How to Handle Stress, Build Trust, Development Training Processes, and Create a Documented Workflow – Ask Clay Anything

Audio Transcription

Welcome back to another exciting and fun business coaching podcast. My name is Clay Clark. I’m the former US SBA entrepreneur of the year, sort of an entrepreneurial Peter Pan Broadcasting my show behind my wall on my land. I am essent trick, but uh, I am focused maniacally on helping you get where you want to go. And I would argue that if you study the world and you study most people, most people on the world today, most people on the planet today, most people who are centric, therefore the average person, according to Forbes, the average person, 70 percent of people hate their jobs. Nine out of 10 small businesses fail. The average American has less than $400 saved. And so if you want to be centric, uh, encourage you to get off our podcast, but if you want to be east centric and live in a way where you can live life like the way Michael Jordan played basketball, or the way that Marvin Gaye sang a song, then this is the show and we’re happy to have you come along on this journey.

So today we have Shawn, uh, a business coach and he has some questions he wants to ask me. So shot. Without any further ado, what questions do you have for me, my friend? Well, first of all, it’s an honor to be here and to get to ask you these questions. Oh Dude, I’m excited to have you in the man cave. I love this place. It’s awesome. It’s just like the office. There’s, there’s tons of stuff to look in decor everywhere. Andrew, maybe you can film some of that to the listeners can kind of see the accoutrements and the decor as we answer the questions that Shawn has today. Okay. So I’ve been a, per your advice listening to a book by Ben Horowitz, who he wrote the book. It’s called the hard thing about hard things and it’s kind of a real rough book. They’ll take you to the bottom and when you read it, right. Um, so real quick tickets to the top, you know, ben Horowitz is the guy who started the company called opsware, which he later sold to Hewlett Packard for over a billion dollars. So it does end positively, but, but the book, the hard thing about hard things is his journey

Okay. Well, he says in the book, ideally the CEO will be urgent, yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself. So I heard you, uh, just on Thursday and a business coaching sales training with some of the team members at thrive. Uh, we, we were talking about sales and just making connections with people. But you had told us the people we’re talking to, because we’re a business coaching platform, one of their biggest problems is an inability to do that, to separate their emotion, their current situation from the problem that they are experiencing. So how do you as a coach, a really help a client to separate the emotion when when the situation is tough?

I’d like for you to read that notable quotable again, and I’d like for the listeners to really focus in on what you’re saying because what you’re saying is pretty profound. So I think I need to get my profound quote music ready. Okay. And then I will have an answer for you. I want to make sure that we have the fully grasping the, the, the statement from Ben Horowitz, the man who started a opsware and sold it for over a billion dollars to peck. He says, ideally the CEO will be urgent, yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing or employees or herself. All right, so here’s the deal, uh, as a business owner, if you want to be an entrepreneur, no fall Rafa Conte has a notable quotable for you. Now you might say to yourself, who in the world is naval ravikant will deval. Rob icon is the CEO and Co founder of a company called Angel List. He’s also the guy who helped early stage investor who’s an angel investor in twitter, Uber, facebook, a lot of big companies, and he says, entrepreneurship is really hard and painful. I’m not sure I’d recommend it for anyone who can’t handle the extreme stress, I would just pile on, but probably more intense. I would say entrepreneurship is not something, it’s something that 90 percent of people shouldn’t do. I think 95 percent of people shouldn’t be an entrepreneur. I think it’s really a bad thing for most people because most people can’t handle the emotions of, of, of the business, of running a company.

And so the philosophy that I would encourage you to embrace is something called stoicism. Now, if you’re not into this too to Stoicism, I would encourage you to look up the serenity prayer and because I know you’re busy, I feel like my job is to provide the answers. It can save you from reading all the books that I’ve read, and so I’m going to go ahead and cue up the definition of, of stoicism. Stoicism says it’s the endurance of pain or hardship without a display of feelings and without complaint. Stoicism is the endurance of pain or hardship without a display of feelings and without pain. Now, there’s a thing called the serenity prayer. And, uh, uh, whenever you have a podcast and you’re, and you want, you’re trying to answer the questions that you’ve never seen before, one of the things you have to do is you gotta be quick on your feet to find the answers real fast.

I don’t want to paraphrase the serenity prayer, so I’m going to give you, give me just one second. I’m pulling it up here. Now we’ll read everybody the serenity prayer. Now the serenity prayer would be more of the Judeo Christian mindset, worldview and a. This is what the serenity prayer is. It says, God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change, the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. Living One day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardships as the pathway to peace, taking as he did the sin in this sinful world as it is not as I would have it, trusting that he will make all things right if I surrender to his will, that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with him forever in the next aisle.

All I would say is that if you cannot deal with at least 20 times more adversity than the average person, you should not start a business. You just shouldn’t because I get so much negativity thrown at me every day. I may just thinking about yesterday, I mean, Gosh, we have a really great businesses, really great companies that make profit and produce a lot of time freedom and financial freedom, but there’s not one day, Sean, that someone doesn’t go onto social media and say that I’m a bigot. I’m a racist. I’m a sexist. Uh, recently. This is something hilarious. I made the policy at elephant in the room. We’re a men’s grooming lounge, so if you are a man that will cut your hair, if you’re somebody who wants to get your business coaching hair and you’re insistent that you are a man, but you’re not a man. I’ve recently decided I’m not gonna argue with you about it because I don’t want to do a deep dive examination to see your name is Amanda.

You want to get your haircut? If you could step into that room real quick, we’ll give you a quick pat down here. I mean, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to be doing that. So what I decided to do is I’m not going to do like Tsa style pat downs to see if you are in fact a gender bender to see if you’re transitioning to see if you have the the anatomical requirements needed to get your hair cut at a men’s only place you wouldn’t believe the hate I’ve had now, the hate I’ve received as a result of that decision. Now here’s the thing. Previously we said some men’s grooming lounge. So if you’re not a man, you can’t get your haircut. I did that for six years and I had that policy because that was what it was.

And as we’re franchising, we’re going in different states and cities where they have different values, different cultures and religions, and I just don’t want to mess with it. I want to spend my day worrying about someone’s gender or someone’s gender confusion or someone’s trends, someone’s transgender status. I don’t know. I just want to think of it. I don’t care. I just want to go to chipotle a and buy a Burrito and have a nice dinner with my wife. I don’t care. So by making that decision though, there’s a tradeoff and you know you’re going to get certain feedback. So if you don’t, if you’re not built like a tank, a, if you’re not somebody who, I mean, anytime somebody criticizes me, it’s like a bb shooting a tank. If you, if you, if you can’t handle it, you just got to get off the field and quit trying to be a linebacker Cuz it’s gonna hurt.

It’s gonna hurt everybody, you know, it’s going to hurt your family, it’s going to hurt you psychologically. You’re going to do nothing but injured everyone around you and you’re not going to have success if you don’t have an extreme high tolerance for criticism and negativity. And so in the meeting you want to have a sense of urgency, like, okay, this needs to be done, but you don’t want to like attack people and get a little emotional. And, and I, I try and our coaches meetings are probably the toughest meeting for me of the day because you guys were asking tough questions from tough clients, uh, that we want to help. But I mean, if I just lost my mind, I’m like, you guys are terrible, and all the clients are terrible on coaches are terrible. Ah, you know, it probably wouldn’t work out very well. So I have to say, okay, here’s the deal.

I recognize that the client did not get their action items done, but this is what you need to say to them to prove to them that the system works, or I realized the client didn’t bring their financial data to the meeting, therefore you couldn’t do the meeting. Uh, but this is what you need to do. I can’t sit there and emotionally react to every single

accusation or negative thing. Hopefully that’s helpful shot. Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely helpful. What’s your next question? My friend? Okay, so question number two. He says, most business relationships either become too tense or to tolerate a. or, excuse me. So tolerant. Yeah. Yeah. Or, okay. Hold on. Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive. After awhile, either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. So given that most of the advice dispensed by a business coach could be considered harsh or hard to swallow. Maybe how do you keep the relationship tolerable in the longterm with your clients? Um, given that this is the nature of the relationship, but we’re all humans here, well, um, people are, are led by their business coaching heart and their head follows, so communicating over and over again that you’re trying to help somebody and the entire reason you’re telling them these things because you want to help them, that’s what’s going to keep that relationship together. Also, Lee Cockerell, the former executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts who once managed over 40,000 employees he wants. He said, if you’re going to be honest, you’d better be funny and I 100 percent agree with that. So again, you have to deliver tough news, but you also have to be lovable while you’re doing it.

And I think a lot of people don’t. They don’t, um, think about that. They don’t think about, hey, I’m dealing with a human and they have to have a staff to like me in some capacity or they’re not going to listen to me. So you’ve got to focus on leading their heart and their head follows and when you have to deliver tough news to quote Lee Cockerell, the former executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts, if you’re going to be honest, you had better be funny. Yeah. Back to you. Next question. Okay. So the third question I have here is a, again, another quote from Ben Horowitz. In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. So in your experience, how does this come into play with a brand new business relationship? What does this mean in the context of, you know, being a business coach who’s helping a business owner, uh, to grow their business? Okay, well, let’s, let’s look at it from a broader level. If you’re out there building trust with anybody, there are kind of five things that always build trust. And that’s what builds the trust. But if you want to build trust, this is how you build trust. Okay? One consistency. If you’re late, people hate you, so if you’re late, people hate you. Got It. You can say what you want, feel what you want, but the reality is if you are late, people hate you. Be Consistent. Lee early.

Be consistently early, be consistently early. Second, people don’t care what you say, they care what you do, so do more than promised all the time. Always do more than you promised. Always say the deadline will be. You will have it ready for you by Tuesday and then get it done by Monday. So Hey, I’ll have it done in two weeks and get it done in one week. You have to do more than promised and you must be consistently early. Principle number one, you must be consistently early, right to you must do more than you got to do more than its promise. You got to over deliver. Three people do judge appearance. People, Judge, appearance people, judge appearance. So if you look like Jabba the Hutt, take that to mean whatever you think it means. If you look like Jabba the Hutt, you will not be president.

If you look like Jabba the Hutt, you will not be a pop music star. If you look like Jabba Hutt, you will not be the leading actor in a movie. If you look like Jabba the Hutt, you will not be a best selling author.

There we go.

I love the explosions, but you have to do it though because that’s the reality. You can argue with me. You’re so mean. Find me an example. Find me an example of a job of the hot out there who’s running a country of North Korea’s leader seems to be smaller than that. That beautiful freaking dictator. Yes. Don’t quote North Korea. Don’t give me North Korea as an example. Unbelievable. So building trust, be consistently early to more than promised. People do judge appearance. Yup. Three is feed your mind positivity and share it. Nobody wants to be around someone who’s negative, so every time you’re around somebody always have something new and encouraging to share that. Most people don’t know. Always be the guy that knows more about everything than everybody else that’s positive like that. Don’t sit there and like told you so I got ya. Don’t be that guy who runs around, um, with, with, with, uh, non-helpful academic business coaching knowledge, but get people like give them positivity that’s actionable and share it.

So if you’re a coach or you’re a consultant or a financial planner, say, hey, did you know this? And give them little tips that help them like the moves. Just give them moves. All right, final thing. The final thing is this is, this is big. This is big right hand written notes, handwritten notes, and extra communication. This is extra communication will change the game for you. Okay? So handwritten notes and extra communication. So let’s say you’re a dating somebody and you said, hey, let’s go on a date Thursday night. Okay, that’s cool. We’ll go Thursday night. But if you were to call them between now and Thursday and just leave a voicemail saying, hey, you’re the best, I think you’re awesome. I leave my wife just ridiculous voicemails all the time. They’re always like super sexual and Iran. They’re crazy and they’re just, you’re just nuts.

You know, they’re just, they don’t even make sense, but they’re just, they’re crazy and they arrive and they’re, they’re just like a super dirty rap song for my wife and I’ll leave these crazy voice mails or all leave a song about streaking on her voicemail, but how do you want a streak for her and just where you’re like, what? Or I’ll leave her handwritten notes where I’ll write it in blue pen and I’ll write it. I’ll give, you know, um, all drop off her favorite candy bar or favorite beverage to Irwin before she asks her when she doesn’t ask. But it’s just, you have to build trust. You’ve got to be consistently early. You have to do more than promised. People do judge your appearance, feed your mind positivity and share it and provide handwritten

notes and extra extra communications because that’s gonna. That’s gonna. That’s gonna. Work your way up. I think [inaudible] really good at that.

Well, there’s a little kind of little subtle little bonus little bonus nugget here is be empathetic. And when we talk about being empathetic, empathy means, um, where you actually care if they have a loss. And you actually care if they have a win, like you experienced the same emotions. So if your client’s father dies,

yeah, actually care and get to a place mentally where it impacts you the same way. If your own father died or as close as you could. If a client has a huge win and financially gets ahead, get yourself to a place emotionally where you just had a huge win and you are excited. People absolutely love that. That’s how to build trust and longterm friendships. Next question. This just in Sean, what say you again, Ben Horowitz. He says there are only two ways for a manager to improve the output of an employee motivation and training. So for an owner that is maybe good at motivating but has no formalized training for any single process in the company, how do you as a coach express the importance of taking the painstaking time to develop these training processes? Even if their company maybe performing right now? Well, in the short term, without them. Repeat it again please. Okay. So there are only two ways for a business coaching manager to improve the output of an employee motivation and training. Right? Right. So my question would be, you know how as a coach, if the company is functioning and they don’t have training processes in place, they’re kind of just relying on motivation. So how do you kind of, even though it might be working, how do you express the importance of still taking the time and and writing out a process for everything so that they can then train people.

Okay, so step one is what gets scheduled gets done. That’s Lee Cockerell, the former executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts. What gets scheduled gets done. You have to app actually schedule time for what you want to get done. So all you’d want to do right now, if you feel overwhelmed and you feel like you don’t have a good training process in place, just say every Monday at 8:00 AM, we’ll train our team every Wednesday at 8:00 AM and every Friday at 8:00 AM and be consistent. And most business owners always, we’ll skip the training for a new deal.

Notice that. Take note of that, be aware of that. Most business owners will always skip internal meetings for a new deal, but that will kill a company over time. So you have to block out time for the actual training that matters and then be there and then each week. So what gets done, what gets scheduled gets done. Step one, okay, so step one and she’ll schedule time to meet with your team regularly scheduled time to meet with your team regularly, right? Second step is document your processes in those meetings, document the processes. Those meetings are okay because you, there’s a um, a curse of knowledge where it’s basically, you know, so much about your thing that certain things to you are now obvious what the employees, when you hand them the checklist or the manual, it doesn’t make sense to them. So document the processes in the meetings.

You’re seeing me do that right now with my real estate company, Sam Adams reality. I’m building the processes in the meetings. I don’t build the processes outside of the meetings because I want to know, do the people even understand these documents? So build the processes in the meetings, right? Yeah, and step three is roleplay whenever possible, role play, role play, role play, role play in those meetings. Okay. Roleplay in the meetings, and then step four is basically you must become a shadow master so you make sure that you are always being shadowed. Make sure that you are always being shadowed. I mean, if I’m a pastor of a church and I’m trying to teach an associate pastor how to prepare for a sermon, the best thing he can do is shadow me when I’m preparing for a sermon. Me talking about it all the time and giving you general platitudes and that’s not very helpful, but if you can actually see me do it, that is very, very helpful. Sean, what is the next question that you have? My friend processes the purpose of process from Ben Horowitz here again, the purpose of process is communication. If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process because you can just talk to each other. Do you actually agree with that? Repeat it again, place. He says the purpose of processes, communication. If there are five people in your business coaching company, you don’t need process because you can just talk to each other.

I agree. And then once you get bigger, you’ll overtime you say five. I’m not gonna argue with Ben Horowitz about this idea, but I’m just saying is until the you need to scale, like until you need to move beyond the five. Oh, you don’t need to spend your whole day making checklists and systems when it’s just one person. Yeah. But then once you have two people, that’s when the system is bad. I would use you and clay stairs as an example with leadership initiative, you know, you um, help reach out to entrepreneurs to see if they’re a good fit for the program. Oh yeah. In clydesdale stairs. Helps them qualify them and to see if they’re a good fit. And if they are, he will then assign them the appropriate business coach won’t because there’s not 50 of you. If clay has an issue with the way that you’re following the script or not following the script for using the system.

We’re not using the system. He can talk to you directly, but there is a baseline script you’re using, right? But a script is not a process. A script is a script right now. Process would be what is the email you send after the first call and then how do you book things into the calendar and how do you organize your files, how do you, uh, and that’s the process. And so you guys are just to that point with that particular business venture where the complexity, because you just added Claire, right, and now claire on undoubtedly probably as doing things a little bit differently than maybe you did and now she’s going to want to know the right way and the wrong way to do things and the only way for her to know without having retroactive Monday morning coaching, which by the way, this is the most way most business owners coach.

They’ll say, well, he did it wrong, but here’s the way to do it. Right? The only way to help somebody proactively is to then have a documented process. And so you’re just at the place now for the leadership initiative where you’re going to have to really dial in a lot of the processes for certain aspects of the business that you already have. A lot of processes already nailed down, but as you grow from, let’s say to coaches to three, you’ll probably see the need for processes right in front of your very eyes on a daily basis. Was it helpful? I’m already seeing that. Yeah, definitely. And there’ve been several systems that we use that because Claire is now on board, you know, we’ve, we’ve went through and found weaknesses in them because of the way she did something so it wasn’t written right now we’re improving those. And so step one, again, scheduled time to meet with your team regularly. Step to document the processes in the meetings. Step three, roleplay in the meetings. And step four, make sure that you are always being shadowed back to you, sean. Okay. All right.

So I’m saying it weird, weird, all of it. Where do you get off? I just don’t get what you’re saying it that way. Why I’m saying what? What way? Forget it. I will. I will forget it.

For our listeners out there, I don’t think sean saying anything weird at all, but I wanted to play that audio clip is a nice segue to provide a transition for you to get your next question ready to provide that little bit of we use. If there’s audio silence on a podcast there, it really creates that tension that can.

Oh yeah.

Sean, this just in your next question is our next question comes from a another quote from Ben Horowitz. He says, struggle is not the failure but is not failure, but it causes failure, especially if you are weak always. If you are weak, most people are not strong enough. So where and when. This is specifically with your history. Are you saying that this is a quote from Ben Horowitz? Yeah, this is a quote from his book. Okay, so I’m gonna. I’m gonna. I’m gonna. Queue up my quote music. Okay, here we go.

I’d like for you to read the notable quotable again because this is powerful breathing kind of slow enough where the average person can soak it in. It’s not good. We just say we want to soak in every word, so if you gave me kind of a maybe three to five words and pause, lathering, it also gives me time to type it on the show notes for this struggle is not failure, but it causes business coaching failure, especially if you are always, if you are.

Most people are not strong enough. Boom.

So my question regarding that is you have made a decision in your life early on in your life that most people will, will probably never make, but at times as a business coach, you want to just tell people this is where this is the decision you need to make and you decided to get a second job and then you decided to get a third job at applebee’s target and directv. That’s insane. Yeah. Most people would never do that. Right. So what kind of mindset when you were making that decision, did you have, and what types of things were you thinking as you committed to a third job?

Okay, I’m just looking to my mind, uh, just for a second here. And then we’ll look into the camera as we look into my mind, I am somebody who believes these are. These are three, three beliefs that I have that probably most people don’t believe. I believe that I am a child of God.

I do believe I’m a child of God. I do. I literally do believe I’m a child of God to. I believe that in the Bible, proverbs 10, four, it talks about God blesses the hands of the diligent and punishes slackers. I literally believe that God is punishing people who are slackers. Therefore, I don’t want to get punished by God because I believe he’s omnipresent, omnipotent, Omni, right? Omnipotent, omniscient. People say omniscient. He knows everything. Omnipresent. He’s everywhere, omnipotent, all powerful. I believe that. So I literally believe that. I don’t want to be punished by God. I do believe I was created by God. I don’t want to be punished by God. So what drives me? It’s insecurity. It’s not good enough. I believe that whatever I do is not good enough. And the third is that I have a lot of needs.

Like I want to buy pinion wood. I want to take my wife on a date. I wanted to take my kids to Dave and busters yesterday. I want to take my, um, my mother in law and my wife and kids out for dinner this morning for breakfast this morning. I want to have a wall that I live behind. I want to have a pool with a big rock fountain and I want to have a hot tub that spills into it. And I want to have a hot tub and I want to have a double decker man-cave. And I have all these things I want in me wanting. It doesn’t matter. Our culture is about, be amazing. That would be amazing. Movement. Oh, we love the. It’d be amazing. How about be on time, be on time. Movement. Wow. This movement through the kitchen on it with clay. This. This is what can we everybody.

So the first day of the be on time where we recognize that a bowel movement has more importance than just saying goals. So we’re going to do as part of the beyond time movement is we’re going to be on time. We’re going to show up on time each and every time we recognize that God himself punches us if we’re slackers and God himself rewards us if we’re not. So we all want things. We all want Lamborghinis, pools and these things, but as part of the bian tie movement, we’re just going to do what we say we’re going to do. Holy Crap. And so that, that’s kind of my mindset.

You know, I just, I and I and I, and then all of that kind of enveloped. If you look at those big three mindsets, they’re all surrounded by this, this area, this area, this secret, the secret. We talked about faith, family, finances, fitness and friendship and funding. F six goals. You have to have set. You have to set goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fun. So it’s just. I’m trying to write that down, buddy. Okay. You got to set goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship and your fund, but surround a kind of like an ozone that surrounds my f six goals is this thing called it gath.

And some people say it. Gaf Is this, I don’t give a, you’re going to say a bad word. No, no, come on now. This is a healthy show. I don’t give a, it doesn’t work as well as probably improper English. I don’t give my focus to anything that’s not on those goals. Don’t give any of my. I don’t give an F. I don’t give any of my focus to any of the things that are not on that list period. I don’t care. I don’t, I don’t know how to. And I grew up, you know, as a kid where I was sexually abused by a neighbor. Um, I stuttered all the time and I don’t know if that helped me or hurt me, but I just don’t care. I don’t. So it’s like people reach out to me all the time and say, Hey, uh, I feel like, I mean the a man the other day literally attack to me via email going on this huge rant about how I should speak at this event because it was a person in my position should speak at this event. I don’t need, I have five kids. My best speaking event is what I’m speaking to all five of them. It’s an event that there’s five of them. We talked, boom. So you know, I, I’m just, you cannot be successful if you run around worrying about what everybody thinks about you. You have to just define your goals for your faith, your family, your finances, your fitness, your friendship, and your fun, and you have to execute those goals and you can’t worry about everybody else thinks. Sean does that. Does that help you at all?

Yeah. Yeah. Obviously that’s not common mindsets, but hopefully more people will pick that up and that’s, that’s helpful for them because I definitely, my life has changed since I have started adopting these mindsets.

If you want to take the mindset where you care about everybody and how everybody feels,

do you want to do is you want to start a communist country because you can. Everyone can make the same amount of money and all that money goes into a pool where it’s equally divided by a government who will make sure that you have a. it’s mandated mediocrity, socialists and high taxation is mandated mediocrity. It’s where you tax the rich to give to the poor because the poor. I woke up at 3:00 this morning too, and the poor, you know, they want to wake up around like seven or eight, usually nine. The poor wake up right before their work. That’s where when they show up to work at the local grocery store, they look like they just woke up and it’s 9:00. So if you want to take from the rich and give to the poor, that’s a great strategy by endorsed by Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong, noon in any of those fabulous communist countries who are famous for the invention of

such great products. As

Sean back to you. Okay, so this, this is not a ben Horowitz question, but I’ve got some clients right now who are actually taking solid action. Big shout out to John and Louisiana. John Louisiana, big shout out to John. Come on now. He’s uh, he, he’s done something that’s pretty amazing. He took a blank sheet and he created a company workflow and now the, you know, my step as a coach is to help him work through that and figure out, you know, what are going to be the most impactful processes to get documented in your business right now. So as I’m trying to help him do that, what do you typically look for in that process? Which you want to do is you want to document your work flow from left to right on a business coaching whiteboard and after you document these processes, these processes from left to right on a, on a, on a workflow, it’s on a big white one, a big white board. You’re going to draw it out. Step one, we do this, step two, we do that. Step through and do that. You want to ask yourself what is the biggest limiting factor? And I just did this on Friday with one of my clients who has a limousine company and they’re top in Google, which means marketing is not really a problem. They have so many leads coming in everyday shot. It’s so many leads that you’re getting probably eight to 10 leads a week, but they’re not closing a whole lot of deals. So the question is why?

So help me through the workflow if on the left side of the Whiteboard, that’s marketing right? And that involves digital advertising and online marketing and they’re top in Google and they already have tons of leads coming in. Why aren’t they closing deals? What, what, what, what steps would you advise? I would take a look at the presentation once they’re getting people. And how would you know what the presentation is or isn’t? Well, I’d have to ask a lot of questions about what they’re doing. Keep going. So I would ask, uh, you know, whenever a lead comes in, what is your first step? What do you, you know, how are you making contact with that? And you must then read, you got to respond.

Oh, you got to record the calls, right? You’ve got to record the metal level.

Causes cost every time. You got to listen to them because you’re not recording work. Yeah. You’re blowing leads. So when you do, do you speculate in this particular instance that the calls were being recorded? Do you do guess by default that calls are being recorded? I have not yet had a client that does that. So I’m like going, listen, we got to listen to the calls man. And then once you record the calls then you can find out whether it’s a system problem or a people problem. So you want to ask yourself every week, what is our biggest limiting factor? What is limiting our growth the most this week? So can I tell you the biggest limiting factor at thrive right now? Yeah. We had six new coaching clients reach out to us and want to move forward since Thursday. Wow. Do what that means. I am the biggest limiting factor. The good news is I never want to have more than 160 clients in our program.

Total. Yeah, so that’s good. Good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s good. It’s not good. Like a justification. Good. It literally is. I can answer to prayer. Good. It’s, it’s like that’s all I want to do, but you have the biggest limiting factor is right now for the program overall. No workshops. People want to go to more workshops, more people are wanting to go to workshops that happen more often or do they want to have a bigger workshop but more people can get in and if that is in fact true, we make it bigger than we lose the ability to communicate and answer the specific questions people have in a bigger setting. Yeah, so I’m working on a format right now where if you go to a workshop, you’ll never be in a group that’s more than like 50 people and then maybe you have four sessions simultaneously going on. So I’m teaching the same thing four times, but a group of 50 just comes in each time for a different setting it off. So that stuff I’m working through right now, we always want to ask yourself, what is your biggest limiting factor? Does that. Does that help Sean? Oh yeah. That’s very helpful. Sean, do you have another question on this? Shameless shamelessly extensive edition of ask clay. Anything. Who’s clay? That’s me. I’m the person without the talent. Sean has a little bit. Sean has

90 percent more talent than I have, but I’m the talent. So I apologize for the overall lack of talent on today’s show. Sean, back to you. Okay. So

this is a huge quote here, but I find it.

Let me get my huge quilt music ready. Yes. Here we go. Slow unquote music.

So the most important thing to understand is that the job of, of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company executive. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett Packard after the sale of opsware, there was an incredible period. Peter, real quick, one more time. I just want to make sure we’re all. We’re all getting this repeated starting apparently. Yeah. Oh yeah. The most important thing to understand is that the job of a big company executive is very different from the job of a small company. Executives. When I was managing thousands of people at Hewlett Packard after the sale of opsware, there was an incredible number of incoming demands on my time. Everyone wanted a piece of little companies that wanted to partner with me or sell themselves to me. People would by organization needed approvals, other business units needed my help.

Customers wanted my attention and so forth. As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing existing business. Most of the work that I did was incoming fax. Most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in order, you are trying to do too much. As a result, the company executives tend to interrupt, driven. In contrast. When you are a startup, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days, have to take eight to 10 new initiatives for the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion without massive input from you. The company will stay at rest. That’s been Horowitz again, from the hard thing about hard the

things I found that really interesting because we work with a lot of small business owners, right? So technically speaking, when is a company no longer a startup and what is the small business administration will consider you as a small business up until you have about 50 employees. Okay. So I would just say when you have 50 employees or less, I would say elephant in the room is no longer a small business. Um, I would say make your life epic thrive is really not a small business. And so what happens is as small businesses where there’s just so few people involved that you can, you know everyone’s name. So do you ever, do you, have you ever seen in your life that the TV show cheers? I have not? No. You were the business coaching song or you heard the song maybe sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. Boom, boom, boom. And they’re always badger came. I actually have not heard that song. Really. Okay. What I’m going to do for the listeners out there, I’m going to cue it up here and then I’m gonna have you break down the song. Okay. Okay. One second.

Making new ways in the world today. Takes everything you’ve taken a break from all your worries. Sure. Would help a lot nation.

So people want to go where everyone knows their name. Yeah. And once you grow your company to a point where you don’t know everyone’s name, which I’ve done multiple times, that’s when you begin to have to manage differently. So it Ben Horowitz is talking about is he started opsware from nothing and grew it into a billion dollar company. Then he sold it to Hewlett Packard and when he sold, when we sold the company to Hewlett Packard, they wanted him to manage as more of a white collar executive vice president, President Kinda guy. And it wasn’t what he was used to. And so it was different managing a big team that was managing a small team. And I would say that what Ben Horowitz went through, managing a massive team after he started the startup that struggled for years and sold the company eventually to Hewlett Packard for over a billion dollars, is something that probably 95 percent of our listeners will never relate to.

When you do manage a big team, it becomes more about org charts and processes and providing medical insurance for your people and operations manuals and mitigating risk and trying not to do anything that could screw up the company as opposed to trying to invent something that could start a company. That’s a lot of people don’t like working in big corporate America because they don’t. They feel like they’re working for a place for. Everyone doesn’t know their name. Right. But it’s their job. So hopefully that’s helpful. Yeah. Yeah. What I took from the quote is just that when you’re. When you have a smaller company in order to keep things going and keep the inertia and you have to have a lot of initiatives going, right. You can’t just be focused on one thing or another. You have to say a lot, but you do have to have much more than a corporate corporation and can maybe have maybe three initiatives going on at one time, whereas a small business might need to have like five or six, so hopefully that’s helpful for us. Sean, now Sean, do you have another question or does that wrap up your [inaudible]? This edition of ask me anything with Sean, the business coach. I’m just trying to take my guard up at this point. All right. Thrive nation. You heard it here.

My name is Clay Clark. Sean’s head hedges exploded and you’re listening to the thrive time show on your radio and podcast download. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to email your questions to [email protected]. That’s [email protected] and we will be responsive and we will answer those business coaching questions as soon as humanly possible. We like to end every show with a boom. So then he further ado three, two, one. Woo.