Entrepreneur Podcast | How to Scale a Successful Personal Training Business + Clay Clark Case Study Shares How Selling Cutco Knives Prepared Him to Build His Business + Why Most Real Estate Agents & Insurance Agents Fail (Recorded 2019)

Audio Transcription

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’s 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 doing reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. Amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and 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, because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that. And of course, we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing and I encourage you if you haven’t worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s going to help magnify you and there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day and literally the rest of time he’s working and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day and he loves it. So anyways, this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you Clay and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay. It’s a great, great opportunity to ever work with him. You guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Koloff. We’ll see you guys. Bye-bye. If you’re out there today and you’re in the messy middle trying to build a business into something special, this is a show you need to hear because the founder of Tulsa Fitness Systems is here to share with us his journey from the bottom to the top, right back down to the bottom, and then up to the top again. We got fitness tips, business tips. It’s a great show. Get ready. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Now, one, two, one, here we go! Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, if you’re out there today, and you’re happening to listen to this show at any time and place, no matter where you are, I hate to take the show down to a deep, deep area there. Jason, I hate to take the show down to a deep area. We hate to make the show super religious to start off, but is it okay if I ask for a prayer request? Absolutely. I pray that all the listeners would pray that Gunnar Oshkoski, the receiver on the Patriots, I’m wearing his number 80 jersey right now that he somehow becomes taller And a little bit faster in his early 20s because the Patriots are gonna need Gunnar Olszewski to become a miracle man the rest of the rest of the season because we keep having injuries I’m not sure this shit when the show will come out the show might come out after the Super Bowl who knows yeah But I pray that Gunnar Olszewski just gets a little bit taller Yeah And a little bit faster because I love that guy that undrafted beautiful man and number 80 from Bemidji State, the factory of NFL players. Division II Bemidji State, Gunnar Oshkoski. If you just put in your schedule, put in your plan, put it on your to-do list, just pray for Gunnar Oshkoski. He’ll be a little bit faster and a little bit taller. Do you agree with that, Jason? Yeah, and I’ll line up you there on the drive home today, just to support the Patriots. I will play a Ski-Lo’s I Wish on repeat. Nice! That’s what we need. That is what we need. Jason, I haven’t thought about the song I Wish for a long time. Was that a big part of your childhood, I Wish? It was a song that I knew the first half of the chorus for quite some time, but had no idea who Ski-Lo was or had even heard the rest of the song. No, Ski-Lo, let’s cue it up real quick. This is in honor of Gunnar Olszewski and Ski-Lo, both of which are forgotten American treasures. Clint, do you remember this song? I do, I do. This song’s impressive. Let me queue it up. Let’s give us 15 seconds of it. Here we go. Hello, I wish I was a little bit taller. Oh yeah, Gunnar Olshefsky, come on now. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her. Wish I had a rabbit and a hat. Gunnar Olshefsky, if you’re out there, we love you, we support you. I wish I was like six foot nine. And you’re already doing a great job, despite your lack of speed and height. But here, we just need another two inches of height and another tenth of a second off that 40-yard dash, and we’re good. Alright, so on today’s show we have somebody, though, who is an overachiever just like Gunnar Oshkoski. True. And he actually started from the bottom, and now he’s here. Clint Howard, the founder of Tulsa Fitness Systems. How are you, sir? Hey, fantastic, Clay. I’m excited to be here. Hey, I’m excited to have you here. Now, we had you on the show earlier to talk about your journey, starting from the bottom and building your company, and we had you come on the show and talk about practical fitness tips. But on today’s show, we want to go a little bit deeper. We want to do a little bit more of a deep dive into the story. So share with the listeners out there that maybe missed your earlier show or that want more detail. How did you start your first fitness business? Yeah, for sure. So I was, like a lot of people in my industry, I was training in a health club while I was going through college for exercise science and just started training clients. But really, for me, I mean, it started with a vision. I knew I wanted to do something different as far as just working in a gym or a health club, provide just a different experience, a different service. And just I had an entrepreneur mind and I loved you know work ethic and all those things so I Started with that. It’s like okay. What do I do? What’s that going to look like and so for me? I worked I worked about probably 65 to 75 hours a week All through my life my last year of undergrad then I also have a master’s degree So I went to college for three more years, but basically I worked and I was working I was training so I was doing what I enjoyed and what I was studying in school. But I worked early mornings, I worked nights, I worked all weekend. And so I was just basically saving, you know, you talk about delayed gratification. I was not partying, I wasn’t spending my money, I was working, getting experience but also saving up my money. And so then when I finished graduate school, I, you know, I started my first studio and I did want to take out loans. And so we went in pretty cheap, you know, went in low with not a lot of overhead and it just grew from there. So yeah, I was really blessed as far as saving and learning about how to sign a lease and how to look for a facility, location, and then not having to take out a loan or borrow money. So I started all just by myself. Let’s talk about this. When you started your first business, do you remember how much money it cost to start your first fitness location? Do you remember how much it cost on a monthly basis to lease space and how much startup capital it required? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I remember it. That was all new to me. I was fresh out of college. I knew exercise science, but I certainly did not know business. So I was getting advice from mentors and looking for facilities and learning about like TripleNet and CAM and what rent is and signing three year, five year leases. But so yeah, we had to buy equipment. So it was, I think, probably about $30,000 or $40,000. And then I signed on to a five year lease for a space that was a smaller facility. We were doing all private training. So it was about 1,200 square feet. But still, signing on to a five year lease, I was fresh out of college. So I didn’t really know what I was doing as far as business. So it was a, you know, there was a lot of nerves. Certainly I was taking a big risk, but I just had a lot of confidence in myself that I could be successful and really I didn’t have any… Where was this gym located? Was it in a basement somewhere? Was it at your parents’ house? Was it in a shopping center? Where was the first location? Yeah, so I was in Norman. I was going to college at OU. And so we were in Norman, Oklahoma. And yeah, we were in, you know, the, certainly we knew our clientele, our market. So we were in the, you know, Northwest Norman, they call it the Brookhaven area, which is a higher income area as far as in Norman. And then we went into just a strip center, like a, you know, retail space. Now Norman, Oklahoma has a population of 110,000 people. Is it, for the folks out there who are not familiar with Norman, Oklahoma, which is the home of the Oklahoma University, is it a wealthy area? Is it a middle class? How would you describe the population of Norman? Yeah, it’s pretty, I mean it has its pockets. I mean certainly there’s wealth there, any major college town. So there’s one area, anyone that’s familiar with Norman, it’s called Brookhaven. That’s kind of the Northwest Norman, which is where most of the upper class and the nicer neighborhoods. And again, we were doing more high end, one on one training, so definitely we knew our market. And that’s the big thing, if you’re going to open any business. You definitely, you know, that type of business we need to know that, you know, it’s convenient and people are going to come so you want to be in the right area of town. How did you decorate the area? Do you remember what it looked like inside? Some of our listeners out there in that startup mode right now. What did it look like inside? Yeah, so we, this is all things I had to learn, you know, as far as dealing with contractors. And we found a space that was basically a kind of white box or a shell. And then we had, you know, architects that had to do the blueprint. It was a real basic model of what we were doing. Then it was these smaller, it’s kind of a two-room studio. And so we had a small office, a restroom. We didn’t have locker rooms. This is all just private training, more like a kind of a high-end boutique studio. And then we had two separate rooms. So that was part of our, really part of our niche was the fact that it was private training. It wasn’t like in a health club where people are watching you work out and there’s lots of sweat on equipment and things like that. It was a different environment. So yeah, a basic model, but it was separated. So there were like private individual suites that we called them. And then minimal equipment, you know, we were doing, you know, dumbbells and a few basic pieces of equipment. Walk us through the gear you had in there. What kind of gear did you have inside? I’m picturing this beautiful startup. What kind of gear did you have in there? Yeah, so it was pretty basic. I mean, we had a just kind of a universal machine that had, you could do like a cable stack rack where people from here were doing like lat pull downs and you could do like a different chest press and things like that. What do you call that? What do you call that machine? It was, you know, the company is Life Fitness. Life Fitness. And it was just like a cable column. A cable column from Life Fitness. Okay. And what other kind of stuff did you have in there? We had a leg press machine. And then we had a stability ball, of course, medicine balls, and really dumbbells. It was pretty basic as far as the equipment. And then it was just more of the boutique style and the one-on-one intimacy is what we were really providing in just a different environment. What kind of people set up this gear? I’m looking at this life fitness equipment. I mean, you’re buying this. I mean, who builds these things? Yeah, so my first studio, we were part of a franchise that at the time was getting popular was Fitness Together. Got it. So yeah, that was, so they helped with a lot of those things. I mean, definitely they had like area, territory directors that helped us as far as getting set up and you know, how to get equipment and purchase equipment. So certainly we had, we had some help. That was partly when I got out of college. You know, I knew exercise science and you know, physiology. I didn’t know business. I was studying business on my own. That’s probably why I did go with the franchise because it helped me a ton. What kind of systems did you get out of Fitness Together that looking back on it were helpful? Yeah, you know, the probably the biggest thing really is they send you off to franchise school for a week and most of that week was spent role playing, was doing sales. And I had done some sales already selling cutco knives and so I Oh yeah! I love it! I had kind of cut my teeth doing that so you know I had some sales experience but just again just sitting down getting grilled for five days role-playing and getting through all the hiccups of asking for a you know large large sums of money for training a lot of that is just you know it’s just getting through fear and stories in your head how to practice, how to ask, the certainty in your product. So that was the biggest thing. Certainly they helped with marketing and setting up systems and different things like that as far as pay structure. I never had an employee. I was hiring people that were my age older than me. So I had to learn a lot pretty quick about leadership and payroll and just things like that that people don’t think about when you go into a business. A lot of people in my industry, they’re trainers and they think, oh, I know how to train, so I’m going to become a business owner. And it’s a whole different world. There’s a lot of stuff I want to unpack there. First off, you said that, if I’m getting this right, you believe that your experience working at Cutco Knives was a good experience for you. That was a great experience. It was great. I just… Now, there’s people all over the internet who troll Cutco Knives and say it’s a horrible experience. I’m going to cue up audio of someone who worked at Cutco Knives who didn’t like it. I personally think any time you can gain sales experience, it’s the best training possible. But there are people that think that working at Cutco Knives is a bad thing. And so I’m going to cue up audio of somebody who was talking about how bad it was to work at Cutco Knives. And then line by line, you can refute why we disagree with this idea. OK, we’ll debate with somebody this is a mckibb is audio real quick hit player uh… locally kate so it seemed oddly fitting to record this video much was going on the background music here but here’s a couple weeks ago i started with vector marketing as a cutco representative now this guy does not strike me as the kind of man who can sell anything to anybody in any circumstance. Let me continue. And I have to say that Cutco itself is a fine product. This cut right here, you might be able to see it, I don’t know if it will zoom in. That was from a steak knife. Okay. Table knife, sorry. Get to the business, buddy. What’s he doing with his pattern on the Cutco because I can’t handle a knife. Make your jokes now, is a crap ton of leather and rope. The knives themselves, they work. There’s nothing wrong with them. Vector themselves, though. OK, so I’d like to talk a few about a few things. I don’t want to hear you talk about a few things. I want you to get to the business, buddy. What is this about you? If you’re doing Vector marketing as a full-time job, Yep. Tell us about it. Leave now. You’re a veteran. Oh, he says if you’re doing it as a full-time job, leave now. Clint, do you disagree with that strongly? I disagree. I mean, I did it in college, so it wasn’t going to be a career, but it’s a great college job or a great getting started job for sure. Okay, let me play some more here. I’m not going to make money. This is the binder. I’m not going to break this down. He’s rocking a certain… it looks like he’s been sleeping previous to recording this. But he’s recording it on his own. Oh yeah. But he’s filming himself with that early morning… It looks like he just woke up. From a terrible angle. I have managed to sell a few things here. Okay. Get to the business, buddy. Give us your points. I have managed to sell… He’s got like bedding. It’s called an essential set. I sold an essential set to my girlfriend’s parents because they were in desperate need of knives. I’m wondering how he has a girlfriend or how he sold anything to anybody. And they got a great deal on said knives. Now, make this very clear. These knives are not for chefs. They are not for people who work in professional kitchen settings. These knives are for people that cook and like to cook and live at home. You’re the Jones really keep making these knives are not for ships. These knives are people who like to cook that have thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to spend, you know, on their career. These knives are not for red seal chefs. These knives are for people that like… This guy doesn’t at any point get to a point I don’t think. Let me skip further and see if he has any points at all. The following are the steps in calculating the minimum incentive payout. So one, you put in your pay rate per appointment. In my case, $20.25. You then put in times that and you get 101.25. I know a lot of super, super broke insurance salespeople who do it for like three months and then quit. I know a ton of real estate agents. I bet you if you’re listening right now and you know a real estate agent, 95% of the people you know who are quote unquote full-time real estate agents aren’t selling anything. We know there are certain people, Clint, that just they get their certifications in fitness and they don’t actually have clients. They get their real estate license and they don’t actually sell real estate. They become a Cutco salesperson. There are certain people that are never successful no matter what certifications they have. So Clint, on behalf of the people out there who want to know what valuable things you learned at Cutco Knives, tell us what specific things did you learn from Cutco Knives that was helpful for your career? I mean, a lot of it was just how to build rapport with people, how to communicate. That’s a big thing. They really taught us how, when you walk into someone’s home, because we were going into houses, you know, people’s homes and selling them, was how to just look around, find things. You can make comments about pictures on the wall, things like that, but actually just showing a genuine concern about the people and having a conversation. If you’re about to ask them for a lot of money, we had a presentation, but we actually wanted to build rapport and get to know these people, find out what their needs are. So that was a lot of it. And so then besides that, really just learning how to handle rejection. That’s a big one. So I mean, even though we were calling warm leads, we’d start people you knew and then you’d get referrals from them. I had people hang up on me all the time, would just cuss you on the phone for you to call on them and hang up. I would show up at people’s homes and they would not answer the door after I had scheduled appointments. I would go into people’s houses and after we had an appointment, they’d be just all over there on the phone. I had one guy one time in Oklahoma City, a business guy, that I came in his home and he was over there on a business call and literally his wife was there and I was waiting and he was on a call, I think he was just slow playing me and he was on the phone for, I waited for 45 minutes, this was on a week night, I was in college, sitting there and his wife felt terrible, she said I’m so sorry you had this call and I sat there, before smartphones, I’m just sitting there twiddling my thumbs for 45 minutes, finally I left, he was still on the phone, just things like that. Sounds a lot like selling anything. Yeah, for sure, I mean, so most people would probably quit, you know, the first time that happened because it is, it’s tough. I mean, we would role play in the office and our managers would just hang up on it. Hey, that sucks, you know, do it again. And, and, you know, you just really got to practice, practice, practice and get better. And then you get comfortable. A lot of it was knowing your product. I didn’t know anything about knives, really. So we did a lot of training to learn the product, why it was good. So I did believe in the product. But then besides that, it’s really just learning how to communicate with people. And I realize, I should say, it’s tough out there. Jason, you’ve learned how to sell memberships at Elephant in the Room. What was the hardest part about learning how to sell memberships at Elephant in the Room? Well, as Clint said, you go in new to it. Because that was actually my first… Nude to it? Yes. Well, that… You go in nude? That did not help my cause. What do you talk… This is a family friendly show. You say nude? N-E-W. Oh, okay. You go in new. Yes. Continue. in the W all going to go ahead yes yes you are you are green you don’t have experience it was actually my first sales job and where I fell flat was for the same reason this guy with his glasses who hates vector and everybody else because vector is massive when I was in high school vector my buddy a shout out to Ernesto was one of the greatest cut co-salesman I have ever seen to buy it from us. Quick time out. They have audio of you during your first sales training at Vector Marketing. I want you to stop bringing this up. Flight 209, you are cleared for takeoff. Roger. Huh? LA departure frequency 123.9. Your first meeting was on an airplane, by the way. It was. It was. It was. They asked you to hop on the airplane during your first Vector Marketing training. We continue. Roger. All right. Request vector. Over. What? Flight 209 are clear for vector 324. We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor? Power radio clearance. Over. Have you seen this movie before, Clint? Over. Have you seen that movie? Oh, yeah. It’s a great movie. Oh, it’s a beautiful movie. Okay. Okay. So you got over the fear eventually? Yeah. How long did it take you before you felt like you were over the fear of rejection? It took me about a week only because I realized that it was crucial to my job to be able to do it. So the first week I was like, okay, you know, it’s got a couple of bads, I missed them, but we’ll have more. But my trainer at the time, then going to our weekly meetings, seeing how important those sales were, and then having you guys walk me through role playing, getting shut down, constant rejection before I got in the shop. That way when I was actually selling to people, like Clint said, it’s all about bill. I didn’t realize the rapport factor. I just thought, hey, this is the thing. You’re gonna buy it. I didn’t realize I had to warm people up to me. I had to engage with them. I wish that college had sales classes. Oh yeah. Where you actually had to sell something as a class. Like if they had sales 101 and you actually had to go get a job for somebody like Elephant in the Room or Vector Marketing and go sell something because that’s the hardest part about business ownership for many, many people. Once you can sell, then management becomes the hardest part. I know for Elephant in the Room as an example, we have people every day that reach out to buy a franchise. Every day, people reach out, they want to buy a franchise, and my job is to vet them and to find out who’s a good fit because if you buy an Elephant in the Room franchise today, let me just walk you through what happens. First off, you have to build out the space. You got to build it out, and we have plans for that. You’re going to be out $200,000 right away just in buildout, between shampoo bowls and decor and lighting and ambiance. You got to build that out. Then you’ve got to give a haircut to at least 3,000 people in your town for free. I’m serious! Because their first haircut is a dollar, and we donate that dollar to Compassion International, which is an organization that provides food and shelter and education and clothing for people in third world countries. It’s a great organization, but we give away that first dollar, and half of the people that come in for their first haircut do not come back again, and they do not sign up for a membership. Now, at Elephant in the Room, downtown, south of Broken Arrow, where the experience is so good and so refined, about six out of ten people come back again and become a member. But the business model hinges upon your ability to provide a great service and to sign up people for a membership 60% of the time, and to provide people for a great membership 60% of the time. Now, if you do a great job, Jason, are they going to naturally on their own sign up for a membership unless you guide them through the process of signing up? No. No, they’re not. So even if you do a $1 haircut, people are not going to sign up for a membership. And I think it’s no different probably, Clint, than what you’re used to in the fitness industry. I mean, when you offer a great service, do people naturally sign up for a membership or do you have to walk them through the experience and explain to them the value and the benefits of what you offer? Oh yeah, for sure in our industry because we’re getting people to do something they’re really not excited about doing and don’t really want to do as far as working out. So you have to really show them the benefits and what they’re going to get out of it and a great experience. Now we have another guy here who couldn’t be on the show. One because I didn’t book him on the show, but two, he’s freely available on YouTube and his video is called, Rant About Vector Marketing. I’m going to play this to him. Let me hit play here. Let’s see what he has to say. Good early morning. It is Thursday, June 6th, 2013. This is your Island Blader speaking. Here’s what’s happening. So I’m here talking at about 1230 in the morning here. I’m actually not going to rant and rave about sports. Okay? Mets won. Big deal. Whatever. I’m excited about this. He’s going to rant. A friend of mine from my church actually has made a request to me to make a rant about concerning one vector marketing. Okay. Now remember, back in the day, if you wanted to vote, you had to own land. Back in the day, if you wanted to have a platform, you had to have done something first. Usually you didn’t get a talk show unless you had done something. Oprah got her own talk show as a result of doing a good job. But now everyone has a YouTube channel and everyone can say whatever they want to say. So we’re going to make sure we’re getting this. Everybody now can say something. Let’s hit play and see what this man has to say. They have been the subject of a lot of controversy. They’ve been at it for a while, but here’s the whole sequence of effective marketing. You’re going to know my obvious take after I finish all of this. I want you to finish all of this. I want to hear it. First, when you’re in about 11th or 12th grade, or maybe more like 12th grade, you’re about to graduate high school. Get to the point, buddy. You see things either come into your mailbox, you see flyers around school or whatever. You see a thing and it says work for students. You can make up to $16 an hour or $16 base slash appointment, whatever. Okay. So you’re thinking, ooh, $16 an appointment. Ooh, that sounds awesome. Sounds really good. I can make some good money this summer. You know, interested in summer work? Well, you know, 16 bucks an hour you can make. So naturally you look at the pay and you’re like, oh okay, yeah I’m interested in the position, blah blah blah. Or you might see it online. Yeah, you know, you fill out your online app, you know, most, you know, places these days, especially chain stores, you don’t want an online application. So you fill one out, you know, you don’t expect anything. But on this thing, this a number, whatever. Hi, oh, we see your application online. We were wondering, you know, blah, blah, blah. Are you really interested? Do you want to come in for an interview? Now, mind you, I used to do Vector, except I wasn’t 18. Okay, you know how old I was when I did 23, three summers ago, okay? And it’s like you fill out this application, and like literally five, 10 minutes later, they call you, asking about, oh, you wanna come in for an interview, blah, blah, blah, and you know, I should have seen the red flags right then and there. Oh, you should have seen them. Like, oh, I got a job interview, mom and dad, this is gonna be awesome. And then so you’re like, oh, like, what’s it about? And I’m like, hmm, I wonder. It might be, you know, you get… You mean a job where you have to actually perform? A lot of times, and I didn’t know this, because obviously even at 26, I still have a lot to learn about life. But here we go. Right. You know, you go there, you know, they will actually schedule in on the same day. Oh! Like, really? Like, who does that? You know, usually you need at least like a few days. Like if you, like let’s say today’s Thursday, okay? Usually, oh, you want to come in for an interview? No, how about next Tuesday, Wednesday, whatever. He probably is bad at selling. Let’s keep watching. Same day interview? As you spoke on the phone for the first time? We do same day interviews in the room. That was the thing that got me. Typically people give you three days. Don’t you start with me. Let’s get deeper into it. I want to hear this guy. So many people talk about, they just openly bitch about their first life insurance job. I’ve got one guy I know who was the CFO. He was the CFO of Helmrich & Payne, which is a billion dollar business, the CFO, Doug Fears. And Doug Fears, he went to college at Harvard. He said perhaps his best education was selling life insurance, learning how to overcome objections, presenting. But there’s a lot of people that try to sell life insurance and complain about it. Jason, have you ever met somebody who got their real estate license and complained about their lack of income? Have you ever seen this happen? I have not met any realtors personally. Oh boy. See, I’ve coached many, and it’s funny, but I’ll have somebody who will reach out to me and say, could you help me grow my business and there’ll be a real estate agent at some big company like Keller Williams or Jenna with something yeah, and they’ll say could you help me grow my business and they’ll complain like you know the brand It just doesn’t provide me the support. I needed yeah, oh, so you thought that by becoming a real estate licensed agent You thought by getting your a you’re getting your license You would then just get houses and leads that are sold for you simply because you have that license. Okay, let me hit play. Let’s look through this guy. You know, and also this, okay, you also realize this. Come on, buddy. If you don’t make a sale, not only, you know, you keep a log of all your appointments that you’ve done, you know, your family, your friends, whomever you’ve sold to. That’s right. Whomever. Okay. Now, it’s… Now, look, real quick. I used to make, when I built DJConnection.com, I made a rule that I would make 100 outbound calls every day before noon. That was my rule. And I got paid $0 unless I sold something. Why? Because that’s how sales works. Interesting. Let’s hear this guy continue. Apparently, it’s not, you know, like I said with the certain appointments, you know, they say you get base pay, confirmed appointments, that’s crap. Oh. And base pay will be washed out if your commission you earn is higher than your base pay. So if you’re getting paid $17 per appointment or whatever, it’s like, and you earn, someone buys you something so low that it’s like 21, or you only earn like 21 bucks, that’s your pay. Okay? That’s your commission, that’s your pay. Right, because you didn’t sell anything. Okay, it starts with 10%, after $1,000 like 15, 20, you know, depending on whatever the range is. I think I only made it to like 20% or something. You mean they don’t just pay him just to show up? Interesting, they don’t just pay a guy just for being on the planet? Let’s continue. And here’s the thing about cut-cone knives. Oh, here’s the thing. Much as you know they’re really good knives they are and I’m gonna quote Mr. Dink from Doug, very expensive. Okay they’re very overpriced knives. I mean you know they try when your presentation they try to have you compare cut Kota like Henkels or cut Kota Wusthof or whatever you know and you know you can’t buy cutco in the store, you order it online. You know, you can send it back, you can send it back for free sharpening and so on and so forth. You know, that’s pretty good, you know. At least you know you’re set for life when it comes to, you know, if your knives get dull or whatever, okay? That’s neat. But the fact is, the knives are overpriced, you know, you try to… Now, Clint, how good is someone going to be at sales if they fundamentally believe that their product is overpriced? How good is somebody going to be at sales? Not very good. That’s the first part, is you have to believe in your product. So let’s talk about this. You’re a personal trainer. Your company trains group fitness, personal training. And give us an example, not necessarily the person’s name, but just give us an example of somebody that you’ve helped over the years, that you helped lose a ton of weight and get in great shape. Just give us a story, an example of somebody that you’ve helped to get in great shape throughout the years? Yeah, so we’ve helped hundreds. So that’s the biggest thing is we get people that a lot of times they come to us that have tried other things. They’ve worked out other places. They’ve done yo-yo dieting. They’ve tried to go to the gym, work out on their own. And so you’ve got to provide something that gets results, obviously. But you’ve helped people lose weight? Oh, yes. How much weight? Well, let’s see. We’ve had several clients that have over 100 pounds. And you do a great job. My wife actually was on jury duty the other day and she’s sitting there with a member of the Tulsa Fitness Systems and that person was going, yeah, you know Vanessa, I work out there too. And Vanessa says, well why do you work out there? This is a true story. She says, well it’s because they have like a plan. There’s actually a plan. Jason, this just in, there’s actually a plan. What? How dare you? She says there’s a plan. Now, the other place I used to work at, there’s a lot of hype. There’s a lot of people yelling at you, asking you if you’d like to win all day, that kind of thing. Do you want to be successful all day? Let me hear it if you want to win! You know, there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of people wearing really small shirts. There’s a lot of winning, a lot of small shirting, a lot of people asking, a lot of hype. But there’s no written down plan. There’s not actually like a plan. So you get there, Jason, and you could, by the way, Jason, if you showed up to work out someplace in a group fitness class, what would be some of your tips, some of your keys, where you would know that the person who’s leading the workout doesn’t have a plan? How would you know, Jason, as a layperson who’s not a fitness expert, how would you know if the person training you does not have a plan? Well, I actually went to Back when I was working out like a machine at TCC. They had a really good gym at their downtown I think it’s the Metro campus area, but they had a like an aggressive spin class and I thought I’ve never done that I’m trying to up my cardio again So I went and I could tell the instructor had no idea what he was doing because the guy what I want you to do So I want you to turn it up to max resistance and you’re gonna get out of the saddle or whatever He was calling is if you’re gonna do this and you’re gonna switch it up and he didn’t have any linear plan, and as we were doing it, we realized everybody’s getting hurt, we’re getting tired in not a good way, none of it makes any sense whatsoever. Yeah, again, so my wife is sitting next to a lady doing the jury duty thing, and she’s going, it’s awesome, and Vanessa, because you guys are building the property out there in jinx, when you move, you should sign up. And Vanessa, the more she’s hearing about it, this went on for about 30 minutes. She’s like, well, we already work in Jenks. I should probably just sign up. I think my wife’s going to become a new member soon. She’s a paying customer. Oh, man. We’ll take great care of her. But seriously, she’s heard great things from this lady who was like a walking commercial about it. And what does it cost to work out at Tulsa Fitness Systems now? What do you charge per month on average? Yeah, so we do private personal training, but we’re probably more known for our group training. It’s very affordable. It’s a hundred and something dollars a month. So let’s just say a hundred and something dollars a month. There are trainers I know in Tulsa who charge, you know, 50 bucks a month for their group class and it’s still too much. And you go, why? Because they don’t have a freaking plan. And there’s always so much hype you can have before you have to get down to having a plan. There are other places that charge. I know of a guy in particular, I was at a, I was DJing back in the day, this would be about five years ago, it was a friend of mine where he had a party with a DJ and I was invited to attend. So it wasn’t my DJ career, but this is a guy who I originally DJed at his wedding reception and his 40th birthday party. I was invited to attend his kid’s party or something. They had a DJ there. I was there and I was talking to some of the guests and one guy who was there was jacked. This guy is jacked. I’m talking to him, I’m making small talk and I’m like, what do you do for a living, man? And he says, oh, I’m a trainer. I said, you’re a trainer? He goes, yeah, I just kind of, I’m asking about his model. Where do you train? He goes, I come to people’s homes, and I just have like 15 clients. And I’m like, you have 15 clients? He goes, yeah. Now, I talked to my friend, he’s been a client, my friend has hired this guy for years. And apparently he just has like 15 clients, and he charges people about a grand a month. And he just works out with you, and he just comes to your place, and that’s his deal. So he has like 15 grand a month coming in, no overhead. And I’m going to ask my buddy, like, dude, you pay a grand a month for fitness? He says, well, yeah. I mean, but this guy is like, I mean, he walks me through my diet. He comes to my house. I mean, it’s an awesome deal. And it’s like he’s my accountability partner. He walks me through my food. He’s like a nutritionist slash trainer. Clint with Fitness Together, wasn’t that the model back in the day? About, was it $600 a month or something for one-on-one training? Yeah, so back then we did actually packages. I think now they do it more, probably different. But it was, yeah, no, actually our average package sold was about $2,800. $2,800? Wow. Yes, it was anywhere from, like, very rarely we would sell somebody, would buy a small, like a 10-pack or something for like $800. But it was more of two to six thousand dollar packages. Really? They were paying up front for it. And people bought that? Yeah, yeah all day. Okay, so let’s talk about this. So Tulsa Fitness Systems, do you also do one-on-one training for the listeners out there that want to know about it? Yeah, we do. We do quite a bit. We don’t really advertise it much, but we do a ton of it. We actually really do. What does that cost? What does that cost? Yeah, it varies. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s more per session or we’ll do packages but it’s anywhere from you know 65 to 90 dollars a session typically. And there are again you have people like this YouTube guy who’s talking about vector marketing he says the knives are overpriced. They’re overpriced. Well this is the problem. See I grew up without any money but when you’re a poor person and you’re trying to sell nice things you can’t possibly sell it cheap enough in your mind to justify. So if you’re a poor person you have usually what’s called a poverty mindset which means that you believe there’s a scarcity of money available. If you’re out there today and you’re in the messy middle trying to build a business into something special, this is a show you need to hear because the founder of Tulsa Fitness Systems is here to share with us his journey from the bottom to the top right back down to the bottom, and then up to the top again. We got fitness tips, business tips. It’s a great show. Get ready. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show. Three, two, one, hit it! 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 here. Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, if you’re out there today and you’re happening to listen to this show at any time and place, no matter where you are, I hate to take the show down to a deep, deep area there. Jason, I hate to take the show down to a deep area. We hate to make the show super religious to start off, but is it okay if I ask for a prayer request? Absolutely. I pray that all the listeners would pray that Gunnar Olszewski, the receiver on the Patriots, I’m wearing his number 80 jersey right now, that he somehow becomes taller and a little bit faster in his early 20s because the Patriots are going to need Gunnar Olszewski to become a miracle man for the rest of the season because we keep having injuries. I’m not sure when this show will come out. This show might come out after the Super Bowl, who knows? But I pray that Gunnar Olszewski just gets a little bit taller and a little bit faster. Because I love that guy, that undrafted, beautiful man, number 80 from Bemidji State, the factory of NFL players. Division II, Bemidji State, Gunnar Olshefsky. If you just put in your schedule, put in your plan, put it on your to-do list, just pray for Gunnar Olshefsky. A little bit faster, and a little bit taller. Do you agree with that, Jason? Yeah, and I’ll line up you there on the drive home today, just to support the Patriots. I will play a Ski-Lo’s I Wish on repeat. Nice! That’s what we need. That is what we need. Jason, I haven’t thought about the song I Wish for a long time. Was that a big part of your childhood, I Wish? It was a song that I knew the first half of the chorus for quite some time but had no idea who Ski-Lo was or had even heard the rest of the song. No, Ski-Lo, let’s cue it up real quick. This is in Let’s do this in honor of Gunnar Olszewski and Steelo, both of which are forgotten American treasures. Clint, do you remember this song? I do. This song is impressive. Let me queue it up. Let’s give us 15 seconds of it. Here we go. Hello, I wish I was a little bit taller. Oh yeah, Gunnar Olszewski, come on now. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her. Wish I had a rabbit and a hat. Gunnar Olszewski, if you’re out there, we love you. We support you. I wish I was like six foot eight. You’re already doing a great job, despite your lack of speed and height. But we just need another two inches of height and another tenth of a second off that 40-yard dash and we’re good. Alright, so on today’s show we have somebody, though, who is an overachiever just like Gunnar Oshkoski. True. And he actually started from the bottom and now he’s here. Clint Howard, the founder of Tulsa Fitness Systems. How are you, sir? Hey, fantastic, Clayton. Excited to be here. Hey, I’m excited to have you here. Now, we had you on the show earlier to talk about your journey starting from the bottom and building your company, and we had you come on the show and talk about practical fitness tips. But on today’s show, we want to go a little bit deeper. We want to do a little bit more of a deep dive into the story. So share with the listeners out there that maybe missed your earlier show or that want more detail. How did you start your first fitness business? Yeah for sure. So I was like a lot of people in my industry. I was training in health in a health club while I was going through college for exercise science and just started training clients. But really for me I mean it started with the vision. I knew I wanted to do something different as far as just working in a gym or a health club. Provide just a you know a different experience, a different service. And just I had an entrepreneur mind and I loved work ethic and all those things. So I started with that. It’s like, okay, what do I do? What’s that going to look like? And so for me, I worked, I worked about probably 65 to 75 hours a week all through my last year of undergrad. Then I also have a master’s degree. So I went to college for three more years. But basically I worked and I was working, I was training. So I was doing what I enjoyed and what I was studying in school But I worked early mornings. I worked nights I worked all weekend and so I was just basically saving you know you talk about delayed gratification. I was not partying I wasn’t spending my money. I was working getting experience, but also saving up my money And so then when I finished graduate school I you know I started my first studio And I didn’t want to take out loans, and so we went in pretty cheap. Went in low with not a lot of overhead, and it just grew from there. So yeah, so I was really blessed as far as saving and learning about how to sign a lease and how to look for a facility, location, and then not having to take out a loan or borrow money. So I started all just by myself. Let’s talk about this. When you started your first business. What kind of, do you remember how much money it cost to start your first fitness location? Do you remember how much it cost on a monthly basis to lease space and how much startup capital it required? Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so I remember, that was all new to me. I was fresh out of college, you know, I knew exercise science, but I certainly did not know business. So, you know, I was getting advice from mentors and looking for facilities and learning about like Triple Net and CAM and what rent is and signing three-year, five-year leases. So yeah, we had to buy equipment. So it was, I think, probably about $30,000 or $40,000. And then I signed on to a five-year lease for a space that was a smaller facility. We were doing all private training, so it was about 1,200 square feet. But still, signing on to a five-year lease, I was fresh out of college, so I didn’t really know what I was doing as far as business So it was a you know, there’s a lot of a lot of nerve certainly I was taking a big risk But I just I had a lot of confidence in myself that I could I could be successful and really I didn’t I didn’t have Any where was this gym located? Yeah, was it in a basement somewhere? Was it? At your parents house was it in a shopping center? Where was the first location? Yes. Well, I was in Norman I was going to college at OU and so we were in Norman, Oklahoma. And yeah, we were in, you know, the, certainly we knew our clientele, our market. So we were in the, you know, Northwest Norman, they’ve got the Brookhaven area, which is a higher, higher income area as far as in Norman. And then we went into just a strip center, like a, you know, a retail space. Now Norman, Oklahoma has a population of 110,000 people. Is it a, for the folks out there who are not familiar with Norman, Oklahoma, which is the home of the Oklahoma University, is it a wealthy area? Is it a middle class? How would you describe the population of Norman? Yeah, it’s pretty, I mean it has its pockets. I mean certainly there’s there’s wealth there, any major college town. So there’s one area, anyone that’s familiar with Norman, it’s called Brookhaven. That’s kind of the Northwest Norman, which is where most of the, you know, the upper upper class and the nicer neighborhoods. And again, we were doing more high-end one-on-one training, so definitely we knew we knew our market and that’s a big thing if you’re going to open any business you definitely you know that type of business we need to know that you know it’s convenient and people are going to come so you want to you want to be in the right area of town. How did you decorate the area? Do you remember what it looked like inside? Some of our listeners out there in that startup mode right now. What did it look like inside? Yeah so we this is all things I had to learn you know as far as dealing with contractors and we found a space it was basically a kind of white box or a shell. And then we had architects that had to do the blueprint. It was a real basic model of what we were doing. Then it was these smaller, kind of two-room studio. So we had a small office, a restroom. We didn’t have locker rooms. This is all just private training, more like a high-end boutique studio. And then we had two separate rooms. So that was part of our—really part of our niche was the fact that it was private training. It wasn’t like in a health club where people are watching you work out and there’s lots of sweat on equipment and things like that. It was a different environment. So yeah, a basic model, but it was separated so they were like private individual suites that we called them. Oh yeah. And then minimal equipment, you know, we were doing, you know, dumbbells and a few basic pieces of equipment. Walk us through the gear you had in there. What kind of gear did you have inside there? I’m picturing this beautiful startup. What kind of gear did you have in there? Yeah, so it was pretty basic. We had a universal machine that you could do a cable stack rack where people from here were doing lat pull downs and you could do different chest press and things like that. What do you call that machine? The company is Life Fitness. Life Fitness. And it was just like a cable column. A cable column from Life Fitness. Okay. And what other kind of stuff did you have in there? We had a leg press machine. And then we had a stability ball, of course, medicine balls, and really dumbbells. It was pretty basic as far as the equipment. And then it was just more of the boutique style and the one-on-one intimacy is what we were really providing in just a different environment. What kind of people set up this gear? I’m looking at this life fitness equipment. You’re buying this. I mean, this is impressive. Who builds these things? You do it yourself? Yeah, so my first studio, we were part of a franchise that at the time was getting popular. It was Fitness Together. Got it. So yeah, that was, so they helped with a lot of those things. I mean, definitely they had like area, territory directors that helped us as far as getting set up and you know, how to get equipment, purchase equipment. So certainly we had some help. That was partly when I got out of college. You know, I knew exercise science and, you know, physiology. I didn’t know business. I was studying business on my own. That’s probably why I did go with the franchise because it helped me a ton. What kind of systems did you get out of fitness together that looking back on it were helpful? Yeah, you know, the probably the biggest thing really is they send you off to franchise school for a week and most of that week was spent role playing, was doing sales. And I had done some sales already, selling cutco knives, and so I. Oh, yeah. I had kind of cut my teeth doing that. So, I had some sales experience, but just again, just sitting down getting grilled for five days role playing and getting through all the hiccups of asking for large sums of money for training. A lot of that is just getting through fear and stories in your head how to practice, how to ask uncertainty in your product. So that’s the biggest thing. Certainly they help with marketing and setting up you know setting up systems and different things like that as far as pay structure. I never had an employee. I was hiring people that were my age older than me. So we had to learn a lot pretty quick about leadership and payroll and just things like that that people don’t think about when you go into a business. A lot of people in my industry, they’re trainers and they think oh I know how to train so I’m going to become a business owner. And it’s a whole different world. There’s a lot of stuff I want to unpack there. First off, you said that, if I’m getting this right, you believe that your experience working at Cutco Knives was a good experience for you. That was a great experience. It was great. I just… Now, there’s people all over the internet who troll Cutco Knives and say it’s a horrible experience. I’m going to cue up audio of someone who worked at Cutco knives who didn’t like it. I personally think any time you can gain sales experience, it’s the best training possible. But there are people that think that working at Cutco knives is a bad thing. And so I’m going to cue up audio of somebody who was talking about how bad it was to work at Cutco knives. And then line by line, you can refute why we disagree with this idea. We’ll debate with somebody. Let me keep this audio real quick. Let me hit play here. Okay, let me… I seem to record a lot of videos in this room. Okay, so it seemed oddly fitting to record this video. I’m not sure what’s going on with the background music here, but here we go. A couple weeks ago, I started with Vector Marketing as a co-representative. Now, this guy does not strike me as the kind of man who could sell anything to anybody. No, not at all. Under any circumstance. Let me continue. And I have to say that Cutco itself is a fine product. This cut right here, you might be able to see it, I don’t know if it will zoom in, that was from a steak knife. Okay. Table knife, sorry. Get to the business, buddy. What’s he doing with this pattern on the Cutco because I can’t handle a knife. Make your jokes now is a crap ton of leather and rope. The knives themselves, they work. There’s nothing wrong with them. Vector themselves, though. Um, okay, so I’d like to talk a few, about a few things. I don’t want to hear you talk about a few things. I want you to get to the business, buddy. What is this? If you’re doing Vector marketing as a full-time job, leave now. Oh, he says if you’re doing it as a full-time job, leave now. Clint, do you disagree with that strongly? I disagree. I mean, I did it in college, so it wasn’t going to be a career, but it’s a great college job or a great getting started job for sure. Okay, let me play some more here. I’m not going to make money. This is the binder. I’m not going to break this down. I’m just telling you. He’s rocking a certain… It looks like he’s been sleeping previous to recording this. But he’s recording it on his own. Oh yeah. But he’s filming himself with that early morning… he looks like he just woke up. From a terrible angle. I have managed to sell a few things here. Okay. Get to the business buddy. Give us your points. I have managed to sell… he’s got like… I sold an essential set. I sold an essential set to my girlfriend’s parents because they were in desperate need of knives. I’m wondering how he has a girlfriend or how he sold anything to anybody. And they got a great deal on said knives. Now make this very clear. These knives are not for chefs. They are not for people who work in professional kitchen settings. These knives are for people that cook and like to cook and live at home. And they’re for your… the Jones, really. What are you thinking over there, James? These knives are not for chefs. These knives are for people who like to cook. These knives are not for people that have thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to spend, you know, on their career. These knives are not for red seal chefs. These knives are for people that like… This guy doesn’t at any point get to a point I don’t think. Let me skip further and see if he has any points at all. The following are the steps in calculating the minimum incentive payout. So one, you put in your pay rate per appointment. In my case, $20.25. You then put in your number of appointments. Mine was five. I then would put in the time slot and you get $101.25. I know a lot of super, super broke insurance salespeople who do it for like three months and then quit. I know a ton of real estate agents. I bet you if you’re listening right now and you know a real estate agent, 95% of the people you know who are quote unquote full-time real estate agents aren’t selling anything. We know there are certain people, Clint, that just, they get their certifications in fitness and they don’t actually have clients. They get their real estate license and they don’t actually sell real estate. They become a Cutco salesperson. There are certain people that are never successful no matter what certifications they have. So Clint, on behalf of the people out there who want to know what valuable things you learned at Cutco Knives, tell us what specific things did you learn from Cutco Knives that was helpful for your career? I mean a lot of it was just how to build rapport with people. Yep. How to communicate. That’s a big thing. They really taught us how when you walk into someone’s home, because we were going into houses, you know, people’s homes and selling them, was how to just look around, find things. You can make comments about pictures on the wall, things like that, but actually just showing a genuine concern about the people and having a conversation. If you’re about to ask them for a lot of money, we had a presentation, but we actually wanted to build rapport and get to know these people, find out what their needs are. So that was a lot of it. So then besides that, really just learning how to handle rejection. That’s a big one. So I mean, even though we were calling warm leads, we’d start people you knew and then you’d get referrals from them. You know, I had people hang up on me all the time, would you know, just cuss you on the phone for calling them and hang up. I would show up at people’s homes and they would not answer the door after I had scheduled appointments. I would go into people’s houses and after we had an appointment they’d be just all over there on the phone. I had one guy one time in Oklahoma City, a business guy, that I came in his home and he was over there on a business call and literally his wife is there and I was waiting and he was on a call, I think he was just slow playing me, and he was on the phone for, I waited for 45 minutes, this was on a weeknight, I was in college, sitting there and his wife felt terrible, she said, I’m so sorry you had this call, and yeah I sit there, this was before smartphones, so I’m just sitting there twiddling my thumbs for 45 minutes, finally I left, he was still on the phone, just things like that. Sounds a lot like selling anything. Yeah, for sure, I mean, so most people would probably quit, you know, the first time that happened because it is, it’s tough. I mean, we would role play in the office and our managers would just hang up on it, hey, that sucks, you know, do it again. And you know, you just really got to practice, practice, practice and get better and then you get comfortable. And a lot of it is knowing your product. I mean, I didn’t know anything about knives really, so we did a lot of training to learn the product, why it was good, so I did believe in the product. But then besides that, it’s really just learning how to communicate with people. And I realize, hey, it’s tough out there. Jason, you’ve learned how to sell memberships at Elephant in the Room. What was the hardest part about learning how to sell memberships at Elephant in the Room? Well, as Clint said, you go in new to it. Because that was actually my first… Nude to it? Yes. You go in nude? That did not help my cause. What’s this? This is a family friendly show. You say nude? N-E-W Okay You are green you don’t have any experience It was actually my first sales job and where I fell flat was for the same reason This guy with his glasses who hates vector and everybody else because vector was massive when I was in high school vector My buddy shout out to Ernesto was one of the greatest cutco salesman I have ever seen because all of these kids came in thinking, okay, we’re going to be given this massively expensive product and people are just going to buy it from us. Quick timeout. They have audio of you during your first sales training at Vector Marketing. I want you to stop bringing this up. Flight 209, are you all clear for takeoff? Roger. Huh? LA departure frequency 123.9. Your first meeting was on an airplane, by the way. It was. It was. It was. It was. It was. They asked you to hop on the airplane during your first vector marketing training. We continue. Roger. All right. Request vector. Over. What? Flight 209 are clear for vector 324. We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, Roger. What’s our vector, Victor? Power radio clearance. Over. Have you seen this movie before, Clint? Over. Have you seen that movie? Oh, yeah. It’s a great movie. Oh, it’s a beautiful movie. I love that. Okay. So you got over the fear eventually? Yeah. How long did it take you before you felt like you were over the fear of rejection? It took me about a week only because I realized that it was crucial to my job to be able to do it. So the first week, I was like, okay, you know, it’s got a couple of bad times, but we’ll have more. But my trainer at the time, then going to our weekly meeting, seeing how important those sales were, and then having you guys walk me through role-playing, getting shut down, constant rejection before I got in the shop. That way when I was actually selling to people, like Clint said, it’s all about the, I didn’t realize the rapport factor. I just thought, hey, this is a thing. You going to buy it? I didn’t realize I had to warm people up to me. I had to engage with them. I wish that college had sales classes. Oh yeah. Where you actually had to sell something as a class. Like if they had sales 101 and you actually had to go get a job for somebody like Elephant in the Room or Vector Marketing and go sell something because that’s the hardest part about business ownership for many, many people. Once you can sell, then management becomes the hardest part. But I know like for Elephant in the Room as an example, we have people every day that reach out to buy a franchise. Every day, people reach out, they want to buy a franchise, and my job is to vet them and to find out who’s a good fit because if you buy an Elephant in the Room franchise today, let me just walk you through what happens. First off, you have to build out the space. You got to build it out and we have plans for that. You’re going to be out $200,000 right away just in build out between shampoo bowls and decor and lighting and ambiance. You got to build that out. Then you’ve got to give a haircut to at least 3,000 people in your town for free. I’m serious! Because their first haircut is a dollar and we donate that dollar to Compassion International, which is an organization that provides food and shelter and education and clothing for people in third world countries. It’s a great organization, but we give away that first dollar and half of the people that come in for their first haircut do not come back again and they do not sign up for a membership. Elephant in the Room downtown south of Broken Arrow with the experience is so good and so refined about six out of ten people come back again and become a member. But the business model hinges upon your ability to provide a great service and to sign up people for a membership 60 percent of the time and to provide people for a membership 60% of the time and to provide people for a great membership 60% of the time. Now if you do a great job Jason are they going to naturally on their own sign up for a membership unless you guide them through the process of signing up? No. No they’re not. So even if you do a $1 haircut people are not going to sign up for a membership and I think it’s no different probably Clinton what you’re used to in the fitness industry I mean when you offer a great service, do people naturally sign up for a membership or do you have to walk them through the experience and explain to them the value and the benefits of what you offer? Oh yeah, for sure in our industry because we’re getting people to do something they’re really not excited about doing and don’t really want to do as far as working out. So you have to really provide, show them the benefits and what they’re going to get out of it and a great experience. Now we have another guy here who couldn’t be on the show. One because I didn’t book him on the show, but two, he’s freely available on YouTube and his video is called, Rant About Vector Marketing. I’m going to play this to him. Let me play it. Let’s see what he has to say. Good early morning. It is Thursday, June 6, 2013. This is your Island Blader speaking. Here’s what’s happening. So I’m here talking at about 1230 in the morning here. I’m actually not going to rant and rave about sports. Okay? Mets won, big deal, whatever. I’m excited about this. He’s going to rant. A friend of mine from my church actually has made a request to me to make a rant about concerning one vector marketing. Okay, now remember, back in the day, if you wanted to vote, you had to own land. And back in the day, if you wanted to have a platform, you had to have done something first. Yep. You know usually didn’t get a talk show unless you had done something Like Oprah got her own talk show as a result of doing a good job But now everyone has a YouTube channel everyone can say whatever they want to say So we’re gonna make sure we’re getting this everybody now can say something What’s it? What’s it play and see what to see what this man has to say? They have been the subject of a lot of controversy They’ve been at it for a while, but here’s the whole sequence of effective marketing. You’re going to know my obvious take after I finish all of this. I want you to finish all of this. I want to hear it. First, when you’re in about 11th or 12th grade, or maybe more like 12th grade, you’re about to graduate high school. Get to the point, buddy. You see things either come into your mailbox, you see flyers around school, or whatever. You see a thing and it’s it says work for students. You can make up to $16 an hour or $16 base slash appointment whatever. Okay. Okay. So you’re thinking, ooh $16 an appointment. That sounds awesome. Sounds really good. I can make some good money this summer. You know, interested in summer work? Well, you know, 16 bucks an hour you can make. So naturally you look at the pay and you’re like, oh, okay, yeah, I’m interested in the position, blah, blah, blah. Or you might see it online. Yeah, you know, you fill out your online app, you know, most, most, you know, places these days, especially chain stores, you don’t want an online application. So you fill one out, you know, you don’t expect anything. But on this thing, this workforstudents.com thing, or even you see things itself, or you call a number, whatever. Hi, oh, we see your application online. We were wondering, you know, blah, blah, blah. Are you really interested? Do you want to come in for an interview? Now, mind you, I used to do Vector, except I wasn’t 18. Okay. And it’s like you fill out this application and like literally five, 10 minutes later they call you. Ask you about, oh you want to come in for an interview, blah, blah, blah. And you know, I should have seen the red flags right then and there. Oh, you should have seen them. Oh, I got a job interview, mom and dad. This would be awesome. And then so you’re like, oh, what’s it about? And I’m like, hmm, I wonder. It might be, you know, you get. You mean a job where you have to actually perform? A lot of times, and I didn’t know this, because obviously even at 26, I still have a lot to learn about life. But here we go. Right. You know, you go there. You go there. They will actually schedule in on the same day. Oh! Like, really? Like, who does that? You know, usually you need at least like a few days. Like, if you, like let’s say today’s Thursday okay usually now I think the summary of this next Tuesday when he probably is bad at selling right it’s probably summer let’s keep watching you know same day interview as you as you spoke on the phone for the first time now we do same day interviews are all from the room well that was the thing that got me is you call you know typically people give you three days don’t you start with me now let’s hit well let’s get deeper into it I want to hear this guy because again so many people talk about they just openly bitch about their first life insurance job I’ve got one guy. I know who was the CFO. He was the CFO of Helmer campaign Which is a billion dollar business the CFO Doug fears and Doug fears who has a and he went to college at Harvard He said perhaps his best education was selling life insurance, learning how to overcome objections, presenting. But there’s a lot of people that try to sell life insurance and complain about it. Jason, have you ever met somebody who got their real estate license and complained about their lack of income? Have you ever seen this happen? I have not met any realtors personally. Oh boy. See, I’ve coached many and it’s funny, but I’ll have somebody who will reach out to me and say, could you help me grow my business? And they’ll be a real estate agent at some big company like Keller Williams or Chenoweth or something. And they’ll say, could you help me grow my business? And they’ll complain, like, you know, the brand just doesn’t provide me the support I needed. Yeah. Oh, so you thought that by becoming a real estate licensed agent, you thought by getting your license you would then just get houses and leads that are sold for you simply because you have that license. Okay, let me hit play. Let’s look at this guy. You know, and also this, okay, you also realize this. Come on, buddy. If you don’t make a sale, not only, you know, you keep a log of all your appointments that you’ve done, you know, your family, your friends, whomever you’ve sold to. That’s right. Whomever. Okay. Now, it’s, now look real quick, I used to make, when I built DJConnection.com, I made a rule that I would make 100 outbound calls every day before noon. That was my rule. And I got paid $0 unless I sold something. Why? Because that’s how sales works. Interesting. Let’s hear this guy continue. Apparently, it’s not, you know, like I said with the certain appointments, you know, they say you get base pay, confirmed appointments. That’s crap. Oh. And base pay will be washed out if you’re a, if you are, um, commission you earn is higher than your base pay. So if you’re getting paid $17 per appointment or whatever, it’s like, and you earn, someone buys you something so low that it’s like 21 or you only like 21 bucks. That’s your pay. Okay. That’s your commission. That’s your pay. Right, but you didn’t sell anything. It starts with 10%, after a thousand miles, 15, 20, depending on whatever the range is. I think I only made it to 20% or something. You mean they don’t just pay him just to show up? Interesting, they don’t just pay a guy just for being on the planet. Let’s continue. Here’s the thing about cut-cone knives. Here’s the thing. Much as they’re really good knives, they are, and I’m going to quote Mr. Dink from Doug, very expensive. They’re very overpriced knives. I mean, when you’re presentation, they try to have you compare Cutco to like Henkels or Cutco to Wusthof or whatever. You can’t buy Cutco in a store, you order it online. You can send it back for free sharpening and so on and so forth. That’s pretty good. At least you know you’re set for life when it comes to if your knives get dull or whatever. That’s neat. But the fact is, the knives are overpriced. Now, Clint, how good is someone going to be at sales if they fundamentally believe that their product is overpriced? How good is somebody going to be at sales? Not very good. That’s the first part, is you have to believe in your product. So let’s talk about this. You’re a personal trainer. Your company trains group fitness, personal training. And give us an example, not necessarily the person’s name, but just give us an example of somebody that you’ve helped over the years, that you helped lose a ton of weight and get in great shape. Just give us a story, an example of somebody that you’ve helped to get in great shape throughout the years. Yeah, so we’ve helped hundreds. So that’s the biggest thing is we get people that a lot of times they come to us that have tried other things. They’ve worked out other places. They’ve done yo-yo dieting. They’ve tried to go to the gym, work out on their own. And so you’ve got to provide something that gets results, obviously. But you’ve helped people lose weight. Oh, yes. How much weight? Let’s see. We’ve had several clients that have over 100 pounds. You do a great job. My wife actually was on jury duty the other day. She’s sitting there with a member of the Tulsa Fitness Systems. That person was going, yeah, Vanessa, I work out there too. Vanessa says, why do you work out there? This is a true story. She says, well, it’s because they have a plan. There’s actually a plan. Jason, this just in, there’s actually a plan. What? How dare you? She says there’s a plan. Now the other place I used to work at, there’s a lot of hype. There’s a lot of people yelling at you, asking you if you’d like to win all day, that kind of thing. Do you want to be successful all day? Let me hear it if you want to win! You know, there’s a lot of that. There’s a lot of people wearing really small shirts. There’s a lot of winning, a lot of small shirting, a lot of people asking, a lot of hype, but there’s no written down plan. There’s not actually a plan. So you get there, Jason, and you could, by the way, Jason, if you showed up to work out someplace in a group fitness class, what would be some of your tips, some of your keys, where you would know that the person who’s leading the workout doesn’t have a plan? How would you know, Jason, as a layperson who’s not a fitness expert, how would you know if the person training you does not have a plan? Well, I actually went to, back when I was working out like a machine at TCC, they had a really good gym at their downtown, I think it’s the Metro Campus? Sure, yeah. But they had an aggressive spin class, and I thought, I’ve never done that, I’m trying to up my cardio again. So I went, and I could tell the instructor had no idea what he was doing, because he was like, alright, what I want you to do is I want you to turn it up to max resistance, and you’re going to get out of the saddle or whatever he was calling it. You’re going to do this and you’re going to switch it up.” He didn’t have any linear plan and as we were doing it, we realized everybody’s getting hurt. We’re getting tired in not a good way. None of it makes any sense whatsoever. My wife is sitting next to a lady doing the jury duty thing and she’s going, it’s awesome. Vanessa, because you guys are building the property out there in jinx, when you move, you should sign up. And Vanessa, the more she’s hearing about it, this went on for about 30 minutes. She’s like, well, we already work in Jenks. I should probably just sign up. So I think my wife’s going to become a new member soon. She’s a paying customer. Oh, man. We’ll take great care of her. But seriously, she’s heard great things from this lady who was like a walking commercial about it. And what does it cost to work out at Tulsa Fitness Systems now? What do you charge per month on average? Yeah, so we do private personal training, but we’re probably more known for our group training. It’s very affordable. It’s a hundred and something dollars a month. So let’s just say a hundred and something dollars a month. There are trainers I know in Tulsa who charge 50 bucks a month for their group class, and it’s still too much. Right. And you go, why? Because they don’t have a freaking plan. Yeah. Yeah. And there’s only so much hype you can have before you have to get down to having a plan. And there are other places that charge. I know of a guy in particular, I was at a, I was DJing back in the day, this would be about five years ago, it was a friend of mine where he had a party with a DJ and I was invited to attend. So it wasn’t my DJ career, but this is a guy who I, I originally DJed his wedding reception and his 40th birthday party. And I was invited to attend his kid’s party or something. They had a DJ there and I was there and I was talking to some of the guests and one guy who was there was jacked. And this guy’s jacked and I’m talking to me making small talk and I’m like, what do you do for a living man? He says oh, I’m a trainer. That’s your trainer. Yeah, it’s an inch. I just kind of I’m asking about his model Where do you train? He goes I come to people’s homes and I just have like 15 clients I’m like you have 15 clients. He goes. Yeah. Now I talked to my friend who’s hot Who’s he’s been a client. My friend has hired this guy for years Yeah and apparently he just has like 15 clients and he charges people about a grand a month. And he just works out with you, and he just comes to your place, and that’s his deal. So he has like 15 grand a month coming in, no overhead. And I’m going to ask my buddy, like, dude, you pay a grand a month for fitness? He says, well, yeah. I mean, but this guy is like, I mean, he walks me through my diet. He comes to my house. I mean, it’s an awesome deal. And it’s like he’s my accountability partner. He walks me through my food. He’s like a nutritionist slash trainer. Clint, with the fitness together, wasn’t that the model back in the day? Was it $600 a month or something for one-on-one training? Yeah, so back then we did actually packages. And so I think now they do it more probably different. But it was, yeah, no, actually, our average package sold was about $2,800. $2,800? Yes, it was anywhere from, like, very rarely we would sell somebody would buy a small, like a 10-pack or something for like 800 bucks, but it was more of 2 to 6 thousand dollar packages. Really? They were paying up front for a pack. And people bought that? Yeah, yeah, all day. Okay, so let’s talk about this. So Tulsa Fitness Systems, do you also do one-on-one training for the listeners out there that want to know about that? Yeah, we do. We do quite a bit. We don’t really advertise it much, but we do a ton of it. We actually really do. What does that cost? What does that cost? Yeah, it varies. I mean, it’s, you know, it’s more per session or we’ll do packages, but it’s anywhere from $65 to $90 a session, typically. And there are, again, you have people like this YouTube guy who’s talking about vector marketing. He says the knives are overpriced. They’re overpriced. Well, this is the problem. See, I grew up without any money, but when you’re a poor person and you’re trying to sell nice things, you can’t possibly sell it cheap enough in your mind to justify. So if you’re a poor person you have usually what’s called a poverty mindset which means that you believe there’s a scarcity of money available and therefore you only focus on price. This is why I don’t like going out to eat. I still have a poverty mindset about food. I’m serious. To this day, Vanessa and I wanted to go out to eat on Friday, so we went to the melting pot. How is that, by the way? See that you’re asking the wrong guy. This is what’s going to happen. The lighting was dim. The decor was nice. I’m being objective about it. The decor was nice. The waiter, or waitress in this case, her name was Amy, and the assistant she had was Amy. And it was all nice presentation. And they basically, in front of you, they make like a fondue, like cheese dip kind of thing. Or they make a, it’s almost like some sort of heating sauce to heat your meat or whatever. And it’s too much money. So what I do is I always go get the car to pick up Vanessa. I’m like, hey, I’ll go pick up the car. As soon as we’re done eating, I say, I’m going to go pick up the car. Because no matter what the price is, it’s too much. I don’t care what it is. It’s too much. Because I have a poverty mindset that I’m aware of as it relates to food. I do not like, at all, fine dining. Even if somebody else is paying, I do not like it. Would you find it hard to own a restaurant or a food truck? No, I don’t think I would. Because to me, it’s a business that exists to make money. It wouldn’t be hard for me. Me, personally, I’m just saying I do not enjoy going out to dinner and I don’t appreciate fine dining. But unlike this homie here, I am not using that as a reason for why I can’t sell haircuts or personal coaching or marketing services or whatever. But Clint, you could, if you’re not careful, say, yeah, I’m charging too much at Tulsa Fitness Systems and it’s not cheap enough. Why do people think that way, Clint? Yeah, just like you were saying, I think we’re not our customer. And realize there’s a market for everything. I mean, you look at the higher end, people that have money, they will spend money on things that they value. It all comes to value. There’s a market for Rolex and Lamborghini and whatever product it is. It’s like a steak, like you were saying, with food. It just depends. I mean, you have to go after the certain clientele, your avatar, your market, but also understand, hey, I’ve got to provide great value, but dollars follow value, and people value different things differently. What’s a book that you’d recommend for everybody to read about sales? If you had to recommend a book, two books, a few books, what is a book that you’d recommend about sales? You know, honestly, like this isn’t really sales, but one of the first books I read going back to earlier we’re talking about building rapport is how to win friends and influence people just again that’s just how to really just communicate with people and actually you know get along and build rapport and show value but as far as sales I’ve read a lot of sales books I think Chet Chet Holmes ultimate self machine was great book Jason put notes of that on your show notes so listeners can go out there just click a link and buy that book. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. You just mentioned How to Win Friends and Influence People. What other books would you recommend there, sir, as it relates to sales? Let’s see. I’m trying to think. What other books? I’ve read a lot of… Oh, there’s a guy named Jeffrey Gittimer, Little Red Book of Sales. He was on the first case. He’s got a lot of books on sales. I read a lot of his books when I was first getting started. Let me queue up this audio real quick. This is Warren Buffett, the famous investor. He said that the book that changed his life is the Dale Carnegie Course. Let me queue up the audio here real quick so you guys can hear this. This is powerful. Let me queue it up here. Persuasion. That’s the next remarkable skill of Mr. Buffett. Handling people. My mom says when he was in his 20s he was reasonably socially inept. This is Warren Buffett’s son Peter talking about Warren Buffett here. This is Warren Buffett’s son Peter talking about Warren. Reasonably socially inept. I mean like in large crowds he’d much rather not be there and you know he just would rather be reading and working on his stuff. from self-help guru Dale Carnegie. I was terrified of public speaking when I was at high school and college. I couldn’t do it. I mean throw up and everything. So I took this Dale Carnegie course and as soon as I finished it, I was 20 years old, I went out to the University of Omaha and I said I want to start teaching because I wanted to get up in front of people and make sure I didn’t lapse back. Carnegie promised anyone could win friends and influence people if they did things like giving people aspirations to live up to instead of nagging them and using their first name all the time. I actually had the diploma in the office and I don’t have my diploma from college, I don’t have my diploma from graduate school, but I’ve got my Dale Carnegie diploma there because it changed my life. Okay, so that right there turns out to be a book that people should read. Now, Clint, you had a lot of success there. You had a lot of success. A lot of people don’t have a lot of success. We’ve got Mr. Cutco Knives here going on a rant talking about how vector marketing is not a good thing. Napoleon Hill, who couldn’t be here today because he is dead, wrote, he said, opinions are the cheapest commodities on earth. Everyone has a flock of opinions ready to be wished upon anyone who will accept them. If you are influenced by opinions when you reach decisions, you will not succeed in any undertaking. Now, Clint, 96% of businesses fail within the first 10 years, according to Inc. Magazine. I would also hammer home, I agree with that, according to my own anecdotal experience, having met people who run companies into the ground. So talk to me about the challenges that you had. What were some of your biggest obstacles over the years as you’ve grown your fitness empire into Tulsa Fitness Systems? Yeah, for sure. There’s always going to be obstacles. One of the biggest things for me, starting young, like we talked about, once you get past sales and learn how to sell, the next step as you grow, they say bigger, higher levels, bigger levels, bigger devils, was actually hiring people. That was a big thing. I was hiring people that were my age or older than me. That was new to me. So it was learning how to manage people, which is very, very challenging. So that was the hardest part. You said bigger levels, bigger devils. Never heard that before. I’m going to start using that. It’s pretty good here. Yeah. So as you grow, obviously, you have to have a team. So leading people, I’m a very nice person, very, very, I feel like a friendly person. I want to be everybody’s friend, everybody to like me. And so when you start managing people, obviously, that changes the dialect as far as how you communicate with people and your employees is they have to respect you, that you want them to like you, but also not take advantage of you. So I’ve learned a lot of lessons as far as leadership along the way. Jason, can you, for the listeners out there that obviously not everybody out there listening has worked for me or will work for me, can you explain what my management style is like? Just share the good and the bad, because you’ve worked with me now for how long have you been working with me? Two and a half, going on three years. It’s 4.48 in the morning on a Sunday. That’s true. And we’re recording this. Oh yeah. Okay, so talk to the listeners out there about what it’s like to work with me. You have the floor and you can share as much as you want because most people who start a business, there’s three struggle zones. Struggle zone number one, marketing and generating leads. That’s struggle zone number one. Struggle zone number two is then selling anything. I mean, even if you have leads, a lot of people can’t sell anything. And that’s why we have so many people that reach out to us about buying an Elephant in the Room franchise, and I refuse to open another Elephant in the Room franchise until I find somebody else out there who has proven to me that they’re not afraid of sales. Because I get all these people who are school teachers where you can hide their second generation money. Who want to buy an elephant in the room franchise? You’ve seen these guys come in shadow. And if they can’t sell something, they’re not going to be successful. So there’s these three areas that most entrepreneurs struggle with. Again, it’s marketing, generating leads. People struggle with that. Two is selling something to anybody ever. Most people are just horrible at sales. And then the third is managing people, because in the event that you sell something, you have to deliver on what you sell. Talk to the listeners out there about what it’s like to be managed and to work with me for these past almost four years. I can say that of the many jobs that I’ve had, I haven’t had a manager quite like you. And that is a compliment. Oh no. It’s a compliment because in my previous jobs, I didn’t have, like there’s personal growth, right? You know, you set goals, you aspire to hit those every month, year, quarter, whatever. But nobody that I had that was a supervisor, a manager, founder, owner, whatever the title is, has ever helped with that or given me an example. They say, here are the policies, follow them, there’s no follow up, they didn’t care. You’re a very caring person, but you’re also a very intense person. And where you may say sorry again, that’s actually another compliment because you’re direct and you operate under, we just recorded a podcast about it yesterday, but do you want to be liked or do you want to be successful? So talk to the listeners, give listeners examples of when I freaked out, where you’ve seen me just go nuts. And by the way, if you’re out there listening, I wake up every day and make a to-do list of what I’m going to do today. And it’s every day. And so today, I’m going to be finishing reading the book called Prophet First again because the host of that show and the author of that book reached out to us to be on the show. I’m going to continue finishing my article about DJ Casper, who is the inventor of the Cha Cha Slide. We just interviewed him yesterday. That’s such a good interview. And I’ve got to finish doing that outline because I want to rank number one in the world when you type in DJ Casper or the Cha-Cha Slide. I want to be number one, but it requires writing a lot of content. Then I’ve got to record the intro for the Macro Meals podcast they do, and I’ve got to finish watching the Rhodes Church sermon with Pastor Chad Everett and auditing that sermon, and that is before noon today. I’m going to get that done today. I also write on my list, though, some days, fire that person. Can you explain to the listeners moments where you’ve seen me, or maybe it’s weekly moments, where you see the intensity? I call it the dragon energy, where it comes out. By the way, this is why people get stuff done. I would rather be feared than to be loved. This is my worldview. We have people on our team who do love us, they’re great people, but when have you seen those freak out moments? When do you see them? Give us some examples. So, as it relates to Elephant in the Room, we do our weekly tracking. We have to sell at a certain percentage, and every single Friday in front of the entire team we review all three of the local shop’s numbers to see how we’re doing. There have been plenty of times where somebody will fall below the quota, which means we were not profitable for that week. But that also means that if we’re not profitable for that week, that hurts our chances to franchise because we have to operate at a certain percentage of profit. So then the next week comes around, you’re like, okay, we’ve done training, let’s get us back to where we need to be. And they’re still not there. I can kind of see that little, you do what I call the thousand yard stare, where you see the number, then you kind of freeze for a second. You’re not looking at anybody, you’re looking through them and past them. And you’re like, mm, okay, what did we do? Because we trained, how are we not here yet? So you give them one more chance, and it’s week number three, and you’re like, I don’t know what I have to do, if you can’t do it, I will find somebody who will. I remember you actually said that to me one time when it came to getting Google reviews, because it was while we had just started working it into the manager’s job description, and it was like two weeks in, and I was getting maybe one or two, and so you asked me, like, okay, are you asking people what’s your biggest problem? Well, I’m afraid people are going to say no. Okay, well, you can’t be afraid for people to say no. That’s sales. So, I’m going to give you one more week to do it, but if you can’t get reviews, I’m going to have to find somebody who can. And lo and behold, I thought, she’ll probably start getting reviews. Now, were you at the meeting where I publicly fired that lady? I was standing right next to you. I was sitting at the table actually. Do you remember what I said? Yeah, you just, you literally walked over and you said, grab your things, you’re fired. And she said, excuse me? You said you heard me. I will personally escort you out, but you no longer work here, you are fired. And then what’d she say? She was about to just explode, you’re like, oh no, no, no, no, no, it’s okay, we’re just gonna go. It was beautiful, it was very well done. I’ve never seen somebody, one, publicly get fired, but then two, have the person, have the cojones to do it, and then be like, nope, you’re not gonna explode, I’m gonna get you outta here. You can rant on Facebook all you want, but this is not happening in my place of business. Now let’s talk about this. Were you at the meeting where the woman would not get off her smartphone and she would not show up on time and it ended up with me calling her and asking? Did you see that one? It sounds… How long ago was that? Oh, it had to be about three years ago. Okay, because it sounds familiar, but it would have been like my infancy at Elephant in the Room. Okay. What happened was this woman would not get off her smartphone and you guys were doing a training. I think you were there. But she would not get off her smartphone. She would not. And I told her, no smartphones in our meeting. It’s a policy. Do not bring your smartphones. Be folks. She kept yawning, being very disrespectful of you and Katie and the other people who worked there. I was her manager. So I pulled her aside and I said, here’s the deal. You’re fired. One on one, privately. I prefer to fire people. Pull them aside, me and one other person present. And she’s like, you can’t fire me, you can’t, you what? And she’s being all crazy. I was like, okay everybody, real quick, huddle, huddle, huddle. We’re firing this person for being an ass. So I just want to get that out there. Ma’am, you’re an ass. You always have been an ass. You like to yawn all the time, you’re lazy. Get out of here, you’re contaminating. And she was like, you’re not going to hear from my lawyer. And I’m like, that’s awesome. Have him call me if you’re awesome. Get out of here, ass face. You know what I mean? And so, but you know what? If we don’t hold people accountable, what would happen? We just fired a girl this week for being mopey. Mopey! Constantly moping. Mopey! How’s it going? Welcome to Elephant in the Room. You okay? I should be done with my shift. The customers would say, how are you? And she’d say, almost done with my shift. Why do I have to fire mopes? We have to fire mopes because they ruin the energy. You can’t sell unless, like Clint was saying, like you were saying, you have to believe in your product, but you also have to have a certain level of enthusiasm. Because if I were to be selling to you, and I’m just telling you about it, or like if Clint’s selling a gym membership, because like you said, people inherently don’t want to do that because it’s hard. So they have to believe, based off of your energy, that it’s something they want to do. Like, oh, this guy’s fired up. I’m getting fired up. But if he just went in like, well, if you want to get fit, you have to eat this, and you have to work out really hard. Nobody’s going to buy that. Mmmmm. Okay, now Jason, I put a notable quotable at the top of the agenda there. And I’d like for you to be able to share that notable quotable with listeners. And I want to make sure, you said we’ve got to bring that energy, right? Yes. And what happens if we don’t bring the energy? In a work environment. If we can’t sell like Clinton does, if we can’t market like Clinton does, if we can’t manage people, what happens? We get extremely close to bankruptcy and again if people will not do their jobs you have to bring out the energy the dragon you have to or you might refer to as the energy to entertain special okay you’re going to so this is this is kind of this is what’s this is this is on the in my mind as i walk up to a person i prefer to fire them so good you bring your energy yeah gangster Yeah, you’re a gangster. Okay, so go ahead and read to us the notable quotable, please. It says, Public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches. CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are. They could name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural. People just don’t want to do it. Jack Welch. I don’t think I heard it. Yeah, public hangings are teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEO speeches CEOs can talk and blab each day about culture, but the employees all know who the jerks are They can name the jerks for you. It’s just cultural people just don’t want to do it I don’t like you. I got it yet. You read it again, please I want to hear it again public hangings are teaching moments Teaching moments. Every company has to do it. A teaching moment is worth a thousand CEOs. Now real quick, Jack Welch grew a company by 4,000%. The number one CEO of all time. And he said every company has to do it? Every single one. Did he just say that every company has to fire someone publicly one time? That’s what he said. That’s what he just said. I’m asking you, Mr. Listener, when was the last time you fired someone publicly? Oh, you’ve got to do it this week. It’s going to be an awesome week. You’ve got to do it. Clay, I don’t want to do it. Well, okay. I’m just telling you. The moment that people know that you will fire someone publicly, what happens, Jason? They, they, they, like, wise up really quickly. They say, I don’t want to get fired publicly. I don’t want that to happen to me. Okay. They say, oh my gosh, did you just see what just happened to Bobby? I don’t want that to happen to me. It happens though. Now let’s, let’s, let’s read a Bible verse. Then we’ll go back to talking about Tulsa Fitness Systems and the growth thereof. Can you read the Bible verse there from? This is from the Bible, Matthew chapter 21, verses 12 through 13. This, by the way, is not a Jack Welch quote, but it feels a lot like Jack Welch. Can you read it please? Yeah. It says, Jesus entered the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written, he said to them, my house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers Jesus was telling people quit trying to sell stuff in the church Oh, yeah, and they wouldn’t stop so he flipped the tables now if you could read it again, please But replace the word Jesus with Jack Welch and then every time it says he say Jack Welch, please Jack Welch is the temple courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there Jack Welch overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves. It is written, Jack Welch said to them, Jack Welch’s house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of robbers. Okay, now read it again in the context of Elephant in the Room and Jack Welch, and see if you can get rid of the word temple and replace that with elephant in the room. Oh man. Replace Jesus with Jack Welch. Try it again. Jack Welch entered the Elephant in the Room courts and drove out all who were buying and selling there. Let’s replace that with gossiping. Gossiping, okay. And loafing. Oh, man. Do it again. Go for it. Takes me back to my theater days. Improv, okay. Jack Welch entered the elephant in the room courts and drove out all… Wait, hold on. You’re doing good. I’m gonna start over. Jack Welch entered the elephant in the room courts and drove out all who were buying and gossiping there. He overturned… Or Jack Welch overturned the tables of the gossipers and the benches of those sowing gossip. It is written, Jack Welch said to them, my elephant in the room will be called an elephant in the room of prayer which we’re making it a den of gossipers that’s right so think about your business here okay so let’s just say you the business owner walked into your business and drove out all that were slacking you overturn the tables of the slackers and the benches of those who are slacking it is written you said it’s in my handbook our business will be a place where good things happen. So get the hell out of here. There you go. Okay. I’m just telling you, you cannot put up with slackers. You can’t. That is the reason why Tulsa Fitness Systems grows. They have great training. Now, Clint, the moment you’d have bad trainers, even if you had great marketing, even if you had great marketing and great packages and great equipment, if you had bad trainers, what would happen to Tulsa Fitness Systems? Pretty quick. Yeah, so one bad apple could be like a cancer, like you said. I mean, that can feed off of that. And so it just kind of spills on to everything else. Other employees will take notice of that. Clients will take notice. You’ve got to lead by example. Like I said, our business, it’s energy, it’s enthusiasm, it’s having fun, it’s connecting and having relationships. So for sure, yeah, the biggest thing for us is we have sit down we have conversations about that then we fix it really quick You got to fix it though. But Jason again, if we let it drift what happens? It’s um, it goes back to the garden metaphor If you’re not pruning taking those weeds out those weeds spread and then they take over every single thing Clinton have you ever had a moment in growing your businesses where you had to shut down a gym or The gym didn’t do well. I mean if you ever had any I mean you’ve had some success obviously But if you ever had any moments where things did not go well? Yes, I have, for sure. So definitely it’s not all, you know, owning a business or being an entrepreneur is not all roses and like some people think everything’s great. So yeah, for us, when I first started kind of going back a bit, I had one studio that was doing well and out the gate since I got this figured out. I was getting advice from some people that were pushing me to open up more locations. I wasn’t managing my numbers very well and really I was just new to owning a business. What we did is I was in Norman and I actually went in Partners and opened up two studios in Arkansas like Bentonville and Northwest Arkansas. Bentonville, by the way, if you’re out there today and you’re listening to this show in Arkansas, I know there are stereotypes about your state. And in large part, are founded. I’m just being serious. Bentonville is a nice area. If you’ve ever been to Arkansas, Bentonville is a very nice area. Bentonville is amazing. Rogers is very nice. If anybody out there, just do a Google search right now for Pinnacle Drive in Arkansas, or look up the Embassy Suites in Bentonville, Arkansas, the Rogers area. It’s nice. It’s nice. Now, there are other parts of Bentonville that you worry about. There are a lot of Confederate flags out there. We worry about that. There’s a lot of people that have collected an old bus. Jason, you’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it. They have, somehow it’s like, well, I’ll tell you what, Leroy, what are you doing with that old bus? Well, I’ll tell you what, why don’t we put it in front of my house and leave it for a decade and see what happens. That sounds like a good idea. Are you going to do something with that refrigerator, too? What are you going to do with that? I’m going to put that in front of my house, too, and let it grow. Why don’t we put a fridge and a bus in front of our house and see what happens after a decade? And you’ll see, you’ll drive by places in Arkansas where there are buses and refrigerators with trees growing out of them. I mean, that requires some serious neglect to get to a place where a tree is growing through a bus. It takes for a tree to grow? I mean, it’s unbelievable. Do you think we should trim it? Maybe we should cut back the tree. It’s starting to grow through the bus. No, I’ll just let it go. I mean, there’s a certain… But Arkansas, you were in nice areas in Arkansas. And what happened, Clint, ultimately? What ended up happening with those locations? Yeah, long story short, so we had two locations there, and then I was in the process of moving to Tulsa, and growing in Tulsa, and opening up locations in Tulsa. So basically I was at one point within about a year and a half I was owner or part owner of five different locations which is almost unheard of. And then it all kind of backfired and really just went off the rails. The two locations in Arkansas we ended up shutting both of them down. One of them we had some success, we couldn’t keep good employees, a good manager. One of them really never got going. And so, yeah, it was tough. I was driving, you know, over to Bentonville back and forth every week. I was going back and forth. We moved to Tulsa and I was going back to Norman. And so, I was spread out. So, I realized if I was in a location and running it, we were having success. But to manage people from afar is very challenging, finding good people. And like you said, doing the marketing, doing lead generation, and then managing people. So it was tough. I mean, I had one location in Arkansas, we ended up shutting it down after probably about a year, and our landlord wouldn’t, we were locked into a five-year lease. Oh, that’s a lot of fun. And yeah, so the landlord would not let us out of our lease. At this time, Bentonville had overdeveloped, so there was trip centers, and there was retail space everywhere. Then the economy kind of shifted, so there was just spaces available. So it was just a tough time as far as the economy going on. So basically, for almost four years, every month, I was paying rent to a space that was just sitting there. Oh, that’s got to feel good. Yeah, it’s, you know, and I had… Two grand a month? Five grand a month? My part, I had partners in that location. So, you know, there was a lot of, you know, I let my investment partners down. I felt like I had, you know, I had let myself down, the staff there. So I was paying, I think my part was about $800, $900 a month. Every month? Yeah, I was throwing it in the trash basically. Oh, beautiful. So that’s tough to deal with. I could have focused on that, the fact that we had failed in both locations there. I was still paying rent to a place that’s just basically just wasting money. I had to go there and a couple times I had to, like going back to firing people, I had to fire a guy one time and it was terrible. I had this guy that was a manager and he wasn’t doing a good job and super nice guy. Basically I knew I had to get rid of him and I probably didn’t sleep for a week just getting prepared for it to go over there and then when I did this guy and I had to tell him and this guy literally he’s a grown man older than me started crying and begging me for his job. You know it’s just tough I mean I’m a nice person so it was challenging but he wasn’t getting the job done and that’s what it come down to it That’s what I had to tell him. So those are stuff that you know that you have to deal with I mean those are not things that are comfortable But anyway back to so what you know, really my thing was I focused on what I could control the locations that I was managing We still had open the clients we had and it’s easy to dwell on the negative Especially when it comes to finances and money, but you can’t focus on those. Where your attention goes, your focus goes, and so you’ve got to focus on what you can’t control. It’s a learning experience. I say you either, the old cliche, you either win or you learn. You don’t really lose. So I learned a lot from those experiences, and I took that with me. What advice would you give a younger version of yourself, if you could go back in time and mentor a younger Clint Howard at that time when you were on the precipice of opening up those other locations. What are some advice or wisdom you would have given yourself? Yeah, for sure. I think number one is having good mentors, having good coaches. And I’ve had some great ones, but also at one point there I was getting advice from someone that was trying to get me to expand too quickly when we weren’t prepared to expand that fast. So that’s a big thing, getting around successful people. Make sure you’re getting advice from the right people. That’s a big one there. Besides that, I think it’s just learning, like we talked about, sales and leadership, really understanding that. And also, knowing your numbers. I think a lot of business owners have no idea what their numbers are. True. Their ROI, what money’s going in, what’s going out. I think people are afraid to look at their numbers, and that’s how you should dictate all of your moves that you make is based on your numbers. Well, let’s talk about this for a second. You’ve mentioned some terms. And I want to make sure that all the listeners know these terms. Because I think, Jason, if we’re not careful, like the term ROI, before working here, would you have known what that meant? Nope. I would have confused it with the outdoor brand REI. Which I still don’t even know what that is. You talking about Roy? I know who Roy is. He’s a great friend of mine. He’s a great guy. He’s the one with the bus. It’s just amazing. If you look over there, you’ve got that bus. A tree’s growing through it. It’s amazing. His Confederate flag collection is truly impressive, and braces his love for the Old South. He doesn’t wear a shirt often. No, but seriously. So ROY stands for Return On Investment. You also mentioned earlier triple net lease. Well, a triple net lease is a lease agreement on a property where the tenant or lessee, the person who’s renting the space, promises to pay all the expenses of the property, including the real estate taxes, the building insurance, and the maintenance. People don’t realize that a lot of times. They rent space and they go, oh, I did not know these other fabulous things were included as a charge. Another fun fact, common area maintenance is where you take the whole cost to maintain the property, like to landscape the property, to maintain the property, to fix the air conditioning unit for the strip center, to fix all of the costs associated with maintaining the property, and they are divided by the amount of space that you have pro rata. So as an example, I used to lease space at 5,800 East Skelly. And I’m not bitter about it. I’m not I’m not not bitter about it. But I am angry about it, Jason. Because I rented space. And I was told that if I rent the space it would be $5,000 a month-ish. Then one day I answer my phone. I said, hello this is Clay. And this is how the call went. We’re calling on behalf of the landlord. You need to pay $27,000. Right now we’re doing some common area maintenance. And you’ve yet to pay the $27,000. We’re replacing the parking lot and fixing the air conditioning unit. On our 15 story building. And you leased out an entire floor, so you have to pay one-fifteenth of the amount due. I’m going out of the blue, twenty-seven grand. I only have like, you know, a hundred and fifty grand in my bank account. You want twenty-seven of it right now to fix the parking lot and the A.C. unit? Absolutely. And you’re very flexible. If you do not pay, we will begin the eviction process. And by the way, there’s a horse head in your passenger side of your car. You open up your vehicle, you open up, there’s a horse head in there. And a man named Luigi will be out front with a lead pipe. You put the money in the bag, you give the cash to him, we’ll be fine. I might say, wait a minute, I have to pay 27 grand by the end of today. Who are you? You call me sneaks sneaks you’re calling yourself sneaks I Don’t even know who you are. Seriously. Why do I have to pay 27 grand? No more questions. I’ll be sleeping with the fishes Got some concrete shoes Christmas I bought you some concrete shoes. They’re just your size. I’ll be upstairs in a few minutes. Try them on. You want to try them on? We’ll have you dance around in the river bottom. By the way, if I mention my lead pipe, and don’t worry about the horse head, all the blood will eventually come out after we light your vehicle on fire. So can I pay? Is there any flexibility? Absolutely. You can just pay or not pay. If you don’t pay, don’t worry about it. Because then we will decapitate your head and put your head next to the horse head and it will be a nice souvenir to remember the life and times of Clintus. I’m going, okay, okay, I’ll pay. But seriously, it was like a shake that was crazy. I did not know it was going to happen. Has this ever happened to you before? Have you ever had a commentary and maintenance charge before, Clint? Not that much, but I have had surprises. Oh, Jesus. It freaks me out. I didn’t know what was going on. That’s crazy. That’s crazy. So if you’re out there, I mean, imagine your transmission goes out in your car. Have you had that happen before Jason? Oh, yeah last February was a how much did that cost? So total in repairs last February I spent about twenty three hundred dollars fix my Explorer But you’re driving around just having a good old time Have what kind of music you listen to when you’re driving around? Uh, it varies but right now I’m on a big Wu-Tang click Okay, are you really? Okay, so you might be listening to Wu-Tang and let’s go with Let’s say this is what you’re listening to. You’re driving around listening to Wu-Tang here. Okay, so you’re driving around. Let me crank it up here. So you’re having a good time. Would this be something you’re listening to? Oh, absolutely. Okay, let me cue it up here. And let’s start it like this, son. Pulling with this one and that one. And all of a sudden, your vehicle just stops. That happened to me the day before Valentine’s Day. And you’re like, what is that sound? Dream footed scene, who was a fiend? Stop. You somehow get to a… Where did you go to get it fixed, by the way? So I actually had to have it towed to Christian Brothers. And when you took your car to Christian Brothers, what did they tell you? They did the initial… What would you call it? Like the estimate, just to diagnose everything that happened. And what was cool was they sent me… It was like a timeline of everything. Every time they checked something, I would get an update. Then I got a comprehensive report and said, okay, here’s issue 1 through 13, and here’s how much it costs separately, and then here’s the full total. And they’re a good company, by the way. Oh, absolutely. The Fisher Brothers is a fine company. Yeah. But you’re saying, how much was it total? To get, okay, so let’s walk it back here. To fix the ignition coil, the serpentine belts, and the fuses, that was all $1,700. What? Yeah. So again, you’re in your car driving and listening to Wu-Tang Clan. Yep. Oh, I love this song. Here I am, the method man. OK, so you’re getting pulled over. And what happens again? You get pulled over. You’re driving. You pull over because it’s not working. You drive into Christian Brothers. And it’s how much? It was $1,700 to get it drivable. Oh snap! Yeah. Now imagine that happens to your business and to make your business… you’re leasing space, you don’t realize that the common area maintenance… Clint, I think a lot of people don’t realize when you lease a space, if you’re paying CAM, common area maintenance, people don’t realize how expensive that is. Oh no, most people have no idea all the expenses that are… that you have utilities and things that people just don’t really think about. What are other areas where you, coaching a younger version of yourself, a younger you who’s opening up a gym, if there’s listeners out there who are in the process of opening up a business and you were giving yourself advice to the younger version of yourself, what are some other tips you would give yourself? I think the biggest thing is following your passion. You know I think sometimes people get into an industry or business because it sounds fun or they just think they’re going to make a lot of money and it just really sounds like it’d be cool. Yeah. You’ve got to really have a passion and truly, truly want to be successful and hopefully you’re doing something that you enjoy because you’ve got to realize it’s not going to be. Well Thrive Nation, we have so many wonderful people like you on our website every day checking out the podcast and I wanted to take a moment to celebrate the success of a long-time client that we’ve had the pleasure of working with for a while so that they can complain and tell you all the terrible things that we make them do en route to growing their business. And so now without any further ado, we have the owners of Cornerstone Fence. Welcome, guys. How are you? Hey. We’re good. How are you? I am doing great. Now, just so people can know you’re not a hologram, could you guys kind of introduce yourselves, tell us your name and where you’re from, just so people can verify you’re not a hologram? I’m Danica. I’m one of the owners and this is my husband Jordan. My name is Jordan. We started Cornerstone Fence about three years ago. I’m a full-time firefighter so it started as just something to do on my off days, make a little bit of extra money. And about a year and a half ago, we went to a business conference that Clay had out at his place and we decided that maybe instead of building fences as a hobby, maybe we should actually turn this into a business and start trying to grow the business. Now, how did you originally hear about us? How did that conversation come about? I’ll pick on Danica here. How did that conversation come about? Initially, it was the first Reawaken America tour that we went to, and one of my friends was like, hey, you should definitely go to the business conference beforehand. It was a shortened version, I guess, in the morning before the Reawaken America conference in the afternoon. Really one of my friends was just like, this could really help you. Just the tools that you gave us in the shortened version of the business conference were just mind bombs going off. Now, as far as the growth, you two work together, and I’ll pick on Jordan here for this. What kind of growth have you guys experienced, maybe a percentage, or what kind of growth have you seen since we started working with you guys? The first year we were in business, I maybe did four or five fences. Like I say, it was not a hobby necessarily. I don’t consider fence a hobby, but it was three or four fences the first year, so we maybe did $30,000 in fences. Second year, which was still before you, we maybe were on pace to do about $70,000 or $80,000 total revenue. And then we started with you in October of 21. October of 22. And so that first year with you and putting your systems in place, really going after the Google reviews and trying to grow the company, we went from roughly like $80,000 to $700,000 in total revenue. That was last year. Then this year, we’re hoping our goal is $1.5 million this year. I mean this. I’m not just saying this because you’re here. I really do love working with you guys. Our team is always speaking so kindly about you guys. I don’t tell my team, you guys run around saying nice things about these people. But you know, work with a client, I mean, we’re working on the website, we’re working on the photography, the video, there’s a lot of interaction. And every week you have a coaching meeting with Andrew. And Andrew loves working with you guys. So can you maybe share, Danica, what it’s like to have Andrew helping you implement the system and program that I’ve created? What’s it like working with him on a weekly basis? Really, Andrew’s phenomenal. He always brings so much wisdom to our meetings. You know, every problem that we have, he has an optimistic and realistic solution to it. And just the accountability in general, like it’s hard being accountable every single week to update your sheet, to update your tracking sheet, to track all your leads. And just the accountability is, I don’t think we’d be where we are if we didn’t have that kind of accountability. And just him constantly bringing us encouragement, realistic solutions, different resources we can look to just to continue to find solutions for some of the issues that we run into. Now, you know, I call this the core repeatable, actionable processes, aka the crap. You know, there’s all these self-help books about the big idea and the vision and get your mind set, but there’s very few books about the core repeatable actionable processes, the stuff behind the stuff. And I find that people like yourself, shawholmes.com, oxyfresh.com, stevecorrington.com, people that have massive companies now, but I’ve been working with these people for a lot of times over 10 years. The people that do the best are the ones that like the core, repeatable, actionable process, or they learn to appreciate them over time. And the people that struggle are the ones that are always looking for the new shiny thing. I’d love to get your idea, Jordan, on just the importance of knocking out these core, repeatable, actionable processes week after week, day after day, because really business coaching is about helping you guys grow but it’s not an event it’s more of a process. I’d love to get your thoughts on what it’s like to have those weekly meetings with Andrew. Yeah they’ve been like Danica was saying we like to think we’re organized we like to think we hold ourselves accountable but without that meeting every single it’s just it’s awesome because first we can see on a weekly basis, how are we doing, where are we at, are we meeting the goals that we’re supposed to be meeting. So without that weekly meeting, I would imagine that maybe we would get to it once a month maybe, if we didn’t have the coaching. So first, the accountability, because we’re showing up every single Friday, same time, same location, and going over exactly what did we do this week. And so just staying consistent with that and having the accountability has really changed our business for sure, just having that business meeting every week. What would, Danica, what do you think would happen without that weekly meeting and that coaching with Andrew? What would happen with all these ideas you’ve learned at a conference or learned in books? I mean, what would happen to the plan? It would fall apart, because then it’s like, oh, like you said, the big shiny thing in front of you, you can always have things that interfere with your day, but unless you have a plan and something that, and a step that you know is going to hold you accountable, I mean, that’s one thing we learned doing business as husband and wife is it’s really hard for us to hold each other accountable. So just, Andrew’s just phenomenal. He’s having a plan and having a deadline. Like every Friday is a deadline. So it’s like, well, half steps we’re supposed to do. But if you don’t put a deadline to that, and it was just me and her trying to do it by ourselves, you know, we might get it done in six months or eight months, but having that deadline, which is Friday, every single week is, and then we get like, well, why didn’t you do that? That was what you were supposed to do. It’s like, okay, yeah, we messed up this week, we’ll for sure get it done. Having a question. And I wanted to touch on some of the things that you said we learn over time to like, it’s like, I remember when you first brought up the group interview, I’m like, that doesn’t work. There’s no way. And then now it’s like, we are group interview savvy. Like that, I tell everybody that owns a business, I’m like, do a group interview every single week. Because you never know when people are not going to be loyal. You think that they’re or you do weekly almost. Having a plan and a deadline? Well, you can just get caught up in the roll of your week and before you know it, it’s Sunday and you’re starting Monday, first thing in the morning. So it’s like, just, you get caught up in the tumble and roll of everything. There’s constantly a burning fire, there’s constantly kids that are sick, or kids that, you know, something can always distract you and take you away from the necessary things you need to do to be successful and if you just sometimes it’s cram time at three o’clock on Friday before I come down and meet Andrew it’s like oh oh we’re gonna get the tracking sheet updated but I don’t know what we would do without that we think we’re making money but unless you you know on paper and can see it in black and white, it’s a life changer. Now, I want to ask you this, Jordan. What I did when I built my first company, djconnection.com, and I don’t wish this on anybody, but I grew up very poor and I got a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV, just like you’re a firefighter. I was working three jobs and I didn’t know what to do. So I would go to these seminars where they’d have these get rich quick, get motivated people and they would say you know for four thousand dollars a month in a six-month contract we’re going to teach you how to become successful and in every meeting they never really taught the stuff there’s nothing really actionable and then I would go okay now that I finally think I know what I need to do do you guys do the website they said no do you guys do the graphic design no do you guys help me with my bookkeeping or my tracking no do you guys actually do print pieces, photography, videography? No. Do you help me optimize my website? No. Do you launch ads? No. Do you actually know the people? No. But it was all this big idea of just work on your business, not in your business. Could you maybe explain how the meetings are with Andrew? Because I think a lot of people when they think of business consulting or growth, they’re thinking of what I’m thinking, what I thought of was paying people $4,000 a month to talk in generalities and not get into the weeds? So the structure of the meeting, so when we come, first thing is, when’s the week, hey, what’s going on? What’s going on in the business, what’s happening? Any big wins, after that, burning fires, what’s, is there anything major that we need to discuss or get off any big problems, fires that we need to put out right now. And then after that, we get into the items, some of our homework that we’re supposed to be working on. Are you guys doing this? Are you doing this? And then we get into our tracking sheet, exactly how much money came in, how much money went out, how many quotes, how many leads, like it’s very, very detailed, like way more detailed than I thought you could get. Exactly what our conversion rate is, how many quotes we did, how many customers we funded, why we funded them, what happened there, did we do our group interview, did we do our meetings. So, the tracking sheet, I think our tracking sheet has probably 30, 25, 30 different metrics that we go over every single week. Everything from money, to leads, to where are these leads coming from? Is this working? Do we need to adjust here? So it’s very tailored to our business. One of my clients I was talking to, I talked to him just the other day, and he was telling me the story. He said, Clay, when I first hired you 12 years ago, he’s still a client 12 years later, he said, you helped me grow my gym and then I learned those systems and I hired you guys to help me grow my next business. And his next business is a lumber business. He sells lumber wholesale log cabins. The materials need to make log cabins. And now he has a fencing business, but it’s in Idaho. And so he’s got the fencing going on. He’s got the log cabin thing going on. He’s got the gym going on. And he also owns a Tip Top K9 franchise. And he told me, he said, the reason why I bought the Tip Top K9 franchise is I just knew it was the same system so I can apply Let me get your thoughts on that Danica because now that you’re kind of really learning the systems Is it helping you to view business differently now that you see that wow this system over here? Could you come to the conferences where there’s many different industries represented has that helped you to kind of view business differently? Oh, yeah, 100% Before And before, it’s really easy to get emotional when it is your business and things aren’t working, they’re not systematized, but if you, having those systems in place and just knowing that that’s what you have to do every week, it’s not emotional, it’s a checklist item, or even a checklist, like why are we missing these tools? These are all the tools that we bought and this should be on this truck. And so what happened here, if you don’t keep track of those things and have it takes the emotion out of it and makes it a system. My final two questions I have for you guys I’ll let you get back to having a great Saturday. A lot of our clients who work with our couples a lot of more couples this just in oh a lot of more couples and you know my wife and I what we do is I run the daily operations and she loves accounting. That’s kind of her sheet music she likes to read. She likes to kind of sing that song, the accounting song. That’s kind of her world. And other couples I work with, they work together on everything. For anybody out there who is working with their spouse, how has that helped you guys? Because my wife and I, we don’t really talk about business at home, and we don’t have any work-related conflict at home. We just, it’s sort of like we have our lanes and we figured that out at a young age. But I know a lot of couples when you don’t have coaching, it can just be like a perpetual debate that never ends about how should we optimize the website or what’s the best route to hiring or what’s the most effective way to launch an ad. And it’s like there’s a lot of debates going on. I’d love to get your thoughts, Danica. Has that helped at all on the home front at all? Oh yeah, we wouldn’t be where we are without, just not having to think about the website, not having to think about where we stand because we have to discuss it every single week, and that time’s allotted for those discussions. And like you said, kind of our lanes, I’m like the phones, the at home, uploading pictures to Google, all that. And he’s the face and the person that’s meeting and discussing the logistics of any project and directing the guys. So knowing your lane, staying in it, and just not having to think about our ad. It’s not having to think. That’s all on the back end, and you guys take care of that. It helps me sleep at night. All right, that’s great. That’s a bonus right there. Now, final question I have for you guys, and I’ll go back to your husband on this one. So Jordan, for anybody out there who’s thinking about scheduling a 13-point assessment, well, we did our 13-point assessment. It was a free assessment, a free initial meeting, or coming to a conference. We have scholarship tickets so that everybody out there can afford to go. So we tell people, it’s $250 for a ticket or whatever you want to pay. What would you say to anybody out there that’s thinking about coming to a conference or scheduling a 13-point assessment? I highly encourage it. When we came to the very first one and we didn’t know about your coaching stuff, and the first part of that conference was a condensed version of the coaching, and then you guys offered the 13-point assessment, and Danica was like, I think we really need to do this. I was like, man, I don’t know. You know, we, like last year, you know, at this point, we’re doing like 50 or 60,000 in fences, total revenue. I was like, I don’t know, it’s just, we’re a tiny business. We don’t have like the skills to run a massive business. I was almost scared first to grow it, but very doubtful that something that we were running maybe could be a big business. It still sounds weird to say that we did $700,000 last year and this year that we’re hopefully on track and our goal is over a million dollars. In my mind, that still doesn’t it still doesn’t compute because I’m not, I guess I don’t consider myself like a successful business owner or I didn’t at least before. And so doing, really it all started with that coming to a conference and then doing that 13 point assessment and talking with you. Our first meeting was we came in and visited with you and I don’t know, it was just, it was totally, it freaked me out but it’s really changed the way that we view business, number one. Yeah. How we run our business and has gotten us to this point where maybe we will this year be over a million dollars in total revenue. Can I give you a little pro tip on the show? This is my little pro tip for you on the show. Do you want to hit two more? Yes. This is a real thing. This is a real advice I will give you. One of my wonderful clients named Don Calvert with Score Basketball, he did this move. I’m giving you this move and everybody listening to the move. And what he did is he said, you know, in the future I’m gonna start servicing Owasso, Oklahoma. Not now, but soon I’m going to start providing basketball, consulting for Owasso, and soon I’m going to start gathering, I’m going to start servicing Broken Arrow. Now at the time he was just in Bixby. So I said, so Don, let’s go ahead and register the Google map for the office that you’re building, or the location you’re going to service, and let’s go ahead and put a sprinkling of articles on those search engine content, and on those markets, so that your phones will start ringing before you actually open up the new basketball training facility. And no exaggeration at all, his leads almost tripled by doing that and then that created the growth and the justification. And I’m telling you, just a little secret between you and me and everybody watching, Oklahoma is in need of some serious professional fencing installers. I mean, I’m just telling you. So if you guys were to do what you’re doing and kind of start, you know, going down a little bit further down the highway, like registering a map in Owasso or Oklahoma City or whatever markets you’re thinking about going to, and begin putting just a little bit of energy into calling your current happy customers and getting reviews and writing that content, you’ll start getting massive leads and you’ll probably hit two million in the next 12 months. I’m just telling you because you guys have the systems, you’ve worked so hard to build these systems and I know you guys can continue to scale. Thank you guys for carving out time. Are you guys in like a pole barn here? Is this the man cave? Where are you guys? This is our big win of the week. Yeah, that’s the win of the week. We’re finally working on getting the shop finished so we get better pricing on materials, storing it, and saving time instead of the crews. Right now, the crews get here in the morning, then they go to the supplier, get materials, and then they go to the job site. You built this? Yeah. This is awesome. This is exciting. Yeah. It’s a 40 by 60. Anyways, it’s exciting because this has been one of our big hangups is we need to get better pricing on materials, which is happening now. The way you do that is you buy it in bulk, but you’ve got to have somewhere to store it. Anyways, this is our big win of, I guess, really. Can I get a little tour? Can I get a tour real quick? Can you kind of walk us around real quick? This is awesome. I’m so excited for you guys. I love it. Does it smell like new wood? It does. Oh, yeah. Look at this. Alright, so this is the front of the shop. So we, and really it’s at our house. So a lot of things is like we wanted a commercial facility, but right now that’s not in the budget. So we’re making do with what we have. So we got a 40 by 60 going in. So we got all the work trucks here behind us. Anyways, right now it’s going to get us by until we you know hit that one 1.5 maybe 2 million and at that point we’re gonna go and start looking for commercial lanes so anyways we’re gonna store a lot of like uh two by fours pickets uh steel posts like the bread and butter of what we do will be stored in here and uh so garage doors are coming hopefully in two or three weeks so it’ll take a little while but uh we just got the concrete poured. So it’s really a blank canvas right now. So we got today we’re planning out shelving and where we’re going to start storing everything and how to, I guess, try to make the best use of it. You’ve got to be pretty pumped up about this, huh? Oh, I’m super excited. We’re both very excited. Oh, this is awesome. Well, congratulations, guys. I know you guys have been putting in the hard work there and it’s good to see it paying off for you. And again, thank you so much for carving out time and we’ll see you next week, okay? Thank you so much, Clay. Take care, guys. Bye-bye. See you. Hey, Clay Clark and my Thrive peeps. It’s Steve Carrington, as you can tell, although I’m not wearing my signature green shirt as usual, but I am riding in my signature green Lamborghini and I just wanted to say how appreciative I am of Thrive and all the guys at Thrive Time and the show and everything that you guys have done. At Total Ending Concepts, we have had tremendous growth and a lot of things changing, especially on the marketing front. And from a coaching perspective and from a web presence and branding and our internet leads are up, everything is hammering on all cylinders and really we’re just trying to figure out how we can leverage the systems and the processes that we’re learning at Thrive more in our business. So now we’re setting up a lead tracking system that has been long overdue and we’re doing lots of stuff. But I want to take a minute and say thank you, thank you, thank you to Thrive and Clay and everybody for all the help and helping us grow our business and hopefully buy more Lamborghinis like this the more we sell. So appreciate it guys. See ya. Hello my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. He’s key. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crockerill, head of Disney, with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly he’s running 160 companies every six to eight weeks. He’s doing reawaken America tours every six to eight weeks. He’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. 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. I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it, I’m going to turn it down.” Because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. 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, because our clubs were all closed for three months, and you have $350,000 of bills you’ve got to pay, and we have no accounts receivable. He helped us navigate that. And of course, we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing. And I encourage you, if you haven’t worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s gonna help magnify you. And there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day, and literally the rest of the time he’s working, and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day, and he loves it. So anyways, this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you, Clay, and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay, it’s a great, great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys, bye-bye. Hi, I’m Aaron Antis with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them. And I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes. And then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15-year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of sales people for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And, I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four-month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us, and it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing. And Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town. And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35 year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us. And I know if you give them a shot, I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me, the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800% increase in our internet leads. Going from 10 a month to a hundred and eighty a month, that would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years and my three kids started school and they were in school full-time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide what do I want to do. My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building go hand in hand, and we just rolled with it. I love people. I love working with people, I love building relationships, but one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing, I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. So I reached out to Clay at that time and he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago. And in that time, we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week, we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents, but I have to give credit where credit’s due. And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with a specific written business plan. He’s been instrumental in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. The Thrivetime Show two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems, so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. Because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. ever and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it.