Business Podcasts | 13-Year Clay Clark Client and Success Story Shares How Clay Clark Coached Him Into SUPER SUCCESS

My name is Clay Staires. I am the founder of Claystaires.com and the Leadership Initiative.

Growing up, as I went through middle school and as I went through high school, I was pretty much a big fish in a small pond, and so I felt… I had an over-inflated sense of self. So once I graduated from college… I might have been like a lot of folks, graduated from college terrified. So I ran to ministry, ran to the church really quick. From there, I jumped in to being a school teacher, but all the while I knew there was something more inside of me. I took over Shepherd’s Fold Ranch, which was a summer camp and retreat center. But then once again, now here I am at about 47 years old, and I’m feeling like it’s time. There’s this shift beginning to go on like okay, at this place I’ve done what I’ve needed to do. It’s time for me to expand. It’s time for me to grow, but I didn’t know anything about how to run my own business.

As I made that shift from being the executive director of a nonprofit organization into running my own company, I found out really quickly where my weaknesses were. I’ve got to know something about sales and marketing and all those things that terrified me. And so it was about, at that time when we were doing some fundraising for Shepherd’s Fold Ranch that I met a young man named Clay Clark. Clay would tell me, it’s just a formula. Do these things and out comes production, out comes money. I just didn’t believe him. Yeah, it was probably just there in the first month, maybe six weeks with Clay that I got my first speaking engagement. But when we started talking about money, I totally locked up and just said, “I’ll just come down and do it for free.”

But after that first few months, it was like I stepped off a cliff and all of a sudden everything stopped. And so Clay started talking to me about making phone calls and beginning to do that and making a hundred phone calls a day. It was like, are you kidding? No one has ever done that in the history of man. Thrive has provided this confidence that I didn’t have before, and as a result, I’ve been able to turn a 2500 or a $3500 deal into $10,000 or $12,000. Through working with Clay and working with Thrive, I’ve been able to look through the lens, not of my capacity, but I’ve been able to look through the lens of my destiny.

I’ve seen Jack Canfield. I’ve seen Tony Robbins, and I’ll tell you that Clay made a far greater impact on me than any of those other speakers as great as they are and as great as they were at that time.