How to Know if You Are Ready to Open Up Another Business | Ask Clay Anything

Audio Transcription

Hey clay. So my question is, should I open a third business? And so just a little background. I own two boutique training facilities. One is CrossFit jam, the other is an interval-based training studios. So you think of like orange theory but with more weights. But the third business here is going to be within probably about 10 to 15 minutes of both of my other training studios. This third business is going to be a big box gym. So the big difference I’m thinking that it’s going to approach or it’s going to appeal to a different market because my two training facilities, they have price points that are about 150 bucks. This third business is going to be, you know, they’re going to be paying for access to equipment and so the price point is going to be more like $40 or lower.

So I guess my question is, do you as a business coaching professional, think it would appeal to a different market or am I going to be stepping on my toes too much because it’s still within the fitness industry? Little context. I’m still working probably 60 hours per week and these other two businesses you know, I do have some opportunities to kind of scale-up and coach less. But that’s where, where I am right now. So what do I need to do to actually pull the trigger and say it’s a good idea and I’m not going to be spreading myself too thin to open up a this third business.

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

[Inaudible] Yes,

Yes, yes. And Steve Currington is our guest. Sir, welcome onto the thrive time show. How are you? I’m amazing. Thanks for having me. Clay, can I ask you what, what prompted you to want to stop by and visit the man-cave studios? What was, what was prompting you? Well, I was driving, making my visits around broken arrow to all the multitude of Shaw model homes. And I was drive by and I saw your car and I thought, I wonder if they’re back there building that giant pull still. I haven’t seen an update in a while. And by the way, can you show the listeners out there what you do and how you and I know each other? Oh yeah. So I I do, I’m into residential home loans. I’m a mortgage banker. So when people want to buy a house, they call me.

I do the financing, they find the house side do the loan. So we do it. And we met. I don’t know. I mean I think we both kinda knew each other over the years. She knew my name, we knew each other. Yeah. Your dad was part of the group that was auditing or, or, or looking at my file for the entrepreneur of the year for the city of Tulsa when I was the young entrepreneur of the year for the city calls the age of 20. Right. And Dennis Currington, your father was a, you know, looking at my finances and my numbers and kind of the verification team. He and a group of people were doing all that. So that’s how I met Dennis. Yup. And then I was working with your direct competitor to help them dominate the Google search engine. And I was always running ads on Google and I was like, God, this other guy, how does he get up there?

I remember, I remember that. You remember that? Yeah. I was like, Oh, I didn’t know that you were helping him, but I was just like, Ooh. But then I ended up on the news one day. Oh, that made me [inaudible] explain. Explain that. What happened? Well, you know the drop the mic. Whoa. Literally drop the mic, drop the mic, drop them off. Let me get this figured out. I think it was set up for, I’m about 800 feet taller than him, so no problem. No problem. So you know, from time to time the news will like run a story on like finance or whatever. And in fact, channel six interviewed me years ago about the, the new good faith estimate that came out. So I think, you know the, there was a story that was on the news and it was about the mortgage business. So I, you know, I tuned in and it was you and I was watching it and I was like, isn’t that TJ click as you DJ at our wedding?

And I was like, that’s TJ clay. And I was like, is he doing mortgages now? Because you were like in the suit and you were talking about mortgages, but Oh yeah, you know, I know mortgages. I’m not going to say that you know, you are misrepresenting anything, but it definitely was. Does that make, explain what happened? I got asked by a business coaching client to help them get to the top of the Google search engine results. And I did it. I was tasked helping them grow their business. Okay, so one of the modalities, one of the methods, one of the systems I did in this, in the marketing machine was to get him to the top of Google, the other, as I do right now, if you’re listening to this show right now, just Google Tulsa man buys eight billboards for his wife. Tulsa man buys eight billboards for his wife.

And you’ll see sort of sort of my handiwork by the way, Joshua’s living water irrigation, great guy and a, I believe he’s been on now people magazine this week. Fox news, good morning America and 38 other media outlets just this week. So I was doing the media PR thing for this mortgage company and the owner of the business bailed on the day of the interview. Like the minute they were supposed to be there. You are the only one there, right? Yeah, I was there and I was like, well set the whole thing up. And you’re like, well, well I’m like, well and I had been doing all the press releases and I knew about the first time tax buyer, first time buyers tax credit. Yep. More than everybody else. Cause I’d practiced all the lines. I’d written all the PR pitches. Yup. So they said, well, who’s a member of your team that wants to talk about this?

And I said, I am. They said, who are you? I said, I’m, I’m a mortgage expert. There you go. I didn’t say that. I am mortgage banker. Yeah. I said, mortgage expert, right? And they said, are you a banker? Said no, no, it’s too, too limiting on what I do. I’m an expert. True story. I called DJ connection, I swear I called DJ connection and whoever answered, I said, it’s clay Clark doing mortgages now. They’re like, Oh yeah, think of how long? A couple months. And I’m like, Oh, we really, you’re a mortgage expert now clay. So I kinda like was pissed at you like, like silently. Like I didn’t say anything about it, but I was like, Ooh, that Kelly Clark community. How did he get on the news? How did he do that? And did he get on the news as a mortgage expert? But now now what’s really exciting is you’ve actually gone on you and I’ve worked together on this and I feel like I’ve kind of your shirt by, show you what to do.

And whenever you can’t do it, I hope you do it. But most of the time I teach you this stuff and you can do it. But there’s some times like, you know, coding or certain ad management or, or retargeting ads or there’s a lot of technical stuff that we do for you. Yeah. But anyway, the graphic design, the photo, the video. But now we’ve worked together for how long? Almost four years. And so, and now today you are, when we first started working with you, you were not employed. Correct. And now you ha you’re, you’re driving a driving a little Lamborghini around cause that was one of your goals and you’re wearing a, what kind of pants right now? These pants, these, well, just no one’s getting paid from this. I’m just, I saw someone was wearing these kind of like slacks, but they’re like almost, they’re not sweatpants clay, but they’re almost like four way stretchy slacks.

They’re Lulu lemon and I don’t even know what Lulu lemon is. So I’ll ask somebody and they’re like, Oh yeah, they do the, I don’t even what they call them. So I just went in there and I was like, you got some like slacks? And they’re like, yeah, here you go. So this is my, my winter wardrobe. So I do my TLC shirt that’s green. I do my Lulu lemon four way stretch pants and then my, my glow in the dark. Yeezys that’s the move right now for the winter. How much are those shoes? There are a lot there. They were there. I don’t, I mean you asked me that earlier. I honestly, I’m kind of embarrassed to say how much I paid for them. That’s the thing is because I’m even more embarrassed to say how much I paid when I bought the second pair because I was kind of playing around the second time trying to like get a better price in the night.

Ended up buying them for about 20 bucks less, but they were like, Oh, I think 648 bucks by the time they ship to me and everything. Well, okay. So all I’m saying is you and I’ve worked together and you’ve achieved a lot of success over these past almost four years and a lot of successes occurred. And we have a listener out there who is kind of already doing really well. But yeah, and I’m not going to mention the name of his company or where he’s from, but he emailed in a question and I’d like to read the question and then we’re going to break it down together. Does that sound fair? Yeah. Let’s go. Here we go. The question is, does a, a gym owner, by the way, currently owns two gyms that and has an opportunity to own a gym. It’s kind of a big box gym and he’s wanting to know whether he’s ready to have a third business and if it really would be a smart move to own three gyms in the area or if it would hurt his current business.

And so what I’m going to do, Steve, is I’m going to share what you’re doing now on a weekly basis. And I’d like for you to sort of explain what makes it what makes it hard to do this, because if our, if our listener is doing these things that it’s a smart move to open a third gym. Yeah. But if we’re not doing these three things yet, it’s really not a smart move. Right? So I’m going to read off the things that you now do on a weekly basis that our art, our business coaching client here, our listener needs to do. And if the listener is doing these things, then yes, you should open a third gym. But if you’re not doing these things, then you shouldn’t open the third gym. So here’s the thing. Number one, this is the thing that brought in Steve, you’re doing these things right?

One is he needs to have a group interview every week before he opens up his next thing. Yep. Do you agree? 100%. Why is that more like 1000% white? Because sometimes like today you have a guy who is a real pain in the butt, comes in late three days a week leaves early when he’s not supposed to. This has happened. This just happened to you. Now this is another show is going to come out in December, so we’re safe. No one can guess when, who it is, but yeah. So just because you don’t want to be in a position with an employee where they have like power over you or you can’t fire someone or get rid of someone to replace them because you don’t have another option. So we constantly have new talent coming in. We have someone shadowing every week, we have opportunities to hire people every week, whether we need people or not.

And if I find someone who’s really, really good from that group interview, it will give me the reason to at my convenience boot that knucklehead. Tell me if I’m correct, but last week for the group interview, I believe we had as in you and I had, you had, I believe we had like four dozen people almost at the group interview. Right. And if you wanted to hire a great person last week, you could have hired probably three or four. Yeah. We’re never behind the eight ball. Correct. Yup. And then by the way, if you have talent and you don’t have a place for them, add them to your hot list. We call it the a list and just put them on a spreadsheet and say, that’s a good guy and if we have another opening, I’ll reach out to him. Right? And you might say, well, what do I do if someone’s a good fit?

I don’t have a spot. You can get a spot. You make a spot by firing the C player. Yes. But either way you have them shadow, you have the good candidates shadow you to see if they’re a good fit, if they are a good fit and you don’t have a spot, add them to the list. The other secret thing that happens that a lot of people don’t realize when you’re talking about a group interview when you have people shadowing is you have employees in the office that every single week see the people that are going to take their jobs and so it ups the game. It creates that impetus that that feeling of like a, that placebo effect of, Oh wow, I got to perform because, but when you have it, it’s a ghost town and they know that you don’t have anybody to replace somebody today to take advantage of you.

They come in late when they want, they go home, the guy, I’m not just saying that because you’re here, you’re a benevolent guy who really goes the extra mile to treat employees well and you’ve been screwed. Yes. Every time. But every time repeatedly. Yes. That’s why we do the group interview because it’s been knowing you ever since. Ever since I can remember. I remember [inaudible] now I’ve been knowing you though for a while. Well, for awhile now. You ain’t playing though. What had happened was I have, I have been in fellowship with you for up four years and I believe Casey is the only who’s been with you the entire time. Correcto she, she came in like right there in that first five, six months and Forbes is saying that the average person isn’t going to stay at a job for more than two years. So step one, mr listener, do the group interview every week.

Do not open the third business until you have the group interview going every week. You need a pipeline of talent. Yes. If you had a budget of a, I don’t know, pick something you pay for in your business. It’s 400 bucks a month and you spend $100 a week on an ad on indeed or whatever. Yeah. It’s worth the peace of mind to know that if someone doesn’t come in tomorrow, I have two people leaving this week. When it doesn’t, that doesn’t matter. I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. I have one guy that took it better job and more power to me. He did. He was actually a great employee. Never late. He was great. This is how a lot, this is how a lot of, let me, let me tell you how a lot of entrepreneurs feel when they lose an employee all week. Okay? Now this is, I’m going to cue this up and you tell me if you agree. This is how a lot of entrepreneurs feel, and maybe you even felt this way back before the group interview. So key employee comes up to you and says, Hey, I need,

Oh, let me hit the mute so it’s not playing the loud speaker. That’s impressive. Okay. This employee comes in and says, I just want you to know I can’t, I don’t want to tell you this. It’s like a breakup, but I’m gonna. I’m going to have to move on to other opportunities. You meant the world

To me, and then they go work for your competition. Here’s what’s funny about it. Every single time, every single person does it exactly the same way, and here’s how it goes. Let me keep the music.

Are you gonna? Are you going to be back at the office today? Why are you quitting? Can we tell it? Well, I didn’t want to tell you over the phone, but I have this other, and I’m like,

Every time I can call it, if they, whether I’m in the office or I’m out of the office, they’re like, do you have a minute to talk? Not if you’re quitting. I don’t now. This is how it works now. This is how it works right now. If you go to a Steve Currington, his office today, and by the way, check him out, Steve currington.com this is kind of how it feels now. Whenever we have to let somebody go there, it feels kind of, let me, let me get the right music. Let me see if I got the right music. It’s like,

Oh, so well what’s going on? And you say, well, you know, Hey boss, can we talk? And you go, Nope. And they say, why does it cause I don’t care. I don’t care. IDC, I don’t care. Hashtag I don’t care. Hey, by the way, go on Facebook and bitch about it because I don’t care.

GAF.

Right? Yeah, that’s right. Oh wait, seriously. It’s

Like it doesn’t matter. Part of me is like annoyed to a certain extent. Whenever you have somebody that you’ve invested a lot of time and you’ve given them lots of opportunity, you’re still annoyed. I’ve got some coaching to do, then I’ve got to do some more coaching. You know what I mean? Like as a human, when you invested time, I no longer feel those feelings. It’s not even feel few that feel feelings more now, boom. And my employees leaves and I feel that, Oh, that’s probably true. We had some employees leave recently some long or Steve was like, Oh, it just hurts me. But I, for me, I’m like, that’s fine. But listen. Hey, do you feel bad emotionally when you dedicate? No, I don’t. Not unless feel it. Unless someone’s really close and they know that I’m in the backyard yelling. I don’t cry when I excrete things, you know?

Anyway know. I gotta tell you, I feel I feel bad about the burning down that guy’s house. I mean, I thought after, after he quit. So checkbox one for our listener, you need to make sure that you do the group interview every week and have an abundance of talent before you start your next thing. Second, you got to have that weekly, weekly sales training that is only worthwhile if you have call recording. Yup. Call recording. And if you own a gym, there’s going to have the video recording. Steve, why do you want to have the call recording and the video recording? Especially if you own a gym. Why would you want to see what the trainers are actually doing? Why would you want to have the call recording? Why can you absolutely not open a third location unless you are recording the calls? Having video filmed of the training sessions and having a weekly training session to break down the film.

Why? Why can you not open up another one this week for TLC? How many hours did you have to be in the office yourself that you’re doing a lot of work and stuff. I get it, but how many hours do you have to be in the office? Like physically there? Yeah, right. I’m not any. Okay, but you guys stopped like an hour or two if I’m back in the day having a meeting. But back in the day, you used to have to be there all the time. Yeah, I lived there. But now you have call recording and video recording so you know what’s happening all the time. So the day you text a guy, you called a guy who said, Hey guy, it’s like five 45 and I noticed you’re not here. What’s going on? He said, Oh, I was told that I could go home early. And upon further review, he wasn’t told he that you can check the cameras and see you left early.

Yeah, exactly. So again, mr listener, you gotta have the call recording and the video recording, you might say, well, what program should I use? I recommend nest.com for the camera’s nest dot for the cameras. And for the audio, I recommend clarity. C, L a, R I T Y clarity, C L a, R I T Y, clarity, voice.com. That’s what I recommend for the call recording. That’s who we use up at Oxy fresh. That’s we use an elephant in the room. Use clarity, voice.com. Now, Steve the third, you got to have a set time every, Oh wait a minute. Now you can’t, you can’t jump ahead. Hold on a minute on the cameras. Okay. Cameras. You gotta be able to see what those salespeople are saying. Yup. You can’t hire salespeople and put them in there to sell stuff and not watch they’re doing it. I don’t know. I heard from a friend that owned a gym, one of his trainers.

Yup. Might’ve been doing something inappropriate with some of the people he was training. Oh yeah, the sun move. Let’s go. Just for the listener knows. We had one person that worked with years ago who was years. She was a, a female personal trainer who worked for one of my business coaching clients and anytime that she would do the one on one evaluation about it, I’d say a third of the time to a quarter of the time she would have the male potential business coaching clients follow her into the song and like 45 minutes, they would come out later, 45 minutes later they’d come out in front of them. They would book a lot of personal sessions. It’d look, a lot of them knew you couldn’t, you couldn’t open. It was, you could lock the door from the inside. Yeah. So for 45 minutes they’d be in there discussing objections and, and trying to figure out the right package and figuring out the right, you know, and then they would come out of the sauna.

Right. Maybe we’d come out of the sauna with a deal. Yup. They’d worked out a deal. We had a deal. All right. We couldn’t figure out what the deal was. So somebody interrupt. No, someone would have to pay $150 a month for these. It was like $150 a month for a certain kind of training, but 600 per personal training. Oh yeah. And some of the personal training, her business coaching clients would faithfully show up every morning, always on time, never really getting in shape. Right. There was always being there. A lot of them were honestly like there were a lot of overweight guys. They would go into the sauna for the personal training. Right. And we caught that on the camera. True story, because we didn’t have cameras in the song. [inaudible] You got to have the cameras in the call recording so you can hear what people are saying and the, you can hold it accountable and coach home and that kind of thing.

Now, the third you wouldn’t have, you wouldn’t have daily Metta time, daily planning time to plan out your day. You want to print out your calendar every morning, print out your to do list every morning. Steve, how was the act of doing that? Change your life? Oh, it’s amazing. Especially if your people have said that. I’m add, I believe this add thing is just like a Hey, deal with it. You know? I agree. It’s way overrated. Let’s not drug will tell me I’m OCD O C D you just focus on things too long. They say that you don’t focus on things enough. Just we’re called humans just quit me in a week and do so. Yeah. Once you start keeping it to do list and go by, your counter just gives you peace. It’s kinda like the group interview. You just, you know that it’s taken care of and you’re not, you’re not having those 11:00 PM moments where you’re like, Oh crap, I forgot to do this.

Or every single day you print out your to do list, you print out your calendar every single day. Yup. And then you go do it. Yeah. And the way we do it at our office, we’d start with a, we learned this from clay, start with a digital Collin or digital to do list that we do on Google sheets. And then we changed the dates on the tasks and we print it every day. And that way everybody on the team has a to do list. And this morning for example, I said, Casey, go grab so-and-so and bring his to do list. And I want you to read it out loud. Now let’s talk about dysfunction for a second. You were in a meeting for another company company and we don’t even know. I have no idea of the companies you were just telling me because you travel out to Colorado and Oklahoma all over the place, but you were at an undisclosed company.

And the employees, you were talking about how you’re in the meeting with the employees the entire day. They were just receiving text messages, the group messages, no one’s paying attention. Why can’t you have your to do list on your phone app? Yeah cause you will never see it and plus you get desensitized to the notifications so you have to have it in your hand so that you can physically look down and cross that baby. Cause yeah, because I, I’m like a lot of people, I roll all day with my phone on silent. My phone is on silent. I’m not looking, I’m not carrying my phone to get things done. I do reference things that are on my phone and I look at my calendar sometimes, but I don’t have to, if I have it printed out and I have my to do list and my clipboard and everything in one place.

Now the final, the final thing, you have to have it. There’s a lot of things you have to have in place and your coach will give you a Bulletproof checklist that I’ve made. It’s taken me years to make this. And I would encourage you to ask for that and they’ll go through that with you and you can find there are certain holes or chinks in your armor, but the big four. Then the final area you want to actually have nailed down is you want to have a weekly time to look at your finances at the same time in place every week. Now, Steve, why does my wife sit down and look at the finances every single week? Because people steal from their employers and you know, vendors steal and they try to invoice you for things that they shouldn’t. And then a lot of people look at QuickBooks and they think that’s their bank account balance and it’s not.

So there you go, look at your bank and you got to, and it takes hours to do hours. Make sure people aren’t, you know, sticking it to you. And honestly, sometimes things are just errors that are made. So like last week we had somebody who’s a vendor of ours that processes and helps with certain aspects of our company and they move the decimal over accidentally. Yeah. And so we literally paid out thousands for certain things that we should have paid out hundreds for other than my wife. Got it right. But I mean we paid it out first. We got it back. But you know, so I’m just saying, but that could go on for months. And for most business owners it does. And they can’t figure out, I don’t know why we’re not making any money. There’s a hole in the wagon. I’m putting the grain on the wagon.

But it seems like when I get the wagon to the destination, there’s no grain. It’s weird. I lose a clue on the wagons. I have 50 cram. Quickbooks says we have grain on the wagon. I’m looking on there. I need you. Perhaps I should look at the wagon. I thought the hole on the wagon is where the grain is coming out. I still have a whole bunch of checks in this checkbook. There’s no way the money can be gone. So let’s roll. Let’s read it again. Let’s review the moves. One. You have to have the group interview in place too. You have to have call recording and video recording in place for your salespeople, for your sales team. Three, you’ve got to have the daily metaplastic, daily meta time, daily planning, Metta coming from the Greek word meaning above. You have to have daily planning time factored into your schedule and the fourth, you have to have a weekly planning session, weekly time set aside to set time in place every week, the same time in place every week to look at your finances.

The same time it plays every week to do the group interview, the same time it plays every week to do your sales training. All of that has to happen every single week and if you do it, you can grow up to be a Steve Currington where you can wear Yeezys and have yoga pants. That’s right. You didn’t have custom shirts and in the last 45 days, correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve been to London. Oh yeah, we went to Paris. Paris was planned, went Africa, South Africa, California, Cal. I will be in Cali soon. Going to where have you gone in the last four months? I’ve gone to Florida a couple of times. Georgia. South Africa. You like traveling? Yeah. I mean, only for like leisure. You like self actualizing. Do you like doing what you want to do? Yeah. Do you prefer to not do what you want to do?

No. You like doing what you this just in this Justin, you want to do what you want to do? You like doing what you want to do and you have to exchange money for the goods and services that you want, Steve, and therefore you do these four steps. So if you’re out there listening today, this show, this podcast is designed to help you not to harm you. If he didn’t have said that, that doesn’t make sense, please ask your, your business coaching team and I’ll be happy to send you to her podcast. But congratulations on having two successful gyms. Very few people do that. And without any further ado, Steve, we’d like to end each and every show with a boom. Here we go. Free to run DMC. I don’t know what that was.