Entrepreneur | Dealing With Stress – Flying 27 Combat Missions Over Japan

Audio Transcription

Get ready to enter the Thrivetime Show! We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to hear what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As a father of five, that’s where I’mma dive. So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi. It’s C and Z up on your radio. And now, three, two, one, here we go. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, and that’s what we gotta do. Jack, I appreciate you letting us invade your home here, your home office, my friend. I really do appreciate your time. Well, thank you. I’m delighted to have you here. I appreciate what you’re doing, because I think what you’re doing is a real link to some successful careers that are going to come out of it. Well, you know, today we are talking about a subject that I think you might be one of the most qualified people on the planet to talk about. We’re talking about dealing with stress. And we’re talking about dealing with stress with a guy like yourself here who you flew 27 combat missions in a B-29 bomber over Japan. My friend, how many men were flying with you in the B-29 bombers as you were flying over Japan? 11. 11? And were you hooked up on some kind of like a walkie-talkie or some sort of… Yes, yes, always in touch with each other. So how long was it from the time you took off and you flew over towards your target, how long were you in the air before you got there? Boy, you just asked a great question. Most people don’t. Fifteen hours. So you’re flying for… I mean, fifteen hours is the average length of the mission. I would say we were en route for seven hours. So you’re flying for seven hours. So for the thrivers watching this, it’s like you’re moving for seven and a half hours, and it’s kind of rumbling, it’s a big, it’s like a bus, I mean, it’s a big plane, right? Right. And what were all the different jobs of the people on this plane? What kind of things were you guys doing during those seven and a half hours? I felt that my job was probably the most labor-intensive. Okay. of the absolute importance of being on time, on course. If you’re one degree off, you’re not going to make it back. It was that the more petrol you took, the less bombs. So they wanted to have the bomb load. So the jobs on the B-29 was the pilot, the co-pilot, I’ll explain them. Right between them in a little hole was the bombardier. The bombardier operated, the biggest secret we had was called the Northern Bomb Site. And the Northern Bomb Site did pinpoint bombing. You know, you hit a target exactly the way you do it during daytime and it was a big military thing. In fact, one of the big instructions we had was if we ever force land the plane or be in enemy territory, you blow up that bombsite. Really? First thing. First thing you do, blow up that bombsite. That was pretty important. So that was the bombardier. Then, as a navigator, I had to navigate over these thousands of miles of water without any land sites or anything and use celestial navigation, suit the stars, in order to ascertain positions. So that was a lot of hard work all during the flight there and during the flight back. I have a big respect for what you’re doing. I got lost in your neighborhood today just using my natural sense of navigation. Now, let me ask you, so as you’re flying, how big was this B-29? How large was the plane? I don’t know how… The only thing I can say is the first time I saw it, I said, I don’t know how we’re going to get this thing off the ground. Really? I mean, it was, the B-29 was called the Superfort. It was copied from the most successful bomber we had, which was the B-17. And the B-29 was like the B-17 in all respects, except we had some important things like pressurized cabins. Five of the people on board were gunners. There was a central fire control, there were two side gunners, and there was a tail gunner. And the chief gunnery officer was first the bombardier, who operated guns, as well as the central fire control, who was in a kind of a hump on the middle of the plane. The engineer was very important, the radio operator. What was your mindset like as your plane took off and you began flying out to Japan? Well, my first mindset was professionally to make sure I was right. Okay. Because being wrong was being dead. And the second mindset was because we took off from a cliff on Saipan. In order to get up flying speed and I sort of shut my eyes for a moment during that few seconds of correcting the airspeed. So those were anxious moments. Of course, there’s nothing more anxious than being over a target where they’re shooting anti-aircraft fire at you, as well as Japanese fighter planes. And towards the end of the war, we got some of the suicide planes too. I want to dumb it down for people who maybe don’t know what some of these terms are. When you’re flying over Japan, and you see there’s anti-aircraft, these guys are shooting basically cannons up at you? They’re shooting special guns that are designed for that purpose. And they’re called… They’re known as ACAC fire. Okay. Or anti-aircraft fire. But it was tricky because it also had to be set to explode at a certain altitude in order to be effective. For example, if we were at 12,000 feet and exploded at 14,000 feet, it didn’t catch it. I’d explode at 12,000 feet. So when you’re flying in, I mean, are you hearing boom, boom, boom all around you? All around you. There’s more like the anti-aircraft, which looks like a giant carpet that keeps puffing up, and it said, I got you, I got you, you’re next. And there’s this deafening loudness and when you’re looking out the window, could you see the other pilots? You could see, if it’s during the daytime, you saw the other B-29s in your squadron. If it was at night, you were all alone. So you’re flying in formation sometimes during the day? During the day, if you’re in formation. And you could be sitting over here looking at this guy, looking at that guy, and then five minutes later that guy’s not alive? That’s correct. So I read in your book, The Evolution of an Entrepreneur, this harsh reality that 75% of the guys that you went over there and served with passed away. Killed. Killed. How did you manage the stress on a daily level? I’m just trying to make it real. We’ve all lost somebody in our life, but you guys were on a daily basis losing buddies. How did you manage that? You just lived with it. You simply lived with it. There was no answer for it. There was no feeling better. There are three of my buddies that I miss to this day. And I lost him 70 years ago. And I feel that emotion because these were really great people. But I got through it. You just did it. There’s no psychological things. I had no medallion. I didn’t look up at a symbol. the old cliché that no atheists and foxholes, you know, wasn’t true on my part. I was just… we had to concentrate on getting out of there. And they used to have an expression that you were expendable until the bombs fell, and then you’re on your own. And getting out, for example, there are certain times that are much more stressful. If it was at night and you got caught in the glare of the searchlights, there was a better than even money chance of getting shot down. There’s no way of escaping the searchlights. In order to make them more accurate, there used to be a Japanese fighter that would come out and meet us about 50 miles out and gauge our airspeed and our altitudes. So it was very near to the batteries on the ground. And there was kamikaze pilots that were suicide at the end of the war we had kamikaze pilots who were aiming just to bang into us they would just come at you full speed always from the nose from 10 o’clock to 1 o’clock and I don’t want anybody to get off this planet without hearing this. But of all the prisoners of war, because if your plane got shot down, what you’d want to do is eject, you’d want to parachute out of there and survive. And when people would land in Japan, how many of the POWs survived? I never got this officially, but I was told, first of all, immediately after the armistice was signed, there were no combat troops allowed in Japan for another six months, because the feeling was that antagonistic and that harsh and heavy. And I was told that they took 1,500 B-29 prisoners of war and when we got there, three were alive. Three. Three. And I had my own plans. It wasn’t that you didn’t eject. You went to the bomb base and you dove out the bomb bay door. And you dove because you didn’t jump because if you jumped, you could hit your head with the wind passing by, so you dove, like diving into a pool to get out. And my plans were always to try to escape, try to escape, that you have to find a way to get into the hills, which would not have made any difference anyway How could you live with that? I wasn’t speaking Japanese. Dale Carnegie was not a B-29 member of a B-29 crew, but one of the things that he wrote, he’s the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, and he has a quote where he says, Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy. When you got out of the military after doing 27 missions and you go out there and you decide to become an entrepreneur, you’re switching, it had to sort of feel like – I mean, I know when I’ve started my business, there was times where I was stressed. There’s been times where I went, I don’t know how I’m going to make payroll. I don’t know how I’m going to raise the money. Oh, man. But that had to all feel just pretty weak in comparison to the stress you felt while serving in the military. It almost had to be like a… I wouldn’t say… you can’t compare the two. And I wouldn’t say it was like feeling weak. Except that you were used to having tremendous stress because your life was in danger. And after that, the risks that I took in business, and we all take risks, did not bother me at all. I mean, I wasn’t worried about it. I made a decision to do something, and if everything kept working, I followed through with that decision. And there was, in my case, in my case, there was no real fear. There was trauma and I’d say that was greater than the fear. And the trauma is what you hear now as post-traumatic stress. We had, oh, they called it battle fatigue. For quite a long time, I had nightmares and I had to get out of that mode. I want to ask you this because I maybe want to ask you a different way. But I talk to so many entrepreneurs around the world. I do speaking events all over the world and we have thrivers all over the world. And you’ll talk to some people and you’ll talk to someone who owns a hotel, and you talk to him and they say, I just feel overwhelmed by the day-to-day aspects of running my business. I just feel stressed. I just feel like my brain’s going to explode. I feel like, you know, that kind of thing. What is your method for maintaining composure and staying organized and focused? I mean, what is your method? Staying concentrated, it’s like you think of the pressure that a quarterback has in the Super Bowl game. It’s not the same pressure as he had as an amateur or a sandlot game. There’s a lot of pressure. And you learn to live with that pressure. pressure and I’ve said before that if you if you want to be a business you’re going to be stressed you’re going to have stress in fact I almost wrote a book called stress to success well okay Lee Cockrell who is one of our mentors on thrive15.com he is used to be the executive vice president of operations for Walt Disney World Resort so he managed 40-something thousand employees. And he always says life gets easier when you do hard things and life gets harder when you do easy things. It seems like that’s kind of what you’re talking about is you’re stressing your way to success. It’s gonna be stressful, right? Yeah, you just get used to it. I mean if you have a bad arm or bad leg, whatever it is, you learn to live with it, that’s all. Now, when you, do you remember the sense of relief that you felt when you were getting ready for combat mission 28 and you’re getting ready for it, you’re mentally preparing for 28, do you remember the public announcement, do you remember the announcement? As though it happened yesterday. I actually, at that time, we had been sent to Hawaii for, called Rest and Recuperation and Rehabilitation, RR&R. And, you know, we had a fine time. And remember, I was in Honolulu all day and I came back to the base. And the loudspeakers went on and said that the war has just ended and everybody is frozen. You stay where you are and you will get new commands. And that’s, I was alone, lights all around me, an open field, and the only sensation I thought my face was wet, and I realized I was crying. That was just the most overwhelming sense of relief when that happened? The most overwhelming by far. Nothing came close. And even to this day, I mean, do you look back at that as one of the most joyous occasions of your life? Yes, yes, yes, yes it does, it does. It was, it was, well, if you were in a place like Saipan, which wasn’t Boca Raton, and you were, you know, going out on these missions, and you were strategizing and you were doing all the things that they told you to do. And suddenly, I’m going to live. I remember a few days earlier saying, you know, I’d settle for 20 good years of living right now. Well, that would have made me dead at 42. So I’ve done pretty good. But the feeling of relief was intense, the feeling of joy was intense, and as a matter of fact, I became a pussycat in so far as they said you can go home and take home a plane this week. and take home a plane this week, or he can wait for a boat. And I said, I’ll wait for a boat. Now, at age 22, you were honorably discharged as a captain of the U.S. Army Air Force, and you having flown 27 combat missions and served as the navigator and radar officer, officer. You were decorated with the distinguished Flying Cross and Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. To me, you’d already achieved so much, and you were 22. What motivated you to financially put yourself in stressful situations? I mean, here, you just got out of a stressful situation. What motivated you to put yourself in now financially stressful situations and to become What made you do that? It’s hard for me to talk about motivation because all I can tell you is I enjoyed every minute of it. From the time I did something that was a little different, or something that wasn’t on familiar territory. For example, I decided to retire at 70. That was 21 years ago. But I didn’t want to just retire, I wanted to do what I didn’t have time to do more extensive traveling. I traveled enough, but I love traveling. I Wanted to write and I wanted to teach Mm-hmm, and I’ve done though and I in those 20 years. I’ve written seven books and I’ve taught in several colleges and I’ve just had a great great time and I even did something I didn’t think I was going to do. After I went through the terrible pain of losing my wife, I got married again. It’s the best thing I ever did. I want to ask you this because you’ve had such a full life. You have so many more years of success ahead of you, but as you’re looking back, I mean, you’ve gone through six decades of entrepreneurship. And I think, just an example, I’m 34, and so I remember when September 11th happened and the subsequent economy struggled. I have been through the Great Recession. You know, cognitively, I’m aware of these things. I’ve been through, I was raised in the 80s when we had the big boom under Reagan. So I’ve seen that. I’ve seen the ups and downs. I’ve seen the different wars and the different things we’ve been involved in. You have seen this. I mean, your whole, throughout your life, you’ve seen this happen so many times, so many recessions, so many booms, but yet you’ve been a constant success. So through this up and down, you’ve just been a constant success. I really want to get your wisdom on this. What would you say for the entrepreneur right now who’s watching, or the business person right now, or the manager who’s watching, who says, I feel stressed, I’m overwhelmed, I just feel like I don’t know how to deal with these emotions or this stress load, I feel overwhelmed. What advice would you have for that person? Well, forgetting the psychological part of it, if I feel I’m in a bad deal, I believe in cutting my losses and getting out. Okay. And I think that’s been responsible for my good lifestyle. I never went, I never found a ship that I wanted to go down with. Okay. And so I’d say, and then going into different parts and different things, we have our foundation, which we do some lovely charitable work. And I meet very challenging people. And I’ve never felt I really is as far as even when it looked like like things were going to get tougher, it never put me down. It just said, how do I change it? I’d say the biggest piece of advice I could have, you just came up with it, is when you make a mistake and something is turning out badly, don’t ever ask what somebody else did to you. Ask what you did to yourself. I always go to myself, if I missed, I did something wrong. If I was cheated, I allowed it. I should never allow it. It seems like every entrepreneur I’ve met who is successful, every business person I’ve met, they take ownership of their life when they have failure, they own it when they have success, they own it. But it’s the opposite of entitlement. It’s the idea that they are 100% responsible for where they are right now, good or bad. And it seems like that’s something right now that you’re really embracing. 100%. coined a little phrase that said, if you allow yourself to be put in the position of, can I say, getting screwed? Yeah. A position of getting screwed, someone will do it. Yeah. I don’t have to pinpoint who it’s going to be, but I’m not going to get in that position. I’m not going to allow myself. Once I see the indicators, I don’t wait till it’s too late. There was a gentleman that came to me with a deal to go into the hobby business in Minnesota. A hobby business? Hobby. Hobby. Really? Gee, that sounds like fun. I tried it and two months later I hated it. I closed it up. Over. Here’s the deal, you keep it, you want it, you can have it. What I’ve done quite often, a couple of times, not say often, but often enough, when a deal that’s going to take one of us out of it. And then I say to him, here’s the deal. If you want this, it costs $6, and you take over all these commitments that you have and you toss this over if you take the deal. I’ll take it, I’ll buy or I’ll sell. You make a decision. Don’t ever tell me it was not a fair decision because I’ll go either way. Now you’re bringing up an interesting point because we’re talking about managing stress. Obviously humans are talking with each other, they’re working with each other, creatures. Humans are creatures of emotion, there’s greed, there’s jealousy, all those emotions. Have you surrounded yourself intentionally with positive people in the business community to kind of build yourself a network? Does that matter to you? Has that helped you having a network? It matters tremendously, yes. So relationships matter to you? Relationships are not right out there on top of the scale. It’s the relationship that you’ve established. It’s so much fun. The day I started my company, started in a tiny office in Los Angeles. And I said to my wife, who came with me, that you wait here, I’m going to go get some business. I went to one of my favorite accounts. He’s a friend of mine. He wasn’t a friend before, he became a friend through business. And I said, Mickey, you’re going to have, you got an honor today. He said, what’s that? You’re going to give my new company its first order. And he did. Really? That’s an assumptive close I need to start using. You have the honor of being my customer. You have the honor of being the first? Well, I have a different attitude. First of all, selling is an unbelievable science. And I’ll take one small rule that I have. Get off the opposite side of the desk and get on the same side and solve the problems together. And it’s amazing. Like, in starting, everybody would come in with merchandise. I never came in with merchandise. I came in with an idea that I could help your business. What’s your biggest problem? Well, here’s what we can do. Suddenly, you became we. Yeah. And it’s worked for me that we… I want to say this in closing on this topic. One, I know that on behalf of all the Thrivers around the world and in America, I just want to say thank you for your service. And I appreciate you sharing. I know it’s an emotional topic, but I appreciate you sharing because I and other people, we need to hear that story. We need to hear about the sacrifices you went through. I just want to say thank you for doing that. And on a lighter note, I appreciate you letting us come to your house and talk about stress, which has probably caused you stress. It moved everything around. But see, that’s the stress. My good fortune is I have an unbelievably competent wife who knows how to handle all this stuff, and she does it. You might be married to a superhero. That’s the rumor. I might be. Well, thank you again, my friend. I appreciate it. My pleasure. All right, JT, so hypothetically, in your mind, what is the purpose of having a business? To get you to your goals. So it’s a vehicle to get you to your destination. And would you need profits to get there? I mean, when you have a business that’s successful, in your expert opinion, would you need profits to get you to your goals? Yeah, because if you have a $15 million business but you have $15 million in expenses, it’s kind of pointless. Holy crap! Alright, so the question I would have here for you, if you could take like, I don’t know, 10 minutes or less and see if you could save $3,000 a year by reducing your credit card fees, would you do it? Yes, absolutely. Holy crap! Why would somebody out there who’s listening right now, who has a sane mind, why would they not go to Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card Thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card to schedule a 10-minute consultation to see if they can reduce their credit card fees by at least 3,000 bucks a year. Why would they not do it? Yeah, why would they not do it? Maybe because they don’t understand how you set the website. This tree is a symbol of the spirit of the Griswold family Christmas. That’s clear. That can be true. I encourage everybody to check out thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card What would be another reason why someone would not be willing to take 10 minutes to compare rates to see if they could save $3,000 or more on credit card fees. Maybe they think it is a waste of time and that it won’t, it’s not possible. There’s somebody out there that’s making more than $3,000 every 10 minutes and they’re like, nah, that’s not worth my time. Hello, we getting there, I’m out of here, we getting there, I’m out of here. There’s probably some, someone out there. Okay. They would think that. Well, I’ll just tell you folks, if you’re out there today and you’re making less than $3,000 per 10 minutes, I would highly recommend that you go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash hard. Because you can compare rates, you can save money. And you know, the big goal, in my opinion, of building a business is to create time, freedom, and financial freedom. And in order to do that, you have to maximize your profits. Holy crap. Now one way to maximize your profits is to increase your revenue. Another way to do it is to decrease your expenses. It’s a profit deal. It takes the pressure off. JT, is there any other reason why somebody would not be willing to take 10 minutes to compare rates to see if they could save a total of $3,000 a year on average I am at a loss I cannot think of anything else Shampoo is better I go on first and clean the hair Conditioner is better I leave the hair silky and smooth Oh really fool, really Stop looking at me, Swan! Well, let me tell you a good story here real quick. I actually, years ago, compared rates with this company here. It’s called IPS. It’s Integrated Payment Services. And I scheduled a consultation. I don’t know if I was skeptical. I just thought, whatever. I’ll take 10 minutes. I’ll compare rates. I can’t tell. You can tell me I’m a doctor. No, I mean, I’m just not sure. Why can’t you take a guess? Well, not for another two hours. You can’t take a guess for another two hours. And in my case, in my case, my particular case, I save over $20,000 a year. Holy crap! Wow. Which is, you know, like groceries when my wife goes to the organic stores. Find everything you need today? Yeah. Great. Okay. No. Everything OK, ma’am? Oh, it’s just that you’ve only scanned a few items, and it’s already $60. I’m so scared. OK, I’m a trained professional, ma’am. I’ve scanned a lot of groceries. I need you to stay with me. It’s just that my in-laws are in town, and they want a charcuterie board. This isn’t going to be easy, so I need you to be brave, all right? What’s your name? Patricia. Patricia, all right. I need you to take a deep breath. We’re about to do the cheese. You know, that’s the difference between eating organic and not organic. So because my wife eats organic, I had to take the 10 minutes needed to compare rates to save the $20,000 a year on credit card fees just for one of my companies. One question. What’s the brand name of the clock? The brand name of the clock, Rod, do we have it? The brand name of the clock. It’s an elegant, from Ridgway. It’s from Ridgway. Let’s buy the clock and sell the fireplace. I encourage everybody out there, go to thrivetimeshow.com forward slash credit dash card. You schedule a free consultation, request information, a member of our team will call you, they’ll schedule a free consultation. It should take you 10 minutes or less, and they’re going to compare rates and see if they can’t save you more than $3,000 a year off of your credit card processing. You were hoping what? I wouldn’t owe you money at the end of the day. No, you don’t owe us money. Because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, the goal of the business is to create time, freedom and financial freedom. And in order to do that, you need to create additional profits. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. We have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah. So what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both $1.3 billion companies. They both have 2,000 to 3,000 pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually nonexistent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listening and ranking there with Google. And also, we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews. And now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed Pest and Lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay, so 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. our closing rate is about 85% and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten, people really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process and that has obviously, the 411% shows that that that system works. Yeah so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months or I’m sorry the first we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success is by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews. That way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists. Everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly, both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned, that has really, really contributed to our success. But that, like I said, the diligence and consistency in doing those in that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives, and also it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know. The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know, they implemented those systems, that they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely, it’s been a grind this last year. But we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut. And if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s gonna take in order to really succeed. So, we just wanna give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore, I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42 percent increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof and turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983, and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crockrell, head of Disney, with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, graphic designers, and web developers. They run 160 companies every single week. Think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. In the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like the most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. My most impressive thing is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listened to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right and anyways just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right, this is where we used to live years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing and this is our old team. And by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing, and this is our new team. We went from four to 14, and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to ten locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship. And we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrive Time Show, two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13-point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days You can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems So now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve You’re gonna leave energized Motivated but you’re also gonna leave empowered the reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur I always wish that I had this and because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big, get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s gonna be the best business workshop ever and we’re gonna give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it. We go back eight years ago. Think about the number of clients you had back then versus the number of clients you have now. As a percentage, what has been the growth over the past eight years, do you think? We’ve got to inspire somebody out there who just doesn’t have the time to listen to their calls. Okay, so Clay, it’s like I would go up and down from about $10,000 a month up to about $40,000, but it’s an up and down roller coaster. So now we’ve got it to where we’re in excess of 100 clients. That’s awesome. So I would have anywhere from 5 clients to 20 clients on my own with networking, but I had no control over it. Without the systems, you’re going to be victimized by your own business. For somebody out there who struggles with math, if you would say that your average number of clients was 30 and you go to 100, as a percentage, what is that? I have doubled every year since working with you. So I’ve doubled in clients. I’ve doubled in revenue every year. That’s 100% growth every year I’ve worked now, so so I’m looking we’ve been good friends seven eight years and I’ve got Doubled five times which is just incredible. I mean the first time you do it, that’s one thing, but when you do it repeatedly Yeah, I mean that’s what I’m believable. We’re working our blessed assurance off this year to double we’re planning on doubling again We’re incorporating new some some some new things in there to really help us do it, but we are going to double again this year. I started coaching, but it would go up and down, Clay. That’s when I came to you, as I was going up and down, and I wanted to go up and up instead of up and down. And so that’s when it needed a system. So creating a system is you have nailed down specific steps that you’re going to take, no matter how you feel, no matter the results, you lean into them and you do them regardless of what’s happening. You lean into them and it will give you X number of leads. You follow up with those leads, turns into sales. Well I tell you, you know, it’s if you don’t have a script and you don’t have a system, then every day is a whole new creation. You’re creating a lot of energy just to figure out what are you going to do. And the best executives, Peter Drucker is a father of modern management, he said, the most effective executives make one decision a year. What you do is you make a decision, what is your system, and then you work like the Dickens to make sure you follow that system. And so that’s really what it’s all about. So with a script here, we have a brand new gal that just came in working for us. She nailed down the script, and she’s been nailing down appointments. Usually, we try to get one appointment for every 100 calls. We make 200 to 300 calls a day per rep. And she’s been nailing down five and eight appointments a day on that script. So she’s making how many calls a day? She’s making between two and three hundred calls a day. And our relationship is weird in that we do, if someone were to buy an Apple computer today, or let’s say about a personal computer, a PC, the computer is made by, let’s say, Dell. But then the software in the computer would be Microsoft, let’s say, or Adobe or whatever that is. So I basically make the systems and you’re like the computer and I’m like the software. That’s kind of how I would describe our relationship. Tim, I want to ask you this. You and I reconnected, I think it was in the year 2000 and what was it, maybe 2010? Is that right? 2011 maybe? Or maybe further down the road, maybe 2013? 2012. Okay, so 2012 and at that time I was five years removed from the deep from the DJ business And you were how many years removed from tax and accounting software. It was about 10 11 years we met How did we remeet? What was the first interaction or some interaction where you and I first connected? I just remember that somehow you and I went to hideaway pizza, but you remember when we first reconnected. Yeah Well, we had that speaking thing that oh there was so it’s victory Christian Center. I was speaking there. My name is Robert Redman. I actually first met Clay almost three years ago to the day. I don’t know if he remembers it or not, but I wasn’t working with him at the time. I asked to see him and just ask him some questions to help direct my life, to get some mentorship. But I’ve been working with Clay for now just over a year. The role I play here is a business coach, a business consultant. I work with different people. I work with different people. I work with different people. over a year. The role I play here is a business coach, business consultant. I work with different businesses, implementing best practice processes and systems that I have learned here by working with Clay. And the experience working here has, to put it real plainly, has been just life changing. I have not only learned new things But I have gained a whole new mindset that I believe, wherever I end up, will serve me well throughout the rest of my life. Since working with Clay, I have learned so much. I mean, I would like to say it was everything about business in terms of the different categories. I haven’t learned it all. But I’ve learned all about marketing. I’ve learned about advertising. I’ve learned about branding, I’ve learned how to create a sales process for organizations in any industry, I’ve learned how to sell, I’ve learned how to create repeatable systems and processes and hold people accountable, you know, how to hire people. It’s almost like every aspect of a business you can learn, I have learned a a lot in those different categories. And then, again, the mindset that I’ve gained here has been huge. You know, working here, you can’t be a mediocre person. You are a call to a higher standard of excellence, and then as you’re called to that standard here, you begin to see those outcomes in every area of your life, that standard of excellence that you want to implement no matter what you’re involved in. I would like to describe the other people that work with Clay are people that are going somewhere with their life. Marshall in the group interview talks about how, you know, the best fits for this organization are the people that are goal-oriented. So they’re on their own trajectory and we’re on our own trajectory and the best fits are those people where there can be a mutually beneficial relationship that as we pursue our goals and we help the business pursue those goals, the business helps us pursue our goals as well. And so I say people that are driven, people that want to make something of their lives, people that are goal-oriented, they’re focused, and they’re committed to overcoming any adversity that may come their way. Clay’s passion for helping business owners grow their businesses is it’s unique in that I don’t know if there’s anyone else’s that can be as You know, whenever a business starts working with Clay, it’s almost as like Clay is running that business in the sense that he has something at stake. You know, he’s just serving them. They’re one of his clients, but it’s as if he is actively involved in the business. Whenever they have a win, he’s posting it all over his social media. He’s shouting it across the room here at Thrive. He’s sending people encouraging messages. He can kind of be that life coach and business coach in terms of being that motivator and that champion for people’s businesses. It’s, again, unique because there’s no one else I’ve seen get so excited about and passionate about other people’s businesses. The kind of people that wouldn’t like working with Clay are people that are satisfied with mediocrity. People that want to get through life by just doing enough, by just getting by. People who are not looking to develop themselves. People who are not coachable. People who think that they know it all and they’re unwilling to change. I would say those are the type of people, and in short, anyone that’s content with mediocrity would not like working with Clay. So if you’re meeting Clay for the first time, the advice I’d give you is definitely come ready to take tons of notes. Every time Clay speaks, he gives you a wealth of knowledge that you don’t want to miss. I remember the first time that I met Clay. I literally carried a notebook with me all around. I was looking at this notebook the other day actually. I carried a notebook with me all around and I just took tons of notes. I filled the entire notebook in about about three or four months just from being around Clay, following him, and learning from him. become coachable. Be open to learning something new. Be open to challenging yourself. Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you Be open to learning and adjusting parts about you that need to be adjusted.