Business Podcasts | The Power of Quality Mentors + How to Push Through Adversity In Route to Achieving Your Ultimate Success + Learn from a Long-Time Clay Clark Mentor Terry Fischer

Audio Transcription

Psst! Let’s just keep this a secret between you and me and everybody. I have been screwed a lot throughout my career. And you’ve probably been screwed a lot throughout your career. I think if you’re listening today and you own a business, you’ve probably been screwed a lot. And the Bible actually talks about this a lot. Not that the Bible doesn’t speak about being screwed in business often, but it does in Matthew 5 10. It says, Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake. And as a business owner, you know, you have to run a consistent tight ship. So let me just give an example from my business career of examples where I’m constantly being screwed. What will happen is, you’ll typically have a new employee that doesn’t know a lot about business or how to grow a business or really anything. They don’t know photography, they don’t know videography, they don’t know web development, they don’t know search engine optimization, they don’t know accounting, they don’t know legal, they don’t know org charts, they don’t know how to manage people, they don’t know anything about business. And they show up in your life and they’re very, very appreciative for all the things they’re learning. They love it. I mean, for them, this is incredible. They come work for you. I’ve been self-employed since I was 15 years old. I’m 42 years old, so almost 18. Let’s see. Yeah, well, plus eight, that would be 23. And you add on 10 more, that would be 33. So you’re talking about for 25 years I’ve been doing this. 24 years I’ve been self-employed. And when you’ve been self-employed for that long, you see these patterns. And so when I was building my DJ company, a young man or woman would come work for me and I’d teach him how to run an audio system. I would teach him how to get on the microphone and entertain a crowd. I would teach them how to beat match music. I would teach them audio visual sound lights. I would teach them sales. I would teach them marketing. I would teach them branding. I would teach them how to do all the things needed for them to make a six figure income. And then virtually every year as a thank you gift for mentoring these people, I would find out that one of the employees violated their non-compete agreement and their non-solicitation agreement where you’re not supposed to go after my current customers or my current employees or my current vendors, but they do. And because they have nothing to lose, they go start their own business, right? And so then you do a search on Google for Tulsa DJs or Tulsa disc jockeys and you start to see, wow, it seems like a lot of the companies that come up in the search results now for Tulsa DJs are former employees of mine. They might tell you things like, oh, I learned so much and he was a great mentor. But they don’t tell you, oh, by the way, while I was working for him and was on his payroll, I got my business started by stealing his employees, stealing his systems, stealing his processes, and oftentimes even stealing his customers or his leads or whatever. And that happens a lot. And just thinking about it, just, you know, for today’s podcast, it’s probably happened in that just in that business. And that DJ entertainment company that I no longer own dj connection.com, it probably happened 20 times or more, where an employee of mine ended up becoming my competition, you know, and they were so well trained that they went out there and, and all of them eventually crashed and burned. Now you switch into different industries and you say, maybe it’s different, maybe it’s the low cost of entry that made it possible to be screwed often as a DJ. Well, then you go into other industries. So now I’m doing consulting and a lot of times I’ll help a brand grow, I’ll help a business grow and then the client doesn’t know how to do a group interview. They don’t know how to optimize their website and they don’t know how to do their marketing. They don’t know how to do their sales. They don’t know how to hire people. They don’t know how to build scripts. They don’t know about the importance of call recording. They don’t know about accounting. They don’t know about pricing. They don’t know about mass text marketing. They don’t know about anything. All they know is that they’re 30 years old and their life isn’t going well. Their business isn’t growing. All they know is they’re 40 years old and their business isn’t growing. And so oftentimes, and this has happened so many times, I help somebody build a business and grow it dramatically. And for everybody out there listening, if you become a consulting client, it’s a month to month relationship, you know, so it’s $1,700 a month. And so people pay $1,700 a month and their business will double or it will They are so appreciative. However, then one day you’ll discover, wow, it looks like my current client is hanging out with one of my current employees. And a lot of times I’ll have a client that’ll say, can we partner? Can we become a partner because you’ve been helping me grow so much, I’d like to partner up with you. And that way, I can make sure that my business always has access to your mentorship and your team and your staff and that kind of thing. And then I’ll start to get people that will text me photos or email me photos and they’ll go, hey, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but one of your top employees is hanging out with one of your clients. And then you find out virtually every time that this client or partner or whatever it is, is now building their business by hiring your employees. And you call them up and you say, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. And you say, hey, are you hiring my current or ex-employees? And they say, oh, yes, yes, but it’s just business. It’s just business. And that’s sort of the justification you get. And so you got really, you know, a couple options here. You can say, you know, I’m going to stay upset about it. I’m going to sit there and negotiate about it. I’m going to sit there and dwell on it. I’m going to take a year out of my life to focus on every single time I get screwed or this is the method I prefer is you just you move on and you accept that this this happens much in the way that a landscaper doesn’t get emotional every time that a weed emerges he just removes the weed by the way if you’re a landscaper out there and you do get emotional every time that a weed emerges uh I would highly recommend you stop getting emotional about that because it’s like if you work in a pizzeria, you make pizzas. Every time that somebody accidentally wastes some ingredients, do you cry about it? No, you got to move on. It’s like you’re an automotive repair business. And every time that you, you know, a part breaks or something doesn’t go as scheduled, do you get emotional about it? No, you have to move on. Because if you spent all your emotion on these events in your life where you get screwed, you would never get anything done. And so that is one of my superpowers is I’m able to get through being screwed quickly. Because at this point, if I were to do a podcast on every time I’ve been screwed, I probably would have, you know, I mean, seriously, hundreds of examples where I could really get into the details and no one would care about it, you know, and it would take me to that place where I’m thinking about that again. And so the moral of today’s story is you’re going to get screwed, but don’t let it take your joy from you. You know, 1 Timothy chapter 6 verse 10 from the Bible reads, For the love of money is the root of all evil, which while some have coveted after, they have erred from the faith and pierced themselves through with many sorrows. Yeah, because there are people that will screw you for money. It will happen. And Matthew 5.10 says, Blessed are you who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you and men shall revile you and persecute you and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely for my sake.” It’s going to happen. This just in. If you’re in business, you’re going to be screwed. Now on part two of today’s show, I want to introduce you to a guy who’s awesome. This guy has been a mentor in my life. He’s been a phenomenal mentor. He’s built a very successful company called Trinity Chemical. And I just want you to hear a story about a good guy who’s grown a good business and he’s going to teach you a lot of the things that he’s learned as he’s built this multi, multi-million dollar company called Trinity Chemical. It truly is an incredible story and the founder of the company, Terry Fisher, is an absolute great man, a great mentor and he treats people the way he wants to be treated and he needs to be celebrated because he is an awesome guy. And then on part two of today’s show, I’m going to introduce you to a story of a current client who’s also a great guy, who diligently puts in the work, who puts in the effort, and who’s having massive success as a result of diligently following the plan. Now, if any further ado, here is a story about one of the good guys, Terry Fisher, the founder of Trinity Chemical. He’s going to share with you how to start and grow a super successful business. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top Teaching you the systems to get what we got Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks As the father of five, that’s where I’ma dive So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. C and Z up on your radio. And now 3, 2, 1, here we go. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and that’s what we’ve got to do. We started from the bottom. Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. And on today’s show, we have a really special opportunity for you to meet a good friend of mine. You see, the year was 1999 and my wife was a cheerleader at Oral Roberts University and her coach and sponsor, her name was Julie Fisher, and my wife was going to college at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was a cheerleader and a coach. My wife helped coach and cheer and a very talented cheerleader, very, very skilled. And Julie said, as one of the top sponsors, she said, could you watch my house? We’re going on vacation. And so I was dating Vanessa at the time, and I swung by the house after the Fishers returned home, and I thought, wow, this house is massive. Now, mind you, I never grew up in a home with granite countertops. I had never seen hand-scraped wood floors. I’d never been into a neighborhood with a gate, so I get the gate code, I type it in, boop, boop, boop, boop, and it opens, and I drive in, I’m going, oh my gosh, these houses are massive. What in the world? I wonder if the people who live here must be rich. And Terry was the guy who owned the house, who built the businesses that allowed he and his wife to achieve time, freedom, and financial freedom. Freedom. Terry Fisher is the co-founder of Trinity Chemical. Trinity Chemical Industries was founded in 1985 by Terry and his partner with the purpose of identifying and meeting the needs of various bulk liquid shippers utilizing rail equipment. The railroads were really in the early stages of deregulation and they were fighting to keep their market of transported chemicals. Long story short, they started out in a 10 by 10 office cold calling businesses to earn their businesses. Companies like Exxon, big oil and gas companies, big chemical companies. And for three consecutive years of cold calling, they found no water in the well. And then upon three years, they started landing some deals and the rest is history. It’s Trinity Chemical. So we had a workshop this past month here at our beautiful Thrive Time show, World Headquarters in beautiful Jinx, America, on the left coast of the beautiful Arkansas River, where the water is sometimes in the river. And so we had the workshop, and you’re greeting people, I’m shaking hands, and I look over here, somebody’s from Guam over here, somebody’s from Florida, somebody’s from Canada. The poor guy from Canada, his flight got delayed, so he drove here true story So we had a guy from California guys from Las Vegas We’ve had people from Australia. We’ve had people from all over the place attend and Guess who’s attending? My mentor my friend my the guy who mentored me at age 18 and taught me how the world works The guy who I called when I found out my son was blind. The guy who’s, he’s like a Yoda. I stay in touch with him, but I mean, what’s he doing attending my workshop? So I got nervous, like really nervous. I’m always nervous anyway, but I got really nervous. And then I asked Terry on Saturday if he’d be willing to come up and share his story. And so now, without any further ado, Terry Fisher, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical Industries is going to share with you some mentor moments, some mentor magic, the kinds of things you can get at our workshops and the kinds of things that you can only get through the power of a mentor or a business coach. Because over time, you will become the average of the five people that you spend the most time with. Again, you will become the average of the five people that you spend the most time with to quote Tim Ferriss the best-selling author of the four-hour Work week or the four-hour work week. You are the average of the five people you associate with The most that’s Tim Ferriss. You might say well. I don’t like Tim Ferriss. You know I don’t agree with Tim Ferriss I’m not a big Tim Ferriss guy. I don’t like him. I frankly prefer the Thrive Time Show podcast okay fine, but Proverbs 13 20, oh now you’re just using the Bible against us. Well Proverbs 13 20 states, walk with the wise and become wise for a companion of fools suffers harm. Walk with the wise and become wise for the companion of fools suffers harm. What does that mean? It means that Tim Ferriss is just paraphrasing what’s in the Bible. It’s a proven concept. If you hang around with morons, you’re going to become a moron. The people around you begin to set your expectations. They begin to define your normal. And so now without any further ado, my interview live from the workshop with the man, the myth, the legend, Terry Fisher. If you don’t know who Terry Fisher is, check out his website. It’s tcixrail.com. And before the haters begin to ask, no, his website is not optimized. Why? Because he has thousands of customers and he gets them in a very different way than search engine marketing. It’s very business-to-business relationship driven. He’s been around since 1985. The year that Marty McFly went back in time, remember that? So without any further ado, here we go, our interview with Terry Fisher from the Thrive Time Show Workshop. I remember it like it was yesterday. Hit the button, gate opens. I drive. All the houses are nice. People are mowing their lawns. There’s no refrigerators on the lawns. There’s no buses. There’s no rednecks, nice home, nice wife. Upon further review, nice daughters, nice guy. Over time, as I was dealing with life, I’d call Terry up. We did probably a half dozen lunches. And each time, I would leave with a notebook filled with information about how to be a better dad and how to be a better husband. And I only came for business questions and I got the business questions answered real fast But the dad and the husband questions were the ones that changed my life Like it was absolutely and so I did not know you were gonna be here And so I see your daughter and you know, I’m going Santa’s here So I wanted you to meet Santa so that he further do let’s put our hands together for mr. Terry Fisher here Yeah all right, so Terry, we’re talking about building processes and systems. And can you kind of explain to everybody what your company, Trinity Chemical, does? And make sure this mic’s nice and hot. Yeah. The name of the company is Trinity Chemical Industries, but contrary to the way it sounds, we don’t sell chemicals. A lot of confusion in that, but sometimes it works to our advantage. But we used to be in the business of moving a lot of chemicals. So we were in the logistics business, and so thus the chemical name developed. But we’re in the process of changing that a little bit, but really what we do is we move stuff for other people with our rail cars. So we have a large fleet of rail cars that travel all over the country, travel in Canada, they travel in Mexico, they’re going everywhere all the time. They rarely come to Tulsa. I rarely see them. They’re everywhere. And I, quick thing, if you eat that mic, it’ll be good for America. Just eat it. There we go. Yeah, that’s hot mic, hot mic. So, I rarely see those rail cars. There we go. Now, you have thousands of cars, we’ll leave it at that. Yeah. But can we talk about, what does one car cost? That depends. It’s a cheap car. It’s kind of like the wedding question, you know? A cheap car. What’s a cheap car cost to buy? The less I’ve ever paid for a car might be $8,000. Okay. And you have thousands of cars, railroad cars. Most I’ve paid for the car is way more than that. But you have thousands. Way too much. All I’m saying is to give you some context about the… You can look up Trinity Chemical, okay? You can look it up there. It’s online. You can find them. And so I want to talk about systems and processes because Marshall coaches people all the time and the people we’re coaching want to be like you someday. And you’re a humble guy, but we’d all like to have thousands of somethings and systems and great wife and great daughters and great hair. I mean, wow. Wow. So we wanted to talk to me. What’s the hardest part about building systems? What’s the hardest part about sitting down? So when you started Trinity, how did you start? And then how did you build systems? Okay, I have to go back to a little bit on how we started. We literally had nothing, we really bootstrapped it from the beginning. So I can really identify with the startup guys, because we had zero. For three years, we were in a 10 by 10 room, my partner and I were, if we both lean back, at the same time, we’d bump heads, we had two phones, we bought a Sam’s, one filing cabinet. We didn’t have a fax machine, we had nothing. But we were literally selling air. We had nothing to sell, nothing. But we acted like we did. So the phrase about act big before you’re big, that’s what we did. And literally, people would come and say, well, we’re going to be in your town, so we thought we’d come by and see you. And we’re like, crap, they’re going to come by. You know, so they would show up at our door and they would like open the door and they couldn’t get in. We’re like, yeah, we’d stand up and meet in the hallway or something. It was really ridiculous. But the part that was fun about it was we persevered and we persevered and we persevered and we made the calls like they’re saying. How many times did you call? We had call lists and we would call and we would call and we’d go, how many times did you call? I called him yesterday. Did you call him this morning? Yes. Did you call him this afternoon? Yes. Did you send him an email? Yes. Okay. And literally you just have to keep calling and keep calling and keep calling. And finally you get to the right person. But through all of that, the honesty about it was, I remember we made a pitch to a big chemical company and we made our pitch, we wanted a five-year contract. And so he said, well, time out. First of all, we’re not going to give you a five-year contract. That’s off the table. Okay. And we had our contract and we pitched it to him and we had our contract and he said, and this right here we’ll just put that aside. We’re never going to use your contract. Okay. If we do business, we’ll use our contract. And on top of that, if you screw up, no matter what’s on that page, we will get out of it. We’re bigger than you are and we will run you out of the business. We’re like, oh, this is not going good. So then he says, finally, but I kind of like the pitch you gave. You kind of sound like you know what you’re doing. I’m going to give you a shot. Here’s the way it’s going to work. Give you a one-year deal. You want five, we’ll give you a one-year deal. But that’s only conditional that you do what you say. So if you screw up, we’re going to give you a one-year shot, do your deal, be honest, perform, and we’ll keep doing business. If you keep doing business, it’ll probably keep going. So we said, okay, we’ll take that. Yeah, perfect. He said, one last question. How big is your company? You sound like you know what you’re doing, but just how big is your company? We went, shoot. Shoot. Shoot. Well, we looked at each other and we went, you’re really looking at it. He said, I kind of thought so. But I really wanted to hear you say that. Glad you owned up to it. We got a deal. Now, that company? Exxon. Today, 35 years later, we’re still doing business with Exxon. And we have lots of cars with them, and they’re running all over the country. So, I just want to say that whenever the small deals that you’re working on and honesty, just being who you are, persevering, make your pitch, don’t be afraid, it works out. It’s like 36 months, three years, you’re in a 10 by 10 office just grinding. We wrote here on the boom book, on page 153, he’s the personification of these principles. I wrote here, once you have built repeatable and profitable systems, you will discover that you have built a time freedom and financial freedom creating business that serves you, not an overwhelming job. This is the part that I’m working through. You could coach me now, coach all of us here. We work so hard in our businesses, I think a lot of times we’re not careful, the business becomes us. We are the business, and all we care about is the business. The business does not exist to serve us. We exist to serve the business. All we do is the business. The business is what we do. It’s what we think about. And if we have any time left at all, we think about family. But you think about family first, which completely blew my mind that a guy could be super successful financially and also put the family first. Please explain how systems have allowed you to create the time freedom that you now enjoy. Learn how to create time freedom and financial freedom from Terry Fisher with Trinity Chemical when we return, but first go to theclassicclean.com for all of your Tulsa janitorial needs. Go to theclassicclean.com for all of your Tulsa janitorial needs. Get ready to enter the Drive Time Show. Started from the bottom, now we here Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get it here Started from the bottom, now we here Started from the bottom, now we here We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top Teaching you the systems to get what we got Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I break down the books He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks As the father of five, that’s what I’mma dive So if you see my wiping kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio. And now, 3, 2, 1, here we go. We started from the bottom, now we’re getting to the top. We started from the bottom, and that’s what we gotta get from the top. Oh, Thrive Nation, note to self and note to you. In your studio, you never want to let your cats loose in the ceiling of your studio. Because my cats climbed into the ceiling of my studio and I have framed pictures on my ceiling because I have psychological problems and I have to surround myself with positive thoughts at all times. And so my wife and I had a photo of us from when we were young whippersnappers. We were probably circa 2006, 2007. And much to my surprise, much to my amazement, the cats knocked down one of the framed images from the ceiling thus creating breakage. And now in the background you’re hearing us sweep up the remains of the glass. But we move on. We move on. We put the framed image back up in the ceiling. We’ve recovered. Emotionally I’ve recovered. I’m not upset about it. Worst case scenario, I’ve got to go buy another framed item which gives me yet another chance to go to Hobby Lobby, which is my favorite place to go anyway, outside of Atwoods and Guitar Center Which is pretty much where all my stories take place all my stories are This just in Dateline Guitar Center This just in Dateline from Hobby Lobby The other day I was at Atwoods and So again just a just a quick reminder Maybe you want to get a tattoo of that or put on a t-shirt, but if you have an underground walkout basement studio, don’t let the cats roam free or they will break your glass. That’s my notable quotable for the day. But today we’re talking about the power of mentors and finding a business mentor. How do you find a business mentor? Well, at our last conference, a guy who mentored me showed up at the workshop. I didn’t know he was coming! I didn’t know he was going to attend! It blew my mind! Here’s this guy who… my wife was in college, cheering at Oral Roberts University, and his wife was one of the sponsors, and she was heavily involved in the program. She asked my wife to house-sit for her. Next thing you know, I’m meeting Terry Fisher. Terry Fisher, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical. And this guy had had so much success! He had a gate! What? He lived in a gated neighborhood! Hit the button, you know, boop boop boop boop boop boop. Shhhhhh. Door opens. Everyone has a lawn that’s mowed. People had pools in the backyard. Granite countertops. Wood floors. What? I had never seen these accoutrements! I had never seen the decor! And I wanted to know more. And thankfully, Terry Fisher agreed to take me out to lunch and to take me to the proverbial woodshed and to teach me how life works. And so without any further ado, a little bit of an impromptu interview with Terry Fisher. He showed up at the conference and so I thought to myself, Self, do you want to ruin the conference? No, I don’t. Okay, you should probably interview the smartest man in the room. And so we got Terry Fisher on the mic at the Thrive Time Show conference explaining how he and his partner went from a 10 by 10 office space where they made three years of consecutive outbound cold calls with no success and turned it into a multi-million dollar company known today as Trinity Chemical. We’ll put a link to the website on the show notes. You can check them out online at tcixrail.com. Stay tuned. Well, first of all, the way our system works is, I’m going to back up just one quick thing. One of my mentors early on, when he was coaching us about being confident about what we were doing, and I was working for him at the time, and we would go to make our pitch, and then he would say to us, when we came out of the meeting, I’d say, John, we can’t do that. You committed us. We don’t even know what to do. And he goes, I know, but they don’t know that. We can do this, we’ll figure it out. I’m like, oh, okay, perfect. I learned how to sell things that I didn’t know really what I was doing, but the optimism and the confidence that you will learn it and you’ll figure it out. The only thing I coach our people on is this, in our system is, the only thing I can’t fix is inaction. You have to do something. You know, if you make a mistake, we’ll fix it. But do the action. You have to take the steps. And accountability in the system that we have, the follow-up, a lot of people don’t like that. But you say, close the loop. I love that about Clay when he’s saying, if you call me, hey, it’s like a dog with a bone. I will eventually reach you. I had a friend of mine who worked with you for years. This is funny. It just started working for you. And he goes, these guys like micromanage me. They follow up on me every day about my calls like every day and I said, really, we’re meeting for lunch. He says every day. I said every day because I’m an owner and he’s an employee. We’re the same age. We went to college together and I just thought this is a fun conversation. So I just wanted to get his perspective. Like, how does it make you feel? It’s like an animal. He follows up every day. And then I’ve been there probably six months or a year. I said, how’s it going? He said, oh man, we’re having a lot of success. I said, what are you doing? He says, well, I’m basically doing the same thing every day. But it’s that consistency, that follow up, that culture. So once you have the system, you followed up every day. And the guy ended up liking the system and stayed with you for years and bragged about it. But at first, he wasn’t used to that follow-up. So what would be a system right now where you follow up on every day, where it just has to be right? Because you have thousands of cars. How do you keep track of the cars? What kind of systems have you built? The two things that are critical about our cars is if I put myself in the customer’s position, they want to know also where their equipment is all the time, because that’s their product in the car. And it’s, we’re more concerned about the cars moving efficiently through the system, but it’s that system part of it. We recognize and know where the cars are because we’re built into, and most people don’t realize this, but it’s the national defense systems that every rail car moving in the United States and Canada and Mexico is built into the national defense system. So, but I can, and I can look at that system and see where my cars are on a real-time basis, all the time, every day. So, if something happens, an emergency happens in the world or a Twin Towers comes down, immediately all the rail cars that are carrying dangerous products in the world stop. Immediately, no matter where they are. Marshall, talk to me, you have an Elon Musk quote, I want to get Terry’s take on this about, read the Musk quote here. Okay, it says, excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important. Individually, a few acronyms here and there may not seem so bad, but if a thousand people are making these up, over time the result will be a huge glossary that we will have to issue to new employees. No one can actually remember all of these acronyms, and people don’t want to seem dumb in a meeting, so they just sit there in ignorance. So Elon Musk, they tried to send the SpaceX rockets to space. Three times they blew up, and they found out that the cause of the blowups was acronyms. People literally thought someone meant something else, and they made it wrong, and it blew up. So Elon Musk began firing anybody who used acronyms because no one knows what things mean. Small business owners are notorious for saving stuff on their desktop and can’t find the passwords. Anybody here can’t find your passwords? Well, what’s terrible is if you’re not detailed about how you save things, you don’t insist on everyone doing it the same way, you end up being called all the time because no one knows what’s going on. Thrive Nation, when we return, more mentor moments from Terry the legendary Fisher. That’s Terry the legendary Fisher. But between now and when you come back from the break I encourage you to go to onyximaging.com. That’s onyximaging.com where you can save both time and money on your office and printer supplies. Save both time and money what on your office supplies. Onyximaging.com. Stay tuned. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow dot com. Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio. And for those of you who attended our past workshop that we just had in June, it was stellar. We had Canada represented, we had Minnesota represented, we had Florida represented, we had California represented, we had Texas, New York, we had Missouri. All you’re doing is listing off states. No, there’s South Dakota. We had Minot, South Dakota. Minot, M-I-N-O-T. And we had Tulsa, Oklahoma represented. We had a guy that showed up who impacted my life tremendously as a mentor. And I think a lot of the people that I’ve met at workshops say, I’m just trying to find a good business mentor. And here’s the problem. If you worked your entire life to create time freedom and financial freedom. Would you want to spend your day arguing with somebody about how they should run their business? You probably wouldn’t. And so at the conference, Terry Fisher showed up. And when he showed up, we didn’t expect him to be there. And so I recorded him at the conference. And we are going to be breaking down his audio here so that you, the Thrive Nation, can benefit from it. But he showed up at the conference, and I thought, well, if Terry Fisher’s at the conference, the smartest man at the conference must speak. And so I got him up on the mic and so Terry Fisher, the founder of Trinity Chemical, got up there and spoke and shared with us how he went from a 10 by 10 office space he was leasing and after three years of consecutive non-fruitful cold calling was able to turn it into a multi-million dollar business. But Vanessa, I met Terry as a result of your relationship with his daughter, Terry, and his wife, Julie. Can you explain how you got to meet Lindsay and Julie and what Terry Fisher is all about? Well I cheered at ORU with Lindsay Fisher and I will tell you the impact peer-to-peer of interacting with her. I said, the number one thing I think you take away from each one of the Fisher children is how much they idolize and look up to and revere their father. And that is because, that is no accident. That is because of the things that he has done in his life. And I remember, I felt that way because here I am peer to peer with someone. So I never have heard someone, one of my peers, talk about their dad in this light. When I marry someone, he’s going to be like my dad. There’s no one as good as my dad. Each of those children, they mean it. I think you had the same take away. Right. It blew my mind. It blew my mind. I’m honored to introduce you, Thrive Nation, to one of my mentors, the great Terry Fisher, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical, but really importantly, more importantly, the co-founder of a great family, a great father, a great American, and the kind of guy who would take time out of his schedule to mentor me for the low, low price of free. He wouldn’t allow me to reciprocate, and Terry helped Vanessa and I tremendously, and so Terry Fisher, this one’s for you. How do you keep your team with thousands of files all saving things the right way, labeling things the right way, following the right… How do you keep everybody doing that? We do have a contact management system. It was also a database system so that all the customers are filed under a certain name the same way. So you can look up a customer, then you can look up the contracts, you can look up the different amendments, you can look up the riders, you can look up the equipment. So if you just click on the customers name and immediately get a ladder of what you want to find out about that customer Who’s the contact? What’s their telephone? What if I work for you? Yeah, and Not you guys. It’s just me. Okay. I’m a dysfunctional man. I decide to work for you I’ve got a degree some background. I’ve somehow earned this job and you notice that I am NOT saving files The right way I show up to work on time. I smile. I’m kind. I brought you wonderful salads and gifts and Christmas cards and I’m all those things. But I do not save files correctly. How do you deal with that? So it is the follow up system so that there’s a there’s kind of a ladder of accountability so that there’s three aspects to why our information is critical is number one is the what happens to the rail car who has it and why they have it. So that database is built, the product that’s in their car, how the car is outfitted, how long they’re going to keep the car, the number of cars in the fleet, what the product is and the type of fittings it has on the car. Everything about the car is kept in this big database. So the person managing that account has to enter that data into the account, and then that keeps us accountable for if the car comes to the shop and gets repaired because it’s like an automobile. The more you run it that gets repaired, it has to stop and go and get fixed. So that happens all the time. I see a lot of people that struggle getting their teammates to do the system. That’s true. So you have to go back and say, I looked at the car, I looked at the file, it’s not in there, you need to put it in there. Okay, I’m going to go in. Then I have to look at it again. But I do the same thing that you said earlier, is that if I expect my teammates to ask me the same questions, I’m just as accountable to them as they are to me. If they ask me to follow up, I’ll be sure then follow up. And then I’ll follow up. I call it being the loop closer. If you text me, I’ll text you back. If I ask you to do something, I’m going to come back to you and ask you if you did it, unless you text me and say, hey, that thing you asked me to do, I got it done. I think most business owners that I’ve coached, and I’d like to get Marshall your take on this, they themselves refuse to use their own system, but they’re irritated that the employees won’t do it. They themselves will not do the database. They’re like, well, I don’t do the database. You guys do the database. I see that a lot, probably 95% of the time, where the owner themselves will not follow the script, but you should follow the script. And I know for you, you’re all about I’m gonna do it so you’re gonna follow my example. Marshall have you seen this phenomenon? Who here is the best salesperson currently at your company? You are the best salesperson. Like yes, yes, like you hold that role. Yeah, so if you want to always be that person, the first key is to not create a script. Okay? But if at some point you want to grow beyond yourself having to do every single sale, okay, and close every single deal, then you’re gonna have to create a script. And the best way to show, hey, this is the system that works, is record your own calls, script your own calls, and hold yourself accountable to using the script. And if you can hold yourself accountable to using the script that you’ve created Then you know that when you train somebody and hold them accountable to using it. You know that it can work I have two final questions I want to ask Terry and I want to get your take on this this is powerful the word Integrity comes from the root word meaning integer Which is a indivisible number, okay? You are Captain integrity So it’s without talking about integrity, you don’t speak, you don’t travel around speaking, you haven’t written books called Integrity, the Terry Fisher way. I mean, you haven’t written a book about how you grew up and here’s how I do, you probably should have, but you haven’t. But at the same time, you just exude that. Everyone I know who’s worked with you has said, you know, if Terry says he’ll do it, he’ll do it. And I think a lot of people, I know me, I’d be guilty of this early on in my career, we’re motivated, we’re chasing a big dream, but we hit the snooze button. And I know the first couple years of my business, that was kind of the thing. I wanted to do it, but I don’t do it, and then I get all feeling depressed because I don’t do what I think I… I make a commitment to myself, and I don’t even honor my own commitments to myself. How do you stay motivated? How do you stay motivated to do the right thing? Thrive Nation, when we return from the break, more mentor moments from Terry Fisher, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical. It’s amazing when you have a mentor in your life show up at a workshop and he’s taking notes. So, Terry, I appreciate you. It meant the world to me to have you attend the workshop. And Thrive Nation, on behalf of Dr. Z and myself, during the break, go to hoodcpas.com. Just go to hoodcpas.com. Z, shouldn’t they go to hoodcpas.com one time? If you want to get your numbers in line, if you want to have someone that’s going to be proactive and show you the way instead of trying to figure out what happened. Go to hoodcpas.com. Stay tuned. 3, 2, 1, boom! You are now entering the dojo of Mojo and the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Time Show on the microphone. What is this? Top of the iTunes charts in the category of business. Drilling down on business topics like we are a dentist. Providing you with mentorship like you are an apprentice. And we go so fast that you might get motion sickness. Grab a pen and pad to the lab, let’s get in this. It’s time to best some fruit like some Florida oranges. Three, two, one, here come the business ninjas. I’m at boom. Ah, Thrive Nation, welcome back to the conversation. Dr. Z, how are you, my friend? I am fantastic, as always. Well, Z, we have so many people today that we’ve had attend our conferences who told me they were searching for the term, finding a business mentor. They were searching into Google. You know, find a business mentor. How do you find one? And here’s what I have found. A lot of times, the people, not a lot of times, I’d say all the time, freedom, and financial freedom earned it, and therefore they are very particular with how they spend their time, not because they’re bad people, but they’ve been through hell and back to get to where they are. And so at the conference, a guy, Terry Fisher, whose wife was the cheer sponsor at Oral Roberts Roberts University when my wife cheered there. Julie called us, that would be my wife’s cheer sponsor at Oral Roberts University, Julie calls my wife when she’s 18 and says, hey, could you house sit our house? So when they came back from town, the Fishers invited us over as a couple to meet up. And I pulled up- Now where were you in the stage of your relationship with Vanessa? I had just been dating Vanessa maybe three or four weeks. Oh, so you were- They came back for like Christmas break or something. Okay, okay. So you’re still not bona fide. And I show up at their house and Vanessa says there’s a gate code. So I had a hand-painted 1989 hatchback Ford Escort. Sexy. So I type in the gate code. And I’ve never been to a house with a gate. Ever. Blows my mind. Okay. We’re driving by. See, all the lawns are mowed. That’s amazing. See, there’s the Curlicue bushes. You know, the bushes in the shape of the Curlicue. What do you call that move? Is there a name for that? It’s the Curlicue move. Okay. So then, and see, they had front lawns like your house. I used to remember I would walk up to your house and it was like there wasn’t weeds. There weren’t weeds. Do you remember that? Oh, yeah. The Curlicue is the whole thing. Do you remember the whole thing? Yes. I’m like, what is going on? I walk in the house. This is the next level. He opens the door and they have vaulted ceilings. Oh my. Hand scraped floors. Oh my. Z, no linoleum. None? None. It was, they had granite countertops. Oh, come on. No, and I, and Z, I had never seen that stuff. And my mind was blown. And I remember asking him a stupid question like, how did you, how did you build your house? Like something like that. Yeah. How did you? And I remember he said this super graciously. I remember this. I remember this line, and Terry, I apologize if I’m butchering your phrase, but Terry says, Clay, curiosity is the key to wealth. Why don’t we do lunch sometime? So I think it was like, that was probably the dumbest question I’ve ever heard in my life, but good start. Good start. You know, you at least asked a question. You were at least, it was a curious question. So we meet for lunch, and he explains to me, Clay, you have to build wealth one step at a time. My partner and I, we started in a 10 by 10 office, cold calling businesses to earn their business for three consecutive years before we landed our first big deals. Now today we have thousands of railroad cars and it’s called Trinity Chemical. I didn’t know what to do, so I just looked at him and thought, this changes everything. Did he say cold call? Because I, with my DJ company, my sad, stupid DJ company, I never made calls because I was overwhelmed by fear. So I want to get your take on two big learning opportunities here. Okay, here we go. One, how does somebody out there who’s listening find a good mentor? How do they find a mentor? And how do we get over the fear of rejection, whether it’s cold calling, finding a mentor, or whatever? Because I think so many people get stuck on that fear area. Two great questions. Well, thank you Al Gore. You made finding a mentor much easier. This just in. Apparently, you can Google it, find the Thrive Nation, and come to an in-person workshop and start building that. If you depend on your budget, you could do the online mentoring school. You could do one-on-one business coaching. By the way, the best value in the world, $20. $19. Come on. And if you have no budget, you could just rip off the podcast for free. I think that’s pretty affordable. And you can tap into your roommate’s internet connection. Right. Now the other traditional way to do that is that in your community, there are some very successful people. Or more successful than you. Can we call them goats? Yeah, let’s call them goats. Greatest of all time. Greatest of all time. And you see them around town. You can tell by the homes they live in, like you just pointed out. You can tell by the cars they drive in you can tell by just you Know the lifestyle they’re leading Right right. I’ve got a place at the lake and a big boat. Yeah, I’m doing pretty good right absolutely So you’ll find some guys like that, and then you try to find your angle into him see your angle in was through your girlfriend Oh, yeah, who knew the wife right and then you made the move I made the move you made the move I made the move. You made the move. You say, hey. I knew a guy. I knew a lady who knew a guy. I’m curious and I’m a business owner. How do you build a thing like this? And then he shows up at the workshop. Boom! That’s really kind of cool. I thought to myself, you know, the smartest guy at the workshop is currently not mic’d. Maybe I should see if he should go speak. I pulled him aside and said, Terry, would you be happy to talk? He said, well, I’m not a speaker, not a talker guy, but sure. So without any further ado, our exclusive interview from the Thrive Time Show in-person workshop with Terry Fisher. But quick. Wait, you asked me a second question about the fear. You want me to come back to the fear? Well, let me do this. Let me do this. Let me do this. Let me hit a sound effect so it sounds less awkward. This just in. Back to part two of the question. Part two. Part two. Dose. Dose. For our Hispanic population. That’s right. Yes, because we are bilingual and we are, you know, make sure that we are… Tricoastal. Yes, there you go. Bilingual. Yes, of course. Multicultural. How to get over the fear? Mmm. Oof. That’s a tough one because sometimes in life, you just… I love that saying that Nike came out with, just do it. Right. You just have to do it. First of all, you have to practice, practice, practice. Look in the mirror and practice you We’ve got it. We’ve got to step back. Okay, just record yourself Just record yourself without even looking at yourself and then eventually you can actually do the call Pretending you’re you’re you’re you’re pretending now you could do the call in the mirror, okay? And then yes, is this terrorist? Terry yes, no I can’t sound good Terry this Terry no no is this Terry? No. Is this Terry? Is this someone who knows Terry? Who is this? Hey, Terry, what are you doing? Oh, Ter! Let me try again. So then, now we’re moving forward, right? Now we feel comfortable with her voice. We feel comfortable with saying the words in the correct order. We feel comfortable with looking in the mirror and doing it as if we’re doing it with somebody else. else, and then we find someone who’s friendly to us, maybe a significant other, a small child, a significant brother, and then you role play with them the call. And you might have them be rude a few times, and then you maybe have them buy the way. If you hire a PR firm, they have this thing called the rude interview where they actually practice asking you rude questions while role playing with you. That’s actually what PR firms do. That’s what they do. So now what you’ve done, now you’ve done it by yourself, you’ve done it in the mirror, you’ve done it with a friendly person, and now guess what? You’re ready for the big leagues. You’re ready for the big leagues. You’re ready for the big leagues. See, you know what we’re going to have to do? When we come back from the break, we’re going to queue up this audio, this exclusive interview with Terry Fisher. I can hardly wait. But I want to tap into your wisdom on one more question. So many people think, well, Terry Fisher couldn’t possibly help me out. He’s only a multimillion dollar, he’s only a multimillionaire in the area of hauling hazardous chemicals in cold color. He’s only an expert in the areas of trains and railroads. But then if you ask Terry how he got the money to start, you would understand that he opened up a Christian bookstore across from Oral Roberts University because he was trying to date a Christian and he was not a Christian. Interesting. So, Zeke, can’t you learn? Aren’t most businesses more similar than they are different? I mean, so many people get hung up on that. Like, I’m looking for an expert of former Christian, not Christian, converted into a Christian railroad car company. Well, if you look at some of my core businesses that I have now, one’s an optometry clinic, pretty traditional optometry clinic. Oh yeah, so traditional. If you’ve been into a doctor’s office, it’s pretty, you know, pretty standard. Pretty classic. And then I have an auto auction, which is a dealer’s only auto auction. Totally the same, both involve vowels. It’s optometry, auto, both have locations. Yes. Obviously the same business. And I have a diagnostic sleep center. Which is the same thing, they’re all just businesses. They’re all, but you’re right, they are more similar than they are different. And you have the same mindset, the same problem solving, the same steps that you do to make them successful. And that’s why when people come to our in-person workshops, we don’t have to change for everybody’s sake. All businesses are the same. All businesses are the same. They’re the same. You’ve just done a system and you dominate. Pick pebble from hand is the same. You go in business and you dominate. Yes. If you’re in a business that’s not the same, you better be a genius. Like Elon Musk. Yeah. You see jobs. Yeah. But even then, Tesla, even then Apple, even all those have the core basics of a business. The core basics of it. I mean, he may be the first one that came out with the electric car and the quantity and the way he did it, but still, I mean, a car’s a car. A car’s a car. A car’s a car. This just in from a home office. This just in. Now, let me tell you this, Thrive Nation. Also, a spine is a spine. A spine is a spine. See, you want to put that on a shirt. When a spine’s in line, it’s divine. And when a spine is in line, it’s divine. And I’ll tell you, the best thing you could do, the thing you could do that would be the most kind to your body is to reach out to Sibley Chiropractic. That’s drjohnsibley.com. That’s D-R-J-O-H-N-Sibley.com. Tulsa’s number one chiropractor, the chiropractor of choice for the great one, Wayne Gretzky. Check him out today. It’s DrJohnSibley.com. It’s DrJohnSibley.com. Stay tuned. And now, broadcasting live from the box that rocks, it’s the Thrivetime Business Coach Radio Show. I’m not earning, taking it to the top like we’re hiking Mount Vernon We’re changing the mindsets like we’re incense burning Passing on the magic like your name was Irving Serving up that knowledge like I was a servant I cite what I say so you know I’m not a servant Thrive type show, bringing the heat while fervent Giving it to you straight in a world that’s warm Stacking the cash, making the dash, earning the plaques, bringing them back Bring me the tracks so I can get up on them, I can speak the facts. Stacking the cash, making the dash. Running the plaques, bringing them back. Bring me the tracks so I can get up on them, I can speak the facts. Oh, Thrive Nation, you are in for an audio treat today. It’s a festival of knowledge you can’t get in college. It’s that mentorship that’s going to give you that mindset shift you need to get to where you want to go. Z, we’re talking today about the power of mentorship. And we’re going to go to live audio in just a moment from our conference where we had an opportunity to interview Terry Fisher, the co-founder of the multi-million dollar company Trinity Chemical. But Zee, I want to tap into your wisdom and then we’ll go into the audio here. Perfect. Okay. Proverbs 1320 reads… Well, I’m going to get my epic music going so I can read it better. Wow. That would be better. That would be much better. Proverbs 1320 reads, Walk with the wise and become wise, for a companion of fools suffers hard. You might think to yourself, I don’t like that book. That’s fine. I’m going to Tim Ferriss, author of A Four Hour Workweek. He writes, Tim Ferriss, you are the average of the five people you most associate with. associate why do you like hanging out with successful guys have an impact your soul in your mind is around yourself with due to know they’re talking about iraq’s off on you at first was more fun uh… and you know you have guys that are lighter like-minded you know people that are successful and and it’s just fun i mean they they get you speak of the same language what is surrounded self-awareness with with with the idiots. And what if you hang around the morons? You lose the mind. And what if you hang around the idiots? Well, then you become the idiot. You know, like my saying, if you run with the dogs, you’re going to get the… You get the fleas. You get the fleas. And that’s one thing that, you know, we’ve challenged Thrive Nation on several occasions to look at your five inner circle friends and… Connect those dots. Are you, are any of them idiots? We have an audio clip from a caller that called in, and it was probably two years to this date. He’s a pretty passionate chap. He calls in and he says, I am not going to surround myself with high quality people. I’m going to hang around whoever I happen to know through geographical circumstance, whoever I go to school with, whoever’s in my family I’m gonna hang out with those people and you’ll see I’ll become successful I’m not gonna change the five people I spend the most time with. And then he called in today to share with us what happened as a result of not making that change so here’s the audio we had to cut him off it got too toxic. Now you kids are probably saying to yourselves hey I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna get the world by the tail and wrap it around and pull it down and put it in my pocket. Well I’m here to tell you that you’re probably going to find out as you go out there that you’re not going to amount to jack squat. Wow. He’s a little bit disgruntled there. He should have upgraded his social circles. Now without further ado, let’s listen to a guy who is super wise, super kind, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical. That’s Terry Fisher. Let’s get richer with Terry Fisher. How do you stay motivated? How do you stay motivated to do the right thing? If you look in, I’m a great believer in journaling, writing down and to-do lists. But in my personal life, outside of my business, you’ll find this in almost everything I read, everything I’m taking notes on, there’s a circle somewhere on the page where I have divided my life into circles. When I meet somebody or I’m reading something, I’m finding out where does that fit in this circle. The circle. circle is sort of like the F6. My circle looks like this. If you put a pie up there, draw a line through the hat, and then actually there at the very top of this circle is the W. Now these are my letters that my life revolves around. There’s a W at the top, an S at the bottom. Over on the left is an F, F, M, and P. So all those letters mean to me more than anybody else. But what it means is at the top of this W means that stands for the word. And so for me, I used to have different letters, but I kind of simplified it. So this W stands for the word and that means my personal faith, my personal life, my personal relationship, my that’s me reading the Bible and saying, That S at the bottom stands for society, social, friends, colleagues, strangers, however you want to word it, it’s everybody outside my extended family, church life, etc. F over here is family, F over here is finances, M is my mental life, P is my physical life. Every time I’m reading something I figure out where does that fit in my life. So if you ask me different things about that, okay, what am I doing with my, I’m a continual learner, I read all the time, that’s my mental life. Physical life, I’m working out all the time. I have my own personal gym in my garage. It’s kind of a joke in my family. So but primarily… But primarily, he’s really has he has like old man strength, which you’re notorious for your strength. So don’t arm wrestle, maybe Charles, you can arm wrestle later. But this is his, do you just go to throw the weights around? I’ve got the weights, I’ve got the peloton, I’ve got the rowing machine. It’s my personal deal. That’s where I go and release and work out. So but the number one thing in my life is my family. Outside of my faith, number one is my family. So I never in all my career put my work ahead of my family. So a lot of people work Saturdays, a lot of people work monster hours. I never did. Now that may not fit with this crowd. I’m not a workaholic. I’ll own up to that. But I am committed to what I say I’m going to do. Which is the same, you and Dr. Zellner are the same way. Because when you were around Dr. Zellner, you would think he works all the time, but he works almost never. Like maybe four hours a week, five hours. He comes in the office to follow up and make sure that the things are happening. He has set meetings he’s agreed to be at, but it’s like because you guys put your family first, which is an interesting idea. You built systems that can work without you. But because the family’s first, you’re always going, is this a scalable idea that could work without me doing it? Because if it’s not, you don’t want to do it. Yeah. Is that, is that helpful? Like that idea, is that, is it helping anybody? Like if there’s an idea that could work, but it would involve you doing it, you won’t do it because it would involve you doing it over and over. Well, we kind of have a thing in that I’ve kind of developed in my mindset, my partner and I. If you think that every your success of your business, every decision has to revolve around you, and you have to be involved in absolutely everything, then you’re the choke point. Because you cannot do everything, period. It will you’ll never grow beyond your limited little scope of your time. You may be very, very talented and some of you will get to a certain point, but you can’t do it all. Period. It just happens. So you have to learn how to delegate and you have to learn how to have a system. Because Terry is here, Santa is here, the soccer. Does anybody have any questions for Terry? Because he probably will never be at another conference again because he’s not a paid speaker guy. But he’s done it, he’s doing it. Does anybody have any questions for him at all about systems, processes, or creating time freedom? Because he is here. Yes ma’am? What kind of database do you use? A certain system? Yeah, let’s see. I’m trying to think of the system. I don’t really remember the name of it. We’ve had it for so long. Real quick, this is what I’m talking about. Remember the system? Okay, real quick, let me say this. This is Dr. Zellner. The other day, we were talking to somebody and someone goes, Hey, Z, what’s your number one selling frame? And he goes, I don’t know. And they’ll go, well, who’s your top sales rep? Really don’t know. Like, well, what do you know? He’s like, well, $99, your first pair of glasses. You get that, you go in, and we’re gonna spend, you know, 10 grand a month on ads. We got a three-legged marketing stool going on. We interview people every week. Furthermore, furthermore, he said, if I did have to know those numbers, I would need to fire somebody. I would tell you a couple of stories that I like using humor and then one about dealing with a hard customer. I did have a sales guy that was late perennially all the time. So, but he was a really fun guy and he was a great guy to have around. And we didn’t fire him, but I probably should have. And he’s a youth pastor today and that fits his role perfectly. But I got tired of him being late one day, so I finally was, okay, I want to use humor to diffuse this, so I said, Matt, let me just talk to you for a minute about what it means to be on time. So I’m going to say, I’m going to be you for a little bit here, and so I’m going to go out and I’m going to come in. It’s the start of the day, and we’re just getting started, so here you come. And I go out the door and I run into the room, and I literally do the baseball slide, and I slide into my desk, and I hit my stopwatch on my clock, and I went, made it. At like 8.02 or something, I’m like, Matt, that is not on time. You cannot do that every day. So if you do that tomorrow, you’re going home. So we had to send Matt home a few times until he started picking it up, but I had to find a way to say, you can’t slide in home base and then hit your stopwatch and then say, oh yeah, now I need to go to the restroom and I need to get my cup of coffee and I need to, you know, get, you know, and about an hour later, you’re going to work. That’s not on time. Yeah. So I had, so you have to find ways to jokingly motivate people and then sometimes you have to get mad and you have to do things and break things, but not very often. Z, I want to get your take on this because Terry was talking about managing people and there’s just some people he was sharing about that just getting them to show up to work on time can challenge you. I mean it can just be a challenging thing. It can wear you out. Just certain people, convincing them, coaching them, motivating them, trying to get your employees just to show up on time. Well, I mean if you were a life coach, that sounds like you’re right, signed up for what you’re supposed to be doing, right? I would ask you, because I think you and Terry share a very similar worldview on this, how long do you put up with the chronically late person? Or what do you do with the chronically late person, for all the listeners out there? Who manages a team of people? Well, there’s two things. One, you want to always replace them on your time. So that’s a sidebar. It’s a side note. So whenever you do decide that you have finally had enough. Finally had enough. And that’s up to you. You know sometimes. I’ll be honest with you clay. Yeah, may I yeah, may I be honest I’m here to ask what I’d like to do is I’d like to just mentally prepare myself for some on Yeah, let’s get some honest music this way. It gives you the opportunity to truly share with that honest Sincere tone here. We go. Well. Let me tell you a story yes How’d a young man that worked for me years ago? And when he was there he outworked everybody two to one. He was a rock star. But the dude was just always a little late. Now why did I give him more grace? Why did I put up with his face a lot more than the other dude that was chronically late all the time, but didn’t work when he was there It’s the whole sum that you look at it’s hard to break out just one aspect of the five A’s that I look for Attendance it’s just one there’s accuracy He’s going to break down his five A’s. Oh, yeah. But first, let’s all go to will-con.com. Oh, well, hold hands over here. You need a new castle. If you’re trying to add on to your building, trying to build a new building, if you’re trying to build a brand new commercial building, starting with nothing but your bare hands, you’re starting with the hands of a bear, and you want to hire someone to build your building, go to WilliamsContract. Check them out online at will-con… dash… dash… will-con.com. It’s will-con.com. If you’re a communist, go to will-con.com. Bam! subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrivetimeshow.com Thrive Nation, welcome back to the Thrive Time Show on your radio and for anybody who Is just tuning in to the podcast for the first time. Let me let me say this Z. Last Friday we had a massive workshop at our beautiful Riverwalk location and two unicorn events happened simultaneously. Oh my. And Z you know what sound a unicorn makes? Oh wow. Yeah it’s amazing. Kind of like a horse. Well that’s what I got. So the first one was obviously my flag suit. So well no but that was in maybe plan three play that is one of our fourth or fifth highlights one is we hit number one in the world on all categories The world which right there that is Hysterical because I have no discernible talent so that right there was great second is one of my longtime mentors and friends a guy Terry Fisher who really really made a big impact in my life. A guy who’s the co-founder of Trinity Chemical, he showed up at the workshop to attend. It’s crazy when your mentors at a workshop taking notes. I got crazy nervous. It’s been the first time in a long time where I was like… I wish I was there to witness that. He pulled it off. He didn’t seem nervous. I really was nervous. I thought to myself, if we have a guy with that kind of intelligence here, we should probably let him hop on the mic.” So I asked him to come up, and he talked a lot about how to grow a successful company, how to overcome your fear of cold calling. He explained the story of how he and his partner grew a company from a 10 by 10 office space into a multi-million dollar company. I want to get your take on this, Zee, before we go back into the audio. Is there anything worse than somebody who wants to argue with a mentor? Somebody who wants a mentor, and then reaches out to you and wants your feedback but then says, yeah, yeah, but in my industry it’s different. You know, it’s really bad because it kind of, what happens is, is that you’re hiring someone, you are appealing to someone, someone’s giving their time, whether you’re reimbursing them or not, maybe just buying them lunch, maybe they’re doing it as a favor. I mean, however it sets up, all right, and now you’ve put them in the position of being someone that you want to listen to. Right. And that means keep your mouth shut. Why in the world are you so hard to get a hold of? Why are people who are successful, why do they make themselves… I mean, you’ve worked your whole life to earn financial freedom and time freedom. Why do you value your time so much? Why not just make yourself infinitely available to anybody who wants to meet for lunch? You answered the question because I value my time! What? What? I know, it’s… That seems a little bit deep I know when someone it’s always kind of a game What someone actually gets through the gatekeepers and do that slide move? Yeah, they duck stay to do that did they do that you know like possible mission impossible Don’t act and they go up the building with that the suction cups Next thing you know the wind they find they jar the window open they get in and they’re sitting there in your office And you’re like excuse me Yeah, we had a deployment. I mean I’m here for you know for our three o’clock. You know what I mean? Corey, I want you to share with us, because you’re part of a group called Executive Experiences. Is that right? Yes, I am. Can you tell the listeners what Executive Experiences is all about, your group here? Well, Executive Experiences is an opportunity for people to get to know one another much, much quicker. You know, for example, if you were to go on an experience with someone, all of a sudden, and that experience was something extreme, like if you were to go down a boat and these carp fly up in the air and you catch them in nets, all of a sudden you have this bond that is rather close. And so you can take that relationship… And you only go with business owners, right? Only business owners. We need them to be at a certain level. And when you get around people who do this, you get smarter because you learn from one another. And guess what? We’ve had so many people do business with each other. We’ve all made a lot of money because people do business with people they like. Now, Corey, this is one thing I wanted to tell you. By the way, that mic, Chuck, can you angle his mic up just a little bit there? That way all the listeners get to just… There it is. Is that better? Oh, man. There he is. So this is… That is beautiful. So this is something. There’s a guy in your executive experience group. I don’t want you to… I won’t mention his industry. Okay. We’ll just make eye contact and you know who he is. Yes. He will not meet anybody ever. He and I are very similar. Okay. Yes. And we’ll just say that he has a very successful company in Tulsa, been around for a long time. He’s built a big empire. Can you talk to me, or talk to the listeners out there, can you share with us some of the common traits? Because you’re around so many successful people in your group, Executive Experiences. Share some of the common traits of the personalities of the successful entrepreneurs. What are some of the common denominators? Because you’re around these guys. You’re catching fish together, you’re going to Chick-fil-A World Headquarters together, you’re hanging out together. What are some of the common denominators of the kind of people that you’d want to have as a mentor? It’s a lot about what you and Z were talking about. It’s just the protection of your time, but the being deliberate with the time that they have. And so I think that if you were to really base it down to this, everyone has only so many hours in the day. It’s just that some people get a lot more done than other people do. And of the people in executive experiences that are, you just know, they are crushing it. They are very deliberate with their time. I think that they got there only because they went through the whole idea of going to lunch with everyone and being, you know, hey, can I pick your brain type of events and they allowed themselves to go through that enough where they realized, man, I can’t ever get anything done because I’m trying to help everybody else out. So they got really deliberate with their time, they time blocked their time, and they get a lot more done than most people do. Therefore, when we have a chance to interview a guy who has thousands of railroad cars, who has time freedom and financial freedom, who showed up at a workshop and he volunteered his time to speak at the workshop. Zee, we should probably take note of it. Oh yeah, we should. And I kind of feel bad. You do feel bad? Well, we’ve done this on occasion, where we leave a little hanger, a little teaser. A little hanger. He could have taken notes. You have five As? Did I do? Oh, this just in. Let me say this. Before you get into your five As. Somebody’s been sitting in their car, needing to run in to go to the restroom in the truck stop. This is what these guys are. But they wanted to catch the 5 As and they’re sitting there. Let me say this. And I’m sorry. Let me say this. I’m sorry. There is 5 As that we’re going to go over in just a second, but I am the number one A. You know what I’m saying? I am the number one A because I totally skipped that segment. I was going to say he’s got another A for you. But ironically I’m on the B team. So back to you sir. Or the C team. Okay, break it down. Well, we were talking earlier about something that our gentleman said in the conference, and it dealt with how long do you put up with someone being chronically late, how long do you put up with a poor employee, and so one of the answers was, well, you’ll put up as long as you want to, and that may change depending upon how good they are in the five A’s. In other words, you might give a little bit more grace if someone is really good, and it’s the five breakdowns of what I say every great employee or every employee should be striving to. And they are just real quickly. Attendance, and that deals with being on time. That deals with maybe staying a little bit late if you need to. You know, appearance, I mean, are they sharp, they’re high and tight? You know, for me, does it look like they’ve slept on their scrubs for three days? I hate that. Yeah. Not good. Accuracy, when they’re there, are they killing it? Are they doing it right? Do I have to have someone come back and follow up after them? Boo. Oh, boo, boo. Above and beyond, that’s your rock star. That’s the guy that’s just killing it. You’re going, wow. So he’s a little late every now and then. Can you put up with it? Well, that’s up to you. You know what I’m saying? And then attitude. When a person has all five of those and they’re rocking them out, that’s awesome. Now you say, okay, they’re only not doing one. Well, it depends on the one how often they’re doing it. So it’s a balancing act. But you should always be looking for new employees, new great employees, and always have that philosophy, that mindset of, and I know this sounds crazy, pruning that worst employee. So there, we’ve kind of covered those. We’ve covered the 5 A’s. Stay tuned in our exclusive interview with Terry Fisher. Attend the world’s best business workshop led by America’s number one business coach for free by subscribing on iTunes and leaving us an objective review. Claim your tickets by emailing us proof that you did it and your contact information to info at thrive timeshow dot com. Oh, Thrive Nation, years ago there was a man by the name of Terry Fisher who was married to an Oral Roberts University cheer sponsor by the name of Julie Fisher. Now Julie Fisher’s daughter cheered with my wife at Oral Roberts University. You might be saying to yourself, so I don’t understand, it was like a brother of a cousin of a third cousin. The point is, this guy was a very successful entrepreneur. This guy’s a very successful entrepreneur. He still is a very successful entrepreneur. But Z, much like you, he’s kind of in my top five of mentor guys. And how is it possible that a man would have thousands of railroad cars, multiple daughters, one wife, but he only works, from what I can tell, two to three hours a day? That’s crazy. How is it possible? That’s crazy. How is it possible? How are you guys doing it? How are you doing it? Because he worked his butt off years ago. How are you doing it, though? What do you do on a daily basis? You’ve got all these companies up in orbit. They’re all spinning plates. What are you doing? What are you doing? Until you drug me into this radio show, i.e. podcast, I didn’t really do… I did whatever I wanted to do. Traveled, had fun, thought about opening up a new business. I’ve got some new business ideas that I’m getting ready to act on. And by the way, now that we are in the top ten on the business podcast platform consistently, you probably promote those things right here on the show. So anything you want to breathe life into, now we have the platform. We’re getting closer to our goal, which is to be on the cover of Forbes Magazine! We might have to do another four to five years of podcasts before we get there. But once we get there, we’re gonna drop the mic, then we’re gonna pick the mic back up and do another show. Exactly, and then we’ll frame that, and I’ll carry it around with me wherever I go. And then we’ll tweet it. Somebody in Target going, hey, did you see that? See that? From Forbes magazine. Oh, look, this guy looks a lot like me. So Z, I’m excited. Without any further ado, our exclusive interview with Terry Fisher, who attended our in-person Thrive Time Show workshop, and he’s the co-founder of Trinity Chemical. Stay tuned. Well, we kind of learned early on that it’s kind of a small world, really, and when you get down to calling clients and the people that move chemicals. And eventually we get to you get a reputation out there. And so we realized early, early on that the word will spread if you don’t perform. And so we had to literally always keep our word and always follow up and over deliver. And so by keeping our costs low, we were able to say, grow the business, grow the revenue, and then start providing for our families before we hired our first employee. But the systems worked. I’ll tell you one of the really good things about keeping good records. I had a client call me up and they had like 100 cars under lease from us. And so they called up and they said, hey, we need to talk to you about canceling the lease. Oh, okay. What’s the problem was some of the fittings up on top were not performing the way they thought they were supposed to perform, although they were to industry standards. So, this conversation went for a while, back and forth, back and forth, about me trying to solve a problem. Finally, they called me and said, you need to come up here to Kansas City and we need to sit down and talk about this. Because we’re going to cancel on you. We’re going to, whatever we have to do. I said, well, okay, I’ll come up there. But if you’re going to try to cancel, you can tell me that over the phone, but I can tell you from my side of the table, we’re not canceling. So we need to figure out how to work this out. Short story is, it was a multi-millions dollars worth of a contract, and by flying up there and listening to their complaint, and really getting down to why they were upset, and then figuring out a solution, saved the account, and we’re still doing business with them today. The reason I bring that up is listening to your clients is paramount on helping them know that you understand their side of the table and that you will work with them. So that’s keeping your word, and that’s over-delivering because we had to go back and re-figure some of the vows, put different vows on. It cost us some money, but we saved the account. You also avoid dealing with terrorist clients. You try to go out of your way to not deal with psychos, I’m sure, which in our business coaching program might seem crazy to you, but we have probably, we can only work with 160 clients at one time. And so we have people every day reaching out to us and, I don’t know, two out of three times I’ll tell Marshall they’re not a good fit. Why? Because in the event that you coach somebody who’s not coachable, they’re going to get mad. And I’m not interested in helping people that are, you know what I’m saying? You don’t want to work with somebody who’s a difficult human. And so how do you deal with crazy clients? Once you go, we don’t want that business. How do you deal with that? First, listen to their problems. Listen to them. Explain it as best they can. See if that is a reasonable request. If not, you just have to figure out a way to say, listen, we have an agreement, but we’re going to let you out of that agreement under these certain circumstances. If you’ll do this, then we’ll work with you, let you out of the contract. That usually involves an early termination settlement. But you figure out it’s better to kind of softly, diplomatically let them vent to you, figure out a way out. And sometimes what they’re telling you is not the real issue. They may be having cash flow problems and they’re figuring out a way to downsize for a little bit. So their first complaints may not be the real issue. They’re out of cash and they’re going to complain about something. I deal with it all the time. All the time I deal with this. It’s like, oh man, I tell you what, I didn’t like the tonality of the person who cut my hair today. And you’re like, okay, okay, so I saw your card got declined too. If we give it, if we go and give you a free haircut credit, is that good? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, by the way, I don’t want to get anybody in trouble. I was actually kind of happy, but it’s like they’re going to say something that’s not the real issue. Make sense? Yeah. I got one more. One more. Okay. One more hot one. I see Dr. Z do this often. I see Clay do this often. And I know that the way that you have your life and your business and your faith set up, is one of the most important things that a business owner can have, and that’s knowing when to not get caught up in the emotion of a business. So you grow a business big enough, you’re going to have people try to take pieces of it, or ride your coattails, or try to steal your joy. Write a bad review. Write a bad review. So how do you keep the emotion from getting in the way of the motion of what needs to be done on a regular basis. Thousands of customers, thousands of railroad cars, thousands of personal training clients, thousands of home remodeling clients, thousands of whatever you’re dealing with, how do you deal with that? Again, it comes back to just listening to them first. If I can let them vent for just a little bit and then they get it off their chest and then I diplomatically, there are some of the guys in our organization that they kind of have this reputation that if it’s somebody that’s really giving us a really hard time, they’re going to say, time out, we’re going to get Terry on the phone here. Now, for whatever that reason, they don’t say I’m going to get Terry on the phone, they’re going to say we’re going to get one of the other managers on the phone here or they’ll call me some other name. But I’ll get on the phone with them and I kind of have this diplomatic approach to solving the problems because I figured out nobody wins if everybody’s – once somebody starts yelling, then nobody wins. So it just escalates. So you have to figure out a way for diplomacy to be a part of your business. You just can’t get mad. It’s just not worth it for you or the clients. And if eventually you’re going to find out they’re going to move on anyway, or it’s just not worth it, or they’re not big enough clients. So move on to a bigger and better deal. But you have to remove that sort of emotional side of getting mad at somebody for something that really doesn’t really matter all that much. Chuck, do you drive a Ford? I actually do. And so if your Ford was having problems with its battery, you know, a fleet of Ford, you had a big problem with your fleet, you had a transmission issue, heat and air systems, where would you take your Ford automobile? I would take it to RC Auto Specialists. In fact, I’m going to do that here in the next week or so. Really? I am. And it’s not just because they’re paying us. It’s because there’s something wrong. That’s two-thirds of the reason. There’s something wrong with the front end of my truck and I want an honest mechanic to look at it. RCautospecialists.com. That’s RCautospecialists.com. No negative emotion, cause that’s what fitness is. Always dominate, cause I got five kids. I will not lose, I don’t break for clues. They can talk about me, I can take that abuse. Here is the truth, while they make that excuse. I’ll be up grinding, cause the scoreboard’s the truth. He is my mentor, like my Yoda dude. He showed me the force, like I was a young moose. See, on today’s show, we had a rare opportunity to interview Terry Fisher, who attended our conference, but he was a mentor of mine, and is a mentor of mine. He’s a guy who started Trinity Chemical, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical, and I did not expect him to attend the workshop. You never know who’s going to buy a ticket or who listens to the show, but he loves the show. He bought a ticket, came to the workshop with his daughter from Manhattan, had a great time attending the event. I thought to myself, he’s really, really smart, definitely the smartest guy in the room that I know of right now, so I should probably have him speak. In just a moment, we’re going to go into our audio. We interviewed him at the workshop. We’ve recorded it, and I want to play it for all the listeners so they can be mentored by Terry Fisher, the co-founder of Trinity Chemical. But one of the things he’s talking about in this particular audio excerpt is not letting things irritate you. Not letting things just frustrate you and take your joy. And so I want to get your take on this. When somebody files unemployment against you, what do you do? Smile. Okay, smile. Step one, smile. Smile, smile. Got it. Step one, I’m smiling. Step two, smile. I do forget about it. Now, I know people that will fight those things tooth and nail. They’ll fight them. The threshold here in Oklahoma, we’re an at-will state here in Oklahoma. That means if you don’t have a written contract, you can fire somebody for any reason you want to. At will. At will. But if any of it you lost… Now, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. If you can prove that they were maliciously destroying your company, then you can keep them from getting unemployment. But that is a high threshold. And you’ve got to understand that the person who just helped them fill out the application is probably making $12 an hour themselves and wants to stick it to the man themselves. And so, you know, you’re kind of up against it, and I’m known people that have written and gotten attorneys and and Affidavits, and I mean they have just they have worked work work, and they get it the the unemployment’s gone I’m like how much joy how much time? How much is your life worth you know and so for me? It’s kind of like I always kind of liked it when I fired someone if they filed unemployment They always felt like they got the last little little oomph. Oh, that’s a little oomph. A little oomph. And I just, you know what, I just, just like water off a duck. Just don’t worry about it. You get a bath. Have you ever seen a duck in the rain? They’re not wet. It’s just because it just rolls right off of them. You and Terry Fishers are the master of that meta mindset. So without any further ado, our exclusive interview with the co-founder of Trinity Chemical, Terry Fisher. You have to remove that sort of emotional side of getting mad at somebody for something that really doesn’t really matter all that much. Is that helpful for anybody? Is that helpful? Is that helpful? So we’re going to do… Yes, you have a question for Terry? What we’re going to do here is… You have a question? Yeah. How did you get started creating systems? Question is, how did you get started creating systems? How do you get over the paralysis by analysis? How do you get over the paralysis by analysis? Well, you mentioned making the telephone calls. That was it. Really, you just have to make enough calls to where the rejection doesn’t bother you anymore. You’re calling them up. I need to talk to whoever’s in charge. Literally, when we were calling, I’ll tell you one really funny story. When we first started, we were in trucking business first. We had trucks running 24-7 all over the country and it was nightmarish because dealing with drivers and trucks and on time and it was cutthroat. We’re like, we can’t do this anymore. So we eventually hit on the idea that we would experiment with rail, but we knew zero about rail. Nothing. So we went over to the Burlington Northern Yard because we knew they had a big rail yard out here and we just went in and asked if we could talk to somebody. They said, yeah, what do you need to talk about? We said, we don’t really know. They go, oh, well, there happened to be a lady there that had worked for the railroad for like 50 years. So we, she wasn’t doing much, so we said, how about you, can we talk to you for a minute? She said, sure. So we ask a few questions like, these cars that are going by here, you know, where are they going? She’s like, well, they go down this hill and they switch over to this track and that track and who do they belong to? They’re going to different companies. Well, who owns them? Well, you can tell by the initials and so forth. And after a few questions, ten questions, he said, you guys really don’t know a whole lot about rail D. And we said, we really don’t. We know barely the difference between come here and Sikkim. And she started laughing. She goes, why do you want to know? And we said, well, we’re thinking about maybe we could use some rail cars to do some business. And, gee, I’ll tell you what you’ll do. If you’ll come over to here once a week and bring me a Whataburger and a Coke and some fries, I’ll sit down with you and we’ll have lunch and you can ask me any questions you want and I’ll tell you the questions that you didn’t ask but you should be asking. This is what you should be saying, but you’re not, so you don’t even know enough to ask the right questions. I mean, that’s us. That is us right there. We’re coming. So every week for two months, we went over there with Whataburger. And we sat down and we learned, oh, that’s why you do that. And then you document it as you learn it. So as you learn it, you don’t make all your systems at one time. As you find what works, you document that. And what’s neat about our system is we already have probably a thousand downloadables that are already documented. So you can use pretty much all of them for your company, you know, like for your business. I mean, you can just copy most of the systems there. What we’re going to do though is we’re going to… Let me say one… Go for it. Yeah. One more question here. I want to tell you a quick story about why it’s so important for each of you in your own business to keep learning because you’re never the smartest guy in your business. Never. There’s always somebody smarter than you in your business. I’ve never run anybody in my industry that thinks they know 100% of everything about the rail car business. We learned early on that no one, no company, has every car that’s ever needed at the right time at the right place, sitting idle, doing nothing, waiting for us to for them to call us and say, hey, I heard you had this car here. It’s the perfect car for me. Perfect price. Perfect timing. Perfect everything. No one does that. No one has that. And that, I guarantee that’s the same in your business. Nobody in your business knows 100% of everything about your industry. You will be just as smart, but you have to keep learning. So along those lines about being a lifelong learner, I would encourage whatever business you’re in, that whether it’s dog training or whether it’s fitness world, you need to keep on the idea of reading these books that he’s telling you about, reading about the systems, trying them out, experiment, keep moving, keep doing, keep calling. In the very beginning, you asked about how we started the very beginning, we had a very simple sheet of a call list. Every call we made, we wrote down the date, the time, the company, the contact name, and what happened. So it was, we had these little things out there. Left message for him to call back. That was like, we saw that a million times, left a message, left a message, finally got a hold of him. So we had hundreds and thousands of those call sheets until we finally had started getting some success. But it’s calling and documenting every call all the time and always learning, always, always, reading, learning about your business. Terry’s gonna be here today during lunch. He and his daughter will be here, so if you want to interrogate him, he’s just an absolute source of wisdom. Let’s hear it for Terry Fisher, everybody. Thank you, Terry. Appreciate it. Oh, Z, an incredible interview with Terry Fisher. If you’re listening right now, you’re in your car, you’re driving around listening to the podcast, go check out Trinity Chemical. Check out their website. It’s Trinity Chemical. I’m probably 99.97% sure that you will not be able to hire them, and you will have absolutely no need for their services. But if you do want to lease a railroad car to haul your hazardous chemicals, that’s your company. But there again, Z, that’s a niche. It’s just one niche. Z, talk to me about the importance of staying in your lane and staying with one niche until you become dominant. I find that kind of crazy. I’ll be talking to a person who started a business and it really doesn’t have traction yet. I mean, they’re going. The next thing you know, they’re talking about doing all these other vertical integrated things within that business. Okay, come on now. Come on, and and it just makes me a little crazy at times because I want to say listen Oh the space you’re in own that make a good living doing it and then whenever you’ve conquered it And you’re not having to show up every day. You’re not having to work the cash register You’re not having to do everything yourself, and you actually can now work on the business and not in the business now is the time Now is the time you can start thinking about when you can get the pebble from my hand. How long were you in the optometry industry before move on to other industry? Before I could get the pebble, I fought for that pebble many many days. How long before you moved to different industry? Oh about 8 years, 9 years. You obviously not embrace opportunity. I finally… Eight long years. I finally figured out the trick to get the pebble. My son. You hit the bottom of his hand and it fall out. Psh, psh, psh. Fall off hand. And then you can pick it off ground. But you stayed in the same industry for eight years before you went into a different one. Yeah, exactly. Be fruitful then multiply. Boob, boob. Hey, ho, ho. Nice job. Whoa. That’s… Now, Thrive Nation… Hoo, ha. Thrive Nation, we transcribe each and every show. We put it on the podcast, we put it on the show notes at Thrivetimeshow.com. So if you want to find today’s show notes and all show notes archived and transcribed via endquote.net. We use endquote.net to transcribe all of our podcasts. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com today. And Z, at Thrivetimeshow.com you can find podcasts, one-on-one business coaching, conferences, thousands of videos. And we like to end this show with a three, two, and a one. So here we go. Three, two, one, boom! All right, Thrive Nation, on today’s show, you’re going to get a chance to hear from an actual, real entrepreneur. Now, he may look like a male model, but no, he is not a male model. He may look too good to be true, but no, he’s a real person. He’s a wonderful client, a great guy to serve, a great guy to work with. He’s having a lot of success with his company and he’s here to share his story. Ruben Duran, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir? Oh, I’m doing excellent. Thank you for having me. Okay, so tell us, where are you located, sir? And I’m going to take notes here so people can, you know, verify you have a real company, a real website. Where are you located? Okay, we are in Riverview, Florida, and that’s about 30 minutes out of Tampa. Okay, so Riverview, Florida. And I’m taking notes here, this is a real thing, folks. Now, what’s the web address people can go to right now if they want to prove that your website is real? Yes, we have toplawnprose.com. Toplawnprose.com. I’m going to pull up the website right now. I’m going to pull up on the screen so everyone can follow along here. This is toplawnprose.com. This is the website here. And how did you originally hear about us there, sir? How did you come in contact with us? All right, well, I’ll give you the long story short. I was following a YouTube person and they mentioned the podcast. And I decided to give the podcast a try, so I went ahead and started listening to the podcast, binge listened to about, I don’t know, 100, 150 episodes before I decided to check out the conference. So I was last year on in March, I went to the conference in Oklahoma, went over there and checked out the conference. After that, I decided to start implementing a few of the things that you suggested during the conference. And then I reached out, decided to see if I could have an opportunity for coaching. So that’s how I learned about you guys. Now, you know, I’ve been doing this since 2005. So I mean, at this point, what, 18 years doing the same thing and helping people grow companies. And I love it because we meet wonderful people like you. And I talked to a guy the other day, true story. And he told me, he said, Clay, I’ve been listening to your show for like it had to be at least seven or eight years. I said, well, you’ve been listening. I’ve been doing my show for over 10 years. He said, bro, I listen like every day. And for whatever reason, I just never thought that I could grow my company. And then he said, it’s a crazy story. I run into some guy at church, at my church, who uses you guys. And I was like, oh, well, I’m going to reach out then. And he’s like, you know, this guy’s grown his business dramatically. What kind of growth have you had since you started working with our team there? Well, it’s been a 100% growth. So to this point this year, we’ve generated as much revenue as we did all of last year. So let’s be clear. So you’re saying right now in July of 2022, so you’re seven months into the year, we’ll call it eight months into the year. So you still have four more months of the year left and you’ve already exceeded last year’s sales totals? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I know if you keep it going at this pace, where do you think you’ll be in terms of a growth over last year? Do you think you’ll be more than double or you think it’ll be about double or what do you think? It’ll be slightly over double if we keep up the pace of what we had last year. Now I want to get into some stuff, some kind of the stuff behind the stuff, because a lot of times you hop on a wonderful show and there’s great podcasts out there where they talk about the, you know, stuff like, you gotta work on your business to not work in your business. And you’re going, that’s awesome. I appreciate that. Or you’ll hear people with a different kind of tone. They’ll say, you need to work on your business and not in your business. Or you’ll hear a kind of a funny guy. Well, you wanna work on your business to not in your business. But you’re like, what, yeah, but what does that mean? So I’m gonna get into the stuff behind this stuff. 10 things that you’re doing to grow your company. And there’s a lot of things we’re doing, but I just want to focus on the big 10 here. You have to gather objective reviews from clients. You have to gather objective reviews from real clients, you know, from real clients. Why do you have to gather objective reviews from real clients? Well, the reviews are, you know, you can’t put a price to the reviews because I get calls every single day of customers or potential customers saying, hey, I found you on Google and you guys had the most reviews. You guys had the best reviews. You guys had the best ratings. And that’s why we decided to call. Half of the time when they call, they’re already sold. There’s no selling. They’re already sold because they looked at your reviews. They looked at our website, and everything matches up. It looks great. And they’re already sold. So Google reviews are valuable. We made it part of our process, our system, with employees to gather Google reviews, objective reviews from the customer. So when they’re at the customer property, they can knock on the customer’s door. Once they’re done with the work, show the customer the work, and they got the opportunity of doing not just the Google review, they can also do a video review. And we’ve got about 60 video reviews. You can go on our website and check out all those 60 video reviews. We’re doing a great job with those. Now again, this is the stuff behind the stuff. Somebody says, I don’t want to talk about the stuff on this stuff. I want to talk about the emotional stuff. Okay, we can get excited, we can get emotional, we can get fired up here. We can do that, but I just want to make sure we’re clear. You got to gather real reviews from real customers. Second is you got to get real video reviews from real customers. And for anybody who says, I don’t know what you mean by that. I’m talking about you asking a real person, hey, how happy are you with the service that we provided you? And then that customer is going to give you their feedback. And you record that. And then we upload it to your website. And that’s the problem. And it just has to happen. You say, well, how many do I need? You’re never done, folks. You’re never done. This just in. You’re never done. It’s like grass. It’s like cutting grass. You can’t stop cutting grass. You got to keep mowing that grass. That’s a great thing for people like today’s guest, Ruben. The grass keeps growing. And I mean this, you got to keep cutting that grass. Activity number three, I don’t know if you’ve started this yet with your coach who’s helping you down the path, because I make a path and a plan for every single client that we work with. And a big part of that, after we get the marketing and the branding and the website optimization going, now we got to start to hire people. Have you started the process of doing the weekly group interview? Has that began happening for you yet? You know what, before I did any interviews or group interviews, we had some employees that were terrorists. So they were holding us hostage and trying to get us to do things their way and paying them whatever they wanted to get paid and work the days that they wanted to get paid. After I started working with the coaching program, we were able to get into these weekly interviews. And not only doing the weekly interviews, we’re also doing a day of shadowing. That gives the employee the opportunity to see our culture here at Top Lawn Pros and see if this is good for them. But it also gives us the opportunity to see if this person is gonna be a diligent doer. So one of the things that we do is we do that weekly interview at the same day, same exact time, every single week. So what happens when we do that is that we get to see who’s going to be on time, who’s showing up on time. This guy didn’t show up on time or he’s not even allowed into the interview. Number two, we invite them for the day of shadowing. When they come and do the shadowing, are they showing up on time? Are they following the uniform that we asked them to wear for that day? Are they diligent? Are they going to be a team player? And we get to filter through employees really quickly and we’ve created a great working culture due to this weekly interview. So I love the weekly interviews. Now, this is a big thing because I see people that tell me they’re beaten from years of doing business the wrong way. The other day I was talking to a guy, true story, and I’ll be kind of vague so as to not give away too much details, but I am always flipping a house or investing in a property. And I have kind of a method to that. That’s a whole separate show. But I’m meeting this guy, and this guy was a professional baseball player. He played professional baseball over a dozen seasons, pro baseball. And he actually teamed up to throw a no-hitter years ago. I’ll give you that much information. But he is a professional baseball player and he looked beat up and I say, you, you good. You know, he’s, he looked like, I mean, he looked like he had gone through some, uh, just a heck of a life. And he said, well, you know, baseball, I’d get up there. I’d pitch. I had a plan, you know, with a catcher called a call to pitch. I’d throw the pitch. I had a workout routine. I had the whole thing. It was like, you know, eat this food, follow this workout, play in this game. It was very, for me, like a routine and it was great. And I didn’t know when I bought rental properties that my life would become a personal hell. And I said, a personal hell? He says it was terrible. I said, why was it terrible? He said, you can’t find any good people. And my staff, they’re holding me hostage. These people don’t want to clean the rental houses. And I’m going, dude, you got to do the group interview. He’s going, what’s the group interview? I said, bro, every single Wednesday night at 5.30, I interview all potential job candidates. So whenever you apply for a job with me, I say, we want to interview you this Wednesday at 5.30. And I might interview 40 people. I might interview 50 people. I might interview four people, but I’m going to interview them all every single Wednesday. And he goes, why do you do that? I said, because the people that are late, like you were saying, if they’re late, they’re always going to be late. And if they’re late to the interview, they’re never going to start to be on time. And he says, really? You do. Yeah. He goes, wow, I’m doing like one on one interviews, man, you just gave me back my, my debt, my, my, my week. He was so fired up, but he said, what else are you doing? I said, well, this is a guy I’m talking about his property. As you see, I’m trying to get him to show me, show me his property. You know, and he says, uh, well, you know, what else do you do? I said, well, you want to get objective reviews on your rental properties, you know, because you’re renting these properties. You’re doing that whole vacation rental thing, you know, the Airbnb, the VRBO, the vacation rental thing. I’m like, bro, you got to get reviews from the people that are staying at your vacation property. You have a beautiful property here. You need to get reviews. He goes, I don’t know why I haven’t been getting reviews. Let me look at my reviews. And he had like a one. I mean, he had like a one star, Ruben. This guy’s written out his property for years. He had under a two star. So I mean, these are practical moves. Now the next thing is your website. We have got to optimize your real website. And a lot of people, they find these Tai Lopez videos, not to call out Tai Lopez, but come on Tai Lopez, come on. And they go to these Tai Lopez videos. Have you seen these, Ruben? Have you seen the Tai Lopez videos? I have. I’m gonna pull this up just so people can get an example of what I’m talking about. This is Tai Lopez on a jet, okay, and then books. So this is a real commercial. This is a real thing. I’m not making this up. So this is Tai Lopez. He’s on a jet reading books. Let me pull it up here. Where’s Tai Lopez? Come on, Tai Lopez. Okay, let me go ahead. Tai Lopez on a jet. Let me get it. I’m gonna get it. Here he is. Oh, yeah, here he goes. You know what I like more than flying in a private jet like this? My books. Oh, yeah. Okay. Actually not, but I do bring books with me because… And he wants us to believe that he’s on this private jet with this woman, this woman, and this woman, and this dude reading books. I was just talking a little bit earlier on, the question was how to figure out what you should do with your life, like your destiny, what you’re meant to do, what your purpose is. And I find that’s the most common question. And I was just thinking about it when I was here, we’re flying to the biggest investor conference in the world. Get out of here. There’s a lot of people, they watch videos like that, how to get rich quick, no money down. And they’re trying to get rich in like seven minutes. And I’m trying to teach people how to build massive success over time. Okay, I’m not trying to teach you how to get rich quick. And so we have to optimize your real website and we have entire shows about that. And on part two of today’s show, folks, I’m gonna introduce you to the godfather of search engine optimization. His name is Bruce Clay. He actually has written many books on search engine optimization. I have paid him $8,000 per month for multiple contracts to teach me what I now know years ago. I paid this guy eight grand a month. That’s a contract to teach me stuff. It’s phenomenal. So we’re gonna do an interview with Bruce Clay. That’s Bruce Clay from the Godfather of search engine optimization. So we’ve optimized your website, but we have to write content every single week to make that website rank in the search engine. So after we optimize it, we’ve got to write content every single week. Also on your website, you have to have a no-brainer. Your no-brainer you have right now is schedule your first MO for $5. You have a thing where you can read the reviews. You have to create a conversion video on the website. There’s a lot of details. We’ll get into that on part two of today’s show. Next, we have to pull the weekly stats. Why do we have to pull the stats? For anybody out there that’s going, Ruben, I don’t pull the weekly stats. Why do I have to pull the weekly statistics and look at them every single week, sir? Well, I didn’t see the value at first in doing weekly statistics. I was kind of annoyed at my coach when they wanted to do this every single week. I was like, what’s, you’re making me do more work. So I was kind of annoyed of that, but I started doing that. At first, the way I was tracking it was, let me look at the bank account. Is there more money than was there last week? Okay, great. Then we’re doing great. We’re profitable. But doing this has given us some structure so we can see every week how much money is coming in, how much are we spending, how much is the profit, what is our customer acquisition cost, how much are we spending on ads, how many ads are we converting, where are we converting those ads from? Are they coming from Google? Are they coming from any other search engines? Out of the people that call us, how many do we convert into members? Because we do have a membership for our customers. So we know exactly how much money is coming in every month. And we know if we’re gonna make enough money to be able to pay our bills. So this has been great. We also track here our video reviews, we track our Google reviews, we track our competitors’ reviews to see how we’re doing against them, the number of customers being added, if we’re losing any customers, we track that. Conversion rate, there’s a lot of things that we’re tracking on this tracking sheet, and this thing has, I think this has taken us to the next level for sure. And I’ll tell you folks, if you’re out there today and you think that Ruben is a male model, yeah, he could be a male model, but he’s a real person. The company’s toplawnpros.com. Real guy, okay? The only difference between him, he and you, is he took the time to schedule a free 13-point assessment. He took the time to schedule a free 13-point assessment. I’ll tell you this, I do free 13-point assessments. I did one, that’s why I was about five minutes behind for our interview today, and I was talking to a knucklehead, a complete knucklehead, a guy who is not a good fit. And I’ll tell you why he’s not a good fit. He wants something for nothing. He wants a get-rich-quick strategy, and he wants to have his business grow without putting in the work, and you’ve got to be willing to put in the work. I believe it’s about five hours a week of homework that you have to do every week to make the system work. How long per week does it take you to implement? We’ve got a 28-page business plan, and we’re working through it, but how long does it take per week for you to implement the systems that we’re teaching you to grow? Yeah, we are probably anywhere between five and 10 hours every week of time outside of, you know, business hours doing this. So putting numbers into the tracking sheet, doing our 30 minute interviews, you know, looking at our ads, different things that we’re doing. My coach is working with me on systems right now, so optimizing systems, having checklists, adding those for our team members. So yeah, I think we put a good five to 10 hours a week. How would you describe the business coaching for you as being slightly effective, life-changing, moderately effective, good. How would you describe what the business coaching has done for your business? Well, here’s why I reached out and I decided that this was worth my time and the money. I listened to the podcast. I knew what Clay was saying, he’s like, okay, go get reviews. So that’s one of the first things that I started doing. I said, okay, I started listening to the podcast before I listened to the podcast. I probably had like 13 reviews. Then I went to the business conference and listened to how valuable it was to get those reviews. So by the time I went to the conference and started the coaching program, I was already at 60 reviews. So I started the coaching. So I got 60 reviews or about 60 during that time. And then after that, I just started implementing this, go get reviews from every single customer. So the coaching has just been invaluable for me. Holding me accountable has been one of the best things that, so if nothing else, if we didn’t track anything, just holding me accountable to do what I said I was going to do has been one of the biggest things that I can, and then challenging me. I’ve got that coach that just challenges me every week. Hey, did you do the group interviews? Hey, did you get more reviews? Hey, did you call back this customer? So just holding me accountable to doing the things that I said I was going to do is probably one of the biggest things there. You know, one of our clients, we’re going to interview him next, I believe he’ll be on today’s show, and then we’ll have Bruce Clay on a part three of today’s show. His name is Gabe Salinas. His company’s called Window Ninjas. And Gabe was a startup when we met him, and I think he now has, I don’t want to exaggerate, I think he has, we’ll say, more than five locations of his window cleaning company. I don’t want to get the number wrong, we’ll let Gabe tell you on today’s show, but he’s a normal guy, but the one thing that you do and that Gabe does and that all of our wonderful clients do, I mean, we’ve worked with Oxifresh for over a decade. They now have over 500 locations, oxifresh.com. We’ve worked with Tip Top K9 to help them grow from one location now to I think 17 locations. I mean, it’s just incredible growth. All of you have in common two traits. There’s a lot of other traits, but there’s two in particular. You’re diligent, meaning that you are willing to sow the seeds needed to reap the harvest. You’re willing to consistently… You’re diligent doers. You put in the work. And diligent means you’re treating people the way that you would want to be treated while you’re sowing the seeds. And the second thing I have found is coachability. And I find that if you’re willing to have somebody who knows the way to teach you what to do. Success is absolutely possible. Reuben, I’ll give you the final word for anybody out there that’s thinking about attending a workshop or thinking about scheduling a one-on-one consultation. What would you say to them, sir? Well, if you’re willing to put in the work and you’re willing to do the work and the nitty-gritty behind the scenes, then definitely reach out for this coaching program. If you want somebody that will do everything for you and you want the magic to happen, then don’t reach out. I don’t think this will be a good fit for you. But definitely if you want to grow your business and the sky is the limit when you’ve got a business coach for sure. You know, and we only work with 160 clients and people always ask me why don’t you work with a thousand then? Because I’m gonna have a great birthday party today for my twin daughters. I’m gonna have a great time at that today. I’m gonna spend a one to take my wife on a date tonight. And there’s a lot of things I enjoy to my life beyond just business growth. And I’ve built a schedule that allows me to have time freedom and financial freedom. And that’s what it’s all about there. Reuben, thank you so much for being so diligent and so coachable. It’s a pleasure to work with you guys. And again, folks, if you happen to be in the Riverview, Florida area, check out toplawnpros.com. That’s toplawnpros.com. Reuben, take care and have a great day. All right, you too, Clay. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use, because they believe in you, and they have a lot of time on their hands. This started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zilmer. Sunday. Two men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s where I’ma dive. So if you see my wife and 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. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. Okay. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both 1.3 billion dollar companies. They both have two to three thousand pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has. By being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pessamon company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay, so 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy. But also, we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process. And that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals, more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews, that way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists that when everything gets done and it gets done right, it creates accountability, we’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really really contributed to our success but that like is of the diligence and consistency and doing those and that system has really really been a big blessing in our lives and also you know it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut. And we didn’t know… The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know, they implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut, and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s gonna take in order to really succeed. So, we just wanna give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore, I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked 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 percent increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan 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 proven turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you are looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983 and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to 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. 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. He’s key, this kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crocker, or Head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with like 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, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So 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. 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. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressive thing 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. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right? This is where we used to live years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing, and this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing, and this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen, and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us Just thank you. Thank you. Thank you times a thousand 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. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. 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 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 gonna be the best business workshop ever, and we’ll even 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. Hey I’m Ryan Wimpy with Tip Top K9 and I’m the founder. I’m Rachel Wimpy and I am a co-founder. So we’ve been running Tip Top for about the last 14 years franchising for the last three four years. So someone that’d be a good fit for Tip Top loves dogs, they’re high-energy, they want to be able to own their own job but they don’t want to worry about you know the high failure rate. They want to do that like bowling with bumper lanes. So you give us a call, reach out to us and we’ll call you. We’ll send you an FTD, look over that, read it, fall asleep to it, it’s very boring. And then we’ll book a discovery day and you come and you’ll spend a day or two with us. Make sure that you actually like it, make sure that you’re treating it as something that you want to do. So an FTD is a franchise disclosure document. It’s a federally regulated document that goes into all the nitty-gritty details of what the franchise agreement entails. So who would be a good fit to buy a Tip Top K9 would be somebody who loves dogs, who wants to work with dogs all day as their profession. You’ll make a lot of money, you’ll have a lot of fun, it’s very rewarding. And who would not be a good fit is a cat person. So the upfront cost for Tip Top is $43,000. And a lot of people say they’re generating doctor money, but on our disclosure the numbers are anywhere from over a million dollars a year in dog training what our Oklahoma City location did last year to 25-35 grand a month. To train and get trained by us for Tip Top Canine to run your own Tip Top Canine you would be with us for six weeks here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We’ve been married for seven years, eight years. So if you’re watching this video, you’re like, hey, maybe I want to be a dog trainer. Hey, that one sounds super amazing. Go to our website, tiptopcanada.com, click on the yellow franchising tab, fill out the form, and Rachel and I will give you a call. Our Oklahoma City location last year, they did over a million dollars. He’s been running that shop for three years before he was a youth pastor with zero sales experience, zero dog training experience before he ever met with us. So just call us, come spend a day with us, spend a couple days with us, make sure you like training dogs and own your own business. Well the biggest reason to buy a Tip Top K9 is so you own your own job and you own your own future and you don’t hate your life. You get an enjoyable job that brings a lot of income but is really rewarding. My name is Seth Flint and I had originally heard about Tip Top K9 through my old pastors who I worked for. They trained their great Pyrenees with Ryan and Tip Top K9. They did a phenomenal job and became really good friends with Ryan and Rachel. I was working at a local church and it was a great experience. I ended up leaving there and working with Ryan and Tip Top K9. The biggest thing that I really really enjoy about being self-employed is that I can create my own schedule. I have the ability to spend more time with my family, my wife and my daughter. So my very favorite thing about training dogs with Tip Top K9 is that I get to work with the people. Obviously, I love working with dogs, but it’s just so rewarding to be able to train a dog that had serious issues, whether it’s behavioral or whatever, and seeing a transformation, taking that dog home, and mom and dad are literally in tears because of how happy they are with the training. If somebody is interested I’d say don’t hesitate. Make sure you like dogs. Make sure that you enjoy working with people because we’re not just dog trainers. We are customer service people that help dogs and so definitely, definitely don’t hesitate just just come in and ask questions ask all the questions you have