Business | Business Owner Amber Colaw of www.ColawFitness.com Shares About Her Experience Working with Clay Clark to Grow Their Business

Hi, this is Charles and Amber Colaw We’re the owners of Colaw Fitness. We heard about Clay Clark through Paul Hood, our CPS. Clay Clark has helped us take our three locations in three different states and create checklists, workflows, task lists, time blocks for every employee. He’s helped us with creating systems and audits for every department, quantitative scorecards for each department and every position so that everybody has a number. Has been able to give us a lot of time freedom and financial freedom, and peace of mind to know that everything’s running efficiently. And he’s been helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google and pretty much every area of the business has been very, very helpful.

We would describe the experience of working with Clay as very energetic. He’s full of energy, he’s very encouraging, very motivating, but also accountable. So he keeps us accountable and we love that accountability. It keeps our drive in the right direction so we are not chasing things that aren’t worth spending our time on.

Yeah, he’s a great coach. He helps push us on certain areas, helps coach us in certain areas. We’re all emotional creatures and we go up and down and he actually will tell us kind of where we’re at, how we can get from there, and even emotionally if we’re stressed about something, he’ll have a story to relate to and it really helps us in every area of our business. It’s been very helpful.

Sure. I think Clay’s ability to have a whole team behind him that help him with all of his clients all his coaching clients is that it allows Clay to do what he’s really good at, and that’s working one-on-one with the client and coaching them, and then he can have his amazing staff come in and help you accomplish all these goals that you’re setting.

And of course, he has all these resources, whether it’s videographers or whether it’s web developers, but they can quickly jump on your project, knock things out. He can quickly give you the right coaching. He’s just got a whole team of people that whatever area you’re lacking in your own company, he’s got resources from video, web design, search engine guys who are just knowledgeable in that. Even though he knows a lot of that stuff, he’s got these capable lieutenants that are ready to just take off and help you get that stuff. More stuff gets done on a weekly basis than you would on probably most-

Individual.

The individual or some other. We’ve worked with several companies before. It’s just not as many things get done on a weekly basis. So it’s been very helpful.

Well, the conferences for me, I’m a slow learner, so I have to learn over and over again here things over and over again. I’ve been to I think eight different conferences and each time you come, I learn a few new components. Some things are repetitive, but a lot of the stuff just resettles and I get a little bit more depth at each component. So I mean, I’ve been to eight of them. They’re all super entertaining. He’s very funny, very encouraging. You get to self-reflect a lot and a lot of the stuff is really polarizing. You do a personal inventory over yourself and you’ll think like, Hey, I’ve really got to work on this, really got to work on that. So every time you come, I still get a lot of value of it,

And as much as every conference is the same, it’s totally different. So I think we’ll hear stories we haven’t heard before. He’ll have entertainment or he’ll have speakers he didn’t have before. And like you said, you just always catch a different part of the material that maybe you didn’t catch before. Or it’s worded differently.

And it’s really cool because some people that you’ve seen like a year ago at a conference, now they’re being showcased as a success story and you get to see their website, you get to see how their stats and all their metrics have improved and the revenue improved. So it’s really cool to see people that just a year ago that, of course we’ve been here two years, that just came, that I met, is now being successful. It’s really encouraging to see other people accomplish that stuff. So Clay has helped us optimize our website and helped with really topping the right search engines that we need to make sure that we are very, very competitive with all of our other competitors. He’s done… Basically, he outlines exactly what you need to be accomplishing, and he creates tasks that we have to accomplish and his team has to accomplish.

And I would say over the last two years, we’ve totally ramped our website. We’re topping Google and every one of our markets. We’re just doing… I would say just doing really, really good. I felt very, very confident in all of our future locations and making sure that we’re in front of the ideal and likely buyer. It’s very encouraging. It’s important to know when I’m working with Clay, I’ve been in business for a while and met with him even when I already had three businesses at three different states. And to know that what I’ve shared with him is staying private. He’s not sending that out to anybody else to know that I’m… When he is working with me, he’s only working with one no other Jims that are in direct competition with me. It’s very encouraging to have somebody you can trust and rely on that he isn’t going to somehow tell your trade secrets or give information away.

Just really awesome that he’s a trustworthy guy, really cares about you as a client. For us, it’s been a complete mind freedom because Clay has helped us create a lot of different documents and one sheets for every department, put quantitative scorecards to each department. And so for us, it’s been very encouraging and gives us peace that when… As an entrepreneur, it’s stressful. You go to bed at night and you’re worried, did we cover this? Did we cover that? So he helps extract everything out of your brain, everything from your business, put it into document creation, put it into checklists and workflows for every person in each department, and make sure that everything’s getting done every week, every month. And funnel that all into KPIs, our key performance indicators that you can see on a weekly basis to make sure you’re moving the needle in the right area of your company, it’s very encouraging and give you a complete mind freedom and peace to know that that stuff’s created so you’re easy to duplicate and scale your company.

And then we can spend time doing what we’re really good at and just trust the system.

I honestly believe everybody needs a coach. I think we’re all inherently lazy and selfish and carnal. I truly believe that humans are humans, rather, if we’re standing, we’d rather sit. We’re sitting, we’d rather lay down, and if we’re laying down, we’d rather be asleep. So to have somebody that challenges you have real active candor and be honest with you on every aspect of your company, is really, really encouraging to me because I want to know, I want to work on what we’re weak at. I want to see any in any areas that we’re not doing well in. And see his perspective from a third party because you can look at your own business and just see the good, it’s good to have somebody who does this, who’s done this with hundreds of companies. You’ll really look at your company, reflect on your company, and see little chinks in the armor to make sure you’re cover that up so your competition can’t get to you. And that you’re successful overall in the big picture.

So yes, I would recommend Clay Clark because he is a great friend, great encourager. To me he’s been a wonderful friend. He’s also, you could tell he cares. And he also, he assists a wealth of knowledge. He’s worked with so many different companies and different businesses. He could take a concept that he’s used before in the past with somebody totally different industry and see how it would work perfectly for you and whatever niche market you’re in or whatever type of service you’re providing.

And so his brain is just a wealth of knowledge and just to have that type of perspective as a part of your team and your own company is huge, super valuable. So I would definitely encourage people to use him, but one thing is you got to be coachable. You got to be wanting to get feedback. You got to be wanting to really grow your company. You got to want to put that extra 10 hours a week to working on your business and not just in your business. And so, yes, I would recommend it to anybody who’s wanting to grow their company and provide great systems, checklists, workflows, great encouragement, and have accountability.

Welcome back to the Thrive Time Show. Have a business question? Email us today at [email protected], and Clay and Dr. Z will answer your business questions live on the air.

All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. We’re talking about creating checklists for everything. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former US SBA Entrepreneur of the Year, and we’re talking about creating checklists for everything.

So What we’re going to do, this is going to be a lot of fun here, we’re going to do a round table. Eric Chuck, the business coach, is going to read the notable quotable. And then Wes Carter’s going to break down an example. Wes Carter’s the legal eagle with Winners and King. He’s represented top clients all over the region. His firm has represented TD Jakes, Joel Osteen, Craig Rochelle, the big names, I mean Joyce Myers. I mean, there’s a lot of big names there. So he’s going to tell us an example of where you’ve seen something go bad in a business like just bad.

Now, again, attorney-client privilege, no specifics. [inaudible 00:09:19]. So you’re going to read the checklist here Chuck, another checklist. This is from the head of the Harvard, at the time, the head of the Harvard Medical School. He’s a leading professor at the Harvard Medical School. He is an American surgeon. He’s the New York Times bestselling author of the Checklist Manifesto. His name is Atul Gawande.

This is one of my favorite books ever.

I love the book. Okay. Here we go, Chuck.

All right. He says, we don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away, not only from saving lives, but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist in embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us, those we aspire to be, handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great and daring, they improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs a little bit of updating.

Have you ever seen Wes where a really good person yes, made a massive mistake that caused profound legal ramifications.

Yeah. And I’m going to stay away from clients and I’m going to go a little closer to home and talk about attorneys.

Oh, there you go.

Because I’m one. I think exactly what the quote was, hits home so well that it’s, I’m going to paraphrase, it’s ego. It’s I’m an attorney, I have a doctorate. I’ve been doing this. I don’t need a checklist. I need my mental capabilities in my experience, and I’ve seen attorneys that forget to do something very simple. So let’s say I’m thinking of one specific instance where you’re buying a business. So I have a client that’s buying another business. Part of that business is a whole bunch of inventory. So 5, 6, 7, $800,000 worth of inventory. You pay some for the name and things but… So we buy the business, but we close. A month later, someone calls us and they’re like, hey, you bought that inventory, but that was collateral on our loan.

And you owe us. Now we’re going to foreclose on all the inventory you bought and take it to pay us. Because just by the act of selling it, you breached the loan document. And what would’ve prevented that? A search that would’ve taken about five seconds to search something called the UCC, because anybody who puts collateral liens on those things has to register those. And it was public records, publicly available online. You don’t even have to get out of your chair to look for. And I have seen those things happen where it costs someone half a million, three chords a million dollars for something that literally would’ve taken me 15 seconds to do, but I just didn’t personally. But someone forgot.

So let’s say that I’m sold on, okay, I need to have a checklist Chuck. What’s the next notable quotable.

All right. The next notable quotable here is there are good checklists and bad. [inaudible 00:12:26] explained, bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long. They’re hard to use. They’re impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situation in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient to the point and easy to use, even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything. A checklist cannot fly a plane. Listen to that, a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps, the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss.

Good checklists are above all practical.

So these are the action steps that you need to take Thrive Nation right now as a result of hearing this, you need to create a daily checklist for the opening of your business. You need to create a daily checklist for the closing of your business. You need to create a checklist for all the marketing activities of your business. You got to create a weekly checklist for the training of your team. Chuck let’s add this to the show notes. You got to create a checklist for your accounting, verifying that two people have signed off on all the deposits that go into the bank. You just have to create a checklist for everything in your business that you want to be effective. But Marshall, I think there’s somebody listening, not all listeners. It’s like a listener who’s listening to this show right now.

They’re sharing this with their friend and their friend. And friend is fighting, not you the listener. Your friend is fighting, wanting to use a checklist. You say, my industry’s different. I know it works good for surgeons. I know it works great for lawyers and-

It’s different.

Builders of homes, but for me, because I’m a landscaper, or I’m a insurance salesman, or-

[inaudible 00:14:09] the seat of my pants.

I don’t need to use a checklist.

Well, Atul Gawande, like I said, this is one of my favorite books, what he says is it gets the silly stuff out of the way. So it allows the masters of a specific skill to perform. And so it gets it out of, hey, are we making sure we’re making the right incision on the right arm versus the wrong arm? Are we amputating the right leg versus the wrong leg?

The left leg. You got really graphic there.

I know.

If you could make it more not medical body. That almost happened to me. They almost operated on the wrong knee. I tore my ACL in high school and they almost operated on one.

They’re like, but that these are the things that are a part of the checklist that allows the surgeons, the lawyers, the pilots to perform their skill at the highest.

Give us a checklist that has to do with bricks and mortar.

I got one.

Don’t get into the body just gross.

When running the concrete business, I had to implement a pretty poor checklist because before I came on and we started to scale, my father was in charge of every concrete pour that we did, and he never forgot anything. Now, when we scaled that out and had other lead guys doing it, oh, they forgot the troughing machines, like the main equipment that we need to finish the slab, stuff like that. So I had to make a pre-poor and a pour day checklist.

So when you traveling, don’t follow the checklist, the issue in it’s in concrete and not surgery. You’re not cutting off the wrong leg. You’re just spending three hours going back and getting the actual machine.

Or that, or you don’t realize you don’t have them, and you have to tear out the entire slab.

Then you get sued and you need attorneys.

Then you get sued.

Because the slab cracks, and two months later you’re in litigation.

Exactly.

Or you don’t follow a checklist and you do cut off the wrong leg. And then my personal injury attorney has a very good case for that poor patient

Cha. Or in the haircut business, you don’t check the client’s hair notes. And they said to you six months ago, I would like to have a faux hawk. And now they’re growing out their hair doing a different style, and you didn’t check the hair notes and you went ahead and did what you’ve remembered them telling you. You thought six months ago. And then they sent me a hateful email talking about how I’ve hired a bunch of morons.

Come on, we can’t have that.

Now they have a side spike.

There we go. And so I’m just telling you this, whether it’s a haircut business or carpet cleaning or photography or videography. You’ve got to make sure that you have a checklist for everything. You not having a checklist is not an excuse. And even if it is an excuse, the customer votes with their dollars. So if they’re happy, they come back and they bring friends. If they’re not happy, they don’t come back and they tell their friends not to use you either, because that’s how business works.

Don’t be lazy.

Now, Chuck, we come back. We’re talking about how to create a linear workflow. Chuck are we talking about the next.

Weren’t we talking about how to create a linear workflow?

And the linear workflow is how do you create a duplicatable process, a system? How do you create the system? So many people say, I want to create business systems. Well, how do you go about creating step by step business systems that scale, stay tuned.

Presenting the world’s only business school without the BS.

All right, Thrive Nation, we have an exclusive interview today for you with Lee Cockerell, the former executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts, who used to manage over 40,000 people and 1 million customers per week. And we’re talking about checklists and the importance of checklists, using checklists. How did Lee Cockerell, C O C K E R E L L M O U S E? How did Lee Cockerell do it at Disney World? How did he do it? I’ll tell you how he did it with checklists.

But Chuck, you managed a small business. Why do people in small business fight so much against the use of a freaking checklist?

There’s multiple reasons, but one of the main things I see is that… This happened with the concrete company, with my trying to implement checklist through my dad. He was old school.

Old school baby.

He would worry that the guys are busy at the end of the day. I get it. I understand you’re tired.

We don’t have time to use a checklist.

No. Yeah, just so tired. And I’m like, just do it. You just have to do it. So that’s the main thing is you just have to create it and implement it. It’s not going to be perfect on the first try, but revise it and make it better every day.

Everything you need to know about using and implementing checklist with Lee Cockerell. Here we go.

Let’s just say that I’m one of those guys who didn’t actually do the checklist, but I just pretended like I did.

Now that’s a lot of people.

So I am your business. You’re the owner, and there’s 10… Or say I’m at Disney and I pretended like I checked off the checklist. Go ahead and deal with me. What would you say to me if I pretended that I did your checklist?

Yeah, I mean, I would ask you first and then I would keep interrogating you. You do a teenager till you get to the truth and they lie about 12 times before you get there. And then probably would tell them the consequences of that. Do you realize that people can get food poisoning and die from this kind of situation? Do you understand that If when the temperature’s not 160 degrees or more and bacteria’s growing and 12 people die and you’re the responsibility for that.

And by the way, let me tell you again, I’m going to give you one chance. If you ever do this again, you’re terminated and there won’t be any more written warnings. Because when you get into safety, you, you’ll start to see how you deal with your kids when they do something unsafe.

Yeah.

You’re not going to be real nice about it. Yeah, you’re going to be real firm. When they run into the street, you’ll probably have a talk with them. They won’t forget for the rest of the afternoon, or when they… You catch them one day driving without their seatbelt on.

Yeah.

What if it’s an area where it’s not safety, but it’s just… Like Disney, one of the things that’s amazing about Disney is that the, it’s so clean. It’s so clean. If somebody… It is always a clean walkway. It’s beautiful. It’s pristine.

But thousands of people will not come back if there’s just stuff littered everywhere.

Yeah.

How do you deal with that guy?

Well, there’s pretty serious training up front about when you join the company. You go through eight hours of what they call traditions training and cleanliness and friendliness and all hammered in. And you learn about the characters and Walt Disney and the pride we have and the public’s love of Disney. And then when you get to the workplace, you get very clear training, testing, and then our managers know we expect them to enforce the training. So Disney managers have no problem dealing with an employee not doing what they’re supposed to do. [inaudible 00:20:42] Some managers are wishy-washy, they let it go. I don’t want to cause… Our managers are very, that’s how we get consistent in Disney by training, testing and enforcement.

Training, testing and enforcement.

Bill Marriott told me, Lee, the only way you get excellence in any organization is training and enforcement. You’ve got training, you got to enforce it. Don’t close your eye to it.

So let me ask you this here. How many bathrooms were you in charge of? Hundreds?

I don’t.

Thousands?

Hundreds.

Hundreds. Okay. So how come you can, you guys could keep a hundred bathrooms clean and the average small business owner, I can’t keep one clean. What is the difference? Is it the checklist and the enforcement? What is it?

I think first it’s your values. Cleanliness is a big deal. That’s one of our values of Disney, cleanly. Even Walt Disney said before he died, he said, even after I’m gone, if you all will keep this place clean and friendly, everything will work out just fine. He didn’t talk about technology, clean and friendly. And today when you say you stand for something, cleanliness, then you’ve got to do it. And it’s worked into all our training. It’s worked into our systems, it’s worked into our inspection systems. It’s worked into, I mean, even me, executive vice president, I would never walk over a piece of paper, I’ll pick it up, because role modeling, people are watching when I do it. And when you have 72,000 employees wake up in the morning, know that’s their job. There’s nothing on the ground.

What role does your… So your to-do list and your day planner for using the same document.

Yeah.

Is that correct? Okay. So in your mind, if you don’t have a day planner or a to-do list, you’re kind of up creek.

Well, what are you going to do?

Okay, now let me ask you this. In your mind, how important is it to have a checklist? So let’s just say in Disney, there’s a bathroom and there’s a bath… And how many bathrooms did you have on your four resorts? Or did you have four resorts or was it five? Did you manage four resorts?

We had four theme parks and 20 hotels and four theme parks. Hundreds of bathrooms. Hundreds.

Four theme parks, 20 hotels, hundreds of bathrooms.

Sure.

Did you have a checklist for how to clean the bathroom?

Absolutely. They’ve proven that checklist on an airplane. It’s kind of important for the pilots.

Yeah.

Flaps up or down. Does it matter? Yes. Without a people been de-iced or not de-iced in the last 30 minutes, yes or no?

Yeah.

And then when you think about other checklists, hospitals have proven recently that checklists reduce infection rates and all kinds of issues. Wash your hands, checklists. When you go into…

As we’re building, as we’re building Thrive, this online platform, we have to edit videos. And so we’ve made these workflows on how to edit a video quickly and so that when the interview with you, we can get it edited and put into the right format. There’s a big checklist there. In your mind, is it possible to make the magic happen at Disney or any other business without checklists?

Not at all. I mean, it’s so complex. If you don’t have checklists, one day you’re going to show up and you’re not going to have one of the cameras with you.

Yeah.

And you don’t believe that’ll ever happen. It couldn’t happen.

It will.

All of a sudden, one of your people gets distracted. They had a problem at home this morning, a death in the family and it doesn’t get on. Or it gets left at the [inaudible 00:23:53].

I have an embarrassing confession. This is funny. I had a wedding. I did all the way in Houston and I show all, I show up for the weddings before checklist, before I knew this stuff. I show up there so excited to DJ down in Houston and I’m like, oh no, there’s no mic stand. So I thought, I’ll just go buy one. So I go buy one. And I’m like, oh no, there’s no amplifier. And I just kept having that… My wife traveled with me and she never would go with me. Well, the couple we ended up getting the music on right before they got there.

No one knew but I was so nervous. And I remember at that point I’m like, I am never going to a DJ wedding or event without a checklist, and now I’m insisting upon it. And I’ve just noticed that that’s not a natural behavior for people. So what would you say right now to the business owner who says, well, at our staffing company or our insurance agency, we don’t use a checklist because it’s all up here. What would you say to that guy?

I’d say, first of all, you’re not going to execute in an excellent way. And second, what’s going to happen the day you’re not there? Can the company carry on? And I used to work for an outside catering company where you learn when you get everything on the truck, and when you get to the side a hundred miles away to do the dinner. If you don’t have a check, you start to open the boxes and you don’t have the chicken-

Yeah.

Or you don’t have the plates or you don’t have the tablecloths that’s where I really learned about checklist. Make sure everything’s on the truck before you end out.

So without a checklist in your mind you’re…

And this is a checklist, basically. This is a checklist for me.

So let’s talk about the bathroom checklist for a second. Yeah. Does somebody initial that off every day?

Yeah, they do. And it’s all been timed how long it takes to clean that bathroom. 12 minutes. Eight minutes, six minutes. Because the manager’s been in there, they’ve done it. Everybody knows this is how long. So we know that person should only be in there for 12 minutes and he should be in the next bathroom within eight minutes.

Does someone inspect that checklist?

Yes. I mean, yeah. And by the way, the checklists are always improving. When you something goes wrong, you go look and see if it’s on the checklist, why did it go wrong? Boom. Because it wasn’t on there. Or there are people checking it off and not really doing it.

Thrive Nation, when we come back, Lee Cockerell explains to us all how to keep great employees, how to keep great people, stay tuned.

Presenting the world’s only business school without the BS.

All right, Tulsa, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. It is hump day. Hump day. Now, Chuck, a lot of listeners have been reaching out to us and have said, Hey, hey, what’s this whole free photo thing you guys are doing? Can you kind of explain what we’re doing here for the… It’s a way to say thank you to all of our listeners who do in fact own businesses.

Yeah, so we have an awesome backend team at Thrive. Yeah. So we’ve got coders, search engine optimizers-

Photographers.

Designers-

Videographers.

Photographers.

Yes.

Right, we have a team of photographers, and for the first 100 listeners who are also business owners, we are going to give you guys a free set of family photos, right. Free family photo session.

You mean the one where we get to wear the matching sweaters?

Yes. Clay will actually wear the same sweater that you and your family wear.

Oh, nice.

We talked about it offline here. But he’s good with that. So he’s going to get in your pictures with you. And then if you don’t want to do the family photos, you can actually get team head shots, right?

Yeah. So you get team head shots for yourself, for your family.

Right.

One photo session.

One photo session.

Typically we charge groups about a thousand dollars for a non-client. Because it’s very detailed, very good, a very high quality studio level photography.

Right.

The family photo session or head shots for your business, for all the business owners.

Just as a thank you.

As a thank you for the first a hundred. And we’ve already got three people that have taken us up on the office. There’s 97 left. If you want to do it, just email us [email protected]. Just email us to [email protected] and we will shoot those photos for you.

Let’s see those pretty mugs for free.

Let’s see the pretty mugs.

Yes.

The mugs are the pretty people.

Right, that’s what we do. That’s why we’re here.

Chuck, are you talking about literal mugs? What are you talking about?

Yeah, that’s all coffee.

Oh, photos of faces.

Faces-

Oh wow. Okay.

In the places.

Now, Thrive Nation, when we get back into this interview here with Lee Cockerell, you’re going to get a chance to hear Lee Cockerell break down for you how to keep great people. It’s really hard to find really good people, but when you do find good people, how do you keep them? How do you treat quality employees well? How do you treat high level employees in a way that makes them want to stick around? Because at Walt Disney World Resorts, when Lee Cockle managed the facility, they had over 40,000 employees. They had over a million customers a week.

God!

He managed the number one tourist destination on the planet. And I’m telling you, he could not have done it if he was not able to keep his great people. So how do you retain hourly employees? How do you deal with people that don’t perform? How do you onboard new people? What kind of performance indicators do you need to watch during the first 90 days? Lee Cockerell breaks it all down for you. On this exclusive interview with Lee Cockerell, the former executive vice president of Walt Disney World Resorts.

Well, final three questions I have here for you is when you ultimately hire somebody, how long do you want them to stick around? What’s in your mind a good amount of time in today’s economy with today’s young people, today’s workforce, all those different variables? How long do you think it’s real? If I’m a small business owner-

Yeah.

In your mind, you speak to groups all over the country.

Yeah.

What is a realistic amount of time you think I should be able to attract somebody and be able to keep them working?

Well, it depends what job it is. At Disney, we have two workforces. We have college kids 10,000, twice a year. They work for six months. They’re higher energy, they’re quick learners. There just perfect Disney little cast members out there taking care of the guests. And then we have people are going to be making up rooms or cleaning bathrooms, cooks. We want them to stay a long time.

Years.

That’s a skill. Years and years and years. And we’re happy they stay. And if we can get them qualified, they can move up to be the management or sous chef or chef or supervisor, that’s fine. But our goal basically with the half that are not part-time, we have part-timers which work two or three days a week because they for they want to.

Yeah.

Then we have the college kids who turn over after six months. And then we have the core staff, which is the other 40%. And actually we need them to stay because of this other group turning. We need the people there being a good role models for them and teaching them and showing them. And so our goal, I mean, when I hire an executive, I’m there for them to be 20, 30 years if I can get them there.

Well, what if someone’s not a good fit, what if someone is just somehow they made it through the system. They fill 132 questions-

Happens all the time.

How quickly do you want to let them go?

Well, we have a 90 days. If they’re not performing, we just dismiss.

You feel bad about that?

No.

Okay.

I talk about people. If people don’t perform that’s not my problem.

Yeah.

It’s not my fault actually. We even talk about they’re nice people. We talk about those people that have to leave Disney. It’s good people who just don’t fit and people don’t fit.

I just want to hammer home that because I talk to so many business owners who are like, gosh, this guy-

He’s got a wife and two kinds.

Got a wife, he’s got a kid.

When you start worrying about all that, instead of performance, you’re going to slowly get off track.

And this one business and in particular, I was thinking about from years ago, they had people that were not performing. Customers are starting to not come back because the service was so bad and they keep saying, this person’s got a wife and kids. And I was starting, I eventually said, well, what about your wife and kids?

You know what I tell them? Okay, keep them. But let them stay home and pay them, but don’t let them come in. If you feel sorry, pay them. Just don’t let them come in.

Yeah.

It’ll be cheaper.

Right.

Take it out of your retirement fund.

Is that in your ministry foundation?

Or put them in a place where they can do the job, move them into a job, and if they don’t do it there. But no.

Well, now as far as it did Disney, when you did onboard people and they did come on board. Did you have a checklist that extended 90 days? Is that how long? You said 90 days or how long was that?

Well, each job has a different checklist from the learning part, on the job to… Our problem is after 90 days, we can’t easily get rid of you. We have union contracts. So you got a 90 day probationary period.

Where you’re trying to figure out if they’re [inaudible 00:32:32].

Where I can let you go for any reason.

Okay.

And that’s why we tell the managers watch performance in the first 90 days. If they start coming to work late in the first 90 days, and not showing up, having a bad attitude-

Yeah.

Dismiss them. Don’t get over the 90 days.

But you’d recommend that practice even if you didn’t have the unionship.

Absolutely.

First 90 days, let’s figure it out.

Hey, if you’re not good in the first 90 days, it’s going to only get worse. I can tell you it’s not going to get better.

Yeah.

Your best day will be the first day.

Okay.

And if you’re late already the first day, this is…

But you have it documented per position.

Oh, absolutely.

Okay, awesome. So it wasn’t just like a deal of where you just shadow someone and you figure it out. I mean, it’s very detailed. You got to learn how to run this cash register, and flip this burger.

They got to show us You can do it. Yeah. Even the managers, they go tested before they give the keys to the restaurant before they can become the manager. They got three hours, one-on-one with two other managers shooting questions at them, make sure they know the temperatures, what time we open, how you do this, if somebody has a heart attack, what do you do? Where’s the respirator? You know what I mean? Yeah.

Lot of stuff there.

Yeah. It’s kind of like we can’t turn you loose on a thousand dinners unless we know you got your act together.

I’m only obsessing on this question because I see it all the time in small business where there’s like the person who’s the receptionist doesn’t know how to check the voicemails, doesn’t know where the passwords are saved, doesn’t know what to say, and there’s no system. It’s just like, well we’ll just over time she’ll figure it out.

Because they never train. They just came in, threw them on the desk and…

Yeah.

Sad.

That’s brutal.

And they might quit.

Now for a lot of the things we’ve just talked about as far as hiring people, which one of your two books deals with that moreso as far as how to bring on the right people and manage people?

They both have a section in there about how to keep people. This one has one in there. That’s it. One of the rules is hire the best cast.

Okay.

And talks about how to hire the best cast with setting up questions with obstacles, listening to the answers, hiring people who overcome obstacles, listening to how they solve issues. When you ask them a question, they can explain how they went all the way.

Yeah.

Even if it took them two weeks to turn a customer around while the other four people answered the question, took them an hour and they gave up. We can all be better interviewers because the young people today, they go on the internet, they want to work at Target. They go in and say, Target interviewing and all the people, they tell you exactly, here’s what they’re going to ask you. Here’s what you need to say. Disney. So when you put the obstacles in, those are not standard questions.

That’s great.

Yeah. In a nurse you might say, tell me about a time you had to deal with a really sick patient and she wasn’t doing well, and her husband was coming in every night, giving you a hard time and listen to what she did. What was the outcome? And she went through this and did that and got the chief nurse involved, and she sat down with the husband, talked to him and did this and that. And then you go, wow, that’s the person that goes all the way. That’s the one I want. Not the ones who say, oh, these people, they’re coming out they’re a pain in the bud. Yeah. So it’s amazing what people will… Because people can only tell you what they know-

Right.

What they did. They can’t even make it up because they can’t even visualize that greatness. They cannot visualize greatness.

Thrive Nation, when we return Lee, Cockerell’s going to be breaking down for us specifically what greatness looks like in the world of business. And I loved this interview with Lee, and I’ll tell you why. Because he explains that in a great company, the agenda should be 90% the same every week and every week. You should do the same thing over and over and over, making it better and better and better with no new ideas.

That doesn’t sound like you at all.

Just executing the systems, making it better. And the fun comes from nailing it. It’s about rehearsing it and becoming rigorous about executing a high quality system. But Chuck, a lot of people are looking for constantly new ideas.

Right.

They don’t want to…

And when you’re drifting around from idea to idea, you can’t nail anything like Clay just said. Therefore, you can’t make it a money.

I’m so excited for Lee Cockerell to break down what excellence looks like in the world of business. Stay tuned. It’s the Thrive Time Show on your radio. More exclusive interviews with Lee Cockerell when we return.

Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a market increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing clan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth to mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services you’re choosing to use a proof and turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you are looking for.

My name is Taylor Hall. I’m the general manager of the Tulsa Oilers Professional Hockey Team. Our goal every night here at the BOK 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 sales people 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 Farmer’s 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. And if I wanted to do anything.

A couple 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, decline, 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’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 that 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 Druker, the president for UPS Stores Canada. Also a member of the [inaudible 00:42:35] board in our honorary position. So 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 the.

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 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. I, 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 you got everybody up and moving. The fact that you could get John Tanny up dancing in his seat, that is worth the price of mission right there.

It just reinvigorates you. You hear somebody talk about how, you know, put 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 nineties. 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 to my ear.

I think he just really gets our industry, you know, 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.

The Thrive Time Show Today, interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet.

You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zoellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website, we’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How to get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems. So now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve.

You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered.

The reason why I’ve built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this, and because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter Bunny, but inside of it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get rich quick walk on hot coals product.

It’s literally, we teach you the brass tack, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying. And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google Elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zoellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’ll give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see you.