquely apply these principles in your life and business? Use the episode today like a personal business coach.
Arthur, you have six kids, one wonderful wife, beautiful house, multiple successful businesses. What are you passionate about these days?
-Well I’m passionate about mentoring. I love sharing ideas. I love helping people get over the hurdles. A lot of times as entrepreneurs we get stuck, and so I like to be that guy that helps them get unstuck.
-So you’re passionate about helping other entrepreneurs succeed? Being a business coach?
-Absolutely. And not just other entrepreneurs, just anyone I can.
-And I know they’ve done this, so I feel like because you’ve had so much experience mentoring and doing speaking events and working with people, I think you’re qualified and to answer this question. Why do you believe that some people are, I’m not talking about some people are millionaires and some people are multimillionaires, but why are some people clearly unsuccessful financially, spiritually, emotionally? And why are some people successful? What is the separation in your mind.
-I think the biggest thing is they’re totally unbalanced. And I think the ones that are, a lot times the ones that are unsuccessful, if you really look at their lives they’re unbalanced in multiple things. You could probably just go down the list and say, they’re unbalanced spiritually.
They’re unbalanced in their marriage. They’re unbalanced in their time management. They’re unbalanced in their bank account and maybe even in weight loss.
-You grew up with an alcoholic mother, a father that abandoned you. I say abandoned, but he basically was gone from your life from age 13 to 18. Financially, you guys struggled. So talking about mentors, how big of an impact did mentors have in your life, as far as giving you hope that you could be successful even though your parents maybe didn’t encourage you that way?
-Yeah. When I was a teenager, the mentors that I had in my life, it wasn’t like a mentor like I have nowadays, where I’ll sit down and meet with somebody on a regular basis. I was taking what I could get, literally. It might be a coach who gave me a positive word or I’d watch how this person raises their child or I would look at some of the people, the figures in my church and say, you know what? I want to be like that guy. And so it was really one of those, I’ll take anything I could get.
-I got a lot of my mentorship when I was starting out from books. Obviously, John Rockefeller had passed by the time that I was born. Russell Simmons, multimillionaire, founder of hip hop, successful entrepreneur, I couldn’t reach him. So I bought his book. And I found that through the books, when a lot of people get successful, they’ll write everything they did to get there.
And I’m like, what? These secrets, these little secret keys are all in there. And I felt like I would just take those keys and unlock it, and I could have all these successful things that happened. Is there any books that you’ve read that have helped you become successful? A good business coach can recommend good books for you.
-Oh, tremendously. The very first one see, I didn’t used to read a lot. I didn’t like reading. But the very first one, I was talking to a gentleman and he imparted some wisdom in my life, because I was frustrated with some things. And he said, you need to dress better.
And so he suggested the book, Dressing for Success.
-Who wrote that, do you know?
-I don’t. We’ll say it’s Ron Burgundy.
-OK. Is it?
-Uh, no.
-OK. So Dressing for Success, it was an old book that they wrote, and it really went through how mentality-wise what people think when they see other people dressing certain ways. And that’s when I really learned the value of books and other than–
-So you learned to dress successfully and that was the first time that a book meant something to you?
-Absolutely. In fact, I went out that day and I went to a place and I said, I want– I got a whole new wardrobe that day. Threw everything else in the trash.