Business Podcast | 10 Best-Practice Management Moves to Create a Fast-Paced & Fast-Growth Culture of Accountability + Celebrating the 4 Clay Clark Client Success Stories

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. Good look as the father of five, that’s what I’m a dive. So if you see my wiping kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio. And now three, two, one, here we go. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the biggest things we picked up when we picked up the Thrive 15 team was an entire team. You want an SEO guy that knows things about search engine optimization? Got it. was an entire team. You want an SEO guy that knows things about search engine optimization? Got it. You got a website guy that’s built big websites like Garth Brooks’ website? Awesome. We have it. He’s coming in. If I had to pay for that on my own outside of Thrive15, there’s just no way. For us, one of our most immediate needs when I got connected with Clay was technology. We had a website, but I had a website in Tulsa. Our other partner had a website in Colorado. They did everything from doing a drone video Where they flew over all of our markets with the drone they integrated that into our site They built every single thing that I think of they do we do a podcast if I was gonna produce my own podcast There’s no I mean that alone Just that alone would be what I pay for it just for that But then if you add the fact that I’ve got if I need a business card design if I need a website build if I need This if I need that I know what I would pay for that if I had to go a la carte. I feel guilty sometimes. Like I don’t probably write a big enough check for the value that I get. I think there’s a lot of entrepreneurs that have ideas of what they want to do with their business, and how they want to grow, and what market they want to be in, and how they can increase production and do all this. But it’s not about having 4,000 ideas. It’s about having 12 and executing them 4,000 times. That’s the trick, in my opinion. And that’s where Thrive’s value comes in. I feel like I have my own Staff my own like I don’t know a 20 person team that when I need something I Just go to him and it happens All right tribe nation on today’s show we’re talking about this idea that the customer will fire you If you don’t fire bad employees What yes the the empty customer will fire you if you refuse to fire bad employees. Let me just give an example. The other day, I went to this Mexican restaurant. I won’t mention the name of the place here, but I went to it, okay? It’s near here. And I go there and my wife says, could you go in there and order a whatever the heck with a whatever the heck? I said, sure. So I order the thing. And I’m there for a long time. I’ve never gotten that. So I’m ordering the thing and it’s taking a long time, okay? And so I’m thinking to myself, wow, I could have probably gone out and raised the chickens, slaughtered a chicken, done all the things needed to get myself or whatever the heck faster than this took. And the people were rude, they were abrasive, they didn’t want, they didn’t care if you were there. That’s their specialty is rudeness. And then so I didn’t go online, leave a bad review, I didn’t tell people. I just, I thought to myself, mental note, not probably want to go back there, probably not. So I went to a place down the street called Abuelos, you’ve heard of Abuelos? Yeah. And I had a great experience at Abuelos. Yeah. I thought to myself, you know what? I’m gonna go back to Abuelos. You know why? Because I don’t hate myself. Well you want to get, you know, table-side guacamole at Abuelos, but you get table-side sarcasm at the other place. I thought to myself, you know, I mean, self, do you hate yourself? And I thought, no, I don’t hate myself. Okay, well then I probably don’t want to go to a place that hates me. Well, and you don’t want to order what the heck if you’re gonna go to a Mexican restaurant just as a tip I would go like enchiladas Let’s do another example. There’s a gas station around here. I’m not gonna mention the name. I go there, okay You know what I’m talking about. They have like a it’s like a homeless Festival going on in front of the building every day There’s one by my house. It is a homeless festival there you are and they and like the employees feed the homeless people yeah They’ve developed kind of a dependency pyramid shopping carts full of stuff in front of them. You know what I’m talking about, though. I know exactly what you’re talking about. And the people that work there, you can’t tell if they are the homeless people or if they are working there. This is true. And then they all, and each one of them brings their own boom box to work now. Is this happening at yours? I’ve not seen that. The dude brings a bass tube into the gas station. So he’s playing the most foul Travis Scott music possible, and customers are a distraction to his music. Yeah, rapping. And he smells high. I mean, this guy didn’t just say hi, but he’s like, hi. I mean, this guy is wow. And so I thought to myself, self, do you hate yourself? I thought, no, I don’t. No. But so I went to I went to quick trip. It was a better stop. A better thing, baby. Let me do one more example. OK, here we go. Chick-fil-A. There’s a Chick-fil-A. They haven’t figured out this just in Chick-fil-A. Has it figured out? They do. They have got a line wrapped around the building. It is just going 90 miles an hour. The other day I thought, man, this line is long, baby. It’s a long one. You know what? I don’t hate myself. Maybe I’ll go somewhere else just to see what happens. You were going to pop by somewhere. And I’m not going to say where I went. You were going to pop by somewhere. Yeah, there you go. And I went by the place that’s next to the Chick-fil-A. And there’s no cars there. I thought, man, there’s no cars there. It’s going to be quick. It’ll be quick. So I go in I thought I go in and it’s like I scared the employees Yeah, cuz I haven’t seen a customer in a long time and they were not happy to see me. They were scared They’re not where’s this person walking in the store? So I said forget it So I went back to Chick-fil-a cuz the Jackassery was on display and I’m just saying this because if you’re out there today And you own a business and you do not fire the poor performers The customer will fire you and here to talk about it is Matt Klein with OxyPresh. Matt, how are you, sir? I am doing great. Thanks for having me. Matt, what do you do at OxyPresh? What’s your official title these days? So I am the director of franchise development. Me and a team of other two guys, we have a conversation. We have many conversations with people that are trying to get into the small business world, trying to figure out what maybe franchise or small business would fit their niche. We are one of those franchise options, so we’ll take them through everything from evaluation, validation, documentation sharing, everything from how we clean the carpet to how you get insurance for a company. So everything top to bottom. I think what he just said is he likes to scratch the itch to find a niche trying to get rich. I think that’s what he said. Oh, wow. A lot of rhyming going on. He said, I think he said validation. I think that was pretty much it, actually. Yeah. Didn’t he just say valid? What was it? He said validation. Validation. What else did he say? He said validation. It was, I don’t know, did he say confiscation? I don’t think it was confiscation. Oscillation? He’s in charge of oscillation at OxyFresh. He just goes back and forth. Okay, now, seriously, folks, listen to this. So, if you’re out there today and you’re going, I want to buy an Oxifresh. So let’s say you go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash Oxifresh and you go, man, this business plan is hot. You can hook it up and you’re fired up. I’m fired up. We’re all fired up. But if you have employees that work for you and they do a bad job, even if the business model is profoundly solid, like Oxifresh, even with the history of the Oxifresh has, the business won’t work. And so if you go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire folks, you can download a copy of this book I’m gonna read from today. You go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash millionaire. You can go there right now and you can download a copy of my newest book here, which is called A Millionaire’s Guide How to Become Sustainably Rich. And we go to page 159. And I write, if you are not 100% obsessed with delivering on every promise that you have made to your customers, then your entire workforce will quickly learn through observation that they won’t be held accountable either. So to make your life 2% easier, I provided 10 proven methods to create a culture of accountability. So I’m going to fire it off, Matt. You can tell me why it works. And if you don’t like it, you can rebuke it and set it on fire. Okay, here we go. So one, assign every task in writing if possible. So when you tell someone to go do something, whether it’s email documentation or it’s written on an agenda, a shared document, whether it’s communicated via text. Matt, why does it help to have a written documentation of some kind of the work order or the thing that’s supposed to be done, the task that’s supposed to be done? Well, especially for employees or new employees, they have to have something to follow, right? If you have an employee and they don’t have like an actual script to follow, they’re inevitably just gonna do their own thing. They’re gonna find their own script, whether good or bad. So you as the owner, you’ve got to put the best processes in place for them to be successful. And if you don’t, then they are by nature just gonna go do their own thing. And if they’re good, you get away with it maybe. But if they’re not, you’re gonna have a lot of problems because they are gonna do things that they may think is great, or they might cut corners because they think they can get away with it. But yeah, that script is invaluable because it holds them accountable. And then when they come to you, you have problems, you say, did you follow the script or did you not follow the script? And so it gives you something to manage too. And also it allows you to essentially compare your employees to each other. You have to set a standard of procedures. And if it’s broken, then you’ll figure it out pretty quick. Okay. Now, next one, Aaron Antus, I want to get your thoughts on this. Okay. You want to follow up. Step two, you follow up. You can’t just say, Hey, homeboy, do this thing. You got to follow up to see if the thing was done. So as an example today, Aaron, one of our wonderful clients wrote a book and we’re helping the client get the book published. And so I went to Devin, I went to D, I said, D, is this the book done? He says, I got to talk to Devin. I talked to Devin. I said, Devin, is the book done? He said, I got to talk to D. I said, I know what’s happening here. You know what? The boys at corporate are trying to give me the runaround. And I’m just messing with them. But both of them were working on a project and Devon needed to do certain things and Dee needed to typeset the book and then Devon needed to upload the book. So just by following up, it created the conversation. And then I said, are the boys at corporate trying to hold us up here? And they kind of laughed about it and then we got it done. Can you talk about the follow-up thing, Aaron? Why do you have to follow up at shawhomes.com? Well, the interesting thing, like in my world, it’s like, yeah, we schedule a day when the lumber is going to be dropped on site to start, you know, framing a house. Well, if I send the framers there to start framing, and somebody hasn’t followed up to make sure we have the right number of studs there with the right length, the right number of sheets of plywood, the right number of nails, all those things. Guess what happens when framers show up? It gets weird. They’re going to play cards. They are not going to be able to frame a house. So somebody’s got to follow up. I’ve got superintendent, one of the jobs on his task is he’s got to go and check and make sure all the lumber showed up when it was supposed to. He’s got to follow up. Otherwise, things don’t happen. And that goes all the way down the line as we build the home. I used to work in concrete back in the day. Matt, have you ever worked in the concrete industry? No. We, in Minnesota, we had basements. You have basements in Denver, right there, Matt? You have basements? Yeah, we don’t have them here in Oklahoma. So we had to, you know, my job was to work on a concrete crew where we poured basements. So we did the footings and then we poured the basements. And so the crew that got there before us, they dug out the hole, they dug out the, our job was to frame, basically build out the footings and then to frame up what looked like a basement and you pour the concrete in it. Yeah. And then when the concrete dries, you have a basement. And our boss, I won’t mention his name right now, I don’t wanna get him in trouble, I think he’s still in the industry, but he says to me one day, I remember this, he goes, Clay, come here. And I said, what’s going on? He goes, come here. I said, okay. It’s towards the end of the day and he says, should you ever get promoted to a point where your job is to order the amount of concrete we need? If you get it wrong by a large number, I can’t go take this concrete back to the office and use it next week because of how it works. So I want you to watch an adult pour out $15,000 of concrete into a vast nothingness and I want you to just watch it happen. Oh boy. So he, because we finished all the jobs and we had all this leftover concrete. And so he’s like, crank it up. And he hears and he’s standing up, you know, on the forums and he’s just pouring concrete all over the place because, because there’s so much extra concrete and we already have a whole dug. And he’s like, pour it. Come on, let’s go.” And the guy who got it wrong, he’s like, hey, why don’t you assist me in pouring out one quarter of this year’s salary into the… Boop, boop. And it was really, all of us, probably 25 of us gathered. And he’s like, this is a great teaching moment for everybody here. And he’s just pouring it. This was back in like… That’s where you want to put the guy that incorrectly did the order. You want to lay him down in like a hole and put the concrete on top of us. This was like 20 years ago. So today, there’d probably be $50,000 of concrete. I mean, it was just… And we’re pouring, and this is this lesson. It’s about 20 minutes into this lesson, and he’s going, keep it going. And it’s just, I mean, it was rough. And you know, and so I’m like, so what went wrong, boss? And he’s like, I’ll tell you what went wrong. Is it, and he just started going off on a tangent, you know? At the end of the day, no one, someone didn’t follow up. Yeah. They didn’t double check. And I think a lot of great people have good intentions, but if you don’t follow up, the ball gets dropped. On to step number three. This is, these are 10 best practice management moves to create a fast paced and fast growth culture of accountability. This is a big one here. all action items, working off the assumption that these items were not completed in a timely and accurate manner. Follow up with the assumption that they weren’t done properly. I want to talk about this for a second, Matt. Paranoia. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, once said, only the paranoid survive. Why do you have to trust but verify? Why can’t you just blindly assume that the people on your team, if you buy an OxiFresh franchise and you hire a new team of technicians, why can’t you just assume that they got the Google review or that they did in fact clean the carpet, so they did call the customer back. Why can you not assume that? Because there’s only one assumption that will get you hurt, and that’s if you assume that it got done. If you assume that it didn’t get done, you’re always going to double-check yourself and not get into that problem. I’m a perfect example. I used to do all this. I used to set wrong expectations and not follow up and just assume. And you just really start solving, you become a problem solver. The problem that was created was from yourself. And so if you assume that things are not going done, getting done correctly, then you automatically put yourself in a scenario where you’re checking instead of assuming. And then if it’s great, perfect. You’re just checking to make sure. It also gives you a chance by the way, to positively reinforce to your employees that they did a good job. Right. Right. And so, but if you do the opposite, it’s like, they’re doing good, they’re doing good. You’re gonna look back a month later and be like, oh, they did not a single thing because I wasn’t checking in on it. Like everyone’s very behavior based. If they know they can get away with it because you’re not gonna check, they will just continue to do it the way that they feel is appropriate. Now today I will say this, one of my clients I’m working with owed me $5,000 of commission for the month, which is great. Another client owed me $4,000 of commission for the month, which is great. Another client owed me four thousand dollars of commission for the month, which is great. So a total of nine thousand dollars of commission. And it’s the 25th. And that money was owed to me on the 15th. And so I talked to a certain person. I said, hey, did this person get charged? And they go, I think they did. And I said, but I mean, they gave me their credit card to charge. They said it’s a card on file. They said charge it. It was a church. I think they did. I was like, well, I don’t think they did. I mean, they might’ve, but I don’t, I believe they didn’t. And they checked and they go, oh, my bad. Like, oh yeah. So again, the follow-up is so key. It happens every day. Four, be prompt all the time. These are 10 best practice management moves to create a fast-paced and fast growth culture of accountability. Gotta be prompt all the time. You have to be, this is one of the things why you do not want me to hang out with you folks outside of the workplace. It does not go well. Because I want to be on time. So like right now we’re going to the lake this weekend. And I have a schedule right here, Aaron. I’m going to pull it up. I want Matt to see the schedule. And this is my lake schedule. And it’s starting to get, people are starting to get pissed right now, which is how I know we’re getting close, Matt, to lake time. Because we’re going to have a great time, Matt. But Matt, when I, you know, this is my job, is I got to plan it out. I’ve got my Larry’s Lake trip. Okay, here we go. So I have it right here. I said, guys, we got to leave Friday night at 10 o’clock. And they’re like, what? I’m going, no, no, we leave at 10. Because I have my first thing I have to do at six and my next thing at eight. And I have a whole schedule that I have to adhere to. And they’re going, do you really have, this is, I mean, I’m working through it, it’s not done yet, but guys, this is serious crap. We’re going to go to the store at four, we’re going to grill at six, we’re getting s’mores at 7.30, we’re watching Christmas Vacation at 8.30. I don’t want any crap, this is what we’re doing. This is how I, I’m not kidding, when this is done, this will be a typed out agenda, or I can’t do it. Now again, I know why a lot of people struggle to be on time, because they don’t leave on time. That is true. And Matt, in business, casualness causes casualties. It does. So I’m not saying this is like the way to live life. I got three of my kids that think this is awesome. The other two don’t like it so much. I’m like, you’re going to get your ass in the vehicle now. Why? Because we’re going to have fun at the lake. We’re leaving at 10. Come on, let’s go. You know? You will have fun. You will. But I’m serious though. And a lot of people, I joke about it, but a lot of people in our culture, they operate their business like it’s a casual, lazy river. Nothing starts on time, it all drifts. Matt, what happens if you allow that culture to happen? I’ve personally done that, right? If you’re not checking in, you’ll have your, one of your employees show up to the first job 20 minutes late, then they’ll show up to the next job 30 minutes late, and they’ll show up to the next job an hour late. That will catch up to you because they might even be clever enough to get away with a few of them. But inevitably what’ll happen is you’re gonna lose a customer, and that customer might be one customer, it might be a customer with a bunch of referrals, they might leave you a terrible review that reflects the behavior of your technician, right? I mean, it can be a very much, you know, something that builds on itself. So, you know, I always check, if I ever get something from a customer and they say, hey, you know, your guy was on time, I always go and check the very first job of the day. Yeah. And it’s almost always that they were late to the first job. Right. And so it’s that and it’s very simple for the next week I’ll call them at like six o’clock and say, hey, yep, because I know you got a job in like three hours. Just want to make sure you make it. You know, funny story for you. This is a little fun. Eric, Eric Trump story. Eric and I were talking one day. I could share the story. He shared this on the mic out loud. But he said that his dad, Eric, is like a basically a 40 year old man who runs the Trump organization, which has like 4,000 employees. And he said to this day, his dad will call him like at five and go, Hey, did I catch you? And he’s like, catch me doing what? He’s like, are you sleeping in? You know, he’s like to this day, his dad at that point is the president of the United States, still calling his son at five in the morning wanting to know, are you up? Are you getting it done? Because that’s the culture of accountability. And he said, he goes, I take great pride in always being wide awake and ready to go when he calls me, because he can be calling at any time. So I think it’s hilarious. Now we move on to page 161 of the book here, folks. This is move number five. You want to focus on improving your reputation and credibility every day. Get a Google review and a video review every day. What am I saying? Get a Google review and a video review every day. What? Get a video testimonial and a Google review every day. What? I’m telling you, pre-Google, I used to entertain for weddings, and we would do about 80 weddings a weekend, and every weekend, our team would call the bride. So if we DJed your wedding this Saturday, two weeks from now, I would call you, and I would say, hey, how was the wedding? Awesome. I’m just calling to quality control, like I said I would, just to make sure you were super happy. On a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest and one being the worst, how happy were you with the service? And they would say, eight or a nine. We call that the net promoter score. You can call it whatever you want. I’m just saying, how happy were you? And they give me a number and I say, well, what can we do to improve? Is there anything we could do to improve the service? And they give me that number or they tell me what I can do to do better. And I say, okay, great. I’m gonna document that. I’m gonna go over that with the DJ. Thank you so much. And here’s the deal. If you could go on at the time, it was not.com and theweddingwire.com, and you could leave a review today. If you left a review today, you have to do it by the end of today. You’re entered in for a chance to win and all expenses, the dream vacation, valued at $10,000 to either Hawaii or to this tropical island or something. And the brides would go, oh, really? And I said, you have to do it today though. And they would go, oh, how do I do it? I’d have to walk them through it. And so, Matt, at a certain point though, we had thousands of positive reviews and testimonials. And so when a bride, before they ever booked with us, I would say, hey, before you book with us, before you decide to pay us, I know we’re going to meet tomorrow for our first consultation, but before you decide to work with us or not, call through our references just to talk to some other brides and see their, get their feedback. And I would email them a list, and I’m not kidding, this list was hundreds of pages long of just the bride’s name, the groom’s name, and their phone number. And it was just such a wow, because the brides, if they ever reached the couples, they were so wowed. And you have to do this every day. Now, move number six, it’s very important that you’re candid about what cannot get done and what can get done. What? So if you have a culture and you have an employee that says, boss, can you do this? And you’re the boss, you might say, definitely can’t do it. Or I can do it. But not, hey, I’ll get back with you. Because the more times you say that, it begins to drift into an endless to-do list. Or if you’re an employee and your boss says, hey, could you work on Friday night? And you go, yes, I can. Or no, I can’t. But you don’t wanna have a culture where you say, I’ll get back with you. Because if you keep doing that, the list keeps growing. Matt, why is it important to just clarify what you can or cannot do? I think it’s really important lesson for somebody out there that’s in the habit of touching everything twice. Yeah. I mean, what’s your end goal? You’re trying to get an answer to a question that’s probably usually solving a problem, right? And so the longer you wait, like you said, it’s going to compile and then you know you have to figure out something else you have to be working kind of behind the behind the ball so I mean whatever you’re trying to solve like procrastination does kill business a lot right because you’re not actually solving the problem you know I’d say is if you’re gonna be doing things like that you know you should have those expectations of your employees ahead of time right very rarely is there something I need to ask my employees that they’d be like, I’m shocked you would ask me that. I know what their schedule is, they got to submit it. What are they capable of? And I know, so if something comes up, I go, well, this guy could work this weekend or this guy can’t work this weekend, but it shouldn’t be a surprise you as an owner. Like you should just know that. Now, Aaron, we have a lot of our listeners who listen from the Midwest. Yeah, so unless you are a bull castrator, you should never work behind the balls. That’s a principle. That’s a principle! You know, you heard Matt, he was kind of hinging at it. He said, you want to get behind the ball? Yeah, yeah. We know what he meant. He was talking to all the bull castrators out there. He would have said behind the balls. He would have lost them in that analogy. This is true. Okay, let’s continue here. Move number seven. Take responsibility. If your company jacks something up, just say it’s my fault and move on. If you’re the owner. So true. If there’s a problem, don’t say, well, I don’t know who on my team could have possibly let the ball down. You know, I don’t know who on my team could have possibly let the ball down. Own it. Just own it. Say, my fault, my bad. Clearly, it’s my fault. Own the mistake. Find a solution. People are forgiving if you own it. Move number eight. Make sure that the ball, not balls, make sure that the ball does not get dropped as a result of poor communication. So often, people are vague. Again, casualness causes casually be very clear about when things need to be done and who needs to get it done. Who needs to get it done and when does it need to get done. 9. Never delegate an action item to a group of people. Oh no. Oh boy, never say, you seven people work together as a team and plan that party. You know what’s going to happen? Nothing. Nothing or one person is going to do it and then they’re going to resent the other six for not doing anything. Never assign something to a team, just assign it to a specific person. If they want to grab other people to help them, that’s great, but assign things to a specific person. And 10 don’t allow vague and non-action items to constantly work to work their way onto your staff agenda. Like we’re going to research a better way to achieve more success in the fourth quarter. What be specific with action items. Do not get caught assigning vagaries. Now, Matt Klein, people out there, they want to buy an oxy press. Somebody out there. There’s one guy listening right now. And he says, I want to buy an oxy press. I just went to it. I’m sorry, Matt. Flag schedule thing got me all strung out. It reminds me of my father. He used to yell at me all the time. So, but somebody wants to buy an OxyFresh franchise, Matt. How do they get ahold of you? What’s the process like? What does it cost? Yeah, you can go on and fill the form out. The form’s gonna give us your contact information. It’ll log into our system so you can get an automated text message and an email that will just say, hey, you’re working with Matt here. When’s a good time for us to have an intro conversation? And from there, we’ll start the, you know, the real eval. I’m going to ask a bunch of questions like, what has you looking at a franchising? What are you currently doing? What are your, you know, what are some of your goals? What’s your timeframe? Like what’s your, what’s your income dynamic right now? Uh, and, and really the why, like why are you running a company? Is it for time freedom? Is it because you lost your job or whatever? And then we’re going to go down each aspect of OxyPress from financing to what we actually deliver in terms of service to what our back-end office tools are to how we automate with everything in terms of marketing to how we support you and that process can take 30 days it could take you know nine months depending on the person and really kind of what they’re what they’re trying to accomplish and then we’ll get to a point where if it makes sense to both parties and you want to move forward, we’ll fly you out to Colorado. So we’ll take you through the entire process of looking into Oxifresh, down to getting funding, all of that stuff. Matt, what percentage of people need funding or work with funding outside financing versus paying cash to buy an Oxifresh? About 80% of the people we deal with get some form of funding, whether it’s an SBA, whether it’s a line of credit, a HELOC. A big one right now because of the interest rates is a 401k or retirement rollover. That’s a huge financing option right now. So and we have vendors for all of those. They specialize in these things. They’ll help not only navigate your own personal finances. We work on a lot of people’s credit, just building it back up so they actually can become fundable as well through that process. So yeah, we’ll find and figure out what’s best for that individual person. And again, Matt, if someone buys an Oxifresh, I mean, we’re talking about the vast majority of people are using some kind of financing. So are they doing like monthly payments? They work out some kind of small business loan where they do payments? Yeah, usually. Yeah, that’s a misconception. A lot of people think they need to have that money in hand or that they may not be fundable. There’s a few criteria that they need to kind of understand like their credit score needs to be above 670. They can’t have a negative debt to income ratio unless they have a lot of assets to their name. And they typically can’t have a bankruptcy within the last seven years. If you check those three boxes, you can typically get a loan. What about franchisees? Is it a requirement that they have that good of a looking beard like yourself? Or is that not? It doesn’t hurt. It doesn’t hurt. Okay. Hey Matt, how long have you been married now? How long has it been since last week? Three years and a week since last week. You’ve been married three years and a week? No, three years and like two months. Do you still count the number of days you’ve been married? I’m not really that guy. I lean on my wife for a lot of those key details. Okay, I just need details like what the anniversary date is. No, Matt is a great guy and we were all so excited when Matt got married. Part of the show, the reason why we do the show is we just want to make sure he doesn’t screw it up. She’s a great lady. We hear nothing but great things about her. And Matt’s a great guy, but it’s our job to keep him on the straight and narrow during this private public conversation. That’s right. OK, Matt, I appreciate you very much, brother. You take care. We’ll talk to you next week. All right. Thanks, guys. OK, we got you. So I can close my phone down. Yep, let’s close the phone down. OK, you got it? OK, I got it. There we go. May the interrogation begin. Here we go. Three two one and Well, I know that many of you may consider Coming to one of our in-person workshops or becoming a one-on-one business coaching client but before you decide to take action and To invest the time and doing a free 13-point assessment with me or investing the time to come to one of our in-person workshops I thought you should hear directly from one of our longtime clients who’s had a lot of success So he can share with you about his experience. So now that he further I do Charles Ulrich welcome under the thrive time show. How are you, sir? I’m doing great. Thanks. So Charles, I gotta ask you. How did you originally hear about the business coaching services that I provide sir? I Was listening to podcasts on iHeartRadio on my three and a half hour commute back and forth to my business in another state. And so people can prove that your business is real. What’s the name of your company or what’s the website people can go to to learn more about it? Cannonpumps.com. Cannonpumps.com. And what kind of services and products do you provide? a specialized slick line concrete pumping service along the Wasatch Front and Southeast Idaho and have for a lot of years. And so when you reached out to us, were you looking to grow the business or what had you initially decided to reach out about attending a conference or the in-person or the one-on-one business coaching? I had just hit a brick wall, I had lost key people. It was back down to just me after years, and I did not know what to do with my business and was struggling to put the skillset together to, and the desire to grow it and do anything else with it. And so I was just looking for answers, some answers. And from the time that you reached out and scheduled that 13-point assessment to now, how much have you grown, sir? At least 200%, probably. Wow. Wow. So, you’re saying your company has doubled in size? Yes, at least. Maybe more than doubled, or? Yes. Now when we do a weekly call with you, we like to cover the core repeatable, actionable processes. You know, the reason why Dr. Robert Zellner and I have a lot of success in business is that we’re both rigorous and very disciplined about following proven systems. And so a big key component, I would say the key component of what we do, is we have a weekly call that’s designed to provide you with practical operational help for your business. How do those weekly calls help you steer the ship? They make me focus on my business and they help me to remember the fundamentals. We’re always being asked, what about this fundamental? What about this fundamental? How is this problem being resolved? How is this problem being resolved? And over time, you look forward to the meeting because it forces you to resolve any issues you have and work through them with proven solutions. Yep, because it forces you to push through those problems and achieve success. I love it. Now I got to ask you this. How is the weekly, how do the weekly calls, how have they helped you with your sales process? Well, a lot. We run our business for 25 years on our original Dream 100, and we didn’t have much more than that, so we were very limited. One of the first things we did was, of course, Google and the reviews, and now our schedule is full of non-regular customers. I don’t have a set of six customers dictating my whole business. I have a set of 150 customers dictating my business. Now, again, if you were to take those calls out of your life and not have those weekly meetings, what do you think would happen to the level of success that you’ve achieved? Because behind the scenes, we’re optimizing the website, we’re running your ads, we’re making sure we’re tracking all the numbers. What would happen if you took the calls out, you think? Man, it would just be a slow implosion. Not even really that slow, it would just be, there’s just so much ground covered in that, that you can’t, it would be hard to, for me as a business owner and involved in the business, it would be hard for me to replace that, even with people, time, money, the resources would be just hard to grasp, let alone implement it and be able to do a working system to have somebody do any of it. Now, Dr. Robert Zellner and I and our in our companies what we like to do is we like to keep our meetings as short as possible meaning we want to cover what we need to cover and then we want to get back to business probably in the way that you like to pump concrete as quickly as possible and then move on to something else and I think a lot of people maybe don’t quite understand that idea again we have we block out an hour every every week for that meeting but it doesn’t need to take an hour. Can you maybe explain why it’s important to have that meeting regardless of whether it takes an hour or 20 minutes or whatever the timeline is? It helps you keep us focused on the core fundamentals of what we’re doing. If we don’t have that pretty soon, we’re going sideways and we’re worried about things that don’t matter as much. You’ve identified the things that we need to focus on and that meeting, no matter how long it is, helps bring us back and forces us to look at those numbers, our revenue numbers, our reviews numbers, our leads numbers, are we converting, all of that stuff, it forces us to look at the information that nobody wants to look at on their own. Now, in our coaching program, we only work with 160 clients. And so, you know, sometimes you might work, if you’re a listener out there, you might work with me. I work with 15 clients. You might work with Carter. You might work with Devin. You might work with Andrew. You might have worked with Marshall. You might have worked with Eric. You might have worked with, there’s so many wonderful people that we’ve had a chance to mentor over the years. And inevitably, the question gets asked, well, how could your coach possibly help me if he’s not a concrete expert? I want to ask you, how have the coaching calls helped you with your interviewing process and to know what to look for in a job applicant, even though your particular coach, Andrew, is not a concrete, quote unquote, expert? Just because you’re an expert in concrete doesn’t mean you’re a business owner. So Andrew brings a vast knowledge of all these other clients and so can answer a lot of questions about what we need to do employee-wise that I would really have no other answer to. And from that, even though he’s not a concrete guy, he knows more about business than probably 98% of all of my clients who are concrete guys. Now how have the coaching calls helped you with the hiring process in terms of learning how to run and launch your Indeed ads? Because I see a lot of business owners that struggle to recruit people. How has that, the coaching calls and the coaching program helped you to effectively learn how to launch and run indeed ads or the entire hiring process really? One of the biggest things about getting going is just fear of starting. Once you start, if you have little questions or things, you have a resource to go to, to answer those unknowns. So instead of being afraid of them, you can just say, okay, I’m going to do this. And they just help you with the little details over top of it. Now how have the coaching calls helped you with managing your staff? I know, you know, we manage internally, we manage hundreds of employees, but then our clients themselves, I mean, some clients I work with manage hundreds of employees and some clients I work with manage 15 employees. Some manage dozens of employees, some manage, how have the weekly coaching calls helped you to learn how to effectively manage your team? The coaching calls help ground you in the business principles, take a lot of the emotion out of it. Most situations with employees is cut and dry, wrong or right. As employees or employers, we get emotionally involved and are afraid to do that. But when you hear somebody like Andrew as my coach, tell me, nope, this is what needs to happen. It’s like, okay, this is what needs to happen because he has seen it how many ever times with all his other clients. Now, working with Andrew, we wanna help you create systems. Our coaching program, we wanna help you make systems so that everything is documented and over time making checklists and processes for everything. So that way, as your business scales, hypothetically, it’s more systemized over time. How has working with our team helped you to build systems? Well, one of the things that we’ve learned is remove yourself from the business and see how well it functions without you. So it seems like every time I break my leg, my business goes without me and it seems to function pretty well. So it helps everybody in the business be able to know what to do when nobody’s looking over their shoulder. Now, a part of the coaching process is it’s a core repetitive, core repeatable actionable processes. I call it the crap, but it’s the messy middle. It’s after the big new idea, the excitement about the new idea is gone. Somebody still has to follow up and do the core, repeatable, actionable processes. How has that helped you on a weekly basis stay on track, those core, repeatable, actionable processes, you know, after the excitement of the new ideas are gone? Well, through the meetings helps me to realize that I am accountable to somebody, I answer to somebody. And so I go to my team and I hold them accountable so that I can make sure all of these things are done. So it just helps me to stay on top of making sure people are doing what they’re doing instead of having to go in and take care of everything myself. Okay next question I have here for you. The coaching calls a lot of our listeners, a lot of our longtime clients, if people go to Thrivetimeshow.com they can see thousands of customer success stories. A lot of my clients will tell me that they learned a lot about time management in the coaching program. I have one client right now, I’ve helped him to grow his business dramatically. He’s on the verge of selling the company. He says, Hey, I’m going to keep hiring you as I look for my new business because I need someone to help me maximize my time and to stay efficient. Even as I move into my new venture, even after he sells his company, can you talk about time management and how the coaching calls have helped you with time management? Well, this is one of my great struggles is the time management. And so I work on it, try and work on it more and more. And so by being able to have access to my coach, it helps me to formulate a plan and be able to keep my meetings and time management focused on what I need to do and not what other people want me to do. How has the coaching calls helped you with your search engine optimization and generating more leads? I meet a lot of wonderful people that tell me, Clay, I would hire you guys for the coaching service if it didn’t have the search engine optimization and the web development and the graphic design and the photography and all those services. But specifically, it’s a flat rate. We charge $1,700 a month. It’s all included. How much has that helped you in terms of growing your business with our in-house search engine optimization web marketing online ad management team? A hundred percent. People find us now. When I met you, I didn’t even have a website. And the first thing you said was we have to do Google. I just sighed. It was so distant to me. And now I can’t even imagine running this without what your team does for us in the back room. Now, what’s kind of interesting about our relationship, it’s been fun, is I co-founded Tip Top Canine Franchising. You know, it’s a dog training franchise. One of my long-time clients, Ryan and Rachel, started the company, TipTopCanine.com, and I helped them to scale the business so that way it could franchise. So other people who are not Ryan and Rachel could go out there and buy a proven business model that works. And you guys elected to open up a tip-top canine right there in Utah. Actually, your family, you and your whole family opened up a tip-top canine franchise together. How big of a role did you having previously worked with our coaching program, how big of an impact I guess, or how much of a decision, how much did that weigh into your decision to buy a tip top knowing that we would be implementing the same systems that we’ve been implementing in your own company? It was probably the biggest factor because it helped us to understand from the beginning we already had, we’re implementing all of the business principles in our concrete pumping. So when we were exposed to TipTop, we already understand a lot of the policies and practices which makes it easy to go in. So we could hit the ground running at full speed because everybody on our team already knew what the Dream 100 was, what the Google was, why reviews are important, why search engine optimization, all of that. And it was a huge part of why we decided to do that, because we want to use that as a platform to even get more tip tops and we feel that through your systems with that tip top would provide us that opportunity. You know my father he had Lou Gehrig’s disease may he rest in peace and when he but before he passed away though my wife and I we organized kind of a going away party for him so that all the people in his life that mattered to him could all come and say nice things about him while he was still alive and my dad told me that was like the highlight for him was hearing that. And I know a guy like Andrew, he’s a very diligent guy. He stays focused every day on growing your business. Every single morning we meet at 6 a.m. in our coaches meeting to go over any burning fires or any issues or any areas how we can help. If we ever have a business owner that’s stuck, whether it be the tip-top canine franchises that we coach or whether it be our non-tip-top canine franchises or businesses that we work with. And I know he’s committed to helping you grow your business. What would you say about the impact that Andrew himself has made as a result of him teaching you the systems and holding you guys accountable on a weekly basis? Oh, Andrew’s been great. You know, there’s a big age disparity between Andrew and I, but he’s never been afraid to, if there’s something he finds out if we don’t know. But the other thing, he’s been a great example to my kids that all my kids work in my business by their choice, that you don’t have to be an old stodgy guy like me to understand business principles. They’re the same. And so his influence on me and my organization is generational, literally. So just to be clear, I mean, knowing that the business systems that we had in place, working with you with your Cannon Pumps business, those principles, you knowing that those principles and systems would be used at tip-top canine, that was a big motivating factor for you. Yes, huge, huge, probably the biggest factor. And what would you, again, I talk to people all the time, I’m not bashing other franchises, but I talk to people all the time that come to our conferences, and you’ve been to our conferences, and people will come to me and they go, man, I bought a franchise of this company or that company, where there’s no weekly coaching. They train you on how to do the skill or how to buy the business, and then they go back to their local hometown and they feel like they’re just floundering. They have a monthly call where somebody checks in with you, but there’s no weekly accountability. What do you think would happen to your tip-top location if there wasn’t Andrew or somebody like that pushing you guys on a weekly basis to grow? It would go sideways quick. We’d be doing the wrong things at the wrong time for the wrong reasons, and because it would be more emotion-based. And our phone call with Andrew, it keeps focused on the things that we need to accomplish to make it a franchise so that I’m not a business owner that wakes up every day and has to go in and deal with it. Final question I have here for you. For anybody out there that’s thinking about attending one of our in-person workshops or scheduling a 13-point assessment, I don’t want to waste anybody’s time because I only take on 160 clients and I don’t want to waste anybody’s time because our conferences only can accommodate 100 folks at each one and we want to make it very interactive. In your mind, what kind of person would benefit from our one-on-one coaching or the in-person workshops? Somebody that has a business that wants to get to the next level, not sure what to do. Just for ideas alone, your workshop has so many things that you can implement into every level of the business and at least get your brain working towards being a business owner instead of the high paid employee you are. Well brother, I really do appreciate you hopping on the show here. Hopefully we’ve benefited you greatly and it’s been awesome to get to know you over the years and I wish you continued success. Thank you for carving out time for us. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, we’ll talk to you soon. Take care. Okay, see ya. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I wanna tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crockerill, head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks he’s doing reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. Amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that like Clay is like he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go and that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you and Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. Anyways, just an amazing man. Anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that and of course we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man, I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing and I encourage you, if you haven’t ever worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s going to help magnify you and there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day and literally the rest of the time he’s working and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day and he loves it. So anyways this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank You Clay and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay it’s a great great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. Bye bye. Hi I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them. And I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes and then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing 800 million in sales over a 15-year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of salespeople for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes and I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually, in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to a hundred and eighty internet leads in a month just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own so I got a lot of good things to say about the system that clay put in place with us and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town and so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35-year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is, I would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full-time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide what do I want to do. My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building go hand in hand, and we just rolled with it. I love people. I love working with people, I love building relationships, but one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing, I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time, and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago. And in that time, we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week, we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents, but I have to give credit where credit’s due. And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer to insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. The Thrivetime Show, two-day 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. Zellner 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 gonna teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re gonna teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you 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 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, 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 tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner 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’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it.