Scott Belsky | Adobe’s CPO & EVP of Adobe Creative Cloud, co-founder of Behance, early advisor & investor in Pinterest, Uber, Sweetgreen, Periscope, etc. On How to Scale a Business & “A Prototype Is Worth 1,000 Meetings”

Audio Transcription

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Clay, my honor, my honor to be on your show. And thank you for all you do. I hear the ripple effects from you are good ripple effects.

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You know what I mean?

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People rave about what they learn from you. So congratulations.

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I’m Dan Honan with Custom Automation Technologies in Columbus, Ohio. And one of the best things he’s done for us is to get us ranked high on Google searches. We’ve more than doubled the number of calls we get from Google searches. The best thing though is that people that call us now are people that are truly interested

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in hiring us. They’re not just kicking the tire and looking around and that kind of thing. It’s been a really good thing for us to get highly ranked on Google.

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Thanks, Clay.

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What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system. And it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day-to-day basis.

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On today’s show, we’re interviewing the author, entrepreneur, and early-stage investor, Scott Belsky. Andrew, tell us more about this incredible guest.

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On today’s show, Scott Belsky shares how he started and grew the Behance company while attending Harvard before selling it to Adobe for $150 million. And he still found the time to be an early stage investor in big time companies including Pinterest, Uber, Periscope, Warby Parker and many more.

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Today Scott now serves as the chief product officer for Adobe and is the best selling author of The Messy Middle. Finding your way through the hardest and most crucial part of any bold venture and making ideas happen. Overcoming the obstacles between the vision and reality. And did I mention that he sold his company for $150 million to Adobe?

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Andrew, tell us more.

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So during today’s podcast, Scott shares what he did with the money after selling Behance for $150 million.

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Andrew, if you gave me $150 million, my world would probably slow down. $150 million. Andrew, if you gave me $150 million, my world would probably slow down. $150 million. And I’d probably take myself out to eat.

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$150 million.

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And I’d get myself something nice and fancy, someplace with organic, healthy products that my wife could trust. And I’d probably order myself 78 ounces of premium frozen yogurt

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with unlimited toppings. 150 million dollars. And on today’s show Scott shares how he and his partner saved money from their previous jobs and worked for nothing

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during the startup phase of Behance. And on today’s show Scott Belsky explains how they brought in cash by inventing a new product when starting Behance. And on today’s show, Scott Belsky explains how they brought in cash by inventing a new product when starting Behance.

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Andrew. Scott explains how to inspire your team when you don’t have obvious financial awards to shower them with.

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And on today’s show, Scott explains why you should not be distracted by the headlines and the highlights about entrepreneurship swimming all around you. Back to you, Andrew.

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And on today’s show, Scott explains why a prototype is worth 1,000 meetings.

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And on today’s show, Scott explains why you must learn to make decisions quickly once you have gathered all of the facts.

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And on today’s show, Scott explains why he believes that we should stop obsessing about the beginning and ending of all successful entrepreneurial stories and why we should shift our focus to learning more about the messy middle.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. Two men. Eight kids. Co-created by two different women. Thirteen multi-million dollar businesses.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Thrive Time Show.

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Now, three, two, one, here we go!

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We started from the bottom, now we here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we here. We started from the bottom, now we here. We started from the bottom, now we here.

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We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here.

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Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Thrive Nation, on today’s show, we are going to have a blasty blast with the incredible Scott Belsky. Scott, how are you, my friend?

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I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

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Hey, thank you. I’m sorry you made the poor life choice and agreed to be on the show, but we’ll have some fun here today. I know you’ve had a lot of success and I wanted to kind of start off at the bottom. I love to do that to hear about your childhood and because now you’re at this level where I think a lot of people look at it and go, wow. So Scott, walk us through your childhood. How did it all start for you?

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Childhood? Well, let’s see. Depends how far back we want to go and how many tissue boxes we want to get through. Eighth grade dances. You can start there. No, I mean, listen, I’ve always had a non-traditional kind of student side to me. I was always interested in the things more outside the class and in the class. I always had kind of a creative bent. And I also always had kind of an enterprising business bent.

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And I was always looking for the overlaps of these things. So growing up, making stores as a kid, doing a lot of art, having a creativity zone in my basement where I had all sorts of concoctions. And then, of course, in college, thinking about how do I combine interest in design and technology with interest in business? And Behance, which was a company I started interest in technology, with interest in business.

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And Behance, which was a company I started back in 2005, my first real company, the purpose was to literally organize the creative world using technology, and that was one of those examples in my life where I felt like the overlap of interest was perfect.

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Now, you went to some pretty prestigious schools. You went to Cornell, and you received your MBA from Harvard. What was your experience like attending Harvard Business School?

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Well, I was probably one of the worst students there because I was simultaneously starting my company that I started about, I don’t know, about the same month that I started at business school. And the whole time I was there, I was thinking, gosh, should I drop out or should I stick with it? In retrospect, I think the story of dropping out of Harvard

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is way better and more interesting than the story of finishing. But listen, I mean, I had a good experience there. I made some great friends that have been great advisors and collaborators to me ever since. So I can’t regret it.

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But I do think that when you’re building new things, an MBA is less useful than if you’re going into a big company and trying to have more management experience behind you. It’s a bridge to a question mark. At the time when I was at business school, I kind of knew what I wanted to do.

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So when did you actually start Behance? Were you in your dorm room or when did you start

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it?

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Well, I started right before business school. The idea was really inspired by frustration. I couldn’t believe how disorganized the creative world was at that point. People would put their portfolio sites online on their own websites, on their own domain name and no one would ever find them unless they knew them already. And I figured there should really be a LinkedIn for the creative world. There should be an interconnected portfolio platform where the stuff that’s in people’s

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portfolios also thrives and is discovered outside of their portfolios. Sort of circulates online because it’s great creative work and also thrives and it is discovered outside of their portfolios. It sort of circulates online because it’s great creative work and also helps people find it without going through the person’s name. If you talk to any creative professional in the world, they’ll say that they’re more defined by their work than their brand or even what company they happen to have worked for. And that was the insight for Behance.

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So how did you go about starting it? I mean, did you sell a kidney? Did you give blood? Did you have a second job? How did you raise the money? And tell us how you built that initial team.

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Sure. Well, it was a bootstrapping story. So it was rough at times. I had saved some money up for my previous job working at an investment bank. So I had some money to commit. But also I hired two other people to join me,

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and we were all willing to work for nothing for a period of time to figure this out. Then quite quickly, we actually had our first product was a totally analog product. It was a paper product. It was a notebook for creative people that be more organized.

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We sold these paper products literally at trade shows and other places to pay the bills in the beginning and also to build our brand as a company that organized creative people. So it was one of those first insights, which was let’s be a mission centric, medium agnostic business. You know, let’s make sure we organize creative people in whatever possible way we can.

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So, when did you start to gain some traction? Where you moved beyond selling tangible notebooks? When did you start to get some behance traction?

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Well, I would say maybe two or so years into the company is when we started to actually see people post portfolios that we didn’t know ourselves.

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And one of the things we did at Bootstrap the Network was we actually would go and interview great creatives we admired. We’d take the 100 great creatives and designers that we admired and we went to them and said, hey, would you put a portfolio on our platform?

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And they said, no, what the hell, who are you? And then we would say, oh, well, can we interview you for our blog? Can we write about how great your work is? They’re like, oh, well, OK, sure. And then we say, oh, and by the way, when we post this blog post about you, we want a link to your portfolio that we’re willing to put together for you. Can we just take your imagery online and make a portfolio for you? And they would say, oh, OK. We actually got 100 great portfolios that we made for the members ourselves.

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And then when people would find those, they’d be like, oh, so-and-so’s there, I should be there. And that’s how we got the flywheel going, as they call it.

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And how did, for the listeners out there who aren’t familiar with Behance, how did Behance make revenue? Was it a membership model? Can you kind of educate our listeners about the Behance business model?

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Sure. Well, in the beginning, of course, we were bootstrapping every which way we could. I had a book, we had a conference, we sold notebooks, whatever else. But the real driver of revenue for Behance ultimately became two things. One, which was a premium level offering for people to have the contents of their Behance portfolio on their own personal website always in sync. Everyone needs their own website also.

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And so we figured, hey, if you can have the two combined in one solution and managed in one place, people would pay a monthly fee for that. And they did in droves. And then the second was a job posting service and ultimately a talent search product for companies

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to get access to all of the data in the platform to find the exact right designer or creative professional for the job they were hiring for.

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So you grew this thing, I mean Behance took off, how big was it before the good folks at Adobe reached out to acquire you?

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Let’s see, around that time we were a little over a million members.

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Wow!

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You know, fast forward today, we have over 16 million members, so it’s grown quite a bit since the acquisition, but we were in a very high growth rate at the moment where that happened.

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So now since the acquisition, you serve as Adobe, Adobe’s chief product officer, if I’m correct. Yeah. I love the creative cloud, my man. I was whose idea was that I love the creative cloud.

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Well, the creative cloud was really the creative suite of products, but then delivered in a new way and with new services integrated throughout. And so I would say that the creative cloud journey is still well underway. And the idea also was, hey, instead of paying $1,000 for all of these creative tools, you can pick like a plan as low as nine bucks a month and get access to the ones that you want.

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And it was a very empowering thing for creatives out there. of these creative tools, you can pick a plan as low as nine bucks a month, and get access to the ones that you want. It was a very empowering thing for creatives out there, many of whom previously didn’t really properly pay for their products. Now they could say, hey, I can get them legally. I can also have all these services like

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font management and Behance and all these other things integrated throughout my tools. And then I can increasingly have better ways to collaborate with others, because that’s one thing that the creative world is actually still awakening to, how to work together. Scott, how old are you at last count? So I actually just turned 39 last week.

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Okay, so you and I are about the same age, so you can maybe vouch for me on this. When I started my first company, DJ Connection, out of my Oral Roberts University dorm in 1999, I had to buy Adobe, and I got the student version I think it was, for Photoshop. I want to say it was like $600. I know I had a Micron with 333 MHz of RAM, and this is my impersonation of my computer. And it would just mock me. It would take forever to render. And then when I became an adult business owner, I paid $1,000 for Adobe’s version of what is now called

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Premiere and then $1,000 for Audition. I love the Creative Cloud. My friend, what is your role now as Adobe’s chief officer? What kind of stuff? Are you involved with the Creative Cloud? What all do you do?

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Yeah. So I’m looking for all of the creative products. So all of the products in Creative Cloud, you know, of course, the video products, the imaging, photography, experience design, animation, all of these products, how they interoperate, so how they work together and how they have roadmaps ahead that, you know, bring them to another level. Always thinking also about new mediums, like voice interfaces and AR and VR. And so the challenge is always making sure that we’re pushing every segment forward,

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allowing photographers and video editors and others to do the greatest work of their lives while also making sure that they adopt new technologies and create for new problems. You know, you to always stay on the

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edge.

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O’Reilly I don’t know if you could make this as a feature. This is my one feature request. If you could make a mandatory spell check on all Adobe products and then forbid people spelling things wrong anymore, that’d be great. We’re in a culture that’s post-spelling. They no longer know how to spell because of all the spell checks. So once it gets into Photoshop, sometimes people don’t catch that little thing. Mandatory.

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I can’t. Stay tuned.

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Alright, nice. Yes! Yes! Okay, there we go. Now, you have invested since, would you call it selling, since being acquired by Adobe, or since merging with Adobe? How do you describe that? Merging or selling? Yeah, no, we were acquired by Adobe, and I started investing right before that happened. And you’ve invested in Pinterest, I believe, and Uber and brands people know. What do you look for in the companies you invest in?

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Well, I look for different things in the person and also the product and the problems. So on the people side, I love people that want to shake something up, that listen and learn as much as they speak. I love to work with teams that value design and product experience above everything else, not just exploiting some opportunity.

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I really enjoy products that take in human psychology into account. What do we really care about when we start using a product initially? Not much, it turns out. We’re all very lazy, vain, and selfish in the beginning and it better really appeal to near-term needs before it delivers that long-term value.

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So I think about things like that. I also look for teams that really have empathy with the people suffering the problem they’re trying to solve, as opposed to just being passionate about a solution. But people really get the problem they’re trying to solve, as opposed to just being passionate about a solution. But people really get the problem they’re solving and have empathy. I find entrepreneurs

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that end up with an incredible product market fit, as they call it.

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For the listeners out there that maybe don’t know the history of these things, with Uber, how big was Uber when you first invested in it? Was it a small little baby business, or was it a big business? What stage did you invest

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in with Uber?

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I got involved with Uber when it was still an idea, so before they had actually launched their first product.

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So hopefully that turned out well for you, my friend.

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We shall see.

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Now, you have decided to write some books, because apparently you have nothing going on other than making the coolest products in the world. So you wrote this one book here, Making Things Happen. What first inspired you to write this book and what’s that book all about?

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Well, Making Ideas Happen, although in some countries it might be called Things.

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Oh yeah, there we go. Fair enough.

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Making Ideas Happen came out in 2010 and this is a book about why most creative individuals and teams get nothing done. They’re always going from idea to idea to idea. But some creative people and teams defy the odds and are so productive and just churn it out and make ideas happen again and again and again. Making Ideas Happen is a book all about what it is that those people and teams do that we can learn from.

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I like to buy books. While we’re interviewing you, I like our show observer to buy the books. We’re going to buy a book right now, we’re going to get it shipped right now, making ideas happen, and I think after all the royalties you probably make $2 right there. So there we go. $2 for you. Maybe two cents, but thanks. Two cents. There, that’s a mega point for you. Okay, so now your next book, I believe, let me see if I get this title wrong as well, The Messy Middle? Talk to me about this book.

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The Messy Middle. The Messy Middle was inspired also by frustration, in this case by everyone’s obsession with the starts and finishes of everything. And why we don’t talk about the middle volatility, the stuff that actually matters, is wild to me. And so The Messy Middle is all about navigating volatility. How do you endure those lows? How do you optimize the heck out of everything that works? And how you work, how your team works, or what your product’s doing, and how

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your product’s working? And finally, how do you not screw it up in the final mile? Can you share with us about the lowest point when you were building Behance, or maybe any business endeavor you’ve been involved in, or maybe something you’ve invested in. It’s far enough in the past where you can talk about it, but one where you were at the bottom, just the worst possible scenario?

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Because I think some of our listeners out there need a little pep talk, a little empathy.

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Sure. Well, where do I begin? Behance was a five-year bootstrap journey. We had a lot of very great volatile times. I would say just a general challenge I had was we had a small office in Union Square and we’re off of Union Square. And whenever I would walk out of the building, I would see the fruit guy at the corner, the guy selling fruit in his cart. And I would realize that at the end of the day, he had a far better business than we did.

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And it just was very humbling to realize, gosh, like we think we’re smart, we’re working so hard, we’re spending years just working ourselves to the bone and losing money, and yet like we still don’t have a great business or any business for that matter. We’re working at miscomplete anonymity, ambiguity,

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uncertainty, and anxiety. And it was during those periods of time where without any rewards to keep the team motivated, we had to be very creative in coming up with our own reward systems, like, you know, just literally things to work towards in the near term that would keep us engaged. And one of those things, by the way, was we would type Behance into

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Google and it would always say, do you mean Enhance? Do you mean Enhance? Oh, come on, like, can we just not be a mistake anymore? So that was like one of those goals. So we were like in six months, we are no longer going to be a mistake. And that was one of those little hacks we use

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to keep ourselves engaged, even though we had no real short-term rewards to measure ourselves with. And lo and behold, six months later after all these portfolios we put up for the creatives that I talked about at the beginning The hands came up as a legitimate search result early or late 2007. Well now right there deserves a mega bomb Become super hot popular and we lose our SEO all over again. No

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Man what do you say? What do you do at those moments? Do you send it Beyonce a complaint letter? Do you write a big picture? Do you make a big Facebook post of a picture of a dark, esoteric cloud and write, I just feel terrible? Or what do you do? How do you get reinvigorated?

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Well, you just make another goal. And you just keep working towards it. And I think that’s what we’ve always done., is just make up another goal, another milestone, and you just keep churning. I feel like one of the greatest competitive advantages of startups is just sticking together long enough to figure it out.

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The new book just came out, The Trillion Dollar Coach, the book about the life and times of Bill Campbell, the coach of Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt and all these legendary Silicon Valley Icons on and a lot of that book is about dealing with the messy middle of managing You know conflicting personalities that are all trying to win and there’s a little bit of pride a little bit of greed How did you keep the team?

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engaged and not in fighting

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Well, I think you always have to keep people aligned. And there’s two ways of forcing alignment. One is you just, you know, you convince people of where we’re going and why you use design to show a prototype as opposed to discuss it. You know, there’s a lot of ways of getting alignment.

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The other way of getting alignment is to impose process on people. And I find that process is the easy solution, but it’s also the one that screws you over the long-term because the more and more process you add, the more burdensome and bureaucratic

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the system becomes and the less engaged people are. Some process is really important and you have to have process. But at the same time, the work that you do to keep people aligned, to show rather than tell is really important. Are you merchandising to your team, these milestones,

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like we’re going to be a legitimate search result in Google? Are you doing those things and merchandising and rallying the troops? And, and also, are you treating your your team like an immune system? Are you really sensing when there’s something off? And are you addressing it as opposed to assuming everything will get better on its own?

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You just said a knowledge bomb I just want to marinate on you said you want to show a design rather show like a mock up rather than to discuss it. Why is that?

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Yeah, well, listen, a prototype is worth 1000 meetings, you can we can sit around forever and talk about how something should work and why someone should see this and that and this and that, and why are they not engaged at this point? Why did we lose the customer here or there? But if you can actually show the design

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of what it could be and should be, and what’s wrong, if you can just show rather than tell, I actually find that meetings are a lot more productive.

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Oh, that is good right there. A prototype is worth a thousand meetings. That’s good. Now, with your schedule now, I know you’re a busy guy, a lot of demands on your time, people like me reaching out to you. How do you organize the first four hours out of every day and what time do you typically wake up?

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It varies, but what I try to do is I have a few hours every day where I am not focused on email or to-do lists or anything else that’s coming in, but rather on two or three things that I think are most important over the long term. It’s the only trick that I have found to be able to focus sufficient energy on longer term pursuits, slow baking type of things that otherwise you would never get to because you’re always reacting to someone’s email or living someone else’s to-do list.

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I know you’re a humble guy and you don’t like to talk about it a lot, but when you had your business purchased for $150 million, did you go out and immediately buy some frozen yogurt or did you get yourself a new haircut at Sports Clips? What did you do with the money? Did you right away just go out and splurge and get a bunch of ice cream?

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Oh man, well, I think the whole team, we had a few things we just took care of quickly. Some of us had student debt we had to pay off. Some of us had a parent that needed some help. We all had some sort of situation like that. And then beyond that, my advice that I always got from mentors of mine was, try not to change your life for a year. So I actually didn’t do much different for a year. I just tried to kind of keep my head down, do work for the right reasons. Interestingly enough, when you’re no longer doing

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the work because you hope to have an exit someday, you have an opportunity to do the work just because you like doing the work. It’s actually a good test because some people at that point are like, I’m out of here because they never really liked the work they were doing.

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They were doing it for an end. In my case and most of my team, we stuck together for years because we just liked building for creative people. I mean, we just thought that was interesting. And that’s why I think a lot of us stuck with it for a long time.

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My final question I would have for you is this. There’s a lot of people that I’m sure have heard you speak at a conference or a podcast like this where you’ve given advice, you’ve probably had Q&A sessions at different things. And I’d just like to ask you, what is the number one advice that you give people that they almost never actually implement?

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Let’s see. I think one of the pieces of advice that I try to give is to just make decisions more quickly. And the fact that like, you know, the most frequent decision made

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is to not make a decision yet, I think is true. And we all get some sort of analysis paralysis, right? When it comes to digesting data. And I just find that whenever you make a decision, you’re learning, whereas if you’re not making a decision, you’re likely not learning. And decision you are you’re learning whereas if you’re not making a decision you’re likely not learning and if you are

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nimble enough and instrumented in the right way as a team if you make a decision that’s wrong you can quickly revert and get it right. I would and a lot of and I say that but then a lot of you know folks still struggle I think with decisiveness. Another thing is when it’s early stage entrepreneurs just founding something I will always tell them and I sort of mentioned this earlier, but don’t just be passionate about a solution for a problem. Seek empathy with those suffering the

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problem. And empathy matters more than passion, which is the direct opposite of what you typically find, which is most people say, oh, I’m so passionate about this problem and this is the solution. I’m just going to go off and spend three years making it happen. And that’s oftentimes a mistake.

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Scott, I give you the floor, the opportunity to end the show with a cherry on top. What’s the message you want to get out there to the Thrive Nation, most of which who are huge Adobe

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Cloud fans? Well, I mean, keep the feedback coming, because every team, every company that makes products that you use thrives off of the feedback. And I’m trying to make Adobe feel like a little more of a small company these days. That’s one of my big goals as chief product officer. So we are trying to engage and direct, you connect directly and get the feedback. That’s my ask. message I would say is to not get distracted by the headlines,

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by the assumption that everyone else around you is getting more traction than you. Because the truth is that the greatest companies just are so misunderstood. I mean, talk about Pinterest, which recently went public just a couple of weeks ago.

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Notoriously underestimated company that was never written about. People always discounted it as this weird imaging scrapbooking site, you know, but it was a team that just really felt like they were on a long haul journey and, and tried to build a culture such that people didn’t need to have the constant stimuli, you know, dopamine driven headlines and accolades, but rather could just like put their heads down and stick together long enough to figure it out, which to me is, as I said earlier, the competitive

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advantage, I think, in the startup world. Now Scott, in all sincerity, if you could create a taser feature that would taser all graphic designers that refuse to spellcheck, if they could just taser them in a way that won’t kill somebody, but that kind of hurts for an hour or two, that would be great. Scott, thank you for your time, my friend. I realize you have things to go do, but thank you very much.

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Thank you for having me.

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All right, you take care. Now, Andrew, we like to end each and every show with a boom, and so are you ready? I’m so ready. Here’s the deal. I want you to bring the craziest boom you’ve ever brought to the show. You ready?

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I’m so ready.

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Here we go.

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Three, two, one, boom!

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Boom!

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Hi there, my name is Stephanie Pipkin. I am 24 years old and I own Black River Falls Cleaning Services. We opened in April of 2019 and it is now mid-June of 2020. So I wanted to talk today about the success and growth I have achieved by implementing the Proven Path with Clay Clark’s team and my business coach Luke from Thrive Time. It has been insane to

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say the least. I started working with them in mid-february of this year so we’re about four months in of working together and it has Completely transformed my business in pretty much every facet So I’m gonna check my notes here So in four months my leads have tripled I was getting probably like two leads a week, now I’m getting more in

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the like 10 to 15 leads a week. I have doubled my number of employees. I’m now hitting the highest revenue weeks in the history of the company, week to week it seems like. We went from about six appointments today as our highest in February to now 14 to 15 appointments a day. And hiring quality employees has become much simpler and less stressful by using their systems for hiring. I typically only get maybe two complaints a month if

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that and everybody shows up to work. I just have really high quality employees now, especially in something people typically consider a high turnover type of work You know cleaning houses cleaning businesses I have amazing employees now and I get rid of the ones who are not so amazing and bring on new ones because of You know group interviews and higher interviewing every single week. It’s just been great and such a I don’t waste as much time on low quality candidates anymore.

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And your coach will hold you accountable, which I love. Again, the tough love is really great. Luke’s like a stern father figure, but he’s also nice, but also stern when he needs to be when I’m being lazy and not doing the things that I know I need to do because I don’t want to do them. So that’s just great.

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Worth every penny. I mean I’d pay him a million dollars a month if I can and maybe someday I’ll be able to. But I would just say go for it. If it seems like a good fit, just go for it. Do what they say even if you think it’s stupid or ridiculous. Just do what they say because it’ll work. You know people when they look at my business, you know people in my town, they think I’m lucky. They think I’m just, you know, things just happen for me. And you know, maybe I am lucky, but it has a lot to do with hard work and, you know,

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perseverance and, you know, working till you cry sometimes. That’s just being an entrepreneur, which if you know of course I’m gonna be successful It’s it’s an absolute because I I have all this stuff in the background happening And I have Luke and clay and everybody on their team working Really hard to make sure that I’m a success and I can tell that they are just so excited Every single week when I’m having all these wins and things like that, they’re so excited for me.

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So it’s the best thing ever and I would suggest to anybody to work with them. So sorry for the long-winded reply, but I just had so much to say and I could go on for hours probably about how amazing they are.

1
But thank you to Clay and Luke and the entire team there, everything you guys have done for me and I am so excited to continue to work with you for years to come. Thanks so much for watching.

6
My saying is, if it’s important to you, hire a coach. And I think that’s one of the reasons people are not successful is they, you know, they eat a cheeseburger instead of hiring a coach, you know what I mean? And so my coach pushes me, they’re younger than me.

6
They push harder, they’re trained. And as my rich dad always said, amateurs don’t have a coach but professionals always have coaches. So I’ve always had coaches for whatever was important. My rich dad was one of those persons.

6
I wanted to learn how to play Monopoly in real life. So he was my coach.

2
Well, Carter, we have an opportunity here at the Thrive Time Show to work with some really great business owners, people that are actually serious about growing their company. They go to thrivetimeshow.com

2
and they reach out to schedule a free 13 point assessment. And oftentimes I hop on the phone with these folks, and we figure out if they’re a good fit. And once we start working with a client, our goal is to help the client to actually grow their actual business.

2
And on today’s show, we’re joined with a man who we’ve had the opportunity to work with. The company is called NWA Gutter Perfection. And my understanding, Carter, is that they’re up over 60%. Is that right?

22
I would say that’s correct, yes.

2
DJ, welcome on to the Thrive Time Show. How are you, sir?

21
Good. How are you doing, Clay?

2
I’m doing great. So for anybody out there who is doubting whether you’re a hologram or not, what’s the name of your company, sir? Gutter Perfection. How did you guys first hear about us?

20
Do you know?

10
It’s actually a friend of mine found out about your business conferences there, and then we went there. And I guess I was sold the first conference we went to.

2
If you go to nwagutterperfection.com, you can see they’re a real company. They’re a real business. They really are growing. What markets do you service there, DJ? For people out there that might be looking for your services,

2
what’s the market area that you service?

10
Pretty much all of Northwest Arkansas, Bentonville, Springdale, Fayetteville, Rogers, the little surrounding towns there, too.

2
And again, if you go to the website here, folks, nwagutterperfection.com, you can see there are real business, real people having real success. DJ, I really do appreciate your time today, sir. And we’ll talk to you soon.

4
What I’ve seen from Clay and his group at Thrive is they’ll give you a simple system, and it’s the simple systems are the ones that people can wrap their brain around. They’re the ones that people can work with on a day-to-day basis, and that simplicity brings power with it. So it shocked me how simple some of the stuff is, and at times I’m like, why didn’t I think

4
about that? Workflow creation, systematic marketing, and coaching has helped our church so much. You know, the workflow creation is what it really is, is they’re going to look and see every moving part of your church, of your ministry, what needs to be done.

4
And it’s going to go up on a massive board. And so now what it does is it takes what you know needs to be done out of your heart and out of your head. Really takes the pressure, the stress off your shoulders and it puts it on the board where your entire team,

4
your ministry can see exactly what you want them to do every day. And so they know this is the playbook, this is what we’re doing. And then there’s a laser sharp accountability

6
with a meeting afterwards, did it get done or not? Clay, you’re an entrepreneur, I’m an entrepreneur. And as they say in Stoic, the obstacle is the way. I think YouTube is a tremendous educational platform for good and bad. So you’ve got to really choose your teachers wisely as anything else.

6
So the biggest, best lesson sits in the back here. And I think you do it and Dr. Z does it, once you learn something, if you really want to learn it, you got to teach it.

2
I think it’s life-changing for me and how I approach business. Could you explain Okta Nonverba, what it means, and how our listeners can apply it?

6
Clay, you gave me goosebumps, man. I’m glad it hit you as hard as it did. Octononverba is the motto of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kingspoint, New York. I had appointments with Naval Academy and Kingspoint Merchant Marine Academy. And Merchant Marine Academy’s motto was Octononverba.

6
In other words, don’t listen to what a person says.

19
Watch what they do.

5
Well, the first time that I ever met you, Clay, was at that first conference in Tulsa. And that was an incredible conference. And I was so impressed with just the whole thing, just the professionalism, you as a person, your business, your work ethic,

5
and really just who you are. And I was very impressed with all of that. And I thought, gosh, you know, this might be someone that I would really consider working with, like maybe he could really help me. And that’s really what got me interested

5
because I was so impressed with just the professionalism of all of it. And I learned a lot. I come about once a year to a business conference and I’d like to come more, but every year I try to come with my marketing girl with me.

5
And we always learn something. We always learn something. And I think next year I’m gonna bring my husband

1
because he really needs to come too.

2
And you’re in McKinney, Texas, right? So how long have you been an orthodontist in McKinney, Texas?

5
So I’ve been an orthodontist for 26 years, practicing in McKinney.

2
And when you went to medical school, what percentage of the time in medical school or dentistry school, dental school, did they spend teaching you how to market and or grow your own practice?

5
Absolutely zero.

18
Zero?

5
Zero marketing skills.

17
Okay, OK.

2
And from what I talked to Andrew, you’re the coach who works with you, I’m always hearing that more and more patients are coming in from Google. Could you talk about that? How much of an impact does it have

2
having maybe a rebranded or updated website and Google leads coming in?

5
It has had a huge difference. Absolutely huge difference in our patient load coming in. And you know, before I really wasn’t tracking really well. And that’s one of the things I learned from Thrive Time Business was how to track patients coming in, how to really, how to see where they’re coming from. And at the time, I really didn’t know much about Google.

5
And you know, being an orthodontist for 26 years, I didn’t really know a lot of, I kind of went through a time where I went through shock. It was really what I call culture shock because the old ways of marketing were not working anymore. And because I really didn’t know about online marketing,

5
I really didn’t, I was still doing, you know, phone book ads and magazine ads and all of these things. And so Thrive Time has really helped. And, and I will take, I will say that it’s a process. It doesn’t happen overnight, but if you stay the course, you’re going to see results because I’m absolutely convinced.

2
Dr. Christ, thank you for allowing us to take up some of your valuable time today. I really do appreciate you. And I can’t wait to see you in person here soon.

5
All right. Thanks so much, Clay.

6
Clay Clarke is here somewhere.

16
Where’s my buddy Clay?

15
Clay is the greatest.

10
I met his goats today. I met his dogs. I met his chickens. I saw his compound.

14
He’s like the greatest guy. I ran from his goats, his chickens, his dogs.

10
So this guy’s like the greatest marketer you’ve ever seen, right?

3
His entire life, Clay Clark, his entire life is marketing.

2
Okay, Aaron Antis, March 6th and 7th. March 6th and 7th, guess who’s coming to Tulsa, Russia?

13
Ooh, Santa Claus?

2
No, no, that’s March. March 6th. You’re gonna be joined by Robert Kiyosaki, Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, probably the best-selling or one of the best-selling business authors of all time and he’s gonna be joined with Eric Trump. He’ll be joined by Eric Trump. We got Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki in the same place. In the same place. Aaron, why should everybody show up to hear Robert Kiyosaki? Well you got billions of dollars of business experience between those two, not to mention many many many millions of books have been sold.

2
Many many millionaires have been made from the books that have been sold by Robert Kiyosaki. I happen to be one of them. I learned from the man. He was the inspiration. That book was the inspiration for me to get the entrepreneurial spirit, as many other people.

2
Now, since you won’t brag on yourself, I will. You’ve sold billions of dollars of houses, am I correct?

3
That is true.

2
And the book that kickstarted it all for you. Rich Dad Pornhub, the author, the best selling author of Rich Dad Pornhub, Robert Kiyosaki, the guy that kickstarted your career. Yeah, he’s going to be here. He’s going to be here. I’m bummed. And now Eric Trump. People don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. There’s not 50 employees. The Trump Organization, again, most people don’t know this, but the Trump Organization has thousands of employees. And while Donald J. Trump was the 45th president of these United States and soon to be the 47th president

2
of these United States, he needed someone to run the companies for him. And so the man that runs the Trump Organization for Donald J. Trump, as he was the 45th president of the United States and now the 47th president of the United States

2
is Eric Trump. And so Eric Trump is here to talk about time management, promoting from within, marketing, branding, quality control, sales systems, workflow design, workflow mapping, how to build. I mean, everything that you see, the Trump hotels, the Trump

2
golf courses, all their products, the man who manages billions of dollars of real estate and thousands of employees is here to teach us how to do it. You are talking about one of the greatest brands on the planet from a business standpoint.

2
I mean, who else has been able to create a brand like the Trump brand? I mean, look at it. And this is the man behind the business for the last pretty much since 2015. He’s been the man behind it.

2
So you’re talking, we’re into nine going into 10 years of him running it and we get to tap into that knowledge. That’s going to be amazing. This is objectively the highest rated and most reviewed business workshop on the planet. And then you add to that, Robert Kiyosaki,

2
the best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. You add to that, Eric Trump, the man that runs the Trump Organization, you add to that Sean Baker. Now you might say, but Clay, is there more? I need more! Well, okay, Tom Wheelwright is the wealth strategist for Robert Kiyosaki. So people say, Robert Kiyosaki, who’s his financial wealth advisor? Who’s the guy who manages, who’s his

2
wealth strategist? His wealth strategist, Tom Wheelwright, will be here. And you say, Clay, I still, I’m not going to get a ticket unless you give me more. OK, fine. We’re going to serve you the same meal both days.

2
True story. We cater in the food. And because I keep it simple, I literally bring in the same food both days for lunch. It’s Ted Esconzito’s an incredible a Mexican restaurant That’s gonna happen and Jill Donovan our good friend who is the founder of rustic cuff? She started that company in her home and now she sells millions of dollars of apparel and products

2
That’s rustic cuff comments. What says I want more. This is not enough. Give me more Okay, I’m not gonna mention their names right now because I’m working on it behind the scenes here. But we’ve got one guy who’s given me a verbal to be here. And this is a guy who’s one of the wealthiest people in Oklahoma. And nobody really knows who he is because he’s built systems that are very utilitarian, that offer a lot of value. He’s made a lot of money in the, it’s the, it’s where you rent. It’s short,

2
not it’s where you’re renting storage spaces. He’s a storage space guy. He owns this. What do you call that? The rental, the storage space storage units. This guy owns storage units. He owns railroad cars. He owns a lot of assets that make money on a daily basis, but they’re not like customer facing. Most people don’t know who owns the mini storage facility, or most people don’t know who owns the warehouse that’s passively making money. Most people don’t know who owns the railroad cars,

2
but this guy, he’s giving me a verbal that he will be here, and we just continue to add more and more success stories. So if you’re out there today and you want to change your life, you want to give yourself an incredible gift, you want a life-changing experience, you want to learn how to start and grow a company, go to thrivetimeshow.com, go there right now,

2
thrivetimeshow.com, request a ticket for the two-day interactive event. Again, the day here is March 6th and 7th, March 6th and 7th, we just got confirmation, Robert Kiyosaki, best-selling author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. He’ll be here. Eric Trump, the man who leads the Trump organization. It’s going to be a blasty blast.

2
There’s no upsells. Aaron, I could not be more excited about this event. I think it is incredible. And there’s somebody out there right now you’re watching, and you’re like, but I already signed up for this incredible other program called

2
Smoke Your Way to Thin. You think that’s gonna change your life? I promise you this will be ten times better than that.

12
Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking.

2
Don’t do the Smoke Your Way to Thin conference. That is… I’ve tried it. Don’t do it. Chain smoking is not a viable… I mean, it is life-changing. It is life-changing. If you become a chain smoker. It is life-changing. Not the best weight loss program to fight. Right. Not really.

2
So if you’re looking to have life-changing results in a way that won’t cause you to have a stoma, get your tickets at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Aaron Antis. I’m Clay Clark. And reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two-day interactive Thrivetimeshow show workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you it will be a life-changing experience. And reminding you and inviting you to come out to the two-day interactive Thrivetimeshow show workshop right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I promise you it will be a life-changing experience.

2
We can’t wait to see you right here in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

 

Transcribed with Cockatoo