Business Podcasts | How Do I Get Unstuck from the Cave of Entrepreneurship? – Ask Clay Anything

Audio Transcription

Look, Gary, it’s a freaking cave. Oh, pass. Death is permanent, so I know it says that died. Nine out of 10 people who will enter the cave have not made the way up, but we’re not one of those nine out of 10 right, right, right, right. Well, you see we’re, we’re currently not dead because we haven’t currently gone into the cake. Let’s get in the cave. Let’s do some spelunking. Spelunking around in the world of business and entrepreneurship.

One more to go home. Do you feel like you’re stuck inside cave? What if you were to want to get out of this cave and get unstuck? Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to cope my entire body in, oh my, that’s a bad cup of coffee and butter and pushed me down to put me down. Well, according to Entrepreneur magazine, nine out of 10 franchisees don’t fit, but nine out of 10 startup entrepreneurs fail. Just freaking hit me with this. Are you tired of being stuck in this cave and maybe this isn’t a cave at all? Yeah. What? I thought my knock,

you have questions. America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your Broda from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of ask clay. Anything on the thrive time business coach radio show?

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Matt Kline. Are you big ric flair fan?

Well, I could be the biggest.

All right. Well here’s what we’re going to do on today’s show. We’re going to talk about the three aspects of owning an Oxi fresh that make you say, make you want to say

woo.

All right. So Matt Klein, the listeners out there, can you explain, uh, how many Oxi fresh franchises you actually own yourself?

I currently own two myself, uh, northern Colorado. Um, and as a whole, as a franchise, we’re very close about 400 units across the country and Canada.

And how could you possibly own to Oxi fresh franchises while also while also being the Oxi fresh franchise brand developer. I mean, if anybody out there wants to buy an Oxi fresh franchise and they go out to Oxi fresh.com and they schedule a consultation or they go to thrive time, show.com, forward slash oxi fresh and they schedule a consultation to learn more about buying an Oxi fresh, you or your team, uh, you guys are going to be the people that they, that they talked to before buying a franchise. So how could you possibly have a job as an employee but yet be self employed as an Oxi fresh franchisee?

Yeah, so a lot of it’s the resources we have available at oxi fresh in our headquarters, we set up a lot of the business infrastructure around our national scheduling center, uh, which takes the calls incoming for our franchisee. So that eliminates a lot of the time consuming tasks that come along with business ownership, specifically in service industry, right? As you grow, you keep taking more and more calls on every single day. So from day one I want in this business, you never have to hire people, train them how to speak the language of carpet cleaning, um, train them on how to use the technology. We have a a national scheduling center that’s already doing that right now for all of our franchisees. So from day one, that piece of your business is already taken care of. Now you still have to spend time and make sure that you have the right people doing jobs and work with the Home Office on the marketing piece. But in terms of answering the phones, which is very time consuming, you don’t have to do that at all. The a lot of time freedom in my day.

You’re saying Oxi fresh support system, super move. Number one, if I were to buy an Oxi fresh franchise today, and 10 are going to qualifying territory for what does it $57,000, is it $60,000? How much money is it? Is it costs to get Oxi fresh?

Yes. So the initial franchise fee is 37,937 you’re protected territory. Yup. Include your entire equipment set up. About three months worth of product, but at the trading will we want you to spend about four days with us here in Denver. Um, and then you want to have about 20,000 and operating capital to get your business off the ground.

So you’re saying for about $57,000, I could be a self employed person and the, the calls, there’s a call center right now is answering the phone for your location right now as we’re doing this interview, somebody may be calling right now to schedule a carpet cleanings, a service in your, you’re not responsible for answering the phone.

I’m not in that. It’s a very unique thing that we have going on at oxi fresh in the fact that when we first started this, we realized this was bogging down a lot of the competitors that we’re competing with, right? We have people doing jobs in the field, they’re trying to answer those phones. It’s very difficult. And as you grow, that workload gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So for us, if we can streamline that process, which we have very effectively. Um, and you know, I have multiple people in the fields right now. I’m about an hour and away from hour and a half away from my franchise territory and the Home Office at oxi fresh. I think last time I checked I booked five jobs today. I hadn’t spoken to one customer. So they’re taking the calls from the marketing that’s going out that I’ve set up with Aki fresh and myself, uh, through the, the Oxford fresh, um, uh, vendors that we use for marketing and they’re calling, they’re taking the phone call, they’re explaining the cleaning system, getting an accurate quote, and then putting that job into schedule so my technicians can go out and do the job.

So it is absolutely streamlined at that point to where I don’t have to focus on that. I need to make sure my technicians are trained, they have the resources to be successful in the field. I need to make sure with oxi fresh is health that my marketing is, is operating at a very efficient level. And then I need to be able to look at the reporting software on the backend and see what’s happening day to day. Because even though I’m not there, I still know what’s going on with my technicians. I know how they’re operating, what their customer satisfaction scores are. How am I marketing is operating on a time basis in terms of Roi for marketing campaigns. So all of those allow me to effectively run this business and the franchise you have without me actually being on the field doing the jobs without me answering the phone.

So you’re saying that one of the super support systems that makes oxi fresh franchisees say, is it you guys have a turn key call center?

Yeah, and it’s actually multifaith. So we book about 70% of our jobs across the country via that scheduling center and it’s not outsourced. It’s hot hired and trained it back in our Home Office in Lakewood, Colorado. And we almost look about 25% of our jobs online with no human to human interactions. We have an active live online scheduling platform. Customers trust the Internet. They’re finding us on the Internet. They’re getting a quote on there and they’re trusting when they book a job for Tuesday at 9:00 AM that you’re going to be there, right? That’s a big number. 20% across the country are not even using phone lines anymore, just online services and we’re one of very, very few companies that has a true online scheduling platform and that number will continue to increase.

Matt, you don’t want to overstate this, but that’s a turnkey Oxi fresh call center. Really what makes me want to say we move on to system ric flair. Ric flair. Proud today. Turnkey marketing. You alluded to it earlier, but this is, this right here is hot. You mean you’re not out there networking all day every day. Going to every chamber event, wearing people out doing a multilevel pitch. You’re not cold calling everybody to generate jobs. There are turnkey, proven marketing systems that will generate leads from the Internet and other sources that you will provide to the Franchisee.

Yes, we certainly have those. I will say there is always a huge value to going out and getting business on the commercial level in order to grow your business. You want to be multifaith on that as well. You want to have a great online presence. You want to have very good marketing marketing vendors like home advisor, like thumb tack, like paper Click options online, mailers still work good, so you want to have a marketing budget. We want to basically spread that marketing net as wide as possible and be able to dive in and see exactly what’s giving us the best results and where we need space. We spend more money or less, but in what we do for you, we don’t want our franchisees, he’s focusing on the technology aspect of online marketing from your local website, how it ranks organically. When you’re talking about search engine optimization, we want to look at your Google pages, how they can base you ranked the highest possible when someone’s on their cell phone searching carpet setting in your given area. We won’t have an extremely good strong Facebook presence, extremely good Yelp presence, so all of those things. If you tie all those together and you work on your end in terms of getting reviews for those, you don’t have to focus on the technology. We handle that. So it’s a, it’s a two way street. You meet us in the middle and you have a very successful franchise with the resources we get and your effort. It’s a win win

cause it is sexy. I just, there’s something sexy about all that marketing and all that call center. You’ve got the Turkey marketing and it’s just like Andrew did it.

Whoa. Matt who wrote on the Cue card? That’s my man. That’s my dad drove from hot though. Was that a, did I say twerk later? Percolate. Andrew, what did you, what did you put on these cue cards? Man? Andrew has been writing cue cards recently and he put Oxi fresh systems are so good. They make me want to twerk a late and I just didn’t even know. I’m just reading the Cue cards and I’ll go back to the drawing board.

Batam and we’re talking about those words.

So let’s think about this real quick. I was thinking about this, the call center, that means as a Franchisee, you don’t have to hire any reps and need people to answer the phone. You have to train the people. You don’t have to buy them a computer. You don’t have to get him a phone line. Do you have to deal with unemployment? You just get calls and you guys are dealing with the hiring, the firing, the motivating, inspiring, the coaching, the trail, all that you gotta that, the technology, the phones, all that system number two, you’ve got the turnkey marketing so that you’re making the phone ring. The local Franchisee has to do a great job, which creates great reviews and he’s got to spend some money on ads, but you know the ads that work, you know the Roi that will make the people cry in a good way. You got it all because these systems make you say, whew. Now system number three, the metrics and the tracking, the metrics, the tracking and the technology, the metrics tracking and the technology. You guys provide people the metrics they need to be looking at that, the systems to track and the technology of the world’s greenest carpet cleaner. How is all of this possible, Matt? How’s it possible?

Well, it’s taken us a while. We’re going on our 13th year here. We’ve been very diligent in the way we wanted to set the business up. We didn’t want to buy out of the box software. We wanted to customize it to fit what we’re specifically doing every day. Same thing with our cleaning system. We didn’t want to be the average carpet cleaner. Um, you know, we wanted to be the, the green initiative. We wanted to be the company that everyone is turning to and trying to be. And we’ve successfully done that and we’re still thriving. We’re trying to grow and change and the call center of work better next year than it is today. But the technology, the reporting is very important. It’s really hard to quantify over a conversation. But when you see how the scheduling platform integrates with our actual marketing vendors, how it integrates into the scheduling center in the online scheduling platform, how we can actually go back and look and see how the marketing is, is performing, how are our customer satisfaction scores reporting on a percentage basis, you know, going into your print apparel store, going into your, um, your entire single sign on platform, which will manage basically every aspect of your business that ties everything together, right?

So you and your employees have your thumb on the pulse of every single moment of that day because everything is cloud based. Everything glaive time, if you need to do something that gets sent to you via text gets sent you the email. So we try to encompass all of this with easy to use, very intricate technology platforms. But for you, it’s just growing, managing your business, making sure you’re being the you can be and working on your business. So you can be better tomorrow than you are today and you can do that. You’re going to have a successful, but

what am I’m out there though? Did I say, you know, Gosh, I want to answer my own phone. Time, freedom, time, freedom. I want to answer my own phone. What have you said? You know what, I don’t want to do turnkey marketing. I want the, I want to throw it, throw away the key and I’m going to start that car using a uh, you know, like uh, like a what, what would you start a Kiki? What, what, what, what kind of thing would macgyver started car with? Maybe like a, like a condo in a nail file. If you want to start your car that way you say turnkey, screw that and you say, I want to answer her own phone. I don’t want turn key marketing and I don’t want metrics. I don’t want to focus on that. I want to kind of fiddle around all the time and change the logo every day and make print pieces that don’t work and talk about my feelings for an hour and a half and I don’t want time freedom. I just want to work all the time. Cause you know, nine out of 10 small businesses fail and nine and a 10 franchises don’t fail. And I kind of want to be in the middle somewhere. I liked that wildness match it someone by an Oxi fresh if that’s what they’re into.

Yes.

Um, I think some people can do that. That’s a much, much larger hill to climb. But you know, for people that want to, they don’t want to recreate the wheel, they want to understand what’s working. They want to invest your time and improving systems. I think we are an excellent option to do that. I’m a perfect example. I have very limited time in my day and I have, you know, I’m creating jobs for people in my area that want to have a career that want to be able to grow themselves. I feel very fortunate that down the road if there’s another opportunity for me and another franchise or another business venture I can do so because the automation of oxi fresh allows me to really kind of investigate other ways where I can become a better business person. And I, I, I feel very comfortable in that.

There was an entrepreneur magazine article, article two two seven three nine four to be accurate.com. Article two two seven three nine four. This article reported that 90% of Franchisees don’t fail, but just 10% of franchisees fail. Now,

this

publication reported at nine out of 10 startups fail, which would appear to me to be, to reverse.

Oh

Matt, does that ever blow your mind that nine and a 10 small business startups fail and that nine and a 10 franchisees don’t fail?

No. It doesn’t blow my mind at all because when you think about the amount of time, it’s know a lot of franchises the first few years that that’s their make or break and some don’t make that as well. That’s probably something they should put in there. But the ones that do get through that process of growth and kind of struggle, um, you know, what they’re doing is they’re hiring right? People that specialize in, whether it’s marketing or technology, right? You don’t have one person trying to figure out the best new ways and marketing and the technology behind it, and then trying to figure how you hire and the best way to hire and creating manuals and all these sorts of things. I mean, starting your business from scratch and you better be very versed in a lot of those avenues or it’s going to be a pretty quick, you know, life cycle of that business.

And you know, one to two years when you first start a business, you’ve just scratched the surface if you’re doing everything. Whereas if you’re a franchise, one or two years, you should be an effective, profitable business because you’re not spending the time trying to create everything you’re utilizing the things we already know work. So that doesn’t surprise me at all. Um, you know where I stand because I talked to a lot of people that have owned businesses that want something a little bit more simple, that’s a little bit more scalable than trying to do things on their own. So it doesn’t surprise me that much.

What do you, do? You have good hair. Um, do you believe that too? I used to be a lot of your time treating that hair. Are you, um, self tanning, tanning or you just spray tanning? Are you going for long walks and need in a Denver Park? Are you, what, what are you doing this all your time freedom over there and in Denver?

Well, I talk a lot about carpet cleaning. My main role is to really get people engaged in the brand and understand exactly what they’re getting into. And I always tell people, you know, when we go through this process, no is a perfectly acceptable answer, but let’s just make sure we get you all the information where you can make the appropriate decision for you and your family. Um, I do use a lot of hair products

all right here, you know, and all that sort of,

no, I don’t really fly it.

Yeah, I mean you just got to,

you just kind of hit for me. I, I, you know, you still have to prioritize your day. There’s some days where I spend a lot more time on my business and others, but my, my business isn’t dependent on me every single day to be everything for it. Right? Even to the point, if I, you know, I do a lot of stuff off texts because it’s an easy quick as the way in my, my technicians know, I’m always on the phone, just like right now. Um, you know, they can’t get ahold of me in a certain period of time. They can call the scheduling center. The support line is going to answer it. It can be a, just a normal question. It can be a problem and they’re going to basically dive into that and help them. So even if I have the owner who, who manages the business as a whole, if I can’t be the immediate answer, they don’t, they’re not stuck. And I think that’s important too, right? You have access to the Home Office, myself, other people that own businesses, the support line. So you know, time freedom is, is what you make of it. If you play golf everyday, you’re going to be great at golf, but you may not be the best fit.

Now,

it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play golf.

If somebody out there is interested in buying an thrive time, show.com forward slash oxi fresh, that’s thrive time show.com, forward slash oxi fresh. You fill out the form, you scheduling a consultation, it’s, you know, brief call, kind of an overview. How you doing, what’s going on. Um, as you go through the process, eventually, Matt, you did this thing called the discovery day and that’s the final thing I want to cover on today’s show before you get back to your time freedom and your, uh, speed. Are you still in new spelunking mean? Do you still spend, you know, eight to 12 hours per day spelunking or is that just an urban legend? And in Denver, that’s everyone. Everyone just,

I got a pretty good story about our founder, Jonathan. Tell us you ever want to see a grown man?

What happened? You stuck in a tag on a good one. Do you get stuck in a cave?

So, uh, well we pretty close. Yeah, we’re in Golden, Colorado and I took our fearless leader, Jonathan splunking one time and I’ve only done it once so that, you know, the, the eight, 10 hours, that would be difficult. But um, I, I’ve never seen a grown man shake so much in tears.

Boozy schools is stranded by rocks. Was he scared to be in the case?

I learned that very quickly. Oh yeah. He was afraid we were, we were in there too. I don’t think I’ll ever want to go splunking again. You should ask him about it.

You couldn’t get out or you might just start crying. You couldn’t get out.

Well, we were pretty close. To me, it’s stuck

seriously.

You know? Here’s the very, yeah. To shimmy down this rock like with your shelter and your shoulders so you can get down to the bottom by 10 feet. And then he had a Shimmy your way back. Oh Man. Um, you know, as a, as a non skinny growing up, that was a very scary moment in my life.

Can I tell you this? You have just made all of our listeners scared as a result of what you just said. And I hope all the listeners can get up that just a feeling of claustrophobia and how deep of a cave was this? Was this a deep cave?

We were pretty far. It got to the point where I couldn’t get, I couldn’t go any further cause my body wouldn’t fit. That’s not a very, and then you get to think about how long it took you to get down there and you’re like, ah, I don’t know. I mean, just the thought process of how far you went and how far you got to go and the fact now you got to go off and set it down. Um, yeah, that was, I did a lot better than Jonathan, you know, pack it in. I was just going to live in there for a while.

This is, this is what I would have said to you if I was there. This is what I would have said to you, Matt. This is a audio of what I was thinking right now as you were telling me this, this is what I would’ve said to you at that moment had I have been there in video two. You’re spelunking friend.

Lot of pressure. You got to rise above it. You got a harness and the good energy block out the battery, harness energy, block bad. Feel the flow happy, feel it. It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse, it goes up and down and round. Circular Circle with the music, with the flow.

Okay, out there today, a lot of pressure and no flow. If you’re out there and you’re an oversized man spelunking into the narrow cave of entrepreneurship and you want to get your body through that hole and get out of that cave through that crevice and get up to some fresh air and to make some freaking money and get some freaking time freedom, you need to go to oxi fresh.com forward slash thrive time show, thrive time, show.com forward slash oxi fresh, sorry, thrive time show.com forward slash oxi fresh is, this isn’t my profession here, focuses on my amateur podcaster, so thrive time show.com/oxy versus go there, fill out the form, escape from the norm, get unstuck from your crevice and Matt will give you a call, he’ll have a little hard hat on with a light bulb and he’ll have all sorts of kind of sit and dirt on his face and he’s going to put down like a helicopter and he’s going to be saying, if you need some help, here is your career in the toilet. Let me help you. Come on. And he’s going to just slap you around, knockout, drag you out. And you’re going to wake up in Denver. That’s the discovery day is usually not that rough, but pretty soon you’re going to be healed, transformed. Matt, you’re going to save people if they just fill out that freakin form.

Talk about how people can save themselves, that’s for sure.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Matt, I’m going to let you hang up on me because I know you want to and I’ll talk to you next week.

All right guys, so much.

Take care. Time, freedom, financial freedom. Oxi fresh. Check it out today, and thrive time, show.com forward slash oxi fresh. Thrivetimeshow.com/oxifresh , and as always, we like to end with a boom. So here we go. Three, two, one, boom.