Am I Building Assets or Ass-Hats? – A Knowledge Bomb

Audio Transcription

Grabbed the duck tape and mentally prepare yourself for yet another mind expanding knowledge bomb from America’s number one business coach, Clay Clark.

All right, thrive nation. Today’s knowledge bomb. We’re asking on today’s business coaching knowledge bomb. We’re asking the truly important question that every entrepreneur has to ask themselves. Someday. Someday you’re gonna. Have to ask yourself. You’re gonna. Have to sit down with yourself and say, do I have time freedom? No. Am I going the right direction with my life? No. I married the right person. No, these are not that. We’re not talking about that. This is the big question that as an entrepreneur, strictly related to the success of your company and what you’re building, you have to ask yourself, am I building an asset or an ass hat? Oh, now before you think you know what, you just wrote that fancy title to speak in hyperbole to get my attention and you have no actual premise or no thoughts defending. Well, let me explain this idea to many entrepreneurs.

Clay stairs, you’re a business coach. You see this? Yes sir. They feel like they’re wearing all the hats. They say I’m wearing all the hats. No, I ain’t got time for that because I’m wearing all the hats. Exactly. I don’t got time to do that or this because I’m wearing all the hats chain. Nobody got time for that jump. You’ve seen this. I don’t have time to do the group interview because I’m wearing all the hats. I don’t have time to build a script because I’m wearing. I don’t have time to watch online ads because I am wearing all the hats. I ain’t got time to write my con. I don’t have time to read my content. No, because I’m wearing all the hats. You. Nobody got time. I don’t have time to interview and look at my numbers. I don’t have time to look at my numbers because I am wearing all of the hats.

Well, the webster’s definition of the phrase, wearing all the hats is too many jobs or roles. Carrying the burden of many roles. That’s what that phrase means to bear or carry. The burden of many roles were to have too many jobs or roles. Right now, the definition of an ass according to webster is this, a hoofed mammals or horse family with a brain call typically smaller than a horse or with longer ears or definition to say foolish or stupid person. There you go. So a foolish or stupid person who is wearing all the hats has too many jobs. A foolish or stupid person who has too many jobs is by a lot of times people talk about what the word enthusiasm comes from. The Greek word meaning theos means God, and then in it’s within. So it’s God within. That’s the origin of the word.

So when I say the word ass hat, I really do mean a foolish or stupid person who chooses to wear all the hats. Now, if you’re wearing all the hats, as a small business owner, I’m as I did when I started out. That’s something that’s an admirable. You have to, when you start, you have to be willing to wear all the hats. You have to do whatever it takes, but according to Robert Kiyosaki and if you don’t like him, according to webster and the definition webster’s dictionary, the definition of an asset is this, according to webster, regarded as having business coaching value and being available to meet the debts, commitments or legacies, Robert Kiyosaki to gives a definition that I I agree with and I think the webster definition should be updated to read this. He defines an asset as anything that puts money in your pocket. A liability is anything that takes money out of your pocket.

The big mistake that poor and middle class people make, according to Kia, Saki is spinning their lives buying liabilities instead of assets. So if you are creating liabilities. So let me give you an example. I have met probably a thousand or more entrepreneurs throughout my life as a business coach, as a speaker and as a owner of companies and they love clay stairs to start a blog, a love Eric Trump to start a blog. That’s right. And when you start a blog, you’re creating a time liability because it’s another hat you have to wear and it does not produce you time freedom. The two currencies that I’m looking to create as an entrepreneur is I’m looking to create a currency of time freedom and a currency of financial freedom. Can you create a new liability ability? That ability now takes time away from your love bank, from your bank account.

It takes time away from you. So if you start a blog that’s not needed to grow the company, that is a liability, right? If you start a podcast that doesn’t create money or is it going to help you market your business is a liability. If you began to focus on things that don’t move the needle, that is a liability. And so the question today is, are you building assets that create time and financial freedom or are you building ass hats? That being many rules that only a foolish, stupid or obstinate person would want to create. So now we have a notable quotable and then I will get into the wisdom of clay stairs. The first notable quotable comes in hot from Michael Gerber, the best selling author of the myth revisited series, a phenomenal book. I encourage you to check it out. Everybody should have one copy of this book he writes.

If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you have a job, and it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic. Now, Jeff, I wanted to update it with a clay, Clark and new international version. Okay, so if you can out here, if your business depends on you, you don’t own an asset. You are an ass hat and you’re the worst kind of ass hat because you actually think you’re getting ahead. So don’t build a business where you have to do every single job. Now, Michael Gerber goes on to write much, much more tactfully than I’ve read. He. He has a certain tact. Chuck. He writes with a certain class and a nuance.

He says here, they get my kind of a Michael Gerber reading voice ready, the difference jumping echo, please. Chuck Chuck Chuck on US ideas Meco here. The difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create the lives actively while everyone else is created by their lives to hold out the SR passively waiting to see where life takes them next. The difference between the two is living fully and just existed. Now I want to break that down to a

Clark new international version because I feel like someone’s not getting it. Okay, so the difference between asset creating people an ass hat creating people is that asset creating people create their lives actively while everyone else is created by their lives passively waiting to see where they’re asked asthat life takes them next. The difference between an asset creating an business coaching entrepreneur and an ast hat. Creating entrepreneur is living fully and just existing. It might sound harsh, but I’m trying to shock you out of the Rut because I know what it was like when I built Dj connection and I was the only one who knew that. Who knew how to maintain my equipment. I was the only one who knew how to make the sales calls. The only one clay stairs who knew how to Dj and I had a job. I’m deejaying literally six nights a week and it was me and a dude named Garrett.

Then I thought it was a real entrepreneur chop and I was the only one who had who knew how to do everything else except for the paperwork. Then I thought it was a real entrepreneur and it was me and one super skilled dj who had a job for a local FM radio station and he and I were the only two guys who can dj and he would never follow systems. Oh yeah. And he would never be open for coaching. And this guy was a phenomenal Dj. If you liked the show, he was going to do every night. Right. Because it didn’t matter what you wanted. He was going to do what he wanted is a talent grow. And so I hired. I’m not kidding. I hired all of the major FM personalities I could find, and so it was Dj connection with my company, but every single dj I had except for me would never listen to what the bride wanted, would never follow the systems, and they were.

Their dynamic range was either awesome or terrible because if you loved what they did, you loved it, but if you wanted to do something for you, they would not do it. Right. So even then, I didn’t have a team I didn’t have. I didn’t have a business. It was just an ass hat. I had to put out all the fires, do all the work. I was super busy. I was obstinate because I was making money because making money so I was obstinate. According to webster, I was obstinate. I was foolish and I had many burdens, many jobs. So clay stairs. What advice would you have for anybody out there who is hearing this for the first time they’re going, am I building an ass hat? What am I building an asset? What? What? What advice would feedback? Because you’ve been in the trenches helping people for years.

Talk to us about this. Well, I think first of all, clay, we do what we know to do. You know, how many people are in that spot of wearing the ass hat, but they’re just doing the best they can. Right? Yeah. I just said that but, but you know they’re doing the best they can. I’m doing all that I know to do. And, and, and for me personally, when I started my company, the very first thing that I wanted to be careful of was not to get trapped in the company. So I started coaching with you. Right? Because I knew that I had the talent and skill to do the job, but I didn’t know how to build the company around it without wearing the ass hat. And I won’t get into all of the details of our conversation we had a couple weeks ago. Yeah. But you’re in a spot right now with your career, with a lot of your ventures where you’re in a kind of a weird spot and that you’re about ready to not need to do anything.

Yes. Like we’re about, I’d say 20 weeks away from you. Not Having to do anything other than to recruit and lead. Preach seriously because of what you’re doing. That’s my plan. And remember when we talked about that though and you’re like, I don’t know man. I, I just couldn’t get my head around. I don’t know. It feels kind of weird. Yeah. Like I mean, so let’s not get into the specifics of that is specifically about arrangement for because it’s still materializing, but could you share what was going through your mind when you. Because we all in some way I’ve done it. I do it. We all do in some way. We all kind of stayed loyal to ask. Oh yeah. We love the idea. We have many jobs where many hats, it makes us feel valuable and we love that we’re needed. We have to worry about like, well, if I’m not needed, how can I.

What if I get fired from. I mean if they’re not needed, what? Why would I need. Can you talk to me about what kind of processing this idea of escaping needing to do any work at all? Well, I think clay that, that I had a picture in my mind of what it would look like and so I’m putting all this effort into trying to create that picture and then all of a sudden as you and I had been talking, it’s like the picture is changing and I had a, I’m finding that I had an allegiance to the picture rather than an allegiance to the actual result. And so as you are showing me a different way to get to the business coaching result, I’m having to release this allegiant that I had these, this allegiance to a certain picture or certain expectation. And I mean, I’m still in it.

I’m just, you know, I don’t want anybody to think that I’m now just, Oh, just whatever, you know, clay playlist. I’m there. I’m Marcus, I’m not, I’m still kind of going. Are you sure? Are you sure? This thing is going to work as an example, like elephant in the room. Let me give you an example. Um, there was a person who worked in that company early on that Chubb, we let them keep basically like an 80 percent commission on haircuts. Huge amount. So if there’s cutting someone’s hair for like 40 bucks, I mean they’re gonna make like 32 bucks, 30 bucks. I mean lets me do the math on this. If they’re making $40 per haircut and it’s times point eight, we’re talking they’re making $32 per haircut. Okay. And they can do to an hour. So chuck cutting hair, they were able to bring in $64 per hour.

Yeah. And that came out to $2,560 a week. Cutting hair. It’s pretty good. And I had to explain like as we grow you really would rather make $2 a haircut and own a store. Like what? Because it’s hard to process that. Look Dude, I make $32 per cut. I do myself and if I make to see here’s the deal. If we do two haircuts and our and there are six through. Remember there’s each, each store has an average of 10 chairs chat. Okay. So of all 10 chairs are being used at one time and we cut two haircuts per hour. That’s 20 possible haircuts in our and that’s $40 an hour of income for you. Plus you have to do nothing. Yeah, you can scale when you do nothing. Yeah, but did. You can’t scale if you’re doing everything. So it’s a weird deal. Chubb of have to go backwards. You after you’ve already achieved your financial goals to scale a business, you really do have to go backwards and start to hire key people to take the critical jobs from you.

Well, and that’s where the rockefeller quote comes in where he says, I would rather earn one percent off of 100 people’s efforts than 100 percent of my own efforts. Right? And if you’re out there and you’re starting to wonder, am I had asset? Let me tell you something I can do for building an ass or building an asset. Sorry, I come from a long line of people that built assets. My grandparents had companies and they built assets. My parents had a company and they will cover your ass. You want, you want to build an ass. Had that caused. You don’t want to have your ass exposed or I don’t want to go pay grow. The thing is the thing that gets you into entrepreneurship and being able to go through the grind of the first years of business is that you are willing to do all of those things, but like we went over the Michael Gerber quote, you cannot get stuck in that rat race, that hamster wheel of the better your business does. The worst here. Life is. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen clients and my parents, I might, like I said, my grandparents go through this and you’ve done the best piece of advice is to reach out to a coach, be an us vs somebody. Find somebody that can give you a proven path and then stick to the system, plan your work, and then work your plan and follow the system and you’ll be successful.

Now, if anybody out there that feels like you’re stuck in a world where you are just overwhelmed, um, I’m going to give you even more a reason to be scared. Uh, I mean, seriously, you have to. You have to be scared. You cannot stay here. This is not a good place for you. You’re covering your ass and you’re paying the bills. I mean, good job. You’re not bankrupt. I mean, nine out of 10 startups fail according to Forbes will put that on the show notes, but nine out of 10 startups fail. According to Forbes, 80 percent of businesses fail, so the fact that you’re actually covering your ass, that’s powerful. I mean, seriously, you don’t wanna run it off your ass exposed when you’re. When you hear somebody who went bankrupt or you hear about it in the news or you hear about a friend of yours who lost everything and is now at the age of 50 living with their mom.

That’s tough. So I get what it’s like. You have this desire to want to pay the bills. I’m not talking about just immediately delegating everything. It takes time, but let me read you a notable quotable that hopefully will just freak you out, freak you out a little bit here. Okay. Clayton Christianson is a Harvard business school professor. He wrote a book called, how will you measure your life? A new international version. Clayton Christianson wrote a book, New International version, my translation, here we go, the book real and in a new international clarkisms means how will you know whether you’re an ass hat or an asset, but this is what he says. He says, does that mean that we should never hire or promote an inexperienced manager who had not already learned to do what needs to be done and the assignment? The answer, it depends. You see in a startup company where there are no processes in place to get things done than everything that is done must be done by individual people.

Resources in this circumstance it would be too risky to draft somebody with no experience, little experience to to do the job because in the absence of processes that can guide people, experienced people need to lead, but in an established companies where much of the guidance to employees is provided by process as it is less dependent upon the managers with detailed hands on experience, then it makes sense to hire or promote someone who needs less experience. Who needs to learn experience. As an example, at the leadership initiative, you have great people and you have many great people in one of the great people. You have a this person I won’t give you get into the specific details of this person, but as you’re growing, it’s exciting to see this. This person has a background in human interaction. Yes. Okay. Guiding people down a path. This was their background, so students attend to school and they need someone to guide them down the path.

We’ll call this person the counselor. The third job is to make sure they didn’t invent the curriculum. They did not write the curriculum. They did not, but their job is to make sure that every student is following the path and if they get off the path, we can meet with the parents and help you get back on path, meet with the student, get back on the path. We keep the students in line. We can make sure that nobody in the flock disappears. They don’t get lost. We have to have a high emotional intelligence. As a counselor. We have to really care about getting people to the end. We have to have a passion for getting people to improve their lives. We have to care. We have to get our satisfaction from seeing people succeed. That is what a counselor is, so when you told me there’d be a counselor joining your team, I knew immediately that they would be the perfect fit to implement this, the business coaching systems because they don’t need to be the person who created the systems.

They don’t have to have lived the life. They don’t have to have the tapestry of the career that you and I have clay. They don’t have to be like chop or they used to own their own company. They don’t have to be like me where I’ve had many, many companies. They don’t have to be like, you are the. You’ve owned your own business. They don’t have to have that journey. What they do have to have is a passion for people and a high level of emotional intelligence, but if we didn’t have all the processes, the search engine checklists, the hiring checklist, the dream 100 systems, all of the systems in place, there is no way somebody like that could lead the way because there wouldn’t be any thing to go off. Then you’d have to hire somebody who’s really experienced in business coaching and pay them 200 grand a year, which was, this is why most business coaching programs are so expensive because they’re hiring people based upon their resume and you’re paying six grand a month for somebody to coach you.

We are the other day, there’s one company, it’s $7,000 a day a day when their coach and they that I heard this come on, they meet four times a week. Again, clay stairs now is recruiting people to come work for him that are high emotional intelligence, high character, great background kind of people, and those people can lead our clients to success and it’s. It’s, it’s exciting to see something grow because of these processes right in front of your eyes. Man, I’m excited for you. I’m having a great time. I’ve got a quick question for you and this may be too black and white. Okay. But I just want to ask a quick question here because I have an answer in my mind as I have talked with many of my clients, but, but it, when you’re in startup mode and you are doing all the work yourself.

Yep. The idea is to move through that startup mode as quickly as possible and move into the business model mode. Yep. And what would you say as far as a timeframe on moving through that startup freight face? I’ve got a client that has been in business for 33 years running an h vac company and he is still in startup mode. Okay. Well, the bigger the vision, the longer the delayed gratification must be. Okay. So as an example, um, you have been very much a part of this thrive journey from kind of day one because you were a client of mine before we tried to scale the system held before you moved into thrive here. Yeah. And so it was a deal of, of you’ve seen me do this for, I’ve been coaching clients forever. Well with that, the idea that business coaching could not, could be high quality and not $7,000 a month.

That’s a, that’s a big idea. The idea that we could personally mentor 2,500 students through our workshop. And by the way, if you’re out there, you haven’t checked out thrive time, school.com, you know, we only have 2,500 availabilities. You can get your reserve your spot now that gives you access to the workshops. Only 2000 people can come with only 2,500 people. You have hundreds of thousands of dollars of downloadables access to the videos and you can actually email us your questions to [email protected]. But we started that thrive time school.com. Um, did, did he, we can replace a business school for $19 a month. That’s a big idea. So, um, that’s like, not as big as an idea as fedex, but fedex took over a decade for Fred Smith to exit the day to day operation. What about AOL? America Online took Steve Case over 10 years. It took facebook a little over five years. Uh, it took esp and over a decade to make a profit. So those are like big, big ideas. The typical small business owner, if they will simply execute the items on their weekly action list.

The fastest I’ve seen is six months. Wow. And the average is probably 18 months. Wow. And I’d like to personify this story with one example. I think of tip top canine. Yeah. Um, and what we’ll do, I’ll cue up in an audio of them in just a minute so you can hear what they’re saying. But tip top canine, I mean those guys, they had been training dogs for like eight or nine years. They knew a ton about it. They’re like dog whisperers. I knew nothing about that, but they didn’t have a turnkey system in place for their marketing. They didn’t have a turnkey system in place for their recruiting of people. They didn’t have a turnkey system in place for the training of people. They didn’t have a turnkey system in place for the call center. They didn’t have a turnkey marketing and ad offer. They didn’t have a turnkey legal, uh, it didn’t happen.

It didn’t have a firm grasp of the legal aspects of the company, but they were doing the best they could. They were. Yeah. And so it took about 24 months to get it to where they had a, you’d have to ask Ryan, I wouldn’t say tripled their sales, but maybe doubled their sales, but the sales weren’t dependent upon them. So increased finances and time freedom. Right? Right. And now, and now it’s arguable whether they’re needed beyond leadership and vision. They like to, they’re very involved, but they are leading a vision and so now that they have the time to open up other locations, they’ve now been able to open up eight locations. And so they went from one location and being okay profitable to being very profitable in eight locations and working less. So there are eight times larger and they’re working their, their, their, their personal time freedom.

I might, from what I can tell, has at least doubled the amount of time freedom they have. Well, and so that’s, that’s a, that’s a two year process I think to another group that worked with score basketball. I worked with, Don took don about three years to get their angst. We needed to do everything we needed to create an entire billing model, an entire new website, all new print pieces, hire new people, train new people. I mean we had to, I mean really there’s nobody who works for him now that used to work there and nothing about it that is still the same except for him. How often do you see that? Every time. Every time, right? I think luke owens at the hub, Jim 18 month process, he’s making year today, you know, week over week comparison, 78 percent up. Uh, but he has nobody that was originally there.

You had to replace the entire stellar research, went from having a great idea and they were just kinda getting by to make it a $100,000 a month of profit. That’s Delbert research and that was just a hair under two years. And the reason why you’re saying that plays that people are sticking with the process all through this, they’re not just so how long will it take? Like four months. Can we be there for months? It’s called a Kaizen and so on. I’ll give you an example. Right now I’m doing some eyes on it. I’m always doing Kaizen, but I have some guys on like today and it’s pretty big for me. I have every week I try to optimize my schedule by two or three percent. Right? You might say that stupid two percent, but on Wednesdays I have a meeting at 7:00 AM with a client who’s doing great and he needs us for his ongoing search engine optimization for improving his company, for his sales scripting for which there’s so much we do for him.

What do you do? All the online ads. We. We built the processes who he needs our company, but he doesn’t need me because I could assign it to any of our coaches and they could do it with our team and he needs a graphic designer, photographer or videographer, web developer. He needs all those things and there’s no way he could find all those things for, you know, $1,600 a month. I mean there’s just, there’s no way. I mean, every one of our videographers makes more than $1,600 a month. Some more than $1,600 a week. Nobody’s making $1,600 a month. I mean that’s just one person or our web developers are all making more than $3,000 a month and we have multiple of them so he could not replace that, but I don’t personally need because he doesn’t want to grow beyond his current size. But he needs that because it’s for him, he views it like, hey look, I haven’t got like a, you know, like a mutant team that I’m paying like $10 an hour or two.

So for him it’s like it’s great, but I don’t need to be in that. So I told them today, hey, I would like to starting in October no longer be in these meetings. I’m going to move it to a different client, to a different coach and that’ll free up one hour a week. Now that one hour a week makes my day shorter, so I’ll move one of my afternoon clients to the morning, which means that I can record earlier on Wednesdays, which allows me to do one more, probably big guest interview a week and it allows me to work on a book deal I’m working on, so it it, it’s like I’m always optimizing that and then we had case studies this week worked clay, we’ve had like I want to say in our coaches meeting probably 30 case, Daddy’s trying to native 25. You’ve got turned into me of clients that I’m able to double the size of their sales within 18 months, so I want to turn those into graphs that we can post on our website.

We can put in our coaching rooms and we can share with clients on this podcast and I want to do that in Shep. We’ve, we’ve asked you guys to provide me the graphs. You guys did that. All the coaches that I wanted, verifiable numbers. You did that. Then John, give me a rough draft today and I’m going to work through that. That Kaizen, that continual improvement down, it’ll tell you improvement over time, probably take me four weeks to finish that, and then when I’m done with that, I have a list of ongoing improvement, so I’m working on the show intros for this to make it a little snappier, but the point is I’m never done. I’m always having the next level. It’s kind of like growing a garden. You’re never done weeding. It’s a chip. I would say. It’s like when you. After you build a house, you’re never done maintaining it. Yeah, and I just want to clarify for everybody. Kaizen, k a I, Z e n it’s a Japanese word for improvement, and in the business mind it means continual improvement over time. So every system, every employee, everything.

You must get that all the time. Do Lust. That’s a tough one thing I notice about you. You get more beautiful. As each day passes. I shaved my neck, beard, chill. I want to add one to this. I went to give you a strong. You are not an asset. I am not an asset. You know asthma, you are. I said, because I’m not crying right now for awhile. Be Fly in my eye for awhile. I did not. I did not know. I first met you. I thought to myself this could be an asset or as had that graduates from either I guess you get certificate. No, you would never worked as hot. I just wondered if you were. Does that make sense?

Serious though? I just. If you’re out there and you’re feeling like you’re stuck, we can help you but I can’t help you if we don’t get a chance to know you. So I got three ways we can help you today that are very easy and I think we have a free option and then like a $19 option and then like you can hire a whole team for less than hiring a $10 an hour employee option. Option one, go to thrive time, show on Itunes, subscribe. That’s free. Why subscribe? Okay. The mind is what the mind is fed is free. Leave us an objective review and then email is proof that you did it to info at thrive time. Show.com, like a screenshot of the review and we’ll give you a free tickets to our in person workshop. Come on my bed or you got to buy is a workbook and then we serve food there.

So you’re 35 bucks out. Boom there. It’s the world’s highest and most reviewed business coaching workshop. You’re gonna. Love it. It’s two days, it’s 15 hours. We cover marketing, sales, advertising, search engine optimization to. Awesome. So the next. The next thing we do, the next thing we do is you say, you know what, I’d like to pay you something a little bit. Okay, I respect it. Looks like there’s only $2,500 you can get into the program because you haven’t got this $19 a month. Includes the workshop and it includes hundreds of thousands of dollars of downloadables, templates, agreements, workflows, systems, and you get access to thousands of training videos and you can participate in the show by emailing us your questions to [email protected]. And we’ll have you on the show as a guest from time to time if the schedules work. Yeah, it’s a good move. We can only accommodate 2,500 people for that.

Learn more about that at thrive time, school.com. And then if you actually want a one on one mentor to help you. We only have 160 spots I think right now we’re a little over. How’s that possible? Well, what happens is, is there some people that are transitioning out, like they’re selling their company. I think of brb roofing. I worked with them for years and they were able to sell the company, you know Dos, he sold the company. What’s kind of hard to coach a guy that’s seven. Margarita. Yeah, on the side of a beach somewhere because he sold his company. I had another company today that’s now top in google. They got an offer to buy their company for a decent amount. Another company looks like they’re going to have a large conglomerate come in and buy their chain of stores here in the Tulsa area.

So if that happens, Yay for you. And then it opens up a spot for somebody else. And so if you’d like to do a 13 point assessment, we’re going to sit down with you to find out whether you’re a good fit. We actually have a very linear 13 step assessment and you can schedule that today for free by going to thrive time show.com, thrive nation. I just want to, again, I want to ask this question today. Are you wearing all the hats? Do you find yourself working every second of the day? Do you feel like your wheels are just spinning, Spinning, spinning? He’s like, you’re just trapped in the self employment rat race. Are you building an asset that creates time freedom and financial freedom? Are you building an income producing asset that creates time freedom and financial freedom? Or are you building an ass hat? Are you being an obstinate person who wears all the different roles and hats? Which one are you going to be today? What are you going to do? And know that any further I do three, two, one, boom.