DJConnection.com | Clay Clark Shares How He Built DJConnection.com (One of America’s Largest Wedding Entertainment Companies ) + Join Eric Trump & Kiyosaki At Clay Clark’s March 6-7 Business Conference

Audio Transcription

You know you’re seeing a real turntablist. Are you impressed yet or no? Are you impressed or no? You’re still not impressed? Let’s see. Watch what he’s doing. Watch what he’s doing. It’s good stuff. I play DJ here. So he’s got two records going. Okay. See that bean? Look at that bean. That’s something. That’s something.

Watch him. You gotta watch him. She was trying to figure out what a DJ even does. I’m trying to explain to her, like, I really did render a service for years. Oh, see, now look at him. He’s beat matching there, sinking him in. He’s making the beats match.

Oh, you see it? When I pitched that, it was a down shaft. Oh, yes. Thriving on a New Year’s Day. How about that, Bean? Wow.

Boom. It’s beautiful. Now, one thing you guys don’t know is Dan Nix can do this with like one arm. And that arm can be sprained. It can be a sprained one arm. It’s amazing.

And that arm can be like his left arm. You’re right-handed, right? Left. You’re left-handed? So this is his right sprained arm. He can do what he’s doing with two arms.

It just comes easy for Nix. 2.52, 5 hours and 38 minutes. Until game time, baby. Oh yeah. Hey, Marky, Marky, Marky, Marky! Is it half-clean?

Oh, oh. Whoa! Uh, they’re all taking something out there, too. I think that’s their trip, I think, now. They all pass the spot, especially with what they’re in. I’m going to put my hands in the air with me.

One, two, three. I got my girl outside. I’m ready to go. I got my girl in the camera. Yo, what’s up baby? What’s up?

Who’s open? Say what? Here we go. Here we go. Yeah. Yeah.

Hey yo, I’m rocking with my kids. You know I’m number one. Bout to kick it with my fools in episode one. Yo, we got the kids with the correctional facility. Yo, I’m bringing it on. Hey yo, I’m rocking with my kids.

You can’t flow, but when I get up in the middle, yo, I am the king. I’m the king. I’m the king. I’m the king. the the

the I’m gonna be on my mic, tearing it down till I’m done, so uh, get ready you, because yo, we coming with episode 2, baby. Oh, you got that guy! We got the Marriott guy! Marriott guy! Yeah! You are not alone, baby.

Oh, you’re not alone. Oh, you’re not alone. Come to the shambles, baby. Why is he working here? She was our happy, magical children. I wish I had never met her at all.

Even though I love her so, she’s got love for me. I’m often asked by people, young entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs, they’ll say, How did you build DJConnection.com? How did you build what many consider to be the largest wedding entertainment company on the planet? How did you start?

What was the starting point? How did you get the money? How did you get the capital? How did you know what to do? My friend, DJConnection.com was my magnificent obsession. And just like your own child, I just thought about it.

I cared about it. I’m obsessed on growing the business each and every day. And to quote Andrew Carnegie, one of America’s richest men who earned tremendous amounts of wealth and then methodically gave it all away, I put all of my eggs in one basket, and I watched that basket. The dust finally settled,

and after spending two frantic non-stop days moving all of my belongings out of my dorm room, the reality finally occurred to me. I was no longer in college. I was no longer really employed by anybody, other than my internship with an accounting software company called tax and accounting software. I

Had no structure. I had no commitments. No customers. I had no money. Oh Yes, it finally hit me And if you’re reading this book and you’re ever ambitious crazy enough to start a business from scratch This feeling will hit you at some point as well Being your own boss is great. You get to choose whatever 80 hours per week you want to work. Think about that for a second. Being your boss, I mean it is great right? I mean you can choose your

own hours just whatever 80 hours a week you want to work because whenever you are sick and you don’t show up the business doesn’t show up either because you are the business. In fact you’re not really, you don’t own a business. When you start a company you just own a job and you own a job that nobody else wants because it’s tough You get to choose those 80 hours you get to work per week because you have to do all the jobs You have to wear all the hats

And when the going gets rough You get to lay yourself off and so alone Except for the help of with help from my wife Vanessa my wife to be Vanessa My magnificent obsession as Napoleon Hill calls it began. Basically everything I did during this time revolved around djconnection.com. I stayed up late at night creating invoices and customer lead sheets using the incredibly sophisticated Microsoft Windows

accessory program now known as Paint. Yep, I used Microsoft Paint to database my customers. Why? Because I didn’t have anybody to help me. I couldn’t afford a new database. I couldn’t afford it. I didn’t know anybody who knew what to do. Even if I did know them, I couldn’t pay them. So I went to Kinko’s to have my very own business cards made. And I carried them around in the backpack that I wore in college

so that I could always be ready to pass out my cards to anyone who came within a foot or more of me. Because I was only getting three to five calls per month for my Yellow Page advertisement, I was really hustling. I mean, when you’re spending $2,500 a month on a Yellow Page ad and you don’t even make $2,500 a month or barely make $2,500 a month, trust me, I was hustling.

Well, how did I do it? I had a job working at Target. I had a job working at Applebee’s. I had a job working at DirecTV all at the same time. So you might say, well, it takes a team to make the dream. People say it takes teamwork to make the dream work.

Well, if that was true, my team consisted of me, myself, and I. And maybe you’re out there listening, and maybe you have a team that can help you achieve your dream. But I’m going to say this to you. Maybe you’re alone. Maybe you’re alone, and you have to recognize that you are alone, just like I was alone. And that no one is going to come and help you.

So I bought that Yellow Page ad from Sally Lewis and I was hustling to grow DJConnection.com. And I don’t know if I’m quite conveying with the words the amount of hustling that I was doing. So I’ll give you an analogy. Every day a gazelle wakes up in Africa. Knowing that if it does not outrun and escape the hunting attempts of the lion, it will die and be eaten in a painful death. Every day in Africa the lion wakes up and knows that if it does not catch the gazelle, it will starve to death.

Every day, my friend, I woke up in my one-bedroom, fountain-crest apartment complex in Tulsa, Oklahoma, knowing that if I didn’t get a booking that day for DJConnection.com, that I couldn’t afford to make my Yellow Page payment from DJConnection.com, my storage payment from DJConnection.com, or my rent payment from DJ connection calm so my friends when I say I was hustling I was hustling and who was there to help me nobody nobody helped me Just like as I grew the company some people came some people left, but I did it all by myself

Oh people showed up once the company grew and they wanted to ride my coattails and talk about the sacrifice They put into it, but at the end of the day, I was the catalyst. I started my company, just like you’re going to have to start your company all by yourself. As I was hustling with previously unseen speed, passion, and hidden desperation, I was meeting all types of people and working all types of jobs to pay the bills. Like I said, I worked at Target in the electronics section, where I was reprimanded daily by my rather large boss who always was on me about working at an unrealistically fast pace. I’ll never forget being laid off from that Target at 71st and Street Memorial in Tulsa after being a seasonal worker. And for anyone planning a vacation to visit this tourist attraction, that Target has moved and is now occupied by some other large retail store.

I believe a furniture store. Sorry to disappoint you. My friend, I was actually pumped up that I got laid off. It set me free. But I did not get laid off before I ran into a guy by the name of Todd Starkey. You see, Todd came into Target to buy a video camera for his wife. Her name was Allison.

And when he came up to the counter, he had this look on his face as though he was overwhelmed. Don’t get me wrong, Todd is a wonderful guy, but he did not look very excited about being at Target. Thus, I made my move. I said, hello sir, how are you doing? Is there anything that I can do to help you? Todd replied, almost shocked, that an employee in the electronics section actually greeted a bewildered customer with

enthusiasm. He said, yeah, I’m looking for a video camera for my wife. Do you know anything about these things? Well I did, because I read all the instruction manuals, because I was trying to get promoted out of Target. I was trying to take my life to the next level. I was mentally participating in that job at the time. I was trying to be the best I could possibly be at that particular moment. When I started at Target I honestly ate most of the pretzels during my shift.

I wasn’t mentally alert but somehow someway I stumbled upon a book called The New Imperialists, an incredible book that explained how Steve Jobs, how he made his empire, explained how these huge Silicon Valley tycoons started their businesses and grew them into massive organizations. It explained the Cisco story. And I was fired up. I was beginning to stumble onto the Napoleon Hill content. And I just decided I was going to over deliver. And so this was just a kind of open ended question that I was waiting for.

So I proceeded to build rapport with Todd by asking him what he was looking for in a camera, what features he needed and what he was not looking for. After talking with Todd, I determined that he needed a high quality camera that was about 30 percent less than the one he was originally planning on buying to meet his needs. Todd was sincerely appreciative that I had saved him some money and so he asked, So Clay, what do you do here? My name was on my name tag.

I responded with even more passion. Basically, I work here in the electronics section. However, it is my job to make sure that all of the ladies’ underwear, deodorant, batteries, car accessories, and assorted whatnots don’t migrate into the electronics section. I go to ORU and I hadn’t been officially de-enrolled yet. What do you do, Todd?

I asked. Well, Todd went on to explain to me how he worked at a place called Tax and Accounting Software Company, a company that specialized in selling and servicing tax and accounting software, oddly enough, for accountants and professional bookkeepers throughout the country. He told me that the guy who started Tax and Accounting Corporation was an ORU graduate and that they were currently hiring interns if my schedule would allow for it. He said that I should come on by for an interview. So I asked for his card. I put his card in my

wallet and I was overwhelmed with joy to know that I would be getting the heck out of Target as soon as my interview with Tax and Accounting Software was done. I knew that I was going to get that job if I could just get the interview. And I did get that interview. And I rolled up to tax and accounting software looking and smelling like a million bucks in my 19-year-old way. I drove my Mazda hand-painted DJ van.

I tell you what, that van was sweet. I hand-painted that van myself. When I bought that van, that van had hundreds of thousands of miles on it, but it was the only van that I could afford. And I bought that van myself because nobody was there to help me. I parked my car over there at the CityPlex Towers located at 81st and Lewis in Tulsa.

And I thought to myself, I’m going to get this job. I am going to get this job. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I’m going to get this job. I wore some tan, super sexy corduroy dress pants, a blue shirt and a yellow tie. The same kind of blue shirt that I wore every single day as I grew DJConnection.com. I was feeling good about life when they finally called me from the lobby to the interview room and I was interviewed by Steve Heck, a former

professional baseball player and San Francisco Giant. He played for the San Francisco Giants, my favorite team growing up. And another lady with dark hair and beautiful yet trusting and interrogative eyes. Her job was to break me down. I think she would have probably used a waterboarding technique if it was available. This lady was intense, but she was an attractive lady.

But there was something about her. She was intense yet attractive. She freaked me out. I’m not really even sure how to describe it. I’ll move on. And she asked me all these tough, character-revealing questions.

The interview started out well. They threw me some softball questions like, well, tell me about yourself. So what was the most difficult situation that you’ve been in? And how did you overcome this situation to get the job done? And I could answer questions like that all day. Then they started asking me tough questions.

So, so Clay, how long have you been attending ORU? When do you plan on graduating? They kept going after me with stuff like, so what made you interested in ORU’s accounting internship program. And I knew that I had to totally BS each and every answer or I was going to be screwed with a passion, like your average screw would be by Bob Beal after he just got himself some

new Sears power tools. Oh man, I was screwed. So I had to go for it. And you might have to go for it. You’ve got to fake it until you make it. You know you do.

You know you do. You know that you have a product and you know right now that there’s like 10 people in the world buying that product and you know that you got to fake it Until you make it you’ve got to take that sort of approach to branding that that Elon Musk would take You might be saying to yourself. What kind of approach to branding would Elon Musk take you know Elon Musk the guy behind PayPal? The guy behind Tesla the guy behind Neuralink the guy behind SpaceX, I mean come on, Elon Musk, this is what Elon Musk says, Elon Musk says, brand is just a perception and perception will match reality

over time, sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. But brand is simply a collective impression some have about a product. My friend, when I started DJ Connection, I had nothing, I mean, brand is just a perception people perceived That I had nothing because it was just me and a hand-painted van and so people wouldn’t pay me So I had to buy the biggest yellow page ad that I could afford so that way people would perceive And maybe believe that I was in fact the real deal. Do you know how hard it is?

Do you know how hard it is to hire a 40 year old man to come work for you when you’re 19 years old. Think about that. Now, Elon Musk said, sometimes it will be ahead, other times it will be behind. Well, at that time, my branding was way behind me. I was a very, I was becoming a very good DJ, but I had to book the DJ shows for very low rates because my branding was so terrible.

But brand, my friend, is simply a collective impression some have about a product. So I would ask you this today. On a scale of 1 to 10, how highly would you rank your branding? Is your branding holding you back? Are you like me where I had a horrible hand-painted van, a non-existent website, business cards that look terrible? Or are you somebody who’s over-branding? Maybe we need to take the product quality up to the

next level. So as I was being interrogated, I said something to the effect of, you know, I actually met Todd Starkey when he was shopping at Target, where I head up the electronics department. And honestly, I don’t really see myself wanting to work with Target the rest of my life. The more I talk with Todd, the more your company sounded like a great place to work at after college.

And I’m just really looking for a company that will appreciate an employee who’s an ultra-hard worker and who is ultra-passionate about getting things done. I have a small mobile entertainment business that I’ve been using to pay my way through college and I think this internship opportunity would look better on my resume than having to say that I interned for myself. And they’re like, it kind of makes sense. I had hit a home run, but I kept going because the one lady, she was kind of hard to convince,

but the other guy, he was into it. Steve was into it. So I kept going on. That’s when Steve, that’s when I said, so Steve, I understand that you played baseball for the San Francisco Giants. Did you ever play with Will Clark or Matt Williams?

I mean, that must have been great.” And then Steve responded with a few baseball stories and I just had to keep playing that card hard. Man, that’s awesome. So what brought you to tax and accounting software? What did you most like about it here?

What do you most like about it here, Steve? Tell me more about it. The thing is, if you want to win friends and influence people, you have to become interested in people. You see, people are most interested in themselves. People’s favorite topic is themselves.

And so I had to get Steve engaged on the topic of Steve because Steve is a great guy, but Steve likes to talk about Steve. So I had to ask Steve about Steve. So if you’re out there today thinking about doing a sales presentation or selling a product or a service, you’ve gotta take an interest in the other person. That even works when on dates, my friends.

So, it was gonna be awesome. My strategy of interviewing the interviewer was working. And as the interview was winding down, I gave them my resume, knowing that if they called ORU to verify that I was actively enrolled there as a student, I was screwed because I had just been kicked out

of Oral Roberts University. But I just gave it to them with confidence, knowing that they were hiring many interns and that most people do not call references.” So true. You see, when you dress up nice, I found that most businesses do not call references.

But if you get referred to somebody for a job, you’re almost good to go. And so getting laid off from Target was incredible. And I was honestly happy to get the news when Tara, the big boss, actually a very small lady, but the big boss and manager had to let me go. Now shortly after beginning work at Taxon Accounting Software for a while, rumors started

flying in that Taxon Accounting Software Corporation was going to be purchased by Intuit. Being that I did not know why that mattered, I did not see this as a bad thing. I was just fired up to be making $10 per hour. I was fired up that they serve Subway sandwiches every day. I was fired up to be working in an office. And I love that scan card keychain, you know, the one they gave me to get into the building.

Life was sweet, baby. By the way, they also brought pizzas on a consistent basis, and I did enjoy those pizzas. Then, unexpectedly one day, I got called into the office by a guy named Randy, who said that we needed to talk. And I don’t care if your mom says it, your wife says it, your principal says it, or anyone says it.

The phrase, we need to talk, is never good. And so I got nervous, but I knew that I was working hard and was doing a good job at this point on the phones, and so I knew that it could not have been work-related, and I knew that I couldn’t really get fired for personal related stuff outside of work and thus I felt nervous but good. I mean they couldn’t kick me out for getting kicked out of Oral Roberts University, could they?

Well, when I sat down in Randy’s office, the dark haired lady again from the initial interview, the beautiful lady with those interrogating distrusting eyes was there too and she’s looking at me and oh crap, I knew it, she called ORU, didn’t she? The rat! How could she? They proceeded to tell me in a serious talk that they’d heard I was being kicked out of

ORU for recording the infamous ORU Slim Shady song. And they were both ORU alumni. So they wanted to know what was going on. And if in fact I was the one who wrote the song or produced the song, they wanted to know if it was true. Were the rumors true?

I told them the story with conviction and passion and I explained to them how Adam Bagwell and I spent 12 hours recording the song to vent our personal frustrations with the school’s hypocrisy. I explained how our friends had put it online without our permission. I explained to them how I got kicked out and then they kind of cracked a smile. They couldn’t believe it. They had to know more.

When I left that meeting, something had changed. The dynamic I had shared with them and the rest of my co-workers was now different. Everyone loved me. Belinda, the Hispanic lady, started talking to me. Todd, the white guy, would say, what’s up DJ? in the hall. Other employees started telling their personal ORU stories. A former ORU basketball player told me how ORU paid for his SUV to get him to attend college there. Everyone at work started telling me more and more dirt on ORU. I felt like I had enough info and inside scoop on the squirrelly Richard Roberts to write 10 songs.

But I did not because I’m classy. Or at least I like to tell people I’m classy. I think I’m more humble than I am classy. Okay, I’m both super humble. I’m probably the world’s most humble and classy man. but I do I do remember I do recall that that Todd gave me the number of this evangelistic it’s a even gel evangelical evangelical it was it was an outreach with or you connections it was a media outreach it was a evangelistic there we go an evangelistic outreach designed to reach churches all across the nation with or you connections that he had

heard was hiring. I lasted about two weeks working at a different fast food restaurant because the environment there just wasn’t for me and I really needed another opportunity and I’ve always been of the belief that that you know whether you want the job or not if you need a job you have to take that job right don’t you have to take that job don’t you I mean if whether you want the job or not if you need to pay the bills, you kind of have

to take the job. I know there’s a lot of people, I’ve met a lot of people, a lot of college graduates who will tell me, you know, I’m holding out for management. And I’m like, okay, well, what do you do now? Well, I live with my parents. You see, I couldn’t, I can’t handle the idea, I couldn’t handle the concept of living with

my parents, ever. Or asking for money, ever. I’m not that kind of guy. I’d rather live in the van and take showers at the gym, all American, than to go live with my parents or to live on the couch with somebody else. I want to be an independent person.

And so for a time, not a big period of time, but for a week or so, I did that. I lived in a van. I took showers at All American Fitness, and that’s what I did. But at the end of the day, DJ Connection was always in my mind. DJ Connection was my magnificent obsession. DJConnection.com was what I dreamed about.

I knew that I could grow it into something that could create time and financial freedom for me, and I didn’t give up on it because I emotionally connected to my dream, and I emotionally disconnected from all of the frustrations, the tribulations, all of the manifestations of negativity that was in my way, all the setbacks. I viewed them as set-ups for my future success. I viewed failure as a prerequisite to success because I was reading Napoleon Hill over and

over and over again. So I went to work at a company called Faith Highway. At the time it was called Impact Ministries. And just for simplicity, I’m going to refer to it as Impact Ministries from this point forward. I did a moderate amount of pre-interview interrogations of people who knew people who had allegedly

worked there, so I could get a vibe for the company. And through doing this, I learned that Impact was actually a ministry and not actually a company built to produce profits. The owners of Impact sincerely believed that they were doing an outreach to the lost by by producing TV commercials that could be aired in local markets all across the country and They weren’t really striving to make a profit to do so what they were doing was they were trying to share

the gospel on cable television now the problem for me was I was not a Christian at the time and Before I applied at impact I had discovered that the ministry itself Actually came as a result of a ministry called the toy makers dream and the toy makers dream was this traveling evangelism production that successfully helped to win an estimated 10,000 plus people plus people to Christ and As the toy makers dream performance has started winding down the idea was tossed out that they could use the infrastructure used to

Promote and market and grow the toy makers dream they could use that to promote the message of the gospel through producing television commercials. And the average church in America essentially couldn’t afford to make high quality commercials, and so they thought, what if we use the infrastructure, the cameras, the systems we have, what if we use that to produce high quality commercials, and then people would like the commercials so much, we could call up local pastors and see if they would like to lease the rights

to air the commercials in their designated market areas. So picture it this way. You’re a pastor of a local small church and you want to run commercials in your local city. Maybe on ESPN or Fox or CNN or whatever.

You want to reach people to advertise the church. But you don’t have the money to produce awesome commercials and so you get a cold call from us and then we mail you demo videos and if you like them, you could license the commercials from us and at the bottom of the commercials we would put a tag line or a message that would say, come join us this Sunday at First Baptist Church. We would put the phone number of your church and the website and that kind of thing.

That’s what we did. So my job was to cold call churches. Now these commercials were produced on very high quality, 35mm film. The pastors, churches and the viewers loved them. At one point they even won the prestigious Addy Award for their quality work and creativity. What we at Impact sold all day was the exclusive rights for the local church to get to use

the Got Jesus commercial or the What If It Were True commercial series in their designated market area. My job was to cold call. I’m talking about cold calling churches that I’ve never spoken to before, churches that I’ve never talked to, churches I don’t even want to call because remember I wasn’t a Christian at this time So I would literally call

Alphabetically through a list of churches and I would just call them all and there was a whole call center of people calling them all Call them all until they cry by or die This company was an anomaly my friend and impact ministry is the only thing I could liken it to Would be like the boiler room movie. Maybe you’ve seen a movie called The Boiler Room. It just was this high energy atmosphere where everyone was on the phone. And through the creative vision of Shane Harwell, our super intense and highly motivational

sales manager, and our visionary founder Tom Newman, and the sales guru and marketing guru Kyle Thompson, Impact successfully sold the crap out of these commercials in nearly every designated market area in the United States. Eventually, the company sold such a high volume of commercials that we had to create our own media buying department to assist pastors with more purchasing so they could get a better deal.

They could buy in bulk. We were buying on behalf of hundreds of churches throughout the country so we could buy the airtime in bulk. Essentially, just like anything, the more you buy, the better of a deal you get, typically, when you negotiate. We were selling commercials to these small individual churches and we were selling commercials

to huge churches and we were selling thousands of them because the scripts were so good. I wasn’t even a Christian at the time, but yet I was able to pick up the phone and to cold call a pastor and to convince him that these commercials were so good, they were so good that they should run them in their market. These pastors would do it. It was crazy.

I had to learn how to cold call. I had to learn that making 100 outbound calls a day and setting three appointments a day was considered to be a success. I had never thought about that before. But that’s how it was. I called and I called and I called.

I eventually began to generate commissions. They weren’t great commissions, but they were enough commissions to make $3,000 a month, to make $4,000 a month. And what I would do is I’d make calls all day and then at the end of the day or at lunch, typically at lunch and at the end of the day, I would go out to my car and I would check those voicemails from the DJConnection.com voicemail.

And I would get the voicemail and I would call the person back. But the problem was I had a singular voicemail system, a singular phone, a singular wireless phone. That meant I had limited minutes. So what I had to do was I had to cold call, I guess not cold call, warm call,

I had to call back the bride. And so I’d call, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop, hey, is this the amazing Amanda? And she’d say, yeah. And I’d say, Amanda, this is Clay with DJ Connection, how are you?

Great. Hey, what day are you looking at at getting married? And she’d say, well, June 7th. That’s incredible. Could you tell me more about that day? And then I would hang up on her.

What? Yeah, I would hang up on her. Why would I hang up on her? Think about it. I had limited minutes. Think about it.

Well, it’s because if they called me back, right, then I wasn’t charged. You were only charged for the outbound minutes. And so that’s how I would do it. That’s how I could afford my call time. And so that’s how I did it. I would book my weddings during lunch, I’d book my weddings on the way home, I’d book

them in the car, and I had a big list of things that I needed to buy to turn DJ Connection into a full-time business. Because at the time, I was working part-time for a guy named Rob Biggins, and his company was called All Access Mobile Music. The deal was, for Rob, I had to book my own gigs and then I got to use his equipment. So I’d book a gig for $300, I’d rent his gear for like $150, and then I got to keep the

profit, you know? And that’s how I did it. Well, at the time, I couldn’t afford my own equipment. I couldn’t do it. And so I tried working, I literally applied for every single DJ company in Tulsa. I applied for Infinity, I applied for Powerhouse, I

applied for all those companies and everybody rejected me. And so I had to go work for Rob. And after I’d worked for Rob for a while, I realized, man, I am not probably ever going to get ahead working for Rob. And so I talked to Rob and I asked Rob if it was okay if I could, you know, start my own business in the future. I just want to tell him that was my goal. And Rob said, yeah, absolutely. That’s totally fine. And the only thing is he said, please don’t call my current customers. Just promise me you won’t call my current customers

and we’ll be fine. And so I said, sure, that’s what we’ll do. And so I saved up all the money that I made working at Faith Highway and Applebee’s and Target and DirecTV. I saved up all that money. And the summer before I got the internship working at Tax and Accounting Software, I saved up all that money too. I saved up a lot of money working concrete.

I worked construction. No exaggeration guys. I was working at least every single day, 15 hours a day. Every day. Seven days a week I had a job. And you know why?

Because nobody was going to help me. And no one’s going to come and help you. It’s not gonna happen if you’re waiting for the Reinforcements to come it’s not gonna happen and I think that the acceptance of that that no one is going to help That is that is so powerful once you get to a place where you can accept that Once you can get to a place where you can realize that Nobody is going to to come and pick you up and no one’s going to come and give you direction on a daily basis.

Once you realize that that mentor you’ve been looking for isn’t going to find you, but that you’re going to have to find them, that’s a great place to be. I want to quote Robert Greene, the bestselling author of the book Mastery here. He once said, no one is really going to help you or give you direction. In fact, the odds are against you. But no matter what job that you’re working at,

I encourage you to learn something from that job. Working at Target, I learned the importance of organizing everything. That store would have been chaos if Tara, my boss, wasn’t fastidious about making sure that all of the products and services

were aligned in the proper location, that the labels were facing out, that everything was clean and in the right place. And I brought that skill into building DJ Connection when I was organizing the warehouse and the equipment. That’s how I did it. And I realized the resourcefulness needed

when I was at Faith Highway, realizing that at Faith Highway they didn’t have anybody calling them. No one was calling Faith Highway to buy those commercials. So we had to call them. I learned the power of making a call script from Faith Highway. A call script so good, I remember thinking that, man they have a script that’s so good at Impact Ministries and Faith Highway that they can have a heathen like me booking commercials, selling commercials to pastors.

That right there is repeatability. Wow, that’s a system. Wow, that’s a process. I mean, here I am, a 19, 20-year-old guy. I know nothing. I know nothing about taxes.

And I’m answering the phone, and I’m answering accounting questions from certified public accountants while working at Tax and Accounting Software. That’s some good systems right there. If you can get a 19-year-old with no accounting background to answer the phone and then to be able to answer the questions of accountants, that’s an incredible system. Tim Redmond, who I work with today, Tim Redmond of Redmond Growth, he and Tim Kluwer built

this unbelievable system up there at Tax and Accounting Software. Do you know before they sold Tax and Accounting Software, they had 450 employees up there? Crazy! And how crazy was it that a 19-year-old like me could hop into the business and run it? That was powerful for me. I remember writing that stuff down in my journal going, gosh, I’ve got to build systems that

are so easy that an idiot could run them. I have to build these kind of systems that are so easy that an idiot could run them, because at the time, I was an idiot. I didn’t even know, I wasn’t even aware of the Warren Buffett quote where he said, I try to invest in businesses so wonderful that an idiot can run them, because sooner or later one will.

And that is so true. Think about that again. He says, I try to invest in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will. That right there is powerful. Powerful.

So important that we embrace that idea. It took me a little bit longer than I would have hoped to learn these concepts, but while working at Faith Highway, I polished my sales skills. While working there at Faith Highway and Impact Ministries, every day I began honing my sales skills. I began to get to a place where I recognized that I needed to make a certain number of phone calls per day.

I needed to get a certain number of rejections per day in order to get a certain number of yeses. So I realized if I made 100 outbound calls a day, I would get probably three people to call me back. Of those three, I could probably book two and I decided I wanted to recreate this atmosphere at DJ connection because I love that atmosphere The magic the magic the energy of a buzzing call center

Nothing’s more sad than a quiet sales room working in a small business where it’s so quiet The phone never rings. It’s sad So on the sales floor at impact ministries in the call center at any given time, there were 20 plus reps selling, pleading, and encouraging pastors to buy these tools to reach the lost. And it was here, amidst the hysteria and the frantic pace of this highly competitive sales room, that I realized what it meant to sell something versus just to take an order, like

I had always done at my previous jobs. Here we were breaking the sales process down to five scientific and choreographed steps. We would step one, establish and build rapport. Step two, we would find the needs of the pastors. Step three, we would deliver benefits supported by facts. Think about that. Wow. Step four, we would shamelessly name-drop. And step five, we would call the pastors to action. In case I messed that up here, I repeat. Step one,

we would establish and build rapport. Step two, we would discover the pastor’s needs. Step three, we would deliver the benefits and the solutions supported by facts and step four We would shamelessly name-drop other churches that we were working with and step five We would do the call to action It was at this job that I learned about the deal wheel the process of taking a hard no and turning it into a yes by playing the wounded dog trick and

Acting as though I was emotionally scarred before sheepishly asking what their main need was before I once again pounced right back on the benefits and solutions. Then back on track to the next step. The shameless name drop and finally the call to action. I learned how to drop the EOL, the estimation of loss, essentially letting the buyer know that if they did not act today, the commercials might not be available tomorrow.

I learned about matching expectations to the actual product and the dangers of buyers remorse. I learned about the dangers, think about that, the dangers of buyers remorse. You don’t want to sell something to somebody unless they are thoroughly convinced and they have bought in. So if you ever have somebody that’s on the verge and you’re kind of like, well, I could probably push them to buy something.

I don’t do that. To this day, I don’t do that. To this day, when I deliver benefits, I support them by fax. To this day, I don’t push people to buy things that they can’t afford to buy because of one, I feel bad. Two, you’re not getting any testimonials or references from people who are upset.

Three, there’s this buyer’s remorse. It’s when somebody wants to buy, but they’re not thoroughly convinced that they should buy. They emotionally want to, but they haven’t resolved in their mind that what you’re saying is in fact supported by facts. They emotionally like you, but they don’t necessarily believe or buy into you

That’s a bad place to be you always want your ideal and likely buyers to buy as a result of you building rapport with them Finding their needs delivering benefits supported by facts and then calling them to take action But then oh yes my friend. I learned about buying emotion I learned that buying emotion is the number one reason people buy or don’t buy. I learned the importance of not ever ruining a relationship with a customer over a small dollar amount so as to not crap on your own campground, as my boss Shane would put it.

In this office, I learned how to sell with benefits supported by facts. I learned the importance of finding everyone’s hot button. I learned the ancient art of the name drop and how to bring passion to the phone. I learned that most purchases are motivated by emotion and not price, and I learned in the absence of value, price is the only consideration. I learned how to become emotionally numb to rejection when making sales calls.

My friend, I learned that failure is a prerequisite to success at this job, and I learned to succeed. And I brought all of that into the founding of DJConnection.com. You ask yourself, where do the scripts come from? A customer called me the other day and said, I think they’re still using the same scripts that you built. Probably.

Somebody called me the other day and said, hey, I think your on hold music is the same and they haven’t changed it. I said, probably. The logo you built is still being used. Absolutely. They said, well, how come you don’t go back there anymore?

Well, the thing is, whenever you sell a company, it’s kind of like breaking up with a girlfriend almost. You know, I mean, maybe you had a great relationship with a girl and maybe at one point you were in love with that girl and you wanted to be with that girl. You could picture yourself being with that girl for the foreseeable future. But now you’ve broken up.

Really there’s nothing left because now your girl is dating some other dude. And I suppose you could go hang out with your girlfriend and some other dude. Maybe they’re married now. But that would get weird real fast, right? Right? Just the thought of it’s even weird.

So, you know, even just checking on DJ Connection, they do things differently now. The guy I sold the company to, Jason Bailey, is a good man and he does things differently from the way that I would do it. He does things, many things probably better

than I would have done it, or differently than I would have done it, but I can’t go back because there’s too much pain. Do I regret selling the business? No. But I lost a part of me there.

Lost a relationship when I sold that company. Am I glad I moved on to other things? Yes. But why don’t I check on it? It’s because it’s really not mine anymore. It’s somebody else’s.

I sold that car and broke up from that girl and now she’s dating somebody else. My friend, when I worked at Faith Highway, when I started working at Faith Highway, I thought you’d go to your job and make calls on the days where I felt good. But at Faith Highway I learned that

in a largely commission-based job, if you don’t make calls on the days you’re feeling sick or you have the sniffles or you probably need some more day quill, then you really won’t do well. I also learned at Faith Highway about jackassery.

I worked at Impact Ministries, I learned about jackassery too. I remember working on the sales floor next to a man who would pray all the time. He’d pray, Lord Jesus, help me to close deals. Just help me to close deals.

And no exaggeration, guys, this is real talk. He’d make like 40 outbound calls a day 40 for zero then I met another guy who he confided in me where we were working out one day at this local gym and he says I want you to know I’m actually not a Christian either and I think we can kind of get fired if we’re not Christians it’s a you know Christian business Christian ministry

but here’s how I’m here’s how I make all my money. What you gotta do is you gotta make 200 outbound calls a day. And when you’re on the phone, you have to understand that it’s an act, right? It’s showtime, it’s an act, it’s a game.

When you’re on the phone, that character, that personality, there needs to be a person who’s enthusiastic, who’s excited, who’s tenacious, who cares. It’s like the best of all virtues. When you’re on the phone, it’s a showtime thing. You can’t, you can be happy, right?

You can be funny, but you can’t be sad. You can be honest and funny, but you can’t be honest and sad. You can have a highlight of the week, but you can’t have a low of the week. My friend, you are just, it’s all about ups. You’ve got to bring the motion up, and the sales will go up. So meanwhile, my homie next to you is praying all the time.

Watch his numbers, because his numbers aren’t good. And I’m sure that God could help him, but for whatever reason, God’s choosing not to. Meanwhile, I’m going to show you my Jedi sales techniques.” And so day by day, week after week, he began showing me the importance of reading the freaking script. His Jedi move was following the script, except instead of making the minimum required 100 calls a day.

This guy was focused on making 200 calls a day. And he said, I’m going to call all my leads, I’m going to open my book, turn to the pages left to right. We called it a book. It’s a book of sales leads. And he said, I’m going to call my leads from left to right.

And then when I finish, I’m going to call all my leads from right to left. But I’m never going to be off the phone unless I’m going to the restroom. And I thought, wow, that right there is a thought process. That’s a move. And to this day, that’s what I do. I never take a lunch break.

I haven’t taken a lunch break in a long time. I don’t do it. Why? I don’t understand why I would want to come to work and then take a lunch break. I don’t get why I would want to be away from my family, sitting there, eating my meal. I’d rather just keep working.

Maybe just slam a protein shake or something. But bottom line, I learned so many things at Impact Ministries and Faith Highway. And all of that DNA, all that culture, all those experiences went into the building of DJ Connection. And yet over time I lost my zeal for selling those evangelism commercials because I wasn’t a Christian.

And I actually believed opposite of what I was selling. It’s called cognitive dissonance. It’s when your values don’t align to your actions. And so over time, I quickly discovered that I didn’t like working with pastors and their boards. I’m a firm believer in GE’s former CEO Jack Welch’s philosophy that committees are not

effective. I found it very hard to deal with the reality that most of these churches of 120 or less people couldn’t make a decision in 60 days or less. I just didn’t understand about the idea that a man would pray about advertising. Every company in America advertises if they’re going to be successful, and I’d have somebody praying about whether they should advertise or not.

I didn’t get it. And so looking back on it, it was just frustrating everybody around me to stick around. And so I ultimately asked my boss, Jeremy Thorne, if I could move on to do something else. And that something else was full-time DJ connection.

Why? Because I decided in my mind that I was going to eventually quit and do DJ connection full-time as soon as I could book four weddings a week for four weeks in a row. So let me explain this to you.

I would get usually, every time a lead came in from the yellow pages, I would pretty much book two out of three leads, maybe three out of four leads. If I had four leads a week that came in from the yellow page advertisement, I’d usually book two or three of those four.

Then when I went out and DJed a wedding, typically two to three people at the wedding would come up and ask me if they could get a card because they wanted me to DJ their wedding. And eventually it occurred to me that everyone I passed out a card to never actually

followed up and called me. And so I started saying to people at the shows they would come up to me and say, hey can I get a card? And I’d say yeah, are you guys getting married? And they’d say yes.

And I’d say well if you give me your phone number I can check my availability to see if I’m open. And then magically I started booking all those shows. And so I started booking all those shows started getting referrals started good We’ll do the yellow page ads Then on the weekends I’d set up shop at these local bridal shops

There’s these local bridal stores where brides go in to find the perfect gown the perfect dress. I would set up my equipment There and I would do a drawing for a chance to win a free DJ for your wedding and Brides would register and I’d call all the leads and give every bride a 15% discount if they registered. One week I booked four weddings. I thought, three weeks from now, baby, I’m quitting this place. And the next week, I can’t remember any bookings I had, but I had like zero bookings or one or

something. Well, then the next week I booked four and then the next weekend I would book zero. And this kept happening four and zero, four and one, four and three, four and four. I booked four weddings one week and then four weddings the next week and then one the next week. And I kept having to reset because I’d set myself this goal that I’m not going to quit until I can book four weddings every week for four weddings in a row. And that right there is a big teaching moment for somebody out there.

That’s some of the things you can learn from this official DJ Connection history, as told by the founder myself, is that. You have to know when your jumping point is. You have to know when are you going to take the jump and to get into self-employment. I recommend that that jump is not an emotional decision. I recommend that when you make that jump, you’re making that jump because you have the

money to do it. Imagine it’s like a pool, right? And the pool can be filled with money, you’d rather jump into a pool with money so that you have some cushion there. But if you’re just jumping off the diving board onto concrete, you’re going to die. I mean, cash is the lifeblood of your business.

Blood is the, it’s the life, you know, your blood gives you life, right? Water, sunshine provides life for plants. So, you know, if you starve a plant of light and water too long, it’s going to die. If you starve a person of their blood system, that would be gross and they would die. If you starve a business of cash, it dies. That’s what bankruptcy is. That’s when you’re out of business. So I made that decision that I’m not going to stop until I had four weddings booked, four weeks in a row. And so each week I kept having to sit by this guy named Ron.

And in the Impact sales room I had gotten to a place where I was annoyed with being there. I didn’t want to sell commercials. They had required praise and worship. We had to go upstairs and sing praise and worship twice a week. And there would be a guy up there singing, Be to our God forever and ever.

Be to our God forever and ever. And I was going no no no I don’t I didn’t believe in it there’s a song our God is an awesome God he raised from heaven above I just didn’t want to I could I wasn’t feeling it I didn’t want to be a part of it I felt like I was a hypocrite because I was a hypocrite so I thought well at least if I’m stuck here until I can put four weddings four weeks in a row I’m

gonna at least try to soak up as much knowledge as possible. So I’m sitting next to this guy named Ron Hood. In the Impact Ministries sales room, this huge room filled with sales representatives, were all surrounding the perimeter of the room. Ron Hood worked in the corner. We all just called him Hood.

He worked at this momentum generating and procrastination killing pace that I now work at today all the time. I never worked like that before. Yeah, I skipped lunches, but I’d never worked like that before. This guy would pound out numbers on the phone

and he would do everything with a sense of urgency. He would leave voicemails with a passion. He would write with a passion. He would take notes with a passion. He was pretty much, he would set the pace for the whole call center every single day.

And because he was so good, he often intimidated people. And because he was 100% focused on his job, people often thought that he was not a nice guy. But the reality was, the reality of the situation, was that he just came to work to do the work. And that was the only reason for being there for him. He did not come to work to have in-depth conversations and political discussions with the employees

and coworkers about the weather, the economy, the various collegiate sports teams or religious differences. And I learned that from Ron. I learned that the key to becoming poor is to talk about religion, politics, and divisive issues during your workday. If you want to slow down your workday and make your day ineffective, get into a debate with somebody about abortion. Or get into a

debate with somebody about building a wall. Should we build a wall to protect us from Mexico? Should we not? Get into a debate about one world currency talk to him about the weather tell me you like hot weather see how they react this is the kind of crap I see today still in companies I work with companies I own people come to work to debate divisive issues and people come to work to do everything but to work but Ron taught me to work.

He taught me this verse, he said, and I wasn’t a Christian at the time, but I kind of like the verse. I mean, do you have to be a Christian to like the verse? I mean, I don’t know, do you have to be a pagan to like pagan music? I don’t know. So, but he had this verse, and that verse, I thought, man, that verse, that verse is

good. And I remember writing it down and thinking, I got to, I got to, I got to, I got to do that. That’s huge. It’s from Colossians 3.23 from the Bible, where it reads,

“‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart.'” Again, Colossians 3.23 from the Bible. It says, “‘Whatever you do, work at it with all of your heart, as working for the Lord himself, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance

from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Jesus Christ you’re serving.” Wow, that was powerful for me. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart as working for the Lord, not for human masters. Since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward, it is the Lord

Jesus Christ you are serving. That helped me so much. Ron was always focused on what he could control, and he created his own daily momentum. He was a sales institution in and of himself. He simply outworked everyone in the room at all times. He was on fire.

To him, cold calling was just a numbers game, and he knew that the more people he called, the more deals he would make, plain and simple. He did not care if that meant he would be hung up on more often than not. He was a cold calling machine. He would work through the breaks. At least I don’t recall him ever taking a break.

So nowadays, I don’t ever take lunch breaks either, just like Ron, but instead I just work through them. I grind through them, I picked up those habits from working with Ron Hood those last few months. He was hungry like the wolf for sales. And I think he was also literally hungry.

I mean, maybe it’s just because he hadn’t eaten anything. Maybe there’s no correlation between this physical hunger and this figurative hunger for deals, but it works for me and I operate best even today when I am hungry.” Ron thrived on competition. He was fueled by a passionate fiery, it was this ardor and drive to succeed. He brought the alacrity, this cheerful readiness to the phone.

This conviction behind the words, his conviction behind his words that he was saying was incredible. At impact, not many people knew too much about Hood because he never spoke with anyone other than pastors? Literally, this guy would roll into work right on time and he’d immediately fire up the phone. Yes, no, yes, no, dial, smile. Call them all until they cry, buy or die. Yes, no, yes, no, dial and smile.

Call them all until they cry, buy or die. He was not affected by the responses. He knew that we had an incredible product and he just wanted to find out who the buyers were. If you weren’t a buyer, he wanted you off of his phone if you were a buyer He wanted to find out your hot button

Something that you were passionate something that you were passionate about so he could quickly find the right commercial package to communicate the church’s message To the community one would bring the fire to every call he would adapt this presentation over time to accommodate the unique dialects personalities and conversation styles of each customer Just listening to him speak fired me up. Just thinking about the passion behind his cold calls and the way he left compelling voicemails makes me want to go make some cold calls right now.

Because of Ron, I now love cold calls, and I sincerely do. I remember when I first tried speaking to Ron, he always acted as though I did not know that I was standing in his area. It was like he was kind of confused as to, why are you interrupting me? And so I kept harassing him and kept asking him to meet. And finally he said, fine, I will meet you, but you will have to, we’ll meet at Grady’s,

because I used to be a waiter there, and you need to figure out what’s wrong with your stinking thinking. I remember him saying that to me. He’s like, I will take you to Grady’s, but you have to figure out what’s wrong

with your stinking thinking. And I was totally oblivious to the idea of what that meant. So I thought, OK, I’m kind of insulted, but I suck at my job, or I’m not as good as he is. I mean, I think he was doing like 10 times as much commission as I was making.

So I agreed to go. And there he pointed out to me, he says, Clay, you have earrings on. Why are you wearing pirate earrings? And I thought, I don’t know. Because I’m awesome?

I wasn’t sure. I mean, I guess I was into rap culture and I had those earrings. He said, when I see those earrings, does that inspire credibility? Or does that, what does that do for you? When people see your earrings,

do they want to do business with you or not? My friend, you have to dress to impress. You have to dress to impress. My friend, if you’re gonna have success, you have to dress to impress. And you gotta wipe that scowl off your face. You got to sound happy on the phone

You got to wipe that scowl off your face and thus the phrase that I said a DJ connection every day dial and smile was born dial and smile Dialing and smiling when you smile on the phone It’s amazing how it impacts you He said clay you have to work as under the Lord with all of your heart as working for the Lord not for human masters, man, since you know that you will receive an inheritance

from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. And so I said, well, what does that mean? He said, listen, don’t worry about your manager, man. They’re making a call quota for you having to make a hundred outbound calls a day,

a minimum of a hundred calls a day. Why don’t you shoot for the maximum? Why don’t you try to set a record? Why don’t you try to beat me there, buddy? Why don’t you try to beat me? And why don’t you make some goals?

Why don’t you write down some specific goals that you want to go after?” And I started thinking, well, I have a goal. I want to start my own DJ company. He said, yeah, but what about all the equipment you need, man? Don’t you need to write that down? And so here’s the list of what I wrote down.

I wrote down, I need to buy a $35 a month phone service. That’s what I need to buy. This is like an extra service where they would record your calls. I needed to pay an extra $40 a month for my cell phone service. I needed an extra $100 a month for the car insurance I needed. I needed this extra DJ gear. I made a list of all the equipment I needed. And then I began to have this new passion knowing that I

wasn’t working for my boss. I was working as unto the Lord. I was just working as unto the Lord. And so passionately, I began to change my mindset and I began to work as unto the Lord. And over time, I eventually booked four weddings, four weeks in a row. And I quit all my jobs, I took that money, and I bought more advertisements, bigger yellow page ads.

I bought bigger yellow page ads. I bought a bigger yellow page ad. This was before the internet, before the websites, before all the search engine optimization. I bought a bigger phone book ad. Then I hired a guy to help me work at more bridal stores. So we have more people in the bridal stores.

I was already in the bridal stores. And I increased, I had a two-legged marketing stool, two things working for me. And then I committed that I was going to work as hard for myself as I ever did while working at Faith Highway. I would personally make 200 outbound calls a day. And that was my three-legged marketing stool, that was my system, was that I was gonna make 200 outbound calls a day,

I’d be working all the bridal shows, all the bridal stores, I couldn’t get into bridal shows at this time, it was bridal stores, and then I would do yellow page ads. And that was my three ways I got the marketing going on.

And I wrote down a list of all the things I wanted to fix over time. I wanted to have a website that was respectable, I wanted to have a logo that I liked, I wanted to have name tags for the guys, I wanted to have better quality speakers, and I wrote down that list

of that equipment. And day by day, week by week, I worked at it. My wife worked at Office Depot and Oral Roberts University, and I was able to then focus on just one job, and that was DJ connection. And I worked at that job. I DJ’d every wedding to the best of my ability.

I always got there early, I always stayed late, I decided to over-deliver. After each and every wedding, I didn’t have to, and it turns out it was illegal, but I did it, I would send the brides a CD with all of the songs that we had played at their wedding to them in an outback gift certificate. And then I would write them a handwritten note thanking them for the opportunity to work with them.

A couple of weeks after the wedding, after they had returned from their honeymoon, I would send it to them. And then I would call and follow up and I would say, hey, you know, is this the amazing bride? Yeah, hey, how was the wedding? And they would say, great. I would say, well, hey, what can I have done to improve?

And they would say, nothing, no Clay, it was great. And I would say, no, but seriously, I would like to know what could I do to make it better? And I learned that at Faith Highway because we run commercials for pastors and we would ask them, what could we do to improve this experience? What can we do to improve these commercials here at Impact Ministries?

And I started asking the brides, you know, what can I do to improve? And they’d always say on the first pass, oh, it was great. But on the second pass, they’d say something like, well, I mean, you know, your presentation,

the music was great, the announcements were great, but you talked a little too fast. So maybe you could slow it down. But other than that, we were really appreciative. And what can we do to help? And I said, well, if you could refer me to a friend, it would mean the world.

And I just kept doing that. And I grew the company. And in 2000, the year 2002, I was named as the Tulsa Metro Chamber of Commerce Young Entrepreneur of the Year for DJ Connection. And I just kept growing it and kept hiring people. And the crazy thing about the hiring process was I would hire people, people that I believed in, and I would train them up.

I always thought it would be like this band where we’re together for years. You know like U2, one of the rare bands that has stayed together for a long time. I thought it would be like U2. But I found that running my company wasn’t like running New Edition, the R&B group. It was like, I had Bobby Brown on my group, you know, in my group, and Bobby wanted to go solo, and Ralph Tresvant wanted to go and do his own thing, and then one by one over

the course of a decade, I noticed that all my former DJs became my competitors. And all of the people that I’d hired that I knew from college had bailed out on a wedding on me or always did what was best for them. They never would honor their commitments. They would say, I’ll DJ for that wedding on June 5th. But then the week of June 5th would come up and they would say, I’m going to go on a trip.

I’m going to go rafting. Or I’m going to go work at a church camp. Or whatever they had committed to me to do, they always bailed out. And I was always stuck left holding the bag. I was left holding the responsibility and thankfully holding all the money. I over time realized that over time

Really nobody is going to stick around and I started reading more and more books I read books about Apple and you know books about the founding of Microsoft and I started realizing when I read books of about Rockefeller that these people too very few of the people that they started their companies with were with them over time, stayed with them.

I started to realize that a business ultimately has to exist to serve me because no matter how much time and energy I poured into them, they would ultimately start their own business to compete directly with me. Every time, unbelievable.

And they’d always have their own justifications. I’d have people tell me, well, God told me to start my own business. That’s always a fun one. When someone says, God told you to start your own business to compete directly with your current boss. That’s always fun.

There was always people that would say, well, hey, I just want you to know I don’t agree with your policies. There was always someone that had a harsh opinion or someone who hated the structure, someone who hated sticking within the playlists I made or sticking within the regulations or the systems we had created. There was always people that hated being on time and so you’d have to create a system for what do you do how

do you handle a DJ who’s late? So I created a system where you have to find people who are late. It’s called merit-based pay. Sticks and carrots. I’d read about this in Jack Welch’s book Straight from the Gut. I realized if the DJs do a great job we should survey the bride after the wedding, and if the bride – we should ask the bride on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy were you with the DJ’s performance?

And if the DJ scores like a 9 or a 10, we should give the DJ a bonus. And if the DJ scores like a – I don’t know, anything less than a 7, we should pay the DJ as low as possible. And that merit-based pay system really was polarizing. It pushed out the terrible disc jockeys. And it attracted people that were focused on results.

And the company grew some more. And then that wave of people left and started their own company. And it just kept happening. And as each person who used to work for me started their own company, one by one they all failed because they weren’t working as under the Lord. You see, those people only worked hard on the days where they felt like it.

Those people were, you know, they only sowed seeds on the days where they felt healthy. And so I found that it didn’t even bother me if people, it was almost a good thing for my DJs to leave and start their own company because every time they did it, their businesses would fail and it would furthermore prove the, it would further prove to the marketplace that my company was the true market leader. My name is Clay Clark and that is how I started DJ Connection. My name is Kevin Thomas and the name of our company is MultiClean.

We are a commercial janitorial service and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas and soon to be Arkansas. We have probably grown probably five times. We’ve added, I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees, and now we have a little over 300 employees. Before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place.

I’ve probably been to, oh, in six, seven years, I’ve probably been to 12 to 13 business conferences and amazingly, each time I go, I learn something new and I’m so excited to bring it back and, and show the team about marketing and how to implement, uh, how, how to help you guys implement the SEO. And the coaching is just great because there’s accountability.

And it’s just a fantastic way to grow your company. Having a relationship with Thrivetime, it’s just been amazing for MultiClient. Oh my goodness, it frees me up because then I don’t have to take a class on search engine optimization

or learn marketing or shoot video. That’s not what we do. What we do is commercial janitorial service. And you guys were the experts on marketing. And you teach me and hold my hand and show me how to do it right.

And therefore, now my company is much, much larger. Folks, on today’s show, we’re joined by a real client. He may look like a male model. He may look like a hologram, but he’s a real person. He’s a long-time client. He’s a man that we consider to be a friend of the Thrive Time Show and a friend of mine. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the show, Kevin. Welcome on to the Thrive Time

Show. How are you, sir? Clay, I’m doing great. I had a great Christmas holiday and I’m glad to be here. Okay, so first question, can you tell us what is your name, first and last name and what’s the name of your company, sir? My name is Kevin Thomas and the name of our company is MultiClean. We are a commercial janitorial service and we serve the entire state of Oklahoma and Kansas and soon to be Arkansas. And how long have we worked with you approximately at this point, sir?

It’s been about six, seven years. And you know, so many people reach out to me. Literally every day. I just talked to a woman this morning. We get 10 to 20 people a day that reach out wanting to see if we can help them grow their companies.

We only work with 160 clients. I do that because I want to only work with people that are super coachable. This woman on the call today was asking me, she said, ìWhatís the most important thing that you do, that you have to do to grow your company. And I was telling her, I said, that’s kind of like asking a skilled chef,

what’s the most important ingredient to make great cookies? Is it flour? Is it eggs? Is it butter? It’s like asking a home builder, what’s the most important component to building a house?

Is it the footings? Is it the frame? Is it the concrete? You know, that’s like asking, that’s a great, maybe it’s a great question, but really it’s all of it.

And so I really wanted to talk to you today about all of it, implementing all of it, growing multi-clean, how we’ve been able to do it. So first off, could you share what it’s like to have a coach that works with you every week, who’s committed to helping you improve your business by one or 2% every week? Well, Andrew is my coach.

And the great thing about having him as a coach is he keeps me accountable. Because sometimes when you’re the owner, there’s no one to be accountable to. And he keeps me on track, he keeps me tracking sales, tracking wins, if we have a loss,

he helps me figure out what happened. He just keeps me being consistent with our processes, with our systems, which before we got involved with Thrive Time, we didn’t really have any systems or processes in place. And in terms of growth over these past six or seven years, I’m not looking for you to share the actual sales totals

because you’re a larger company at this point, but could you share how much growth have you had over the past six or seven years? We have probably grown probably five times. We’ve added, I think when we first started with you, we had 60 to 65 employees,

and now we have a little over 300 employees. So just to be clear, I’m making sure I’m taking notes here. You’ve grown five times, and you’ve grown from how many employees to how many employees? About 60, 65 to well over 300 in that time frame. So let’s unpack all the specific aspects of business growth and I’m going to pull up a

document so our listeners can see. What’s your website we can go to right now to look at while I’m pulling up this source document? What’s your web address, sir? The website is Multiclean, just like it sounds, MulticleanOK.com. MulticleanOK.com.

Can I pull this up? And as I pulled up this source document, many people say, Clay, why do you pull up these documents? Well, contrary to popular belief, most successful people that I know use workflows, they use documents, they use checklists.

We don’t typically memorize things. And a lot of times people say, what? I say, yeah, as a business owner, I’m not going to try to impress you with my memory, but I am going to teach you proven systems. And so when somebody goes to implement these business systems as a coach, we’re going to guide you through all of these processes, but it is – there’s a lot there to it.

There’s a lot of steps. It’s step one, it’s step two, it’s step three, it’s step 807. It’s a lot of steps here. And so as we’re going through this, I don’t want anyone to feel overwhelmed, but I just want people to understand it’s implementing all of these systems simultaneously that produces the success.

So first off, establishing your goals. I’m not trying to have you hop on today’s show and share what your goals are necessarily, but let’s start with step one. Why is it important for everybody out there to figure out clearly what your goals are. Well, Clay, it’s important to have goals. Otherwise you wouldn’t really know, uh, you wouldn’t know where you’re going.

You wouldn’t know if you reached a certain level of success, uh, unless you have a goal that you’re going for. And plus those goals for me, anyway, they keep me motivated to, to grow my company, to grow my employees, to better my employees, and, uh, also to, to make my family stronger and better as well. So we have those goals.

That’s step one. We gotta have those goals. Goals for our faith, our family, our finances, our fitness, our friendship, our fun. And some of us are better in certain areas. Some of us need help in other areas,

but we gotta have our goals. Second, we gotta determine our break-even point. And I think that’s something that a lot of business owners don’t know. So I’m just gonna be very clear with our listeners and kind of bare my soul.

But when we work with a client like you, we charge you $1,700 a month and we make a 20% margin. So we make $340 a month per client. I know what my costs are. Kevin, you know what you pay me. It’s very clear, my profit margin.

Most business owners though, when we start working with them, they don’t know their break-even point. Could you share why it’s important for you as an owner of a company now with 300 employees to know your break-even point? Well, it’s really important because you don’t know if you’re making money and you need

to know what your margins are going to be. You need to know what your cost is so that way you can take your profit and then turn that around and pay your overhead, pay your employees, and most of all, most importantly, is to pay yourself. And because if you’re not paying yourself and if and making an income, then the business is pretty much dead. And again, I’m taking notes here. If it sounds like I’m a type of a novel, I’m not.

I’m just taking notes so everyone can really dial into this. Now, box three, you have to know how many hours a week you’re willing to work. Now, one thing about you bragging on you is you’re willing to do whatever you need to do,

but you’re also super committed to your family. So again, I repeat, you’re very willing to do whatever you need to do, but you’re also committed to your family. So we’re recording this testimonial today on a Saturday, and virtually every entrepreneur I’ve ever met in my life, I don’t say virtually, every entrepreneur I’ve ever interviewed in

my life on this show, we’ve interviewed billionaires, multimillionaires, all of them are no stranger to working on Saturdays. Can you talk about that, about just being realistic with yourself and your family, about how many hours per week you’re actually willing to work whatever it takes, whether it’s eight hours or 15 hours a day. Since we’ve been in business for 31 years, we have a fantastic team right now.

My hours have cut down, so I’m actually able to spend more time with my family because I have such a fantastic team and we have fantastic processes. But as a new owner, you just have to do whatever, whatever you have to do to get it done and eventually it will get easier. Not much easier, but it will get easier.

Now we move on to this next box. You have to know your unique value proposition. Now, as a coaching platform, what we try to do is work with wonderful clients like you to help you stand out in a clutter of commerce. One of the things that I found out about your business very quickly is you had a long history

of running your business. You weren’t a startup. You had a long history of success. I was telling Andrew, hey, we need to document all of Kevin’s testimonials. We need to gather them in one place. We need to start getting Google reviews, objective Google reviews from real clients.

We need to do that because, and this is not a backhanded compliment. You had a very good business, but you guys had not documented your client’s successes over the years. You didn’t have video proof that you guys did a good job. You didn’t have documented testimonials.

You did not have objective Google reviews that matched the quality you provided. Can you talk about the importance of documenting your actual client testimonials and gathering those objective reviews? Absolutely.

That’s really huge in our growth. The fact that we are the highest and most reviewed commercial cleaning service in the entire state of Oklahoma is a very important thing. And it just shows proof of who we are when we get Google reviews. Also, when we do video testimonials, it’s real people giving real testimonials. It’s not super, super professional, it’s just a real person giving a real review about how they feel about MultiClean. And it’s just been a huge help to our business when people that get online, they look for

a commercial cleaning service and usually they go to the maps page, we’re right there all the time and usually we get picked to give someone a quote. And that’s been really instrumental in the growth of MultiClean. And again, this is not an event. This is an ongoing process, and every week we’re gathering objective Google reviews, objective video reviews.

And again, that’s one of the ways you stand out in the clutter of commerce. The next is the branding. A lot of times we meet a business owner, Kevin, and their website is in disrepair. Their website needs help. So I think about clients that we’ve had tremendous success with, brands like Shaw Homes. When we started working with Shaw Homes, by the way, Shaw Homes was just sold, but we

started working with Shaw Homes. They were around $14 million a year of sales, and we helped them to grow over $150 million in sales. So just to be clear, we helped Shaw Homes grow from $14 million in sales to over $150 million in sales. We work with wonderful brands like Oxifresh, where Oxifresh today now has over 550 locations.

And branding really is just the perception that people have when they see your company for the first time. Branding is your website, your print pieces, your logos, your business cards, your one sheets. Branding is the perception people have

when they see your business for the first time. And I would encourage everybody out there to self-assess yourself on a scale of one to 10. 10 being the highest, one being the worst. How highly would you rank your branding? Kevin, can you talk about the impact that’s made having a professional

branding working for you? Absolutely. Branding is, is pretty key in the commercial janitorial service because there are a lot of startups that will, that are very cheap and don’t really offer much service when we show up. Everything that we do is professional.

Our card looks good, our proposal looks good. We have a team here that continually communicates with a customer or potential customer. And so having that brand that this is a professional company, we have a lot of respect out there amongst our competitors and amongst our clients as well,

because we have that, the quality name goes with MultiClean and that’s very important in this industry. Now, again, there’s somebody out there who needs to hear this. We’ve been working together for years, and every week, you’re growing by… Every week, we’re improving the company, in my opinion, by one or two percent. So at the end of the year, you say, what did we do?

Well, we made the company 50 percent better. Every week, we’re improving the company by one or two percent. Well, what are we talking about? At the end of the year, you’ve grown the company. At the end of the five years, you’ve grown the company. At the end of the five years you’ve grown the company. At the end of the six years you look back and go, wow, we’re five times larger. What do you say to somebody out there that’s looking to get rich quick? Somebody who’s looking for the one thing that will turn their business around and make them rich tomorrow. What would you say?

I would say give it up on that idea because there’s no such thing as it’s it’s more like get rich slowly. That’s the only way to be successful is take your time, do it right, be patient, be a man or a woman of integrity and make good decisions for your company

and just do it right. Now, step four, I’m going through this methodically, folks. Step number four, again, you define your unique value proposition, got it, okay. Step five, you improve your branding. Step six, you have to come up with a three-legged marketing

stool. And with your business, we have clearly defined a three-legged marketing stool. What does that mean? A stool with three legs is stable. A stool with one leg is going to fall over.

It’s probably not even a stool. At that point, it’s sort of a monopod. But you have to have a three-legged marketing stool. So for your company, we have three things that we do. And there’s some other things we do too, but one is we really, really focus on search engine optimization by gathering the most objective reviews, writing original content, gathering

video testimonials. Second, Dream 100. That’s where you reach out to your ideal and likely buyers consistently. You reach out to your ideal and likely buyers. And third, you’re wowing your customers to the point that you’re generating word of mouth. The word of mouth is becoming…

You’re intentional about wowing your customers, thus it creates word of mouth. Could you talk about the importance of having a three-legged marketing stool for anybody out there that has a one-legged marketing stool or no intentional approach to marketing at all? Well, Clay, the nice thing about the three-legged marketing is that we learned that from you at Thrivetime.

We didn’t really know what we were doing. And so when we joined up with Thrivetime, we started doing the SEO, we got our website in order, got it all cleaned up so that when people search for commercial janitorial services, they find us. Also, when they do find us, we’re top in Google reviews. And then also, with the Dream 100, we have a database in our Excel and HubSpot that we’re continually going to and making cold calls. The important thing about all that is that you can’t just rely on one.

Maybe one day one’s doing well, the next day, next month, another one is doing well, so it’s circular. At one point, one of them is always going to be doing well to help your company grow. Once the leads come in, you have to actually sell something. This just in, if we don’t sell, our business will go to hell. You know that.

Most of our listeners know that too. But there’s a lot of entrepreneurs out there that have a bias. They think, you know, if I have a great idea, it’ll sell itself. If I build it, they will come. And they think that because they’ve watched Field of Dreams. They think that because they’ve watched too many Tai Lopez videos. They think that because they’ve watched Get Rich Quick videos about ClickFunnels and various other online, I call it scammockery, but it’s where someone’s trying to get rich quick.

I would just tell you that if you build it, they won’t come. A product is so good, it still won’t sell itself. You have to get out there and work it. To do that, you have sales scripts, you have recorded calls for quality control, you have one sheets, you have pre-written emails, you have lead trackers. You have all of those things in place. Could you talk about the importance of having intentionally scripted calls and

intentionally recorded calls and intentional, just being intentional about every aspect of your sales process? Absolutely. We’re intentional with all that with our sales scripts. We have two ladies that are inside sales and they’re continually calling. They have a fantastic script that they use. The one sheet that we use, we give it and it compares us to other services. And actually, that was designed by you guys at Thrive Time, which has been very helpful. And then our lead tracker, which Andrew and I go over each week, we kind of look,

because I don’t see all of the leads that come in, but we go over the lead tracker and I’m able to see from beginning to end when the lead came in, where it is, is it in the bid process right now and did we get it or did we not get it? And if we didn’t get it, that goes into another file for a follow-up call in three to five months. And if you don’t have all those in some kind of a process, you’re just going to lose all

those potential leads. I hope that this podcast, this broadcast can change somebody’s life. Now, in part two of today’s show, I am going to do a show specifically about how if you have a great idea, it won’t sell itself. Part two of the show is going to start off with Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, there’s old video footage of Steve Jobs telling you, the viewer, telling me,

the viewer, that hey, a great product will not sell itself. It’s powerful when you hear from other people who are actually achieving success, who did achieve success. I encourage everybody to pay attention and take notes because we’re trying to help you achieve massive success. Step number eight, you have to know how much money it costs

you to acquire a new customer. You have to determine your sustainable acquisition costs. So just today, I mean, I talked to a wonderful lady today. I’m gonna talk to a wonderful young man. I say a young man, a guy in his late thirties. I’m gonna talk to a man in his late thirties today.

I talked to a woman this morning who’s super successful. And I know that whether they buy a ticket to a conference or not, or whether they become a client or not, Kevin, I know that our marketing costs to promote our conferences hover around $12,000 a month. What? Yeah.

So I spend about $12,000 every month to market our business conferences. Why am I telling you that? Well, folks, do the math. If we have a conference every two months, so every 60 days, right? And we’re spending $24,000 to promote a conference and we’re doing a conference every 60 days approximately,

how much money does it cost me for every person who’s in attendance? So let’s just kind of do some math for a second. I want to give people some real examples. So if I’m spending $24,000 this month or over the next two months on promoting a conference

and we sell a total of 300 tickets, that means it’s $80. It costs me $80 per customer, per conference attendee. And I’m not talking about the food we serve, Kevin. I’m not talking about the Eric Trumps, the Robert Kiyosaki’s, the Tim Tebow’s

that come in to speak. I’m not talking about any of the workbooks we give the attendees. I’m just talking about the cost to get in front of our ideal and likely buyers, it comes out to about $80 per ticket buyer. And I think if you ask the average entrepreneur, I know this because I’ve been doing business

coaching for 20 years, the average client I talk to, the average potential client I talk to, they do not know what it costs them to get a new customer. Can you talk about that for a second? Why is it important to know how much money it costs you at Multi Clean to get a new customer? Well, Clay, it’s really important because you have a sales team, you have an outside sales team, inside sales team, and you have overhead costs along with startup costs for us. We have to start

up with new equipment and all kinds of equipment to do the building. The bigger the building, the bigger the startup. So it’s very important to nail that down on what it costs. Sometimes I have to rein in the team and say, okay, we can’t buy all this brand new, this equipment, that equipment for this account. Thankfully, most of our startup costs are recouped within the first three to five months of starting a contract with a customer.

But it’s very important to know that, otherwise you’re just not, at the end of the month, you’re like, where’d all my money go? So it’s very important to know what that cost is. Folks, I’m telling you, this is the kind of stuff they don’t teach at business school, but they should. Okay, so here we go.

The next is, you’ve got to, this is stuff we have to do. We have to, box number nine, step number nine, we have to create repeatable systems, processes, and file organization. Now, so many people, what’s interesting to me, Kevin, is so many of our listeners, they know about Dr. Z and the auto auction, or they know about me and the dog training business, or they know about me in the haircut chain and they go,

Clay, did you grow up, like was your dad like the Zolhan? Was your dad really into hair? Is that how you got going? Or they’ll go, Clay, are you and Dr. Z really into cars? Do you have like an automotive background? Or they’ll say, it’s z66aa.com.

And Dr. Z, full disclosure, just did sell that business. So it’s now switching the branding over here to America’s auto auction, okay? And by the way, the company that bought his auto auction bought it because it was successful. People look up Make Your Dog Epic, they go, are you, did you have a dog training background?

People look up Dr. Zellner and Associates, they go, is that because you guys are in love with the human eyeball? And then what happens is people are left to think, are you successful because of luck? Or have you, Clay, have you and Dr. Z been able to combine to build what? 14 multi-million dollar companies because you’re lucky? Because of your

vast knowledge of the human eyeball and hair? Dogs? Or is it because you’re following a proven process? And that’s what I want to hammer home into everybody’s cranium right now. Everybody can do this, Kevin, but you’ve got to follow a system. What do you say to somebody who says, I just don’t know if I can do it? What would you say?

Well, I would say that before we had a relationship with Thrivetime, I don’t even think I knew what a process meant or what a process was. So the coaches there have helped me put in some great processes in place to track sales, to learn about, we have a software called HubSpot that you’re

familiar with, Excel, and we have another software called HiRise that we use and it tracks all of our customers day by day. And without that, we would be lost and floundering so poorly. But because of these processes in place, we’re doing so well. It’s all out of my brain because that’s where it was before. And now it’s not.

Now it’s in paper. It’s on our server so that we can draw to it each week. And that really helps in our growth and the flow of the whole company. And I want to greatly respect your time. So the final five minutes we have here, we’re going to kind of crank up the speed a little bit here. But box number nine, we’ve created repeatable systems and processes.

We’ve documented these things so we can improve them over time. Box number 10, we’ve created management systems. What people on your team will do what jobs? Think about it, folks. If you have a company, what are you expecting your employees to do every day? What people on your team will not do their jobs, and what jobs are people doing well?

Think about the people on your team. What are they supposed to be doing on a daily basis? And what are they not doing on a daily basis? What are they being held accountable for? And at the end of the day, Kevin, if you don’t have checklists and documented expectations and some sort of merit-based pay, nothing’s going to happen. Why do you have to take the time to make the checklists and the processes and the description of what you want employees to do and have some sort of merit-based pay system in place?

Well, if it’s not documented, then they won’t know what to do. And also, if it’s not documented, it’s really difficult to rely on all the employees to just think on their own. They need some help. They need time to focus and to get things done. That goes all the way from the lady that welcomes everyone in all the way up to our general manager, even to me.

We have to have documented expectations. This is so powerful, folks. I’m hoping you’re learning something. This is, I’m telling you, folks, this is the boring stuff that will make you rich. You see, when the average person gets bored,

the great clients, they bored down. What am I saying? When the average person gets bored, the great, the most successful people, they bored down. You see a skilled athlete, you see a successful entrepreneur, they have focused on

mastering these systems. They have focused on mastering their craft. People like Larry Bird, the great NBA player, people like LeBron James, people like Michael Jordan, they practiced to the point that they couldn’t get it wrong. You don’t practice until you can get it right. You practice until you can’t get it wrong. And that’s why you have to document these systems. Box number 11, you have to create a sustainable schedule. You have to have a schedule. Kevin, if you’re not doing the group interview, let’s say, every week, if you’re not interviewing

potential client or potential employees every week, if you’re not interviewing potential employees every week and you’re not having your weekly accountability meetings with your team, what’s going to happen if you don’t have a predictable, repeatable schedule in place? Well, nothing’s going to happen. That’s the key.

Having a group interview has been great. We just hired a salesman in our Oklahoma City office to the group interview, which was fantastic. And also in Tulsa as well. But just having those sustainable schedules in place is just great for the growth of the company. Now, Kevin, I’ve got a wonderful client. I’ll be very vague.

They’re based in Florida. And they were telling me, they said, Clay, I have a vacation coming up in California and I said, that’s great. They said, no, it’s terrible. I said, why is it terrible? They said, I haven’t been doing the group interview consistently and I’ve kind of delegated that to somebody in my office that’s, I don’t really know what they’re saying, I just know that the group interview, I’m not involved in the

process and I’m just looking at my calendar and if we go on this trip to California, we’re going to have some problems. What do you say to somebody out there who’s abdicating their hiring process or abdicating their sales calls? I say abdicate, they’re not delegating.

Delegate means to assign and then to follow up to make sure it’s done correctly. Abdicate means to just say, well, someone else is handling it. What do you say to somebody out there specifically that is abdicating their hiring process, the group interview process, the process for recruiting employees?

Well, um, I love to be involved in all the group interviews. And, uh, usually when, whenever there’s a group interview, there’s anywhere from four to 12 people. And the great thing about it is that within the first five minutes, you know, the two or three that you want to keep. And so that saves me so much time

because interviewing 12 people takes 12 hours. Interviewing 12 people in a group interview takes about an hour. And I love that. I love saving time. I love saving money like that

where I’m not having to spend all day interviewing people that may or may not even show up. And it’s just great. And I highly encourage owners to get involved in the, uh, the hiring process. Group interviews are very successful. I’m encouraging you to do that.

And now again, so many people can hear this stuff and they go, this is so overwhelming, there’s so much to do a box number 12, you want to create human resources and recruitment systems. And we have systems for that box number 13. You want to look at your numbers. You must, you have to measure what you treasure.

By default, you will slack where you don’t track. By default, you will slack where you don’t track. You have to measure what you treasure. I hope this is sinking in for somebody. Casualness causes casualties. I want people to think about these words.

Casualness causes casualties. You have to measure what you treasure. You will slack where you do not track. These are all things we’re going to teach you. Kevin, we’ve got to have accountability though. And so anybody out there, I have a law firm I’ve used for years, wintersking.com.

The reason why I pay them on a monthly basis is I want to make sure that all my filings are correct, everything’s being done properly. I have an accounting firm called CCK. CCK, I’ve used them for years, over 10 years actually. And I’ve used them, and the reason why I pay them on a monthly basis is I want to make sure that I’m paying my taxes on time properly, that sort of thing.

Any area of our life where we want to have improvement, I would argue you need to have a coach, whether it’s an accountant, whether it’s a lawyer, they have different names, sometimes they’re called a lawyer, sometimes they’re called an accountant, sometimes in fitness. So many people I know, a lot of my, this is true, some of my friends are former pro athletes. And they tell me, they say, Clay, as soon as I retired from my sport, I quit working

out. And I go, okay, that’s fine. And they go, you know what I did this year? I said, what’d you do? They said, I hired a personal trainer. And I said, what happened?

They said, now I’m back in the flow. And I think we all just need, we need to know three things. We need to know what to do. Two, we need someone to hold us accountable. And then we need to have someone who has the tools. Can you talk to somebody out there that’s thinking about scheduling a 13-point assessment to talk to myself and our team

about becoming a business coaching client? Well, I remember when I had my first meeting with you, I thought, I have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing to lose except growth. And after that 20 to 30-minute meeting with you, I thought, this is going to change the trajectory of multi-clean and it has. Because the coaching is, they keep you accountable and like I said earlier, sometimes it’s hard to keep owners accountable because they think they know everything and we don’t.

So I’ve loved it. I’ve loved the coaching. I’ve loved having Andrew keep me accountable and when sometimes I can’t make the meeting, we have phone calls. And it’s just been great. It’s been good accountability.

Even my wife says, no matter what, you’re never leaving Thrive Time. Now, let’s say this, somebody, you know how, we live in a soundbite world. So if you could, I won’t paint you too much into a corner here,

but if you have 30 seconds, you know, and somebody said, Kevin, how has the Thrive Time Show business coaching program impacted your business? Or how could it impact somebody’s business? Kind of a 30-second overview or summary,

how would you describe the business coaching and how it’s impacted your business? Well, it’s given me my why. And it’s taught me the importance of systems. It’s taught me the importance of family time and the S7 goals that you impress upon me all the time, because, you know, you can be the owner of a company and

work a hundred hours a week, and then you have no family. And so the Thrive Time relationship I’ve had now for six, seven years has done everything to not only improve my business, but improve my life, improved my relationship with my son and my wife. And it’s just been fantastic. And I highly encourage, if you’re thinking about

growing your business and getting out of a rut, to meet up with Clay and all the people at Thrivetime. Final question I have here for you. I don’t know that people know this because I try to keep it secret. I don’t try to talk about it a lot, but this is just real.

We charge people $1,700 a month. That’s what we charge people, $1,700 a month. And people say, why do you charge that? Well, it’s a 20% margin, and that’s what we do. Now, we have some clients that we partner up with, and we make a percentage of the growth.

And frankly, I make a lot of my wealth by teaming up with clients and these sorts of things. But when I was building my company, DJConnection.com, I remember when I met with the Yellow Page guy, he told me it was gonna be $2,500 a month to buy a Yellow Page ad.

I mean, this is over 20 years ago, 25 years ago. And that amount was wild. So I got a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. That was my get-rich system, you know, as I went to work. That was my life hack. I got a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV.

But I think everybody needs a little bit of a hand up, maybe not a hand out, but a hand up. And that’s how we make the packages affordable. It’s $1,700 a month, 1-7-0-0. It’s less money than it costs to hire a minimum wage employee. Also, it is month to month,

although most of our clients are with us for, basically until they sell the company, our average client is with us for over six years. But we do have scholarships. We work with a couple of clients a month where if they need help financially,

we work with them at a discount. What do you say to somebody who’s thinking about coming to our next workshop with Eric Trump or Robert Kiyosaki or Tim Tebow or whatever workshop we have coming up. What do you say to somebody who’s on the fence right now?

They’re going, I’m thinking about scheduling a 13 point assessment. I’m thinking about buying a ticket for an in-person workshop. Kevin, what do you say to them? I would say do both.

I’ve probably been to, oh, in six, seven years, I’ve probably been to 12 to 13 business conferences and amazingly, each time I go, I learn something new and I’m so excited to bring it back and show the team about marketing and how to implement, how to help you guys implement the SEO and the coaching is just great because there’s accountability and it’s just a fantastic way to grow your company, having a relationship with Thrive Time,

it’s just been amazing for multi-claim. I don’t know that we talked about it, but we do the photography, video, web, search engine, online ads. From a peace of mind perspective, what does that do for you as an owner knowing that,

hey, it’s a flat rate I’m paying and I have a team that handles all of that for me, the graphic design, the photography, the search engine, the web development, the strategy, what does that do for you? Oh my goodness.

It frees me up because then I don’t have to get, take a class on search engine optimization or, or, or learn marketing or shoot video. That’s not what we do. What we do is commercial janitorial service. And you guys were the experts on marketing and you teach me and hold my hand and show me how to do it right.

And therefore now my company is much, much larger. Kevin, I really do appreciate your time. For anybody in the Oklahoma area, anybody in Kansas, I believe you said you said Kansas, Oklahoma, what other states are you in now, Kevin? We’re in Oklahoma and Southern Kansas and this in 2025, we are looking to open an office in Northwest Arkansas.

I encourage everybody out there, check out the website right now. I’ll pull it up one more time, folks. That website is multicleanok.com. That’s multicleanok.com. If you’re looking for a commercial cleaning service that you can trust, go to multicleanok.com. Kevin, thank you so much for your time, sir.

I hope you have a great rest of your day. Thank you, Clay. Bye-bye. One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Scully got a very serious disease. And that disease, I’ve seen other people get it, too. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is

90% of the work. And that if you just tell all these other people, here’s this great idea, then of course they can go off and make it happen. And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship

in between a great idea and a great product. Clay Clark is here somewhere. Where’s my buddy Clay? Clay, Clay Clark! Clay! Clay!

Clay! Clay’s the greatest. I met his goats today, I met his dogs, I met his chickens. I saw his compound. He’s like the greatest guy. I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs.

So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right? His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing. OK, Aaron Antis, March 6th and 7th, March 6th and 7th. Guess who’s coming to Tulsa, Russia? Oh, Santa Claus. No, no, that’s March. March 6th and 7th.

You’re going to be joined by Robert Kiyosaki. Robert Kiyosaki, best selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, possibly the best selling or one of the best-selling business authors of all time and he’s going to be joined with Eric Trump. He’ll be joined by Eric Trump. We got Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki in the same place. In the same place. Aaron, why should everybody show up to hear Robert Kiyosaki? Well you got billions of

dollars of business experience between those two, not to mention many many many millions of books have been sold. Many, many millionaires have been made from the books that have been sold by Robert Kiyosaki. I happen to be one of them. I learned from the man. He was the inspiration. That book was the inspiration for me to get the entrepreneurial spirit, as many other people. Now, since you won’t brag on yourself, I will. You’ve sold billions of dollars of houses, am I correct? That is true. And the book that kick-started it all for you.

Rich Dad Pornhub. The best-selling author of Rich Dad Pornhub, Robert Kiyosaki, the guy that kick-started your career, he’s going to be here. He’s going to be here. I’m pumped. And now Eric Trump, people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of

employees. There’s not 50 employees. The Trump Organization, again, most people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. And while Donald J. Trump was the 45th president of these United States and soon to be the 47th president of these United States, he needed someone to run the companies for him.

And so the man that runs the Trump Organization for Donald J. Trump as he was the 45th president of the United States and now the 47th president of the United States is Eric Trump. So Eric Trump is here to talk about time management, promoting from within, marketing, branding, quality control, sales systems, workflow design, workflow mapping, how to build. I mean, everything that you see, the Trump hotels, the Trump golf courses, all their products, the man who manages billions of dollars of real estate, thousands of employees

is here to teach us how to do it. You are talking about one of the greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint. I mean, who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand? I mean, look at it. And this is the man behind the business for the last, pretty much since 2015. He’s been the man behind it. So you’re talking, we’re into nine going into ten years of him running it, and we get to tap into that knowledge.

That’s gonna be amazing. Now, think about this for a second. You know, would you buy a ticket just to see Robert Kiyosaki, Eric Trump. Of course you would. Of course you would. But we’re also going to be joined by Sean Baker. This is the best-selling author, the guy who invented the carnivore diet.

Oh yeah. Dr. Sean Baker. He’s been on Joe Rogan multiple times. He’s going to be joining us. You’ve got Robert Kiyosaki, the best-selling author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, Eric Trump, Sean Baker.

The lineup continues to grow. And this is how we do our tickets here at the Thrive Time Show. If you want to get a VIP ticket, you can absolutely do it. It’s $500 for a VIP ticket. We’ve always done it that way. Now, if you want to take a general admission ticket,

it’s $250 or whatever price you want to pay. And the reason why I do that and the reason why we do that is because we want to make our events affordable for everybody. I grew up without money. I totally understand what it’s like to be the tight spot. So if you want to attend, it’s $250 or whatever price

you want to pay. That’s how I do it. And it’s $500 for a VIP ticket. Now, we only have limited seating here. But the most people we’ve ever had in this building was for the Jim Brewer presentation. Jim Brewer came here, the legendary comedian

Jim Brewer came to Tulsa, and we had 419 people that were here. 419 people. And I thought to myself, there’s no more room. I felt kind of bad that a couple people had VIP seats in the men’s restroom. No, I’m just kidding. So I thought, you know what, we should probably add on. So we’re adding on what we call the upper deck, or the top shelf. So the seats are very close to the presenters.

But we’re actually building right now. We’re adding on to the facility to make room to accommodate another 30 attendees or more. So again, if you want to get tickets for this event, all you have to do is go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Go to Thrivetimeshow.com.

When you go to Thrivetimeshow.com, you’ll go there, you’ll request the ticket, boom. Or if you want to text me, if you want a little bit faster service, you say, I want you to call me right now. Just text my number. It’s my cell phone number, my personal cell phone number. We’ll keep that private between you, between you, me, everybody. We’ll keep that private. And anybody, don’t share that with anybody except for everybody. That’s my private cell phone number. It’s 918-851-0102. 918-851-0102. I know we have a lot of Spanish-speaking people that attend these conferences.

And so to be bilingually sensitive, my cell phone number is 9188510102. That is not actually bilingual. That’s just saying Juan for a Juan. It’s not the same thing. I think you’re attacking me. Now, let’s talk about this. Now, what kind of stuff will you learn at the Thrive Time Show Workshop. So Aaron, you’ve been to many of these over the past seven, eight years, so let’s talk about it. I’ll tee up the thing and then you tell me what you’re gonna learn here, okay? Okay.

You’re gonna learn marketing. Marketing and branding. What are we gonna learn about marketing and branding? Oh yeah, we’re gonna dive into, you know, so many people say, oh you know, I got to get my brand known out there, like the Trump brand, right? You want to get that brand out there. It’s like, how do I actually make people know what my business is? And make it a household name. You’re going to learn some intricacies

of how you can do that. You’re going to learn sales. So many people struggle to sell something. This just in, your business will go to hell if you can’t sell. So we’re going to teach you sales. We’re going to teach you search engine optimization, how

to come up top in the search engine results. We’re going to teach you how to manage people. Aaron, you have managed, no exaggeration, hundreds of people throughout your career and thousands of contractors. And most people struggle with managing people.

Why does everybody have to learn how to manage people? Well, because first of all, people are, you either have great people or you have people who suck. And so it can be a challenge. You know, learning how to work with a large group of people and get everybody pulling in the same direction

can be a challenge. But if you have the right systems, you have the right processes, and you’re really good at selecting great ones, and we have a process we teach about how to find great people.

When you start with the people who have a great attitude, they’re teachable, they’re driven, all of those things, then you can get those people all pulling in the same direction. So we’re gonna teach you branding, marketing, sales, search engine optimization.

We’re gonna teach you accounting. We’re going to teach you personal finance, how to manage your finance. We’re going to teach you time management. How do you manage your time? How do you get more done during a typical day? How do you build an organization if you’re not organized? How do you do organization? How do you build an org chart? Everything that you need to know to start and grow a business will be taught during this two-day interactive business workshop.

Now, let me tell you how the format is set up here. Again, folks, this is a two-day interactive 15… Think about this, folks. It’s two days. Each day it starts at 7 a.m. and it goes until 5 p.m. So from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. two days. It’s a two-day interactive workshop. The way we do it is we do a 30-minute teaching session and then we break for 15 minutes for a question-and-answer session. So,

Aaron, what kind of great stuff happens during that 15-minute question-and-answer session after every teaching session. I actually think it’s the best part about the workshops because here’s what happens. I’ve been to lots of these things over the years. I’ve paid many thousands of dollars to go to them.

And you go in there and they talk in vague generalities and they’re constantly upselling you for something, trying to get you to buy this thing or that thing or this program or this membership. And you don’t, you leave not getting your very specific questions answered

about your business or your employees or what you’re doing on your marketing. But what’s awesome about this is we literally answer every single question that any person asks. And it’s very specific to what your business is. And what we do is we allow you, as the attendee,

to write your questions on the whiteboard. And then we literally, as you mentioned, we answer every single question on the whiteboard. And then we take a 15-minute break to stretch and to make it entertaining when you’re stretching. And this is a true story.

When you get up and stretch, you’ll be greeted by mariachis. There’s going to probably be alpaca here, llamas, helicopter rides, a coffee bar, a snow cone. I mean, you had a crocodile one time. That was pretty interesting.

You know, I should write that down. Sorry for that one guy that we lost. The crocodile, we duct taped its face. So that’s right. We duct taped. No, it was a baby crocodile.

And we duct taped. Yeah, duct tape around the mouth so it didn’t bite anybody. But it was really cool passing that thing around and petting it. I should do that. I should. We have a small petting zoo that will be assembled.

It’s going to be great. And then you’re in the company of hundreds of entrepreneurs. So there’s not a lot of people in America today. In fact, there’s less than 10 million people today, according to US Debt Clock, that identify as being self-employed.

So if you have a country with 350 million people, that means you have less than 3% of our population that’s even self-employed. So you only have three out of every 100 people in America that are self-employed to begin with. And when Inc. Magazine reports that 96% of businesses

fail by default, by default, you have a one out of 1,000 chance of succeeding in the game of business. But yet, the average client that you and I work with, we can typically double this. No hyperbole, no exaggeration. I have thousands of testimonials to back this up. We have thousands of testimonials to back it up. But when you work with a home builder, when I work with a business

owner, we can typically double the size of the company within 24 months. And you say double? Yeah, there’s businesses that we have tripled. There’s businesses we’ve grown 8x. There’s so many examples you can see at thrivetimeshow.com. But again, this is the most interactive, best business workshop on the planet. This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. And then you add to that Robert Kiyosaki, the bestselling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. You add to that Eric Trump, the

man that runs the Trump Organization. You add to that Sean Baker. Now you might say, Clay, is there more? I need more. Well, Tom Wheelwright is the wealth strategist for Robert Kiyosaki. So people say, Robert Kiyosaki, who’s his financial wealth advisor? Who’s the guy who manages? Who’s his wealth strategist?

His wealth strategist, Tom Wheelwright, will be here. And you say, Clay, I still, I’m not going to get a ticket unless you give me more. OK, fine. We’re going to serve you the same meal both days. True story. We have we cater in the food and because Simple. I keep it simple. I literally bring them the same food both days for lunch. It’s Ted Escovedo’s an incredible Mexican restaurant

That’s gonna happen and Jill Donovan our good friend who is the founder of rustic cuff She started that company in her home and now she sells millions of dollars of apparel and products That’s rusticcuff.com. And someone says, I want more! This is not enough! Give me more.

OK, I’m not going to mention their names right now, because I’m working on it behind the scenes here. But we’ve got one guy who’s given me a verbal to be here. And this is a guy who’s one of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma. And nobody really knows who he is, because he’s built systems that are very utilitarian, that offer a lot of value. He’s made a lot of money in the, it’s the, it’s where you rent, it’s short term, it’s where you’re renting storage spaces.

He’s a storage space guy. He owns the, what do you call that? The rental, the storage space? Storage units. This guy owns storage units, he owns railroad cars, he owns a lot of assets that make money on a daily basis, but they’re not like customer facing.

Most people don’t know who owns the many storage facility, or most people don’t know who owns the warehouse that’s passively making money. Most people don’t know who owns the railroad cars. But this guy, he’s given me a verbal that he will be here. And we just continue to add more and more success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to change your life, you want to give yourself

an incredible gift, you want a life-changing experience, you want to learn how to start and grow a company, go to Thrivetimeshow.com. Go there right now. Thrivetimeshow.com. Request a ticket for the two-day interactive event. Again, the day here is March 6th and 7th. March 6th and 7th. We just got confirmation. Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author, rich dad, poor dad, he’ll be here. Eric Trump,

the man who leads the Trump Organization. It’s going to be a blasty blast. There’s no upsells. Aaron, I could not be more excited about this event. I think it is incredible and there’s somebody out there right now you’re watching and you’re like but I already signed up for this incredible other program called Smoke Your Way to Thin and you think that’s going to change your life.

I promise you this will be ten times better than that. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. Don’t do the Smoke Your Way to Thin conference. That is… I’ve tried it. Don’t do it. Chain smoking is not a viable… I mean it is life changing. It is life changing. If you become a jade smoker, it is life-changing.

Not the best weight loss program, though. Right. Not really. So if you’re looking to have life-changing results in a way that won’t cause you to have a stoma, get your tickets at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Aaron Antis.

I’m Clay Clark. And reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two-day interactive Thrivetimeshow workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you, it will be a life-changing experience. We can’t wait to see you. Right here, right now.

Thanks. Bye. Bye. Bye. here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you it will be a life-changing experience. We can’t wait to see you right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.