Jim McKelvey | The Co-Founder of Square Who Shares Why You Don’t Have to Be a Genius to Become a Successful Entrepreneur

Audio Transcription

Clay Clark:
Thrive Nation on today’s show we’re interviewing Jim McKelvey, the co-founder of Square, who shares with us how he started Square. And why you don’t have to be a genius to become the founder of a billion dollar company or a successful entrepreneur. On today’s show, Jim McKelvey shares with us how you can get really good at something real fast if you have to.

Jim McKelvey:
So, I thought, “Oh, well, maybe if I make a lot of glasswork, I can sell it. And then I immediately realized that my work was terrible. But it’s amazing how fast you can learn something if you decide that, that’s your career. So, I woke up the next morning and I was like, “You better get serious and learn how to sell your stuff.”

Clay Clark:
He shares with us how we came up with the idea to start Square.

Jim McKelvey:
And that in fact was one of the things behind Square because I was trying to sell one of these silly glass bathroom faucets to a lady in Panama who only had an American Express card, which I don’t take.

Clay Clark:
He shares with us his definition of the word entrepreneur, in contrast that to the description that the world has for what it means to be an entrepreneur.

Jim McKelvey:
So, here’s the way I use the word entrepreneur. If you are doing something that has never been done before, if you are solving a problem that is unsolved today, you’re an entrepreneur, and I will support you and applaud you and pity you. But that is a different process than starting a business.

Clay Clark:
Jim was once the boss of the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey. And he and jack Dorsey teamed up together to build Square together. Jack Dorsey’s background was that as a professional massage therapist, and his background was being that of a glassblower, and he explains why that was a perfect background to start Square.

Jim McKelvey:
Jack was no financial expert. He’s running one of the biggest financial companies in the country right now. You know what his professional credential is? He’s a certified massage therapist.

Clay Clark:
Sweet.

Jim McKelvey:
He doesn’t have a college degree. Okay? So, you got a glassblower and a financial therapist, building one of the most notable financial companies in the country right now.

Clay Clark:
Jim shares with us how to create that fire of desire that is required to build a successful business.

Jim McKelvey:
Like when I do something, I try to burn the boats. I try to put myself in a situation where me and my team have to survive or we perish. Now, perish in this case is the company dies. No individuals die, but there have been… that’s great motivation. If you’re committed to solving a problem-

Clay Clark:
I agree.

Jim McKelvey:
… and totally committed, you don’t have to have great tenacity. You just have to have a survival instinct.

Clay Clark:
He shares with us why you don’t need a college degree to become successful as an entrepreneur.

Jim McKelvey:
You don’t have to have a degree to be an entrepreneur, certainly, because by definition, the degree is going to prepare you to do stuff that humanity already knows how to do. So if you want to be a business person, you want to be an accountant. You want to run, be an attorney. You want to be a software engineer that works at a company, yeah, go get qualified and that qualification is typically a degree.

Clay Clark:
He shares with us how Square landed its first 10 customers.

Jim McKelvey:
Number two was a flower lady who sold flowers literally in the building. So, we’re in Jack’s apartment building.

Clay Clark:
Learn all this and more on today’s edition of the Thrivetime Show where we interview the mind blowing and glassblowing co-founder of Square, Jim McKelvey.

Speaker 3:
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, this show does. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women. 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Thrivetime Show.

Speaker 4:
(singing).

Clay Clark:
Yes, yes, and yes, Thrive Nation. On today’s show we have a very special occasion. We have the mind blowing, and glassblowing founder of Square, Jim McKelvey, how are you, sir?

Jim McKelvey:
Doing well, how are you?

Clay Clark:
I seriously am fired up here. I don’t know if I’m more fired up by your glassblowing career or more fired up about the Fed, or Square. But let’s start with where you grew up. What was your life like growing up?

Jim McKelvey:
A kid from St. Louis, Missouri, grew up in a little apartment and a little house, and dad’s a teacher. He was a dean of the engineering school of Washington Uni, so I grew up around scientists and geeks and people who did a lot of math. A relatively boring childhood, but it’s… St. Louis is a great city to live in. Especially if you have kids, and I know I’m putting an ad out for my city, but let me just do it. You can have a normal life here, and it is accessible to everybody and I love it. So, that’s what we’re doing living in St. Louis.

Clay Clark:
How many times have you gone up in the arch?

Jim McKelvey:
Oh, probably seven or eight. You got to go up in the arch.

Clay Clark:
Have you met Ozzie Smith?

Jim McKelvey:
Yes, I’ve met… I’ve met Ozzie like three or four times. Ozzie Smith’s kid went to my public high school.

Clay Clark:
No way.

Jim McKelvey:
Yes.

Clay Clark:
Oh, the Wizard of Oz. In your mind, who’s a bigger deal. Mark McGwire or Ozzie Smith in terms of-

Jim McKelvey:
Ozzie.

Clay Clark:
Ozzie?

Jim McKelvey:
Ozzie [inaudible 00:05:36].

Speaker 5:
Standing ovation for Ozzie Smith.

Jim McKelvey:
It’s the back flip.

Clay Clark:
Oh, the back flip.

Jim McKelvey:
I mean, Mark couldn’t do a back flip.

Clay Clark:
Can you do a back flip?

Jim McKelvey:
I cannot do back flip.

Clay Clark:
I don’t care. I still respect you. Okay, so you lived in St. Louis.

Jim McKelvey:
Not that long [crosstalk 00:05:51].

Clay Clark:
You live in St. Louis, and tell me about the glass blowing. I mean, what was your first real job? Was it glassblowing? Was it something else? Tell me how you got started with a career.

Jim McKelvey:
I don’t know what my first real job was. I don’t know if I’ve even had it yet. I think I worked for IBM for a while, and that was technically a real job. Although I was working out of the LA office and living in St. Louis. So there was no adult supervision. But glassblowing was one of the things I got into after I quit my first semi real job, I worked for a startup that was just not going anywhere and run by a guy that I didn’t really respect. And I quit without having another job lined up. I just walked in and quit. And I woke up the next morning, I was like, “Oh, my God, what am I going to do for money?”

Jim McKelvey:
At the time, programming wasn’t as popular as it is today. So, my computer science degree didn’t mean anything. But I kind of knew how to blow glass. So, I thought, “Oh, well, maybe if I make a lot of glass work, I can sell it,” and then I immediately realized that my work was terrible. But it’s amazing how fast you can learn something if you decide that, that’s your career. So, I woke up the next morning, and I was like, “You better get serious and learn how to sell your stuff. So, I got really good at glassblowing really fast because it was the way I was paying the bills.

Clay Clark:
What kind of stuff did you sell that people liked?

Jim McKelvey:
I had no integrity. So, I wouldn’t make anything. Pink and blue, lady if you think it matches, I’ll make it for you.

Clay Clark:
Got it.

Jim McKelvey:
I was doing commissions, I was doing chandeliers, I was doing a lot of bowls and vases, and then out of sheer craziness, my studio put in a bid to host the World Glass Art Conference, and we got this big studio in St. Louis called Third Degree, and we won the bid to be the hosts for the world’s glass artists. This is a big deal. It was in Australia the year before. So it came here in 2006. And all of a sudden, all the message boards and websites lit up with these people just dissing my city saying, “Oh, there’s nothing in St. Louis. Why would I ever go to St. Louis?” And I was really pissed. So, I thought, “Well, I’m just going to show them, and I’m going to turn out the best glass conference they’ve ever seen, which basically meant tricking out my studio, and I was building these all glass bathrooms.

Jim McKelvey:
So, glass tiles and glass ceilings, and glass sinks. And then I went to buy some faucets to fit with our glass sinks, and I couldn’t find any that were cool. So, I said, “Oh, I’ll make some faucets.” It took me six months to make a functional faucet that was all glass, but when I did that people started coming out of the bathroom saying, “Can I buy one of these things?” And I was like, “No, they’re too much of a pain in the neck.” But one day, some big guy. I remember he was from Texas because I remember his belt buckle [crosstalk 00:08:40]. His belt buckle… Yeah, it looked like he just won a pro wrestling title.

Ric Flair:
Wheeling, dealing, limousine riding, jet flying, son of a gun. And I’m having time holding these alligators down.

Jim McKelvey:
He comes up to me and he’s like, “Son, why don’t you just tell me how much I got to pay?” I made up this number that I thought was astronomical. I said 2,000 bucks. I make one for 2,000 bucks, and he hands me his Visa card, and he says, blue. And so, I have been in the super luxury bathroom fixture business. And that, in fact, was one of the things behind Square because I was trying to sell one of these silly glass bathroom faucets to a lady in Panama who only had an American Express card, which I don’t take at my studio and lost the sale. That’s what started Square.

Clay Clark:
How old were you when you couldn’t take… When you couldn’t accept American Express? How old were you at this time?

Jim McKelvey:
42.

Clay Clark:
42. So, you’re 42 years old when you had your epiphany that led to Square?

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah.

Clay Clark:
And do you have a big Texas sized belt buckle that you wear now?

Jim McKelvey:
I should.

Clay Clark:
Why don’t you? That could be your move.

Jim McKelvey:
I don’t because my wife dresses me. Okay, that’s fair, and she has impeccable taste. If you see me looking good, credit my wife, and if you see me in T-shirts with burn holes in them, and shoes with extra ventilation, that’s self directed fashion. So, yeah, I’ve subcontracted that part.

Clay Clark:
Now, how old were you when you [crosstalk 00:10:24]?

Jim McKelvey:
I’m 42. We got married and started Square the same year.

Clay Clark:
No, you didn’t. So, you got married while you’re building a startup.

Jim McKelvey:
Yep.

Clay Clark:
Tell me about the process of starting Square. How did it start? How did you fund it? Just walk us through this. I’m the world’s infinitely curious about the formation and the starting of Square.

Jim McKelvey:
So, Jack Dorsey and I have been friends for years. He used to work for me at another company, which I still ironically own. It’s a company called Mirror, and Jack and I had kept in touch over the ensuing 15 or 16 years. I was calling him just to catch up and talk about building an electric car because I was starting to try to build electric cars at the time, and Jack had started Twitter, and then we agreed to get together that Christmas. And in the ensuing time, they kicked him out of Twitter. So, they kicked him out for the first time right between then, and I was like… I felt like somebody had beaten up my little brother. I was really pissed off. I said to Jack, I said, “Let’s go out and get even with these guys, right?” Because I was like, I got a lot of free time. I can go out, I can just move out to San Francisco out of pure spite.

Clay Clark:
Love it.

Jim McKelvey:
To get even with the guys that messed with my buddy, right? And Jack to his credit, said, “Well, Jim, why don’t we do something more positive and start a new company?” And I was like, “Okay, what do you want to do?” He’s like, “I don’t know, what do you want to do?” I was like, “I don’t know.” So, we kicking around for ideas. I had already hired our first programmer because we knew we were going to do something with mobile phones. The iPhone had just come out, and we knew it was going to have something to do with mobile technology. So, we’d hired a mobile developer who was starting in two weeks.

Jim McKelvey:
So, we had two weeks to figure out what the company was going to do. And we really didn’t have any ideas, but then I went home to my studio and had this epiphany where I lost a sale. I looked down at my iPhone, and I said, “Why does this thing not process credit cards?” It does everything else, right? The iPhone is this magic device that turns into a book or a TV or a map or a radio or a tea? I mean, it just turns into whatever you need it to turn into, and my attitude is, well, why don’t we make it turn into a credit card machine? And so, that was the beginning of Square.

Clay Clark:
I think that a lot of our listeners that listen to the show all the time, they always say, “Clay, between you and your partner, you guys have started a men’s grooming lounge chain, and your partner started a bank and an optometry clinic, and between Doctor Zoellner and I, we’ve built 16 multimillion dollar companies, and people always say, “How do you do it?” You say well, you find a problem and you solve it. Imagine you were sitting down right now with a one-on-one coaching session with somebody who’s an aspiring entrepreneur, and they’re trying to figure out what kind of business to start, what would you say to him?

Jim McKelvey:
So, let’s define the word entrepreneur. You said aspiring entrepreneur, and I use the word entrepreneur very, very specifically to distinguish entrepreneurship from business. Okay? So, business, let’s say this young person wants to start a business, i.e. they want to start a coffee shop or a brokerage firm or a car company or do something that has been done before. They want to start an airline. An airline is a business. There are airlines that you can copy. Businesses are really good things to do if you want to make money.

Jim McKelvey:
My definition of entrepreneurship is an archaic one because the original definition of entrepreneur was somebody who did crazy stuff, and stuff that had not been done before. So I’ll give you an example of a entrepreneur right now. One of my friends is trying to really cut the cost of launching satellites. So, he’s bought a bunch of 1970s military surplus fighter jets.

Clay Clark:
What?

Jim McKelvey:
[crosstalk 00:14:15]. These old MiG-23s, and I don’t know-

Clay Clark:
Sure.

Harry Caray:
Holy cow!

Clay Clark:
Harry Caray wanted to chime in there.

Jim McKelvey:
I like Harry Caray. I like [crosstalk 00:14:23].

Clay Clark:
He wanted to chime.

Jim McKelvey:
My goal is to earn Harry Caray at least once more during this interview.

Clay Clark:
Okay.

Jim McKelvey:
But I mean, this guy, he strips all the radar off these planes, so they get really light, fuels them up and puts a missile on them. And then he flies him up to 70,000 feet, the surface ceiling, puts it into a power drive like a MACH 2 power drive. So, you’ve got all this kinetic energy, then he points it back up at the atmosphere and launches the missile. And the cool thing about this is if you do the first 70,000 feet, and are going really fast, now you have a lot of energy, so you don’t need a lot of fuel. So, your missile or rocket can be light, and it can get the satellite into orbit really cheaply. So, now, that’s an entrepreneur because that might not work. That sounds nuts.

Jim McKelvey:
If you’re doing something like that, you could be a failure. So, here’s the way I use the word entrepreneur. If you are doing something that has never been done before, if you are solving a problem that is unsolved today, you’re an entrepreneur, and I will support you and applaud you and pity you. But that is a different process than starting a business. Okay, so I got another friend of mine. He’s started a bunch of coffee shops. He’s got the one of the top coffee shop chains in the Midwest. They’re in Hawaii and Japan. His name is Howard, and Howard started a coffee shop. Now the thing about Howard is he did something that has already been done, okay?

Clay Clark:
Yep.

Jim McKelvey:
Because coffee shops have been done. Nothing against what you’re doing. As a matter of fact, it’s way smarter to be somebody like Howard, doing something that has a formula and oh, and maybe, let’s say a trade show. You have a problem with your little coffee shop, you can go to a convention center where there are 1000 people who know how to do the thing that you don’t know how to do.

Clay Clark:
Truth.

Jim McKelvey:
You can take a seminar on it, right? So here’s my advice to a young person, or to anybody, they don’t have to be young. Well, first of all, get over the age thing. You can start a business any age, so forget that.

Harry Caray:
Holy cow!

Jim McKelvey:
If you want to be respected, to be applauded, to have plaques from the city. If you want to be popular on Tinder, be a business person. Start something that people recognize and understand. You’re more fundable. You’re more approachable, people understand it. If you are frustrated with a problem that humanity has not solved, you may have to become an entrepreneur, and that’s a different path. But it is one where the rules are totally different. And this is the reason I wrote the book.

Jim McKelvey:
So, The Innovation Stack is all about my effort to explain this thing that we don’t even have a word for it. And when I say we don’t have a word for, I mean that when you say the word entrepreneur these days, it’s synonymous with a business person. So, you start a car dealership, that’s a lot of work to start a car dealership, you know what you are? You’re called an entrepreneur. But you’re not really in my definition because car dealerships have existed before. So, I wanted to discuss what it’s like to do stuff that had not been done before, and that’s why I had to dust off this 100 year old definition of the term entrepreneur.

Clay Clark:
Have you hung out with Ted Turner?

Jim McKelvey:
No.

Clay Clark:
Ted Turner-

Jim McKelvey:
I have never met Ted.

Clay Clark:
Ted has this quote where he says that, he goes, “My son is now an entrepreneur. That’s what you’re called when you don’t have a job.” And that’s what Ted says. I think that your definition is… I think it’s painful if you want to be an entrepreneur. I just help people grow businesses, but what you do is that genius level stuff. And in your book, you’re attempting to teach these concepts about being an entrepreneur. Could you speak briefly to the emotional pain of being an entrepreneur? It’s not like growing a business and a coffee shop is very easy, but can you speak to the emotional pain that you go through if you’re trying to change the world?

Jim McKelvey:
Yes, I will talk about pain in a second. But I just want to argue with you for just a second.

Clay Clark:
No, do it. Yeah.

Jim McKelvey:
You said genius level stuff, and that is precisely why I wrote the book is to dispel that myth. What you just said is the thing that everyone believes, which is if you do something world changing you have to be some crazy genius. You have to have some sort of special set of skills. Well, listen folks, and I’m telling you this. I got none. I am a really mediocre guy in a lot of things. I’m not even a great glassblower. I’m a pretty good glassblower. There are guys who are great. I’m pretty good. Jack was no financial expert. He’s running one of the biggest financial companies in the country right now. You know what his professional credential is? He’s a certified massage therapists?

Clay Clark:
Sweet.

Jim McKelvey:
He doesn’t have a college degree. Okay, so you got a glassblower and a therapist building one of the most notable financial companies in the country, right now.

Clay Clark:
Massage therapy.

Jim McKelvey:
What are we geniuses about?

Clay Clark:
Massage therapy.

Jim McKelvey:
There’s no genius there. There’s no qualification. There’s no expertise. Oh, my God, this is so good. Clay, this is why I wrote the book because I know people who have tremendous potential who disqualify themselves. Because they say, “I’m not qualified to do entrepreneurship.” What I say to them, which is a little weird, but I say, “Look, yeah, you’re unqualified, but everybody’s unqualified to solve a problem that hasn’t been solved before.” So, I’m a pilot. I fly planes. All right. Now, if I want to get in a plane and fly around, I have to go get certified. I got to get tested. The FAA gives me eye exams, and medicals, and there’s all these things I got to do to be qualified to fly a plane today. That’s really smart. You don’t get in a plane and just start flying. But what about the Wright brothers? How could they be qualified to fly the first airplane? Well, they couldn’t. They just had to figure it out.

Jim McKelvey:
Don’t disqualify yourself because you think entrepreneurship requires some level of qualification. Because that’s what killing bright people, and I when I wrote this book, I have one person in mind, she is so talented. She is so good, and she constantly stops herself from trying things because she says she feels unqualified. I got to put it in. Okay, so now let’s talk about emotional pain unless you want to [crosstalk 00:21:12]-

Clay Clark:
Well, Jim, I don’t want to have a rebuttal. [crosstalk 00:21:14]. This is good. [crosstalk 00:21:17]. I’m going to meet you in St. Louis. We’re going to have a beer, we’ll arm wrestle over this. I think you have a freakish level of tenacity because when you think about Henry Ford, who lost it all multiple times. Yes, academically, he was not a genius. I agree. Thomas Edison, not a genius. 10,000 failed experiments with a light bulb. You got Walt Disney, lost it all five times. I think maybe not your genius, but your gift or whatever that is, is the ability to endure an insane amount of rejection. And don’t you think you have a freakish amount of persistence much more than the average human?

Jim McKelvey:
I may, I may-

Clay Clark:
I think that’s your one superpower.

Jim McKelvey:
It might be, but I have also… I’m really lazy. So, I have trick that supplements my tenacity. I’ll give you a formula, for supplementing your tenacity. If you’re one of these people that gives up easily do something where you can’t give up. So, remember Young Frankenstein, the movie, Gene Wilder, and he’s got the thing where he says, “Lock me in the room with a monster. No matter how loudly I scream, don’t let me out.”

Clay Clark:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yep, burn the boats.

Jim McKelvey:
Yes. That’s sort of my business plan. When I do something I try to burn the boats. I try to put myself in a situation where me and my team have to survive or we perish. Now, perish in this case is the company dies. No individuals die, but there have been… That’s great motivation. If you’re committed to solving a problem-

Clay Clark:
I agree.

Jim McKelvey:
… and totally committed, then you don’t have to have great tenacity. You just have to have a survival instinct. And a lot of the entrepreneurs that I profile in the book, a lot of these guys who are world changing world class entrepreneurs, they are not necessarily the most tenacious, but they put themselves in situations where if they weren’t tenacious they would perish. So, a great example was Ingvar Kamprad, who by his own admission was just forced into inventing and inventing, inventing in-

Clay Clark:
IKEA.

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah, inventing IKEA, building IKEA.

Clay Clark:
And he’s a dyslexic too. A dyslexic. I think a lot of these people when you look at the success of people like yourself, the tenacity is there not having a backup plan is there but in your book, The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business, One Crazy Idea At a Time, you share funny stories. You have these humorous stories of Square’s early days. Can you maybe share with the listeners… I think without a little bit of humor, these difficult situations can be unbearable.

Jim McKelvey:
Oh, my God. Yeah.

Clay Clark:
Could you share with the listeners maybe some of these humorous stories from your book?

Jim McKelvey:
Sure, sure. And I need to apologize, first to let everybody know that the book that you’re going to get if you buy The Innovation Stack is different than the one I wrote. Because when I wrote it, it was half graphic novel. So, the book because I thought it would be fun, and look, there are some great stories in the book, and they’re funny because they should be funny. I mean, you could look at it as, “Wow, that’s tragic.” Or it’s like, “Oh, wow, that’s tragic. And I’m laughing my ass off.” So I would prefer to laugh in the face of tragedy because look, failure is what makes us interesting. Nobody wants hear about success. Success is totally boring. But failure, boy, that’s a great story.

Jim McKelvey:
But when I wrote the book, I would get a story and I would hear some story about [inaudible 00:24:46] or what happened to us at Square, and I would immediately start sketching it. So, it was pen and ink. This was a comic book. Then there’d be the business parts where I’d have to explain the phenomenon, and do some math and stuff like that. And then I switched back to comic, and so when I submitted this to Penguin, my publisher, it was this schizophrenia comic book then business book, then comic book then business book, and they loved it. They bid out another publishing company. There was a little bidding war for it. I thought, “Oh, man, this is great. I’ve created a new format.” Okay?

Clay Clark:
Yeah.

Jim McKelvey:
And then as soon as I signed the contract, and now they own the book, they took me to this windowless conference room in Manhattan and said, “Jim, we got to talk. You can’t do the comics.” I was like, “What? That’s the whole book.”

Clay Clark:
Oh, come on, can I boo? Is that okay if I boo?

Jim McKelvey:
Yes you can.

Clay Clark:
I’m booing. Okay. Continue my friend. I just wanted to get the boo out there. I thought we just killed your dream.

Jim McKelvey:
God, I was crestfallen. Look, they gave me a really good reason. They said, “Look 60% of your book sales are going to be on e-readers and audio books. Do you want to lose 60% of the market right away because your stupid comics are not going to look good on a four inch screen, and they’re not going to read it all on an e-reader, so forget selling this thing. Forget reaching people.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, you’re right. So I went back and I rewrote it and tried to make the stories funny.” But if you buy the book, I will give you the comic because I kept the comic, and I sort of broke it off, and I made chapter nine as its own. I have this comic about a banking badass, AP Giannini. There is a comic book that goes with a book. You can’t get it from Penguin, but if you buy the book, I’ll give it to you.

Clay Clark:
Okay. Now, by the way, you are mentioning people today like the founder of IKEA and AP Giannini, the founder of Bank of America, and a lot of these people don’t have degrees. I mean, when you think about David Auric, no degrees. You think about the guys who launched the computing industry, Wozniak and Jobs, no degree. You think about the people who launched the aviation industry, the Wright brothers, it seems to me you’ve read a lot of these stories. What would you say to somebody out there that says, “Do you have to have a degree to be successful?”

Jim McKelvey:
No, you don’t. You don’t have to have a degree to be an entrepreneur, certainly, because by definition, the degree is going to prepare you to do stuff that humanity already knows how to do. So, if you want to be a business person, you want to be an accountant, you want to run… You want to be an attorney, you want to be a software engineer that works at a company. Yeah, go get qualified, and that qualification is typically a degree. But if you’re going to do something that has never been done before like build the world’s first discount airline or build the world’s biggest bank. You don’t need a degree. No degree will help you.

Jim McKelvey:
I mean, maybe there’ll be some things you learn on the way to that knowledge, but the specific knowledge itself is almost by definition irrelevant because you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before. So, what instead you need to do if you choose this path is just prepare mentally to be in a place where you’re facing a lot of uncertainty. So, if you want to get a degree, get an engineering degree.

Jim McKelvey:
Engineering education is the best preparation I can imagine for entrepreneurship because engineers typically spend most of their time on things that don’t work. If it works, you don’t need an engineer. Like, right now I’m sitting in a chair, and the chair is supporting my body weight. It’s reasonably comfortable. I’m not paying any attention to the chair because it’s functioning as it should. Now, if the chair was about to collapse, or it was hurting me, or there was some sort of problem, well, then, let’s get an engineer and fix that chair or redesign it or do something like that. I recently gave a big gift to Washington University’s engineering school because I want to open up the doors of engineering to more people in the world because I think it’s a great problem solving skill, and it’s probably good prep for entrepreneurship, but you don’t necessarily need that piece of sheepskin.

Clay Clark:
How did you guys go about getting your first 10 customers at Square, your first 10 ones?

Jim McKelvey:
Well, it was easy. I was the first. Because I wanted it.

Clay Clark:
Customer number one, there we go. There we go.

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah. Number two was a flower lady who sold flowers literally in the building. So, we were in Jack’s apartment building. We started in a little Jack’s apartment, and there was a lady in the plaza in front of his apartment in San Francisco that sold flowers. So, we went up to her and said, would you like to be able to take credit cards for people who buy your flowers? And she’s like, “Yeah, but I can’t get a credit card thing.” I was like, “No problem. We’ll give you one.” We gave her the first non founder Square version, and then the third guy was a stunt pilot. Andre [inaudible 00:29:55], Andre got the third Square. He loved it because flight instructors are constantly on the move. So, he needed a mobile way for his clients to pay him. He’s out on the field or in some airplane. I mean, he could literally get paid flying upside down. Then we continue to just let people who wanted to try it, try it, and then we listened to their feedback.

Clay Clark:
Would you say that you got a few of your first customers just by going door to door? I mean, just talking to people. Didn’t you fear some rejection?

Jim McKelvey:
Well, I mean, yeah, there’s rejection. But there are different types of rejections. First of all, there’s the rejection of I don’t need this thing, right? So, most people don’t need to accept credit card payments. You have to have a little bit of a business to need that thing. So, I don’t take it personally if somebody says, “Well, not for me.” Now, if they sit there and tell me I’m stupid, that I’m an idiot. I take that a little personally, and that happened too.

Jim McKelvey:
Probably the biggest rejection I got when we started Square was the CEO of this four billion dollar payment company, which, I mean, this guy I thought was a big deal, right? He takes me out to dinner in New York. He invites me to dinner. Downs a martini, and then gesturing with an olive on a skewer tells me what an idiot I am just using the olive to emphasize his points. And his points frankly were ones I couldn’t refute. He was basically saying, “You’re trying to serve people who don’t deserve to accept credit cards. Their credit scores are too low. They’re too small to sue if they steal your money. They’re unreliable. I mean, he… And he said you’re going to lose all your money, you’re going to lose all your investor’s money. I mean, he was just ripping into me, and into these martinis. I just sat there take, and it for two hours.

Clay Clark:
What? Two hours?

Jim McKelvey:
Well, it was dinner? I mean, look, I don’t turn down free food. Let me get something infinitely clear. Up until very, very recently you could get my total attention just by buying me a burrito. Okay?

Clay Clark:
How many of you guys were on this team? It’s you and Jack Dorsey, and a programmer. Is it just three of you?

Jim McKelvey:
Well, the initial team was me, Jack, this guy named Tristan O’Tierney, and poor Tristan died a couple of years ago.

Clay Clark:
No.

Jim McKelvey:
It was a very tragic situation with Tristan, but a dear guy and he was… that was the original day one team, and then on day two we added another engineer named Sam Wen, and was the original team.

Clay Clark:
So, five guys.

Jim McKelvey:
Oh, and a cat.

Clay Clark:
And a cat. What was your cat’s name?

Jim McKelvey:
Well, it wasn’t my cat. It was Zoey. It was Jack’s cat.

Clay Clark:
What kind of cat?

Jim McKelvey:
A little white long hair stray. She was a feral cat, and she’d grown up on the main streets of San Francisco, and Jack rescued her.

Clay Clark:
Was she a heavyset cat or a skinny cat.

Jim McKelvey:
Skinny and tough.

Clay Clark:
Skinny and tough. Okay, so it’s five of you and a cat, and when did you guys sell a million dollars of stuff for the first time? How long did it take you to sell a million dollars of stuff?

Jim McKelvey:
I don’t know. That was not a metric that [crosstalk 00:33:34]-

Clay Clark:
When did you realize that this thing was actually going to work? Did you ever have a moment where you thought, “Hey, this might work.”

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah, I was sitting in a cab in New Orleans. The company was about… We’d had a product out for about six months, and I was riding in the back of a cab, and the cabbie was telling me that he could take credit cards. He’s like, “I could take credit cards.” Now if you remember cabs in the old days they could never take credit cards. He always had to take cash. It was really awkward and messy, and this guy was like, “I could take your credit card. I could take your credit card. He was like, “I got this thing. It’s like the Square, and so he starts pitching me my own product.

Clay Clark:
Sweet.

Jim McKelvey:
And he’s pitching me, and you know when you meet somebody for the first time and you forget their name, that there’s this window where you can ask again, it’s like, “Oh, what was your name again?” And oh, it was Clay. But if you let that window pass then you have to bluff, and pretend that you still remember.

Clay Clark:
That’s called church.

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah, yeah.

Clay Clark:
Every Sunday.

Jim McKelvey:
There was probably a minute where I could have fessed up and told this guy that, “Oh, yeah, I was one of the guys that invented that,” and I let the window close. I just sat there in the back of the cab listening to this guy pitch me, and he got it… He got most of it wrong. He remembered that it was free. He got the free part right. He got the part that there were no contracts, no penalties, and he got the part right that we gave you your money the next day, which at the time was revolutionary. But he got the rates wrong. He got all sorts of other stuff wrong. But he was pitching me my product without me having expressed any interest in it. This was just like, I’m just a stranger in the back of a cab, but he was so excited because this was changing his life.

Jim McKelvey:
The cabbies, I mean, I don’t know if you know how the credit card world works in cabs, but the credit card that the cabbie doesn’t get most of the money for the credit card, the company that owns the medallions sets up this really creepy system with their… So, they own the credit cards and they skim 10% off the cabbies’ take. So, you want to know why all those credit card machines were broken in the back of the cab. The thing is not broken. The cabbie breaks it because he doesn’t want to have a credit card sale because he’s losing money. So, yeah, that was the day I… that was the moment I was like, “Wow. I might not have to accept every free meal that’s offered to me for the rest of time.”

Harry Caray:
Holy cow!

Clay Clark:
Oh, you got to holy cows you’ve earned so far. So now talk about the actual physical Square device. Did you make that yourself? Did you glass blow the prototype? Who made that?

Jim McKelvey:
I made it with some help. My wife was in the studio with me. I had her working a Bridgeport milling machine. We built them all by hand at the beginning, I tried to make one out of glass just to see if I could, and it was a disaster. I made some out of wood. The very first one I made out of metal. I made it out of aluminum because we had a demo with Steve Jobs, and I thought Steve liked aluminum. The very first Square reader was built out of aluminum. That turned out to be a disaster.

Clay Clark:
What was the Steve like? When you were pitching aluminum to Steve, what’s Steve’s personality type like? I think a lot of listeners would be fascinated to know what it’s like to pitch something to Steve Jobs.

Jim McKelvey:
I wish I had that story. Steve was very sick at the time. And so, we had the demo scheduled, and everything was set, and then Steve fell ill. He was fighting for his life, and so we canceled, so I never got to meet him. We never ended up demoing for Steve. We built, we prepared, we had everything ready to go. We had it scheduled and then he canceled.

Clay Clark:
You’ve met some people that I just… that I have always… I’ve studied, read about. It’s unbelievable. I mean, Peter Teal, one of the first key investors for Facebook. He endorses your book, and he actually says, “Who can say they went up against Amazon and won? Jim McKelvey can.” Peter Teal, what’s it like to be around Peter Teal?

Jim McKelvey:
Peter Teal is a complete badass. I have tremendous respect for Peter, and he funded my current company, and he was the only guy I wanted to fund my company. The reason I wanted Peter so I’m doing something called Invisibly right now, which is I’m trying to essentially give every person in the United States control of their online identity. So, you know what’s in those secret files that represent us, and then allow people to exercise control over the ads that they see, and how their attention is bought and sold, all in an effort to save journalism. So, it’s complicated. I don’t want to give a pitch on this, but I will tell you this Invisibly, if you go to invisibly.com, you will probably be confused about what we’re doing. But the reason it’s called Invisibly is you don’t need to understand it. It works without you understanding but we’d be happy to explain it to you if you want it to because it’s really-

Clay Clark:
How about this, because I grew up really poor and I’m a shameless sales guy. You built your wealth. Can we do a pitch for Invisibly, just a pitch. I mean, we kind of want to be sold something today, in addition to your new book, The Innovation Stack, give us just a little brief pitch.

Jim McKelvey:
So the pitch with invisibly is that you as a Consumer have two big problems. The first is you don’t have any control over how your eyeballs are bought and sold. And if you think the stuff that is free is really free, getting free, you are paying for it with your attention. That’s what advertisements are. You understand this when you’re watching TV and you see an ad. But when you’re online, and when you see an ad, it is the same thing. You are paying for that content. You’re not paying very much, and unfortunately, you’re paying in a way that doesn’t reward quality. And what I mean by this is that if I trick you into watching something for 20 seconds, I make the same amount of money as if I create 20 seconds that you love.

Jim McKelvey:
Now, in a normal economy, if I give you a product, that’s crap, you shouldn’t pay for it. You’d say I don’t want this. And if I give you a product, that’s great, you’d want to pay more for it. People actually want to pay more for good stuff, because that’s what gives us good stuff. But that economy doesn’t work online because you monetize by the amount of time not by the quality.

Clay Clark:
Got it.

Jim McKelvey:
So we figured out a way to fix this, and it involves something called micro payments, which are these tiny, tiny little payments. So when you in an Invisibly experience see an ad, the advertiser is literally paying you. So, if I see an ad for Tide Pods, Procter & Gamble is giving me three cents. Now, that three cents. I mean, who cares about three cents? Well, the answer is, it goes immediately into a little invisible wallet, and then three cents it turns out is a lot of money when you’re browsing content because the typical newspaper article or little video costs less than a penny. So with three cents in your pocket, you can probably view 10 things without having to see another ad. And if you make this system efficient, two things happen.

Jim McKelvey:
One, the individual gets control over their eyeballs because, look, if I’m selling you my eyeballs for money, then we can have a conversation about that. So you can sit there and say, “Well, Jim, what do you want to buy?” And the answer is, “Well, I’m currently toilet training my two year old, right?” So, don’t show me ads for diapers anymore. I don’t want diapers. I probably want disinfectant mops, and-

Clay Clark:
And burrito adds.

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah. Maybe some stronger detergent, right? There’s things that I actually want. And so, Invisibly essentially makes the market for your attention something that you control, and because you control it, it becomes efficient. It becomes efficient, then you have to see way fewer stupid ads.

Clay Clark:
Jim, we’re going to go into lightning round because I want to respect your time here today. So, here we go lightning round. We have five rapid fire questions for you. First off, working at the Fed, the Federal Reserve, what are you doing with the Fed?

Jim McKelvey:
So, I’m a deputy director of the St. Louis Federal Reserve. For instance, tomorrow we have a Fed meeting. We set interest rates, and we do things to maintain maximum employment and stable prices in the United States, and it’s a wonderful system. So, I’ve been there for three years. And the great thing about the Fed, Americans need to know how great our central bank is, and I know it takes a lot of crap from the politicians, but here’s the deal. It’s independent. It is not political. It’s not a Republican Fed. It’s not a Democratic Fed. You are politically neutral when you were on the Fed. And because you’re politically neutral, what you do is you make decisions based on the best information you have for the good of the American people, and that’s what we do. People whine about it, and complain and say, “Oh, quantitative easing, why did you do that?” But the fact is, these are really, really smart people who don’t have to play politics. And so, it is one of the greatest institutions that I’ve ever been associated with, and I love it.

Clay Clark:
Now we have a two listeners here who they own a machine shop. They make parts that are purchased by Tesla and the US Army. They’re two brothers, and Nace, Robert’s here, is in the studio, and Nace has a question for you. So, Nace meet Jim.

Nace:
Hey, Jim, how are you doing?

Jim McKelvey:
Hey, Nace.

Nace:
Hey, actually, we’re not just a fan of the Square. But me and my brother are actually users of the Square, and we’ve been using it for about 10 years now. And we use it on our website daily, and we actually use it at trade shows. So, that little box that you created with no strings attached literally has changed the way we sell our products.

Jim McKelvey:
Thank you.

Nace:
So, we just say to [crosstalk 00:43:30]. Hey, I’ve heard you talk about how the market demand is a driving force of innovation, and how great entrepreneurs and innovators recognize a need in the market to react by creating a company that customers can embrace. So, I have two questions with that side note. Is that okay with you?

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah, go for it.

Nace:
Okay. If you have a new business, how do you vet the new business idea in a market to know if it’s something consumers will embrace before fully just jumping in.

Jim McKelvey:
Okay, so I’m going to go back to that riff that I gave you at the beginning, which is if it’s a business, if you’re a business person, then you can study the market. There are… and you know who’s really good at this? Bankers. So, if you want a free business consult, don’t hire a consultant, go to a bank and try to get a loan. And what the banker will do, he will look up your business on a statistical chart, and he’ll say, “Oh, well, the chances of us getting our money back are this, and they can literally be free consulting.” So that’s for a business. That’s if you’re a business person, okay?

Jim McKelvey:
If you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re building something that has not been built before. If you’re solving a problem that is unsolved, you don’t get any of that. You have to guess and go. So, when we started Square, which I believe was an entrepreneurial company, because we were serving little merchants. We didn’t know if any of them existed. When we started Square we knew we had one customer and that was me. We literally didn’t know if anybody else would ever want this thing because we couldn’t. And this is the thing that people always make this mistake. They sit there and say, “Well, I want this guarantee. I want this guarantee that all my work is going to be fruitful.” And I say, “Okay, if you want a guarantee, go into business.” You don’t even get a full guarantee there, but it’s pretty close.

Jim McKelvey:
You can pretty much assure that if you do the things that the other businesses who are like yours are doing, then you will be successful to the extent that they are successful. The example I use in the book is restaurants in New York. So, I interview Randy Garutti who’s the CEO of Shake Shack, and Randy tells me flat out. He’s like, “Jim, we didn’t invent the hamburger. We just have to make our hamburgers a little bit better, and a little bit tastier, and a little bit faster.” He’s got this team that’s super dedicated to making the hamburger just a little bit better, and he’s kicking ass, but hey man, there are other hamburgers in Manhattan. So, if you want a guarantee go into business. If you want to do something that hasn’t been done before, you’re going to have to be an entrepreneur and that is a different journey.

Nace:
Okay, thank you for that advice.

Jim McKelvey:
Cool.

Nace:
Okay, so what advice for the second question, what advice would you suggest to an existing company to leverage consumer demand more aggressively?

Jim McKelvey:
I don’t even know what that’d be.

Clay Clark:
Oh, wow.

Jim McKelvey:
[crosstalk 00:46:26] Demand more aggressively.

Clay Clark:
You’re trying to trick… Are you trying to trick our guest? What’s he doing?

Jim McKelvey:
What the heck?

Clay Clark:
Unbelievable.

Harry Caray:
Holy cow!

Clay Clark:
Where’s Ozzie Smith to translate, okay.

Jim McKelvey:
What does leveraging demand mean?

Nace:
So, I was just asking for a question of-

Jim McKelvey:
[crosstalk 00:46:43] genius here.

Nace:
Me either. That’s why I was asking it. So, I was asking for just a company that’s breaking even monthly. How do they get people to find them more… or to get consumers to want to demand their products or services more?

Jim McKelvey:
Oh, man, so that’s business. That’s the game I don’t play.

Clay Clark:
Okay.

Jim McKelvey:
I’m sorry, I’m just not qualified to answer the question. You need a good manager. You need somebody who comes in and studies it and makes incremental improvements. I mean, these are all just platitudes. I’m not saying anything that’s even worthy of writing down and remembering because look, duh, do things a little bit better. Be a little bit more efficient. Work harder, not smarter, reverse that. But do that, that’s all a bunch of crap to me because I can’t do that. I’m not a manager. I’m not a guy who takes a business and tweaks it 10%. I can’t do that. I have to [crosstalk 00:47:49]-

Clay Clark:
It’s not your game.

Jim McKelvey:
Because it’s just not my thing. What I’ve basically spent my whole life doing is trying stuff that nobody’s ever tried and failing a lot, but then occasionally when it works, I end up with one of the coolest glassblowing studios in the world, or well, actually, you’re a machine shop. Okay, so, I’ve got a maker space in St. Louis. We’ve got water jets, and embroidery machines, and all these people come together and make stuff. And you know what, that model didn’t exist. It kind of existed in a place called Tech Shop, but then they went bankrupt last year. I build stuff that I don’t know if it’s going to work. But when it does work, the cool thing is, and this is, I’ll try to sell entrepreneurship a little bit here because I’ve been dissing it the whole time.

Jim McKelvey:
If you are successful as an entrepreneur, you have basically no competition. You end up with the market to yourself. You end up with this crazy system that cannot be easily attacked. And the reason I know this is because when Square was four years old Amazon copied our product, undercut our price, added live customer support, which we didn’t have, and everyone thought Square was dead. And a year later, Amazon quit. They couldn’t take our market from us. Now, this is Amazon. This is the most deadly competitor in the planet.

Clay Clark:
True. Yep.

Jim McKelvey:
Amazon scares Walmart. Amazon scares everybody. Amazon scares the government.

Clay Clark:
Amazon scares Amazon.

Jim McKelvey:
Yes, I mean, they’re… But the reason we beat them is not because we’re great managers or anything like that. It’s that we had this thing called an Innovation Stack, and we were entrepreneurs. If you read the book, you’ll learn that there’s this different set of math. It’s like, oh, god, it’s like a Laplace transform, right? If you’re trying to solve a differential equation. This is a terrible analogy. You can lose your whole audience here. I got to go with it. All right. In math, there are these hard ass problems that are called differential equations, and they’re really, really tough to solve. But then there’s this little trick you can play where you translate the equation into a different space, and then you just use basic algebra. And it’s so powerful.

Jim McKelvey:
So, you take your problem, which you can’t figure out and you map it into this new space, solve it using basic algebra, and then you map it back, and it solves the problem. That’s what you want to do. You want to have this other vocabulary. I’m trying to give the world Laplace transform, but I promise there’s no math in the book.

Clay Clark:
Jim, I will say this, we have time for one more question for you. Now, because you’ve done so well as an entrepreneur, you have the money needed to buy burritos, and what’s exciting is I empower you to go out and get yourself a big belt buckle. You got to do it, and then get an Ozzie Smith, some type of Ozzie Smith tribute on it. Think about that.

Jim McKelvey:
That’s a great idea. Although I would probably make my own belt buckle because I’m a maker at heart. I’m a guy who [crosstalk 00:50:56]-

Clay Clark:
You can just wear it when your wife’s not around. You know what I mean? We won’t tell.

Speaker 9:
Surely you can’t be serious.

Speaker 10:
I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.

Jim McKelvey:
I will see you in public. Giant belt buckle.

Clay Clark:
Oh, yes. Now, Jordan this is… Jordan is Nace’s brother, and he’s going to one up with our final question here. So, Jordan, one up your brother with the best question of all time for Jim McKelvey.

Jordan:
Okay. Hey, Jim.

Jim McKelvey:
Hey, Jordan.

Jordan:
So, as a fellow maker, and believe it or not I have two bridge ports back at the shop.

Jim McKelvey:
Oh, awesome. Have you ever left the wrench on the top?

Jordan:
That a big no, no.

Jim McKelvey:
I know. Have you done it?

Jordan:
I will say probably in my younger days because that is where I learned how to machine.

Jim McKelvey:
That will kill you on a [crosstalk 00:51:42].

Jordan:
Yeah.

Jim McKelvey:
Just check it, okay. There you go.

Jordan:
I heard a quote from you. It was when you guys were about to do the Steve Jobs demo, and you were making that first part out of aluminum. And you said sometimes you have to go with what’s good, and then be fast to correct the mistakes. Can you speak to some of the other makers out here about a product they have, and they’re waiting to pull the trigger because it’s not perfect yet?

Jim McKelvey:
Yeah, you got to ship. You got to ship, ship, ship. We made… So, my big problem with the aluminum Square reader was that aluminum is electrically conductive. And so, effectively, it wasn’t a card reader, it was a cardiac reader. It would pick up your heartbeat if you touched it and screw up all the electronics. So, I discovered that too late. I built the thing, tested it out and handed Jack right before a demo. Actually, he had to go demo it to Mike Bloomberg. And the thing didn’t work because it was electrically conductive. So here’s the thing. These days you have so much power as a maker because you have 3D printing, you have CNC machines, you’ve got all these wonderful tools to make stuff quickly. I really believe that you should, if you can make it yourself, because that gives you the power to first of all understand what’s going on to make the little tweaks that need to be made. And you get to move really, really fast.

Jim McKelvey:
So, all of a sudden we discover that aluminum reader is a stupid idea. And I’ve got a plastic one ready the next day? I mean, literally, it was just a question of me getting some plastic and switching. But imagine if I’d had a supply chain that went all the way through Shenzhen? Yeah, I mean, God help you if your supply chain goes through China right now. I mean, China shut down. You want to get that product out? Man, like the fact that you’ve got a couple of bridge ports and some knowledge, your company just surpassed everybody else because they’re shut down and you’re not. Why? Because you control it. And so many people feel like they’ve got to find an expert to build something. Look, I mean, maybe you do if it’s super complicated, but it wasn’t like I knew how to build a credit card reader when I built a credit card reader.

Clay Clark:
True.

Jim McKelvey:
But you could look stuff up. I mean, Made magazine first issue had an article teaching how to build a credit card reader into a cell phone. There was literally an article that taught me how to do all the stuff I needed to do to make Square. You could just look it up. So, if you can make it, make it, and the more you make, the better you get at that.

Clay Clark:
Jim, not that you need to have a Kanye West on your team, but Kanye West says almost the exact same advice in an interview with Forbes talking about the importance of being able to make your own prototypes.

Speaker 12:
The idea comes to you, you sketch it out, and then what?

Kanye West:
We have a team of incredible designers. We’ll take the entire design team to Japan. We’ll take the entire design team to Zone, and talk about where we’d like to take these ideas. And I mean, it’s a painting. It’s a spirit that’s inside of it that’s now translated into these miniature vehicles. I’m just soaking in all of the shoes. Look at all these. Look at these designs. Look at these ideas all together. The protos, the versions that you’ve seen in actuality and the versions that never quite made it to be able to see inside of this. This is an infinite amount of words in front of you. There’s so many prototypes that go into what you eventually get.

Speaker 12:
How many prototypes do you think per shoe you’ll cycle through before you get to the one that you [crosstalk 00:56:06]?

Kanye West:
It’s 100s. We work on, like I said, miniature vehicles. We work on shoes like someone will work on a car.

Clay Clark:
Your book is just filled with wisdom, and if you’re out there today, and you’re thinking about buying a regrettable burrito. You know, that bonus burrito that you don’t need, I encourage you to fast for one day to save up the money needed to buy The Innovation Stack: Building An Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea At a Time. Again, it’s The Innovation Stack: Building An Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea At a Time. Jim, thank you so much for joining us today.

Jim McKelvey:
Clay, Jordan, Nace, this is super cool, guys, and thank you so much for your time today. This was fun.

Clay Clark:
Oh, Thrive Nation, that was a mind expanding look inside the mind of a true American success story. So, if you learn something today share this show with somebody. I’m telling you just send them a text, send them an email, maybe send them a fax.

Speaker 9:
Surely, you can’t be serious.

Speaker 10:
I am serious sorry, and don’t call me Shirley.

Clay Clark:
Why don’t we all just send our friends and family a fax today. If you still have a fax machine, fax them a link to today’s show. Let’s share this. Let’s share the show via a smoke signal. Let’s go out of our way to get this show out here. Out into the vast interwebs, and now without any further ado, let’s end this show with a boom. So, here we go three, two, one, boom!

Clay Clark:
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Clay Clark:
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The system works, but nothing works unless you do. You’ve got to take some action. Download the ebook for free today at thebestseobook.com.

Daniel:
Hello, my name is Daniel. Daniel [inaudible 01:00:39] here in Amarillo, Texas. The way Google has affected my business. We have got a lot of calls from Google. Right now it’s July and we’ve had the best month ever. And it took us about eight to 10 months to get on top of Google, and I’m glad we did.

Clay Clark:
Remember nothing works unless you do. You have to go to thebestseobook.com today. Download the ebook for free. Just download that ebook for free, and you’ll be off to the races.

Christina Nemus:
Hi, my name is Christina Nemus. I’m the owner and operator of Angels Touch Auto Body and Detailing in Bourne, Massachusetts. We have been working with Thrive and their coaching for say eight to nine months. And it took us about six months, five to six months to get on the top of Google. With their help with the website, and marketing, and the SEO, and retargeting ads with Google, and it has been phenomenal. We just have light in day, business coming in, phone calls coming in, walk-ins, referrals, it’s just through the roof, and we couldn’t be happier. At the moment we are up 50% this year from the previous year. And not only is that part of our own hard work and diligence, but also with the help of Thrive and what they’ve done for us and getting on the top of Google, and you know all their knowledge and coaching. And yeah, so super grateful, super pumped to see what the future holds for all of us. Thank you.

Clay Clark:
(singing). Lazy hands make for poverty, but diligent hands bring wealth. Proverbs 10:4. I’m here to tell you, you can do it, if you can just motivate yourself.

Clay Clark:
(Singing).

Clay Clark:
I realize I can’t sing like that, but I can talk, and play the woodblock. Okay, if you guys need me, I’ll just be over here.