Tim Tebow | Design the Life You Want to Live w/ Best-Selling Author Jason Jennings + Morning Success Routines “The First Hour of the Day Really Sets the Track for the Day.” – Jason Jennings + 19 Clay Clark Client Success Stories

Audio Transcription

Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you, and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zimmer. Two men, eight kids co-created by 2 different women. 13 multi-million dollar businesses. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here. Started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We took life, started from the bottom, and now we’re at the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Colton Dixon’s on the hooks, I break down the books. See, bringing some wisdom and the good news As a father of five, that’s why I’m alive So if you see my wife and kids, please tell them hi It’s the C and Z, I’ll call your radio And now, 3, 2, 1, here we go! We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, and we’ll show you how to get here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here We started from the bottom, now we’re here Alright Thrive Nation, you are in for a treat today. Ladies and gentlemen, we are interviewing one of my favorite authors and one of the most successful business and leadership authors on the planet. Jason Jennings began his career as a radio and television reporter and became the youngest radio station group owner in the country. Later he founded Jennings McLaughlin and Company and a powerful consulting firm that really became one of the world’s largest media consulting businesses. His books have been seen on the Wall Street Journal bestsellers list, the New York Times bestsellers list, USA Today bestsellers list, that’s like all the list! He’s on all the lists. Mr. Jason Jennings, welcome on to the show, sir. How are you? Clay, it is great to be with you, and I’m doing really well because I’ve been doing a bit of snooping around. I just told your associate that I’ve done hundreds of radio shows and hundreds of podcasts, and these are the best questions I’ve ever seen in my life. I appreciate that. Now, I want to ask you this here. Where is home for you these days? Where do you live? So I’m originally from the Midwest and you have to know that I am really a Midwesterner at heart, but for the past 30 years myself and the family have lived in a beautiful little bayside village called Tiburon. I’m actually looking out of my home office windows and I’m looking at the Golden Gate Bridge and the skyline of San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay. Wow, well I’ll tell you what, we’re looking here out at the back of Camp Clark and Chicken Palace studios in beautiful Tulsa, Oklahoma, where we have 17 acres, 40-something plus chickens. We have cats. I live behind a wall. It’s the Camp Clark and Chicken Palace experience. And I know that it’s a big tourism desire of your heart to come to Tulsa. And if you ever come, I’d love to give you a tour, my friend. I have actually been to Tulsa, and I know that Tulsa has more Art Deco architecture than any other American city and I’ve actually walked the streets and inspected the Art Deco architecture. Now a fun factoid for you about the Art Deco architecture is years ago a man by the name of Maurice Kanbar, who lives in San Francisco by you, who invented Sky Vodka, bought one third of downtown Tulsa. And he hired me to market all the property, 90% of which was Art Deco. So I walked the Phil Kade Tower, I walked all these buildings in downtown Tulsa and they are truly a sight to behold, much like your book, Hit the Ground Running, which is absolutely a sight to behold. This book, Jason, was introduced to me by my partner, Jonathan Barnett. He’s the founder of Oxifresh, where we now have over 400 locations all around the country. And he said, Clay, I was at the conference and this guy was talking about you got to read Hit the Ground Running. They’re teaching from the book. And so I just, like I do with every book I read, I’m reading the book, I’m highlighting, I’m taking notes. And I started realizing, man, this guy has done deep dive research, case studies. This book is so actionable. It’s so practical uh… jason where did you first get the inspiration to write hit the ground running well i’ll tell you what i am not the brightest bulb in the string i’d never have a muse on my shoulder so all of my books uh… subjects for all of my books have come through carefully listening to other people and so i generally do sixty to eighty speeches a year around the world but what most people don’t know is that for every one of those speeches, I interview at least 10 executives with the company and I require an hour-long conversation with the CEO. And I’m not sure if it’s because I’m a good listener or if they can really tell that I am empathetic to what they’re doing and the challenges they face, but very often I’ll be five or 10 minutes into a conversation with the CEO and they’ll say, hold on a second, let me get up and close my door. And they come back and then they spill the beans and they say, let me tell you how the cow weighed the cabbage and I can’t be, you know, we don’t have a school or a university that trains CEOs. So most people end up in the position of CEO and they don’t have all the answers but they know they’re expected to have all the answers. And so one day I started thinking, wouldn’t it be great to identify in research and study those CEOs who have created the greatest amount of economic value in their first three years on the job. And so then it becomes a huge research task. You know, you run the names of every one of the publicly traded companies in America, and a lot of privately traded companies where financial information is available, and you come up with a short list, and then you get rid of the bad actors, and the people who have received, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in fines from the security exchange commission because I don’t write about bad companies and so we finally came up with this list of companies that many people will know. Staples for example, JM Smucker, Goodrich, Humana Insurance and these were the companies where the CEOs had created the greatest amount of economic value in their first three years in office. On average they had doubled revenues in three years, tripled earnings per share, tripled EBITDA, and doubled profit margins. They were truly outstanding people. We went in, we gained access, which is always the very hardest thing to do, but eventually we always get our man or our woman. We get inside and gain access. And then we spent hours asking questions. I mean, what did you do when you first became CEO? I mean, look at what you’ve achieved. What are the steps that allowed you to do this? And so for a typical book, including that book, I hit the ground running. We generate about 100,000 pages of interview transcripts. And then myself and my research team sit down the old-fashioned way with highlight markers and go through and we’re looking for commonalities. What did all of these CEOs share in common? And then the end result is always a book. I just cannot overstate how valued I felt as a reader when I bought your book. Now just to disclose, I bought your book at the time, I want to say it was about $30 or so, and a lot of times you read a book, I’m a voracious reader, you’ll get a book and you go through it and you go, okay, this guy quit doing research on chapter one. After chapter one, this guy kind of mailed it in here. And then, you know, I’m a person who wants to complete every book, so I read it through, but like the last chapter or two, I’m going, just come on, get to a point. Your book is so action-packed with actionable points. And so what I wanted to do was to have you kind of break down a few of the points and hit the ground running, specifically as we go into the rules. And you have rule number one in the book that says, don’t deceive yourself, you will reap what you sow. The case study of the J.M. Smucker Company story. Can you break that down for us? I can. So we had completed the financial information, we gained access to Tim and Richard Smucker, who at the time were the co-CEOs, and we were in an office that had originally been their father’s office. And I went to Sunday school as a kid, so I always knew, I mean, you’re going to reap what you sow. I mean, I knew that was from Galatians. I could even tell you it was from Galatians 6-7. But above the desk, there was this big sign, and I had missed part of Galatians. It said, Be not deceived, God is not mocked. And if somebody’s listening who is not religious, well, you can use the word good instead of God if you want. Be not deceived, good or God is not mocked. For whatsoever a man soweth, he shall also reap. And I asked them about it, and they told me, I’m sorry, it was their father, it was their grandfather who had that above his desk his entire life. And he said, this is what we, this is why we exist as a company. And so they don’t lie, they don’t have people around them who lie, and they all practice the golden rule of treating people like they would like to be treated themselves, unlike what you see in so many other companies where it’s all about the CEO, it’s all about the ego, it’s all about the shortcuts, it’s all about taking advantage of customers, taking advantage of suppliers. It just didn’t happen in any of these companies. So that’s why I chose to begin that book with that quote from Galatians. One other notable quote I want to share with the listeners out there who are more of a… I’m a Judeo-Christian. My wife and I have five kids, all of which are currently Judeo-Christians. But for those of you out there who are more of a secular perspective, we have hundreds of thousands of listeners. I want to make sure I keep fair and balanced. Napoleon Hill once wrote, he said, nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price. And it’s just, that’s a powerful teaching moment and I’d like to if I can ask you about your literary career. You’ve paid the price. You have paid the price. What price have you paid to get your first book published? Because as I was researching you, I thought, Jason, I could do ten shows just about the price that you paid to get to where you are. How have you paid the price? Yeah, the price was a huge one. And so, you already mentioned the back story in your nice introduction. I was in the broadcasting business and the consulting business. Almost 20 years ago, at age 40, I basically had my midlife crisis. I was alone at home one day. I’m sitting in the family room on the sofa, and I went to get up. Physically, I could get up, but I just plopped back down and I went, �Is that all there is?� I’m just going to keep buying radio stations and growing this consulting company and half the clients are the consulting. When you’re supporting hundreds of people on your staff, the color of go is green. If somebody shows up and they want to be your client, you need the money, so you take them. With some of our clients, I always felt like taking a bath in Lysol. I just knew that there had to be something more. I thought maybe I would become a second career seminarian. I was introduced to a man by the name of Dr. Timothy Lowe, who was head of the Pacific Theological Seminary, the Lutheran Seminary in Berkeley, California. I made the appointment to go and see him, and I said, �I really think I might like to sell everything and come back to seminary and become a second career seminarian.� He said, �That�s a big move.� He said, �You know, we should spend some time talking about that.� Over the next several months, it was Dr. Lowe who eventually told me, ìLook, I donít think you want to come to seminary. Iíd rather put you on a board of directors and have you write us checks.î He said, ìBut I have figured out youíre calling in life. You love business done well. You love leadership done well. I think youíre calling in life your gospel, which is to identify the greatest business leaders, I mean the greatest companies in the world, get inside and find out what they do.î He said, ìThatís what I think you need to write and talk about. So I came home, sleepless night, first one in my life. I was laying in bed. God, if you’re out there, throw me a thunderbolt or something, I mean send me in some direction. Didn’t get the thunderbolt but I woke up in the morning and figured out I was going to get a book contract. Now Clay, I am somebody who has always gone through life, a high achiever. I used to say, I regret it now. I used to tell everybody that worked for me, there are reasons and results. Don’t give me any reasons, just give me the results. I look back and at points in my life I must have been a holy terror. So it was time to get a book contract. Well I got rejected by 97 publishers one after the other. Oh, good. I’m glad you’re in good company here. But here’s what happened. Here’s what happened. With every rejection, with every rejection, I became more determined to get a great publishing company and have a great bestseller. You’re going to love this story. So finally one day I got an email from a man at HarperCollins, the publisher at the business imprint of HarperCollins. He said, �Dear Mr. Jennings, I’m not interested in you. I’m not interested in your idea. I’m not interested in your constituency. Please don’t bother me again.� And sometimes dramatic action is called for. I hit reply and I went, dear so-and-so, you are at stand. And what you don’t know is that Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch are clients of mine and they own your little publishing company. And the next time I’m with them, I’m going to tell them what a jerk they have operating HarperCollins imprint. Within two minutes, what do you have to lose? Within two minutes, I get a reply. It said, dear Mr. Jennings, you sure have put spoke if you’re ever in new york i’ll give you ten minutes i hit reply without even thinking i should be in your office tomorrow morning at nine o’clock so i walked into his office the next day at nine o’clock and i walked up to shake his hand and he’s one of those new yorkers very successful but he’s one of those new yorkers uh… doesn’t shake hands and i said oh you don’t shake i said i’m from california we don’t shake hands, we hug. And I walked up and I gave him the biggest bro hug he had ever had in his life. I thought the guy was going to die. And to this day, he’s still my publisher at Penguin Random House, but every time I see him I say, stand up, it’s time for the hug. So I finally got a book contract from him for a little bit of money. And that was my first book. It’s not the big that eat the small, it’s the fast that eat the slow. So now the real story that you’re going to love is the book was going to be debuting in a few weeks and I get a call from a friend of mine who is the CEO of a media company in Los Angeles and he called me and his name is Craig and Craig said, when’s the book coming out? And I said, in a couple of weeks. He said, you remember last year he said i had some real challenges in my executive suite with my leadership team and you came down and spent a day with us and i think i have a great time he’s remembering i didn’t have a budget and you didn’t send me a bill i thought that’s what friends are for he’s was time for payback he said put together a little radio commercial for your new book send it down and we’re going to give you a million dollars for the free advertising play play i was in Omaha, Nebraska on the day the book came out and the radio campaign debuted and the book Shot to number one it became the number one book in America Not the number one business book But the number one book in America And it really stayed there as long as the radio campaign ran and people were running into bookstores They couldn’t even say the title. I mean do you have the book? It’s not the fat to eat the skinny It’s the skinny to eat the fat. I mean they didn’t even have the title right, but so powerful was the advertising. And of course, what gives you permission to write your second book is the success of your first book, and what gives you permission to write your third book is the success of your second book. I mean, publishers are only interested in your success. And so that’s how the whole thing began, but there was a lot of rejection along the way. I think there’s somebody out there listening who you just spoke into their life in a profound way. There’s somebody out there who’s been getting a ton of rejection. I know I have fought through that rejection. And if you’re out there and you’re just feeling like, you’re feeling overwhelmed by the rejections, just understand that you can view them as learning opportunities and stepping stones and all of the great stories, all of the Jason Jennings of the world, they all have their character built as a result of being promoted through these problems. And Jason, you have really developed a thick skin throughout your career, from what I can tell, which is what has allowed you to get in and interview the top leaders at companies like Staples. In these Fortune 500 companies, you’re able to somehow get into the companies and reach the CEOs when nobody else can. Well, and let me tell you about that. It’s not that I have a thick skin. I’m the biggest softie you’ll ever meet in your life. I believe that to be fully functioning compassionate human beings we always have to allow our head to meet the heart and if I’m guilty of anything sometimes I allowed myself to be led more by my heart than anything else. However, I do know that I don’t know where I heard this many years ago, but everybody else gives up. I mean everybody wants to write a book. Most people give up. Everybody wants to be worth millions of dollars. I mean, most people give up. Most people give up. And so, you know, I’m always gonna be the last man standing. And I’m not gonna tell you that it’s easy to gain access to these companies. It’s hard. And once I had a couple of big successful books, I thought getting access would be easier. It just got harder because they knew that somebody actually was gonna read the book. And it’s all the well-intended gatekeepers, I mean, who are trying to keep you out. And so we just never give up. I mean, we’ll reach out to board members, we’ll reach out to big customers, we will threaten to run ads in newspapers and write about them with people who don’t want to be identified. I’ll do anything, but ultimately we get inside and within five minutes we know we love each other. And they spew and they tell me everything. So rule number four in your book, Hit the Ground Running. You’re sitting down with the leaders at Staples and you came up with this rule number four which is find, keep, and grow the right people. Please share with us what this rule is all about. Okay. So at the end of the day, you only have one competitive advantage as an organization, any organization, and that is your culture. Because whatever you make, sell, produce, supply, someday somebody’s going to do it better, faster, cheaper. They can steal your advertising, they can steal your people, they can steal everything you’ve got. So the only thing any organization has of any value is culture, and that is built around around people and you know most of the gallup studies show that seventy six percent of all employees in america today are not only not engaged they’re actively disengage from their jobs one sergeant the ceo of staples now i just told you how hard it is to get some companies i called staples i said ron sergeant’s office please and the next thing you know this guy’s picking up the phone saying hello this is ron sergeant and i said you answer your own telephone?î He said, ìWell, of course, if Iím in the office.î He said, ìMost of my time Iím in the stores, but if Iím in the office, why wouldnít I answer my own phone?î Thatís how I began to strike up my relationship with him. To him, it was all about that the number one responsibility of the person in charge is to find, which is attract, which is to keep, and to grow the right people. His rules are very, very simple. Always make sure you hire the right person. Never fill a spot with a body. Never do it because it’s going to blow up on you. Number two, promote from within. Number three, give people new challenges and move them around. Have a program to identify the superstars. Make everyone an owner. Constantly communicate with everybody everything or they’re going to think that nothing is happening and you never want your people to think that nothing is happening and look like your customers and be as diverse as your customers and those are his rules Ron Sargent’s rules for people which ultimately allow you to build a culture. I want to ask you this this is a way our organization is structured we coach with a maximum of 160 clients at any given time. I would say the average revenue, Jason, is somewhere between a million and 20 million a year is our average client of revenue. And a lot of times people will say, I hired somebody, I’ve communicated with everybody, they’ve been on my team for about two years or three years, and they’ve kind of like been promoted to a level of incompetence where they were really good as an assistant manager, let’s say. But as a manager, they’re overwhelmed. They were a good person in this particular position, and they still have great character, they just are overwhelmed there. What would you say to the small business owners out there who have a team of 50 employees or less, and they’ve found a good person, they’ve been on the team for a long time, and they’ve accidentally promoted somebody to a level of incompetence? Well, what I can tell you is this. I think that everybody in the world Has a great BS meter, which means everybody knows everything So if the owner of the company is unhappy with the performance of a person Or thinks that they probably got promoted to a position They shouldn’t be in there’s somebody else that knows that as well, and it’s that person that person knows it They are nobody is that delusional so if the boss thinks it so does the person think it. What it comes down to is to have one of those come-to-Jesus speeches saying, you know, John, you’ve been here three years. We put you in this spot. I’m not sure if you’re cutting it, but if I think that, you’re probably thinking the same thing. But you’re so good at other things. I don’t want to lose you. I mean, will you consider taking a step back? I mean, maybe we’ve got to search and find something else for you. It just comes down to what I referenced earlier, when the head meets the heart. So well said, Thrivers. I encourage you to listen to this podcast twice. Underline it. We have all the show notes. Every show is transcribed. That is such powerful language, Chuck. That is, so many business owners struggle to have that conversation, and the way that Jason just said that so artfully, it really demystified that for a lot of people. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen or experienced in my past life with the Concrete Company of not having those conversations out of the anxiety or whatever. And when you just lay it out like Jason just did, it’s just a matter of fact. Here’s a problem, let’s fix it. It makes it a lot easier. Now Jason, how? It does. In fact, in my book, and I don’t want to go off script, but in my book, The Reinventors, you are the the reinvented uh… there’s a chapter about communication and and uh… the big thing about communications that’s companies uh… big companies small companies all-five companies are spending more and more money more money that’s ever been spent on communication dot problem is all the communication is top-down everybody is overwhelmed with so much communication from a company, the company they work for, they don’t even know how to deal with it. So we kind of turn it upside down in my book, The Reinventors, and we talk about bottoms-up communication. And that is the responsibility of every boss, to sit down with Mary or to sit down with Jack and say, The reason I wanted to spend some time with you today is because I really think you’ve got some great talents and I really want to be a great leader for you, but I’m not going to be able to be a great leader for you unless I know a little bit more about you. So today what I want to talk about is you, your dreams, your hopes, your wants, your aspirations, what you ultimately want to achieve. When you have that kind of a tell me conversation with people, you will then know how to lead and grow and develop people. Too many bosses, too many owners fail to take the time to have that conversation. That’s the first conversation that anybody should have with an employee. You know, the bottoms up conversation, Chuck, last Thursday in our office, John sits down with employees and goes over their goals. And several of the young ladies who work with us, mostly the ladies at this time, they had said, we have a staff of close to 100 something people between the different businesses. And the ladies were saying they wanted to get in great shape. And so we were able to kind of reorganize the schedules. They can go to workout classes together. And it’s a logistical thing. And I guarantee you, the people I’ve seen that have already started this program a few months ago, I’m not a fitness expert nor am I trying to get into their personal business. But when you ask somebody, what are your goals? They say, well apart from work or at work, my number one thing is I want to get in shape and I’m struggling to find the time to do that. So by just reorganizing their schedule and blocking out time to go to a local gym and then actually paying for the gym, there’s a new enthusiasm with certain folks in the office. It’s exciting to see that. I cannot hammer home the importance of that bottoms up mentality more. It really, really does. It really does. And then what happens is on an ongoing basis, I mean, then you have to be sufficiently interested for the follow up. So Mary, how’s it going in the gym? Are you getting stronger? Are you working core? What did you do today? It just shows an interest. I think that, Jason, that’s one of the things that we teach all of our clients is to understand that as you scale and begin to duplicate yourself, you have to have the mindset that management is mentorship. You can’t just expect people to have the same mindset as you, and that’s exactly what you’re talking about. Now, rule number seven from this book, Simplify Everything, it’s just there’s so many good things in this book. This is the Aladdin mill story, and it blew my mind at the time I read it, and as I was preparing to interview you again, I’m going through my book and I’m going, oh, this is blowing my mind again. Two mind-exploding moments there. How’s that even possible? And what caused me, I mean, our marketing agency, it’s called Make Your Life Epic. It’s one of the largest, if not the largest, in Oklahoma. And at the time, I had these very complex systems. systems, it was almost like you had to be able to decipher, maybe like hieroglyphics or something, to understand the systems there, Jason. People had to work with me for two to three years to fully understand how to do their job. In your book, Rule Number 7, it says, simplify everything. That set me off and helped me so much. Can you talk about what you mean when you say, simplify everything? Yeah, and the back story to that is Mohawk Carpet, the Aladdin Mill story, one of their brands, and their CEO Jeff Lorberbaum, based in Georgia, about an hour and a half outside of Atlanta. And it is an unbelievable company. It’s the world’s largest carpet and floor manufacturer. They’ll do about $10 billion this year, $3 billion in profit to the bottom line talk about uh… tough cookie to get to i got as far as his assistant gay and i could never i mean it was just a cold shoulder no interest without issue talking to you and so finally i mean we we tried a couple of board members the board of directors and finally i went to his biggest customer uh… who spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year with him and said to you keep the can you get him on our side? Can you get him to agree to talk to me and tell him I’m never going to give up? So one day at 6 o’clock in the morning, I’m in my office at 6 o’clock in the morning on the West Coast and the phone rings. This is Jeff Loverum. What do you want? And I said, Well, I want to talk to you about a book. You’re an incredible business person. I want to write to you about the book. He said, I got the message you’re never going to give up. I said I will never give up. He said be in my office tomorrow morning at nine o’clock. So I schedule a red eye to Atlanta, get in a rental car, through like three hours of morning traffic to get to the location. I mean, I get there with like two or three minutes. I walk in, there was not much of a handshake, and he was all kind of put out by this. And so he said, how long is this going to take? And I said, I don’t know, a couple hours, as long as you want to go. And how does that sound? And he said, well, that’s fine. And so I set up my tape recorders, and with redundancy for three, because you never want to lose anything wonderful. Real quick, quick, quick time out there. I want to dial into that real quick. I want to focus on that, because you just said you have three tape recorders. Yes. I’m the only person that I have ever met, now I’ve met another, who whenever I do speaking events I will have my laptop with me in one bag, another person has a laptop, and there’s another laptop that we pack. I travel with three laptops whenever I travel, which is why I never had AV problems when I did speaking events, because I actually brought my own backup AV gear as well. Can you please talk to me about the paranoia that you have on a daily basis that allows you to bring three tape recorders, and then we’ll go back to your story. I just love that. That’s awesome. All right. So, well, so let me just tell you this before I give the backstory in the three tape recorders. And so he said, how long is this going to take? And I said, well, a couple hours or as long as you want to go. This is nine o’clock in the morning. At six o’clock in the evening, we were still there talking. And as I tell you, these people talk, they talk. It’s not that I’m a skilled questioner because my questions are very simple. Tell me about you, tell me your story, and tell me the story of the company. That’s it. All I really have to do is sit there and say, ìAnd then what happened?î ìAnd then what happened next?î ìAnd then?î ìAll right.î ìAnd next?î That’s all I have to say because I am so captivated. William Buckley once said that 99% of all people are interesting, and 1% of people who are not interesting is interesting because they’re not interesting. And so let me ask you a question. How much is it worth for Jeff Laberbaum, who’s worth billions and billions of dollars, how much is it worth for me to get one day of his time? It’s worth a lot of money. So I can’t afford. I remember having just my main recorder and a backup and interview and I finished hours and the main recorder hadn’t worked if I hadn’t had the backup and that’s when I went to triple and uh… so I always travel with three voice recorders I just your level of preparation is inspiring uh… I uh… just whenever I read your book I just cannot stress to the listeners out there, if you’ve not read a Jason Jennings book, you’re going to spend $20 this month chopping a gas station. Easily. You’re going to go into a gas station, the guy’s going to say, do you want anything extra with that? And you’re going to say, yeah, probably. Let me get this, let me get some of this, let me get some beef jerky, let me overpay for a Red Bull. Yeah, and no, no, no, no, this month, let’s have a month of abstinence. Let’s say no to $19 of random things you don’t need to buy let’s buy a Jason Jennings book and you will see maniacal in a good way Preparation at its best. It’s so good in this this concept rule number seven of simplifying everything It freed me up to scale where previously as I grew the business my personal effort would have to increase But your concept taught me that if you simplify simplify, then you, although you can’t multiply your own personal effort, you can scale your company. Please deep dive into that. Oh, I’m going to in a moment, but I have to let you in on a secret. You just said something, and I’m sitting here with the broadest grin on my face ever. You have to know, for 34 years I’ve been in the gym six days a week, wherever I am. I’m in my high school graduation weight. I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been at. I eat extraordinarily clean. And you know what I did today? I bought a beef jerky at a gas station. We both do that a lot here, too. And I got the jumbo size. Are you striving for ketosis? Is that your game plan right now? Ah, man. So anyway, Jeff Luberbaum is brilliant. And I said, what is the magic that’s allowed you to do this? And he said, look, we just make everything as simple as possible. He said we exist to make our customers’ lives easier and he’s not talking about people who put the carpet in their homes. He’s talking about the carpet stores that sell their floors and sell their carpet. And he said so we just have to ask ourselves how can we make our customers lives easier and then we set about wringing out waste and inefficiency. It’s about knowing exactly where we want to go, but taking small steps to get there, and don’t try and stop things from happening. He said, every day I ask myself, how can we make this more simple? And this was a common thread that we have found in all of the companies I’ve written about for all of my books. They just work relentlessly to make it simple. There are a lot of people in companies who bring no value to the organization. They don’t sell anything, they don’t service anything, they don’t create anything. So what they have to do with their job function is make it appear to be very, very complicated. Because if their job appears to be very, very complicated, they think they can’t be replaced. And so you have to constantly root these people out of the organization who believe that making what they do is so complicated that nobody else can do it. I would like to share two notable quotables. One is by William Shakespeare, and the other one is by me. And I shouldn’t quote myself, Chep, so you can multiply. Now, Chip, I always say at our conferences… Clay Clark, on the other hand, he always says, complexity fails and simplicity scales. Yep. So important that you simplify. Because, Jason, in the event that you try to scale something that’s not simplified, what’s going to happen to the personal life of an owner of a company if they personally try to grow from $2 million a year of sales to $20 million a year of sales and they haven’t simplified their systems and processes? Well, they’re not going to have a life and then they will ultimately be destroyed. You know what, I have the Jason Jennings sound effect for encouraging you to simplify. You just got a simple… So, rule number eight, Chuck, I call this the Ocho. Oh yes, yes. This is my vast knowledge of multiple languages. Very good, very good. Okay, so rule number eight, be accountable. The Goodrich story. This story was so powerful. Can you talk to us about being accountable and the Goodrich story? Yeah, I can. The man’s name is Marshall Larson, who was the CEO who had created so much incredible value in the previous three years what you need to know about it is it is from a little small town uh… let’s see what is the enderland andrew north dakota andrew south dakota but he’d because of small state he got nominated to go to west point he went to west point he served very distinguished military career and left and got into business so he carried a lot of that military career with him. And of course, what happens in the military is there is 100% accountability. So when he got to Goodrich, they had been a former tire manufacturer based in Ohio. They relocated their headquarters to North Carolina, and there were lots of aeronautical businesses. They’re not in the tire business at all anymore. So, his rules, he was a remarkable man to spend time with. He said, look, here’s what it’s all about. He said it’s about having a sense of personal responsibility and being accountable at all times for anything and everything that happens in the company. He said by doing that, that allows me to set the example and hold everyone else accountable at all times. He said there is no slack given here. He said once you have built your accountable team, you trust your team. And he said what you do is everyone has to have a crystal-clear understanding of exactly what’s expected of them. Exactly. Not some idea of what they should be trying to get done, but they should have a crystal-clear understanding exactly what’s happened to them. And then he said forget vision statements. He said you have to have a destination and communicate it all the time. All the time? All the time, non-stop, non-stop. See, what happens at most companies, guys, is this. The leaders make a big pronouncement, they send out the memo, they hang up a couple of posters on the wall, and they just assume that everybody got it, everybody understood, and everybody’s going to live it. That doesn’t happen. It has to be communicated and lived all the time. But like you might expect from a military guy, he said, and you have to have an access of advance. And I was sitting there looking like I just followed off the back of a turnip truck trying to figure out what access of advance means. And but to a military guy, it means, you know, you have to have accountability and you have to follow the steps to reach your destination. And everybody has to be accountable. I didn’t know where you were going to go with this answer, but I did know that it was going to come from a military perspective because of the case study. So I had a notable quotable prepared that I want to ask you here, kind of a sneak attack. Colin Powell, who many people know is the first African-American Secretary of State, very decorated military leader, he once wrote, being responsible sometimes means pissing people off. Can you talk to me about where the rubber meets the road when someone knows what to do, they clearly know what to do, and they just passively aggressively refuse to do it. How would you handle it? Or how would you instruct our business owners to handle that type of situation? Well, I can tell you, more importantly, I think I can channel Marshall Larson here, and I can tell you how he would handle it and he would say john uh… we agreed that this was going to happen you agreed that you were going to get this done you have failed for whatever reason what is your plan for correcting it and getting it back on track let’s discuss that because other parts of the organization are calling on you to get this done. And if you don’t get it done, it’s going to slow them down and adversely affect their performance. So let’s try to figure out what you’re going to do to correct it and know that it has to be corrected. And you don’t need to say any more because the implication is clear. You know, Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, who grew the company by 4,000% during his tenure, he once wrote, he says, good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion. He said relentlessly, which is what you were talking about earlier. You just have to talk about it until you’re just almost sick of it, don’t you? I mean, you have to obsess about over and over and over, articulating the same thing to get it done? Over and over and over again. Rinse and repeat. Do you as an author, do you have a mantra that you repeat over and over and over as you go from best-selling book number one, best-selling book number two, best-selling book number three? Do you have a mantra that keeps you, that you have kind of your own? Because you’re an author, so it’s weird because you’re self-employed, you lead a team, but you’re the head of the team. You’ve probably got a whole lot of pressure from other forces to compel you to write the next book, and you have to get yourself all fired up and articulate the vision to yourself and hold yourself accountable. How do you do it with yourself? I can tell you exactly what I do. It happened when the first book was just about complete. I was about to send the manuscript in, and I will be the first to admit that that book was all about me. I was so proud that I was going to have a book. I was so proud that I had a contract with a huge publisher. I was so proud of this. It was all about me, which is not a good place to be in your life. And finally, I had a revelation. This was the day before the manuscript went in, and it was, this is not about me. This book is going to be around a lot longer. This book has to be more about others, I mean, than about my little world. And so in every book that I work on, every piece of research I do, is coming from the place of, how can I help somebody become better? Will this book fulfill the promise of the title of the book? I am driven. What allows me to keep my finger on the pulse is that every day I get about 100 emails from people who have read books and listened to speeches. Since day one, I respond to every single one of them. It might only be one or two sentences, but I don’t have an assistant write them for me. I write every one, and I will tell you both that there’s never been a morning that I don’t sit here because of Scandinavian heritage. Unfortunately, my kidneys are close to my eyes. There’s never been a morning that I sit here answering these emails where I don’t tear up once or twice because when somebody sends you an email and says, I’m a dry cleaner in Utah. We were almost bankrupt today we have nine locations and it’s because of you would you bookless is more or you and your book big big x small and i just figure it was died and and and that couple wanted to travel to chicago to a speech i was giving just for one minute to shake my hand they didn’t care but in the conference this one to shake my hand and uh… so it’s not so much a mantra and just knowing the powerful responsibility that I have. That right there is Thrive Nation. That is a powerful question I would ask you rhetorically today. What is your big mission? What is your big goal? Why are you doing what you do? Rule number nine from Hit the Ground Running is the importance of cultivating a fierce sense of urgency mister jason you break that down for us uh… well i can’t i mean it’s basically i i i suppose in some respects biblically inspired i’m also a judeo-christian heritage and background uh… but i remember when uh… jesus told challenge these people follow me and somebody said well you know i gotta go home and bury my father he said let the dead buried that dad if you’re coming, just come along now. Well, I’ve got to go back and take care of my family first. Come with me first.” And so urgency was important then, and urgency is important now. And there’s just no room for complacency in any company today. And so Keith Ratty comes to mind from Questar. He was just another fabulous character in the book. And he said, look, you have to set out to win and get things done quickly and surround yourself with others who feel the same way. He said, nobody else can cut it. There’s no place for anybody else here. We’re all setting out to win, getting things done quickly, and surround yourself with others who feel the same way. He said, we have a no-spin policy on everything. We are focused and we get rid of businesses that we have no experience in, we root out any sense of entitlement or complacency. And that entitlement and complacency creep is ripe in lots of companies. Then he said, we do postmortems on everything that works and that doesn’t work. We ask dumb questions, we stay humble. And he said, then when you can no longer do those things, leave, because you’ve lost your sense of urgency about what appears to be your life, in many different aspects. A sense of urgency about your diet. Yes. You say, this meal, this food that is presented to me as an option, this or this does not fall into my diet or my world view, my game plan. So I want to just get off the rails for a second. I want to hit the exit ramp. And I want to ask you about your personal diet because you have a sense of urgency about it. I’ve listened to enough interviews, probably way too many. I’ve probably creeped you way too many times online interviews. Anything I can read about you, it seems like you’re very intentional about your diet and what you’re putting into your body. You have that sense of urgency. Can you talk about what you allow into your body, except for the occasional massive beef jerky stick that you ate today? Yes, I will. Well, first you have to understand that growing up in America’s Midwest, by the age of 16, I weighed 245 pounds. Now, granted, I was playing football, and I was 6’2″, but I was 245 pounds, and I was fat. And I became an exchange student in France. Well, you can imagine, you know what every 16-year-old boy is thinking about. They’re thinking about 16-year-old girls. Well, French people are kind of petite and tiny. I got over there and I looked like an elephant on roller skates. I just put myself on what was probably not healthy, but was a starvation diet. I got down to 170 pounds during the length of time I was there. I just became resolved that that would be where I would stay for the rest of my life. I mean so I don’t think I’ve got any eating disorder but over the years I have figured out what I need to do to stay there and and stay at my top peak physical form and a big part of this is being in the gym every single day six days a week as well and really working yourself out as hard as you possibly can. So my diet is essentially very simple. I guess you could say I don’t eat a lot. So I begin my day with one cup of decaffeinated coffee during my first hour of the day, and I generally take two or three sips of that. I mean, that’s it. The cup is full an hour later. And then about an hour after that, I like to go 12 hours before I’ve had food. So if I’m in bed by 9 o’clock in the evening, then at 9 o’clock I’m having a fruit and vegetable smoothie and it’s fruits and it is vegetables and a little tiny bit of kefir that yogurt based drink and I will drink quite a bit of that. A couple of hours later I’ll have some protein generally a couple of eggs. Then if I’m going to have a half a sandwich in the middle of day it would be a lean turkey sandwich and I will take most of the bread off. And then in the evening I’m going to have a piece of protein, a good piece of protein, it could be as good as a couple of small lamb chops and a vegetable and a salad. And that’s it. And the only exception is, other than the beef jerky today, I have no idea how that even happened. Probably once a month I will allow myself to go to Woody’s Yogurt and have a scoop of ice cream with a little bit of chocolate sauce on top. That’s it. Everybody says, oh my God, you are so disciplined. It’s got nothing to do with discipline in my life. Going to the gym six days a week has nothing to do with discipline. My diet has nothing to do with discipline. Playing my viola has nothing to do with discipline. It has everything to do with a lack of discipline because I’m afraid if I stopped, I would never start again. It’s that simple. So you play the viola. I read that you’re good at that. Are you very, very good? I mean, you’ve played this for years? I don’t know. So, when I was a kid, I wanted to play a stringed instrument. And my father very simply said, no G-D kid of mine is going to G-D play a G-D instrument. You’re playing football, you’re playing basketball, you’re running track. None of this tennis crap either, because that’s for sissies. And so I, from the earliest age, wanted to play the viola. And I was a kid, and I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. I was a little bit of a kid. crack, none of this tennis crap either because that’s for sissies. And so I, from the earliest age, wanted to play a stringed instrument. And so four years ago, I went online, posted an ad that I was looking for a teacher, and several people applied, and I interviewed one young guy who is now like the son I never had, Zamil Sadiq, played with the San Francisco Symphony, he looked up and said, I thought I wanted to play violin. He took a look up at me, he’s a smaller guy, and he said, oh my God, you don’t want to play violin, you want to play viola. He said, it’s your lucky day, I just happened to have one in my car. He went and got it, he brought it in, I picked it up, and he said, I only work with serious students. He said, how serious are you going to be? I said, well, I travel a lot. He said, how many days a year? I said, 120, 130 days a year. He said, how many lessons are you going to have? I said, every day that I’m not on the road, other than Sundays, I want a lesson. He said, well, how many would that be a year? I said, I don’t know, a couple hundred probably. His eyes went ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching. And we went to work, and that’s 12 years ago. And I’m pretty good, yes. I do want to be modest. I absolutely love it. Well, you can’t say this about you, but I can say this about you. I can say that if your career as an author of multiple best-selling books doesn’t work out, you know, if your next book really doesn’t go very well, you could be a male model. Oh, okay. All right. You are looking good there. You’re looking good. I mean, I’m serious. You are eating clean, my friend. Six-two, 170. I put it on the show notes. I put down your recommended diet before we get back into all this business stuff. I know we have a lot of listeners out there. Well, I’ll tell you this. The only one that would want me to be a model for them would be the AARP, my friends. Okay. All right. So now you recently released an updated copy of your best-selling book, Think Big, Act Small. For the listeners out there who are not familiar with this book, where did you first get the inspiration to write that book originally? Okay. So as I said, I don’t have a lot of inspiration in my life. Stuff just normally doesn’t occur to me. I wish I had a muse that showed up and jumped on my shoulder. It doesn’t happen that way. So it’s always from these hundreds of conversations that I have. One day, I was talking to a CEO. I was going to be doing a speech for his company. We were talking about one of my books. He said, ìI like your book.î He said, ìI don’t read many business books.î I said, ìWell, why not?î He said, ìThe most of them are just filled with nitro. He said, they’re written by academics who have never done it. He was kind of down on business books. He said, you know what I would like to know? He said, every company somebody writes about, they say it’s one of the best companies in the United States. He said, I would really like to know who are the best companies in the United States. So I thought, geez, I would too. That’s where these ideas come from and because i knew at the time the companies that we hear about all the time are not necessarily the best companies it’s that they’ve got more uh… they’ve got more promotion going for the more public relations going for them their egos and ceos got a lot of ego wants to be in the limelight a lot and so at the end of the day it’s got to come down to finances and so what we did is i hired a research team and uh… we evaluated uh… every publicly traded company in america i’m trying to remember what the total number was i think i can’t i think it like seventy thousand companies that we value it for the book and the first question we asked was uh… which of these companies have grown their revenues organically that requisition which of these companies grow the revenues organically double digits for ten years well we went to a thousand and thousands of companies and we use fax that for all of our financial research and we cannot the fact but they were like a hundred and twenty three uh… who had grown the revenues double digits every year for ten years and then vj one of my research is so but that doesn’t mean anything he said unless they were going to profits at the same time it means nothing he said of these twenty three let’s see how many had grown their profits double digits every year for ten years about a mess and we did and we fell to 10. And we said surely these 10 companies who have grown their revenues organically for 10 years without a miss and grown their profits 10 years without a miss, 10% every year for 10 years without a miss, these are the finest companies in the country. And they absolutely distinguish themselves. Absolutely distinguish themselves. Great companies like SAS, the fourth largest software company in the world, O’Reilly Automotive, Petco, Medline Enterprises, Dot Foods, I mean these are truly the great companies. What you probably do not know is that about seven or eight years later after the book came out, it was still selling very strong, and my publisher came to me and said, and I was already working on another hardcover at the time, but he said, you know, it’s time to go back and update that book. And he said, so why don’t you see what they’ve done during the past seven or eight years? And what we found is that every one of them had continued doubling, growing their revenues by double digits every year and growing their profits by double digits every year. So they hadn’t only done it for 10 years, they’d done it for 17 or 18 years. Now Jason, you and I are from a time, I’m 37, so you and I are from a time where people used to go out to dinner, I don’t know if you remember this, but they wouldn’t actually be looking down at a cell phone or a smartphone during dinner. They would be making eye contact. There was a time dinosaurs were roaming the earth, and people had like a landline, yellow pages were prevalent, and somebody had to learn how to take and organize notes when writing a book without all the software, without all the tools we now have available. So I’d like to get your approach, because you’re old school and new school, what’s your approach to taking and organizing notes when preparing to write a book? Alright, well you’ve got to remember, I began as a journalist, and I early on figured out that when you were standing as a reporter in front of somebody with a notepad in your hand and asking them questions and writing down every word that they said, they became very careful about their responses because they knew their words were being memorialized. I can honestly say I have not taken a note since. I record every interview that I have is recorded. And as I told you, people just spill. They forget the device is there. They forget that I told them that I would like to record the conversation. They forget that. And my promise is, and I give them an added measure of safety and i think what i want to do is after this interview today uh… the uh… our conversation uh… will be sent to the audio file uh… and it will become uh… script and i’m a set a copy to you via email and you take out anything that you want to that’s in there that you think you overspoken said something wrong because i’m not interested in catching you i’m not interested in writing anything bad, I’m the guy that writes about the good stuff. And so I believe it’s because I don’t take notes that people are so open. We are truly just having a conversation and I get to say, geez, is that fascinating? And then what happened next? What happened as a result of that? Okay, well, but you didn’t finish that story. Tell me about that. One, I couldn’t write that much. Two, they would become very careful and cautious. So I’d record everything, I’d have it transcribed, and that’s how I work. Record everything and then have it transcribed. Now, once you have everything transcribed, it’s all recorded, do you have a special place you like to be physically when writing? Do you go down to a van down by the river? Do you go underneath the Golden Gate Bridge? Do you go to an In and Out Burger? Do you work out of your house? Where do you go when you’re actually sitting down to write? I can only write one place. I’ve never written one word on an airplane, ever. I’ve never written one word in a hotel room, ever. I’m on lots of airplanes and lots of hotel rooms. I’ve just never had an interest in writing there. There’s only one place I write, and that is in my home office. I’ve got this gorgeous view of San Francisco Bay, but I close my door because I don’t even want to look at it. The rule for my writing is, when I’m actively working on a book, I want to write 500 perfect words a day. Note, I did not say 500 words a day. That’s real easy. It’s real easy to write long. I like to write 500 perfect words a day. Some days those come in three or four hours. Some days those don’t come until I leave for the gym. Your office sounds like it has a lot of patina, a lot of maybe history, a lot of things that motivates you, that help you create that ambiance that’s conducive to writing. Could you explain to us, for those listeners out there like myself who are very interested in the habits, routines, talk to me about what your office looks like. Wow, great question. Nobody’s ever asked that one before. First of all, my office would probably be 14 by 14. It’s got a set of sliding doors out to a balcony patio. Every time I need to just get some fresh air or just shake it off. I can walk out there and walk up and down the balcony, which looks out on the glorious hills of Northern California. Imagine that one wall is bookcases, built-in bookcases, floor to ceiling. And as you might guess, I’m guessing there’s a couple of thousand books here and they are all curated. So much like a library would be, my books are curated the same way. I have a glass top desk, a large one, and a glass base. And there’s nothing on my desk, with the exception of a couple of family pictures. Over the years, every time I do a speech, somebody gives me a tchotchke or gives me a gift. They don’t make it to my office. I want my office to be completely cleaned and organized. I have two guest chairs at either end of my glass top desk. I don’t think anybody’s ever sat in them, except on a Saturday morning when the bookkeeper is here and has me sit in one of them, and he wants to go over all the charges, the money I spent that week. Then if I turn around, I look at dual monitors, and behind the monitors is a huge custom piece of art that I had done, and it’s more bookcases on the other side. I’ve been working on dual monitors for probably 15, 16, 17 years and would work on three monitors except I’ve read the productivity studies and you do not get any increase in productivity from three monitors as opposed to two monitors. And that’s it. Many, many years ago, the most important person in my life told me that simplicity is elegance. And so I have a very simple design aesthetic and the only few pieces that exist on the bookshelves are I collect boxes. And so if I’m in China, if I’m in Vietnam, if I’m in South America, if I’m in Poland, if I’m in Russia, I will always buy a wooden box of some kind. And again, they are curated and they are displayed among the books on some of the shelves. And then the final thing is my books have been in 34 languages, so I’ve got a copy of every foreign language edition of my books also in the bookcase. Really? Uh-huh. You know, Randy Pausch was a professor. He was a professor of computer science. He lived between 1960 and I believe 2008. He was a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He wrote this book called The Last Lecture, when he discovered he had terminal cancer. Yeah, and he talked about the importance of having two monitors. I immediately went out there and bought two monitors. Now, all of our employees have two monitors. And that right there could save, Jason, somebody out there hundreds of hours or more a year, just the ability to move data from one source to the other. That’s a powerful tool. One of my monitors flickered this morning and briefly went dark and I almost had a panic attack and so I was on the phone with my IT concierge who jumped on via TeamViewer and fixed whatever flickering there was. But no, I really counted having my two monitors. Well don’t get me all nervous like that. If you get my adrenaline going I might just send you another monitor. Okay, no, no, I’m fine. Okay. Now, you also wrote in your book, Think Big, Act Small. You write about keeping your hands dirty. I’d love for you to share what you mean by this, because so many people say, oh, keep your hands clean of this. Oh, you’re the boss. You’re the owner. You should keep your hands clean. What does it mean to keep your hands dirty? I’ll answer that one very simply. first identified this one when i was uh… writing about sass s a s on the hardware company based in carrie north carolina and uh… the c e o dot jim goodnight one of the most incredible leaders and characters on the planet uh… when they have not built uh… when you walk out of the air drive out of the fast campus it feels like university campus it does not feel like a business park and uh… he actually lives on the grounds a couple of other senior executives live on the grounds it’s filled with parks filled with buildings filled with schools for the kids whose uh… families work there filled with fitness facilities filled with art galleries it’s the most incredible campus i’ve ever been on in my life and i think we run it like a college university although they have increase the revenues double digits for the past twenty seven years it’s a most remarkable company and he spends doctor goodnight is worth billions and billions of billions of billions of dollars and you probably see him profile in sixty minutes he hates paying taxes he would rather spend the money so if there’s any perk that he can provide employees i mean you know uh… health care on campus dot schools on the campus dot dot snacks on the campus dot dot concerts on the campus i mean he would rather spend it on his people than spend it on taxes. I’m just a neat, neat guy, and when he gets a couple of inches of Jack Daniels on the rocks, he tells a mean story, one of the best storytellers I’ve ever met. But he spends half his time, half his time out talking to customers, half his time. He wouldn’t have to do that at this point in his life, 50% of his time. And all of a sudden, we kept finding it in other companies. CEOs who were spending half their time with customers. Just asking customers, what else can we do for you? I mean, what else itches that we can scratch? How are we doing? What’s a pain point for you that maybe we could make go away? And that’s become known as the 50% rule. I’m next week going to be with 100 CEOs. Their a hundred CEOs, their companies do a billion dollars or more a year, and we’ll be talking about the 50% rule. Don’t ever become so self-important with the title of CEO in an organization that you’re unwilling to spend half your time with customers. Wow. Talk about actionable there. Don’t ever get so busy or so self-important that you don’t spend 50% of your time listening and talking to your customers. Now you also wrote about making short term goals with long-term horizons. What do you mean by that? Okay, so what I would say that all these people believe is this. You know, take care of this year. I mean, hit your goals, hit your objectives, get done what you said you were going to get do it as part of a grandiose five-year plan you know when you ask somebody the question somebody says well you know today we’re about a five hundred million dollar company but in five years we want to be a three billion dollar company when that’s the reason they exist they are almost telling you and we will do anything including lie, cheat and steal to get there they’re chasing the wrong thing and they’re also engaged in Chinese math in most instances. Now the population of China is 1.4 billion, so if only 1% of the Chinese, certainly 1% of the population would buy what we have, so oh my god, that’s 140 million. Oh my god, then think about what we’d be worth if we sold 140 million to just 1% of the people in China. So people just show up themselves with Chinese math, with long, grandiose plans. You have to have some idea of where you want to go. You’ve got to have some idea of what you want to be. But you know what? Every one of these companies takes care of business now. This is a powerful concept. You have to take care of business now. You can’t have BS math. You just can’t. Jason, there’s so many people that say, gosh, my product is so good, if I could just go to 1% of the American population, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that math, and it just doesn’t work. Now you also wrote this book that, you just keep writing these mind-expanding books. I’ve had to duct tape my head together figuratively numerous times, The Reinventors, how extraordinary companies pursue radical, continuous change, is in itself, it’s an inspirational teaching moment. I love the cover of the book. I mean the book cover itself is inspiring. Can you talk to us about this book, The Reinventors, and what it’s all about? I can. I can tell you where it came from. It came from my conversations with people getting ready for speeches. I remember the day that it happened. We were at our Lake place in Michigan and I was up in my study. I was talking to the CEO of a small IT company with a couple hundred employees in Iowa and I said, how are you and Well first of all, I said more than that I thanked him for his time and explained what I hoped to Accomplish through the call and I said, how are you?� He said, �I�m much better today than I was last week.� I said, �Well, why is that? What�s happening? What�s going on?� He said, �You know, I just sometimes let people get me down.� He said, �Finally, I have the realization that I�m in charge and that I have to do whatever is necessary to grow this company and take it to where I promised the people it would be Because it’s going to have a positive impact on their lives, and he said I’m having difficulty I’m not going to have anybody else Commoditize me anymore And so what and so what I was hearing from a lot of people were that there be downward pressure on prices They’re being commoditized. Well the problem is, if the only thing you’ve got to talk about is price, there’s only one way to go, and that’s down. I’ve never seen a discussion in price go upward. It always ends up with you going down in your price. So all you’ve got to talk about is price. So there needs to be something else in the game, the value add, the value that you’re going to create. I need to find the companies that have just mastered the art of getting out of the commodity marketplace, who have mastered the art of changing the rules and just constantly learn how to create more value and do more for their customers and earn more and more money. And so it was the reinventors, how extraordinary companies pursue radical, continuous change. And that’s what they do and uh… and if you read that that that has to happen yesterday’s breadwinners and i could get you where you want to go that could happen what brought you to where you are is not going to get you where you want to go so you’ve got to be born to let go of yesterday’s breadwinners you have to get rid of same old same old so during my speeches i look at the audience i say i want everybody to shut up and finish the statement for me if it ain’t broke and everybody shows don’t break it and i go to the one problem with that that flies in the face of the law of suckage so he starts to cater to laughs as you know what the law of suckage says by the time you figure out you suck you have sucked for a long long time now and the audience goes absolutely crazy. So you’ve got to be constantly letting go of same old, same old. You’ve got to be letting go of ego, and you’ve got to be letting go of conventional wisdom. And so we basically identified the companies that have done the most incredible job of constantly reinventing themselves. You know, I tell clients all the time, I say, in the absence of value, price is the only consideration. In the absence of value, price is the only consideration. And if you are finding yourself in a business right now where you’re being commoditized, the prices are being driven down, you’re competing on price only, unless you’re Walmart, that’s not a game you want to get involved in. That’s why your book, I think, The Reinventors, is a fabulous purchase for anybody. And what better way to say I love you, Chopped, than during the month of September, than with the gift of a Jason Jennings best-selling book, The Reinventors. It really is the gift that keeps on giving, Clay. Now, in Chapter 3, you write about picking the destination. What does this mean to you, to pick the destination? Well, so, the destination. When I talk about the destination, that was shared with me by a CEO who had taken over a troubled company and then made it into one of my books. And he said, look, he said, a great CEO, a great leader is really a travel agent. And I probably looked puzzled. And he said, you know, you’ve got to find a destination. You’ve got to find where you want to be. And then you’ve got to invite people to make an investment and come along on the same journey with you. And it was Pat Hasse, and it was Allegheny Technologies. What an incredible job he did turning that company around. So what is the destination is the word. And I guess as we’re coming to a close, or close to a close, it’s a perfect time for me to invoke the one word I haven’t mentioned today and that word is this, and it’s almost the only word I use in my life, in my speeches, and in my books, and that is the word purpose. The destination is actually what your purpose is, not what your vision statement is, forget it, not what your mission statement is, forget it. It’s what you are really trying to be, what you are really trying to become, what you were really trying to go. Let me give you a few quick examples. Ingvar Kamprad, built the world’s only global furniture brand, IKEA. An unbelievable story. So what was his vision statement? He didn’t have a vision statement. What was his mission statement? He didn’t have a mission statement. He said, we’re not in the furniture business. He said, we exist to improve the lives of the many. He said, rich people don’t shop here. We don’t want rich people to shop here. We want the many to shop here. And we want to improve the lives of the many. And the only people I want to have working here are those who want to set out to improve the lives of the many. And at Ikea, what they do every year is they celebrate price reductions. Not price increases, price reductions. I think of ComEd in Chicago, Anne Promagiori, one of the most incredible female CEOs I’ve ever met. You know, what is ComEd? It’s a power distribution company. They shoot electricity through copper wires. Who in the heck wants to work for them? That’s like a dinosaur industry. How did she turn around the fortunes of the company? She said, what? You think we distribute power? She said, we don’t distribute electricity. She said, we power people’s lives there wouldn’t be a life-saving cancer surgery going on right now if we didn’t power people’s lives kids would not be playing soccer games and football games at night if we didn’t power people’s lives people would die of heat stroke in the summer if we didn’t power people’s lives people would freeze in the winter if we didn’t power people’s lives and she reversed the fortune of the company immediately. O’Reilly Automotive, the only company I’ve ever known to have increased the revenues double digits for 59 out of 60 years. Wow. They’re not in the auto parts business. When Charlie O’Reilly founded O’Reilly Automotive, the night before they opened the doors, he said, you know what we’re gonna do? We’re gonna offer the best service in the world. He didn’t say the best service in Missouri. He didn’t say the best service in the United States. He said, we’re going to offer the best service in the world. And he said, you know how we’re going to do that? We’re going to do that by making the customer number two. And everybody looked at him, what? He said, we’re going to make you number one. Because only if we make you number one can we ever hope to offer the greatest customer service in the world. You know, your books are so filled with powerful case studies. I encourage all the listeners out there to check out your book, The Reinventors, How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change. And out of respect for your time, I have two final questions that I wanted to pick your brain on. The habits and routines that make ultra-successful people like yourself a reality. There’s these habits and routines, there’s these things you do in the first hour of your day every day that very few other people are doing Maybe the first two hours of the day would you share with us? How you spend the first couple hours of every day? I will I I would be happy to now This is good a side entry remember I’m the guy that wrote it’s not the big that eats the small so fast need to slow I wrote the high-speed company So you might think that I jump out of bed at 430 in the morning and just I’m raring to go 100 miles an hour. Not the case. Because I think speed without a reason for speed is really reckless. So let me tell you, I’m up every morning at about 4.30. The first hour is for me. Why did I make it 4.30? Because nobody else is awake. Nobody’s going to bother me. That time belongs to me. And so what I spend that hour doing is the first, so I make my cup of decaf and take two sips, as I told you earlier. That’s it. I don’t even like the taste, but it’s something warm. And then the first thing I do is ten minutes of gratitude. And that is gratitude for people. It might be gratitude for a client I haven’t seen for eight years, but I’m grateful for the way they touched my life. It might be a family member. It might be this beautiful home that I get to live in. It might be that I’m grateful that I’m successful enough to have a trainer in the gym kicking me in the butt six days a week wherever I am in the world. So I spent the first 10 minutes really in gratitude. Then I spent the next 10 minutes, and I measured this out on my iPhone, then I spent the next 10 minutes asking what I really want to accomplish today. And that’s not my schedule because my schedule’s already been built. All I have to do is open up my Elbow calendar to know what my schedule is. But it’s a time of contemplation and asking what big do I want to get done today? And then it’s a final 10 minutes imagining what my day is going to look like. Because if I can imagine the day, then I can have that day be the way I imagine it. So that takes the first half hour. Then I spend 30 minutes reading and watching, catching up on the news. That’s a combination of television, several televisions, iPhones, newspapers, magazines. Then I take about 30 minutes to get ready, and then I spend one hour of answering emails. And that’s the first two and a half hours of my day. And then I open up my to-do list and start crossing items off the list. It might be a book It might be a podcast might be a speech Whatever it is, but that first hour of the morning really sets Sets the track for the day Thrivers, uh, listen to this part of the podcast numerous times people that can design the life. They want to live It’s amazing the productivity Improvement you can have because nothing that gets anything that does not get scheduled just doesn’t get done. And I love your intentionality, just the purposefulness of how you plan your day. Jason, for anybody out there who would like to buy your books or find out more about you, I know everybody can pick them up on Amazon. Everybody knows how Google works, but where would you direct people to? What’s the one point of contact where you would most like people to find out more about you and the books that you’ve put together over the years. I guess the first point of contact would probably be my website. It’s just jason-jennings.com and that dash is like a hyphen. That’s the website. And there’s a big section, all of my books. It tells you briefly a little bit. We don’t sell books on my website, so this is not a pitch to sell books. It’ll actually be a two-step process. But if you want to find out about them, go to the website. The story of all the books are there. The pictures of all the foreign language editions are there. If you want to know anything about me, I’m really pretty transparent. My life is an open book. And that’s probably the best point of contact. And then, of course, everybody knows where to get books. Books a Million, Borders, Amazon. They’re all over the place. Jason, I appreciate you so much on behalf of our hundreds of thousands of listeners for taking time out of your schedule and away from your beautiful view in San Francisco to be here with us. And I’m sorry for taking you away from your beef jerky for this long, but hopefully you still have time to eat that. And get to the gym. I’ve got to tell you guys something. I’ve done hundreds of podcasts and radio interviews, maybe thousands, I’m not sure. I’ve enjoyed this one more than any other I’ve ever done. You guys are really, really sharp cookies. And if you ever want me back, don’t hesitate. I really dig you guys. Oh, Chubb, how sharp was Jason Jennings right there? On top of his game, I tell you what. Man, his books are so good. His interview is so good. His routine is so good. Everything about it was just good. It was almost too good. Too good. When we wrap up today’s podcast, I need to go write down a list of ways that Jason is beating me in the game of life, and I need to stop after about four hours of writing that list. I was going to say, yeah. Because he’s a perfect guy. He eats the perfect diet. He’s very intentional. He writes the perfect books. He plays the viola. Expertly, apparently. I’ll tell you what, Thrive Nation, I encourage you to go check out his website today. If you’ve yet to visit his website, it’s worth seeing. The guy has written case studies on some of the biggest companies in the world, and you would be really missing out on something if you don’t read one of his books, because they have the power to absolutely transform your organization, as they did for me many years ago. You can learn more at jason-jennings.com. It’s jason-jennings.com. And Chubb, without any further ado, three, two, one, boom. Boom. Hello, I’m Wes Carter. I’m one of the shareholders at Winters and King. My favorite thing that Thrive has helped me accomplish here in our firm is thinking a little bit outside the box. They do SEO, they do printing, they help us with a lot of things from the day to day marketing for the firm, but they also help us think of things that as attorneys we probably wouldn’t normally think of that help us market our services to our clients. One of the things I love about working with Thrive is that they make it enjoyable to actually do work with them. It’s not dry, it’s usually fun, but it’s always very enjoyable and practical. They give me things and ideas that I can put into place. It’s not just some theoretical spiel that they give me. We get practical steps that we work on together to do my job better. So me personally, I would easily recommend Thrive 15 services to my friends, my families. I recommend them to my clients. I think they do a good job, they’re passionate, they care about their clients, and I think it’s actually a valuable service they provide to people that are in the business world. My name is Jeff Thomas. I’m originally from Atlanta, Georgia. It’s all about getting to the grindstone. It is about putting the, it’s one thing to have a specific vision or a dream, but knowledge without application isn’t knowledge at all. That’s nothing. It’s really funny. The atmosphere is very lively. Everybody that is working for Clay is very upbeat and not tired, not sluggish, not complaining, not whining. They don’t have anything to do with those types of characteristics. It’s all about getting to the grind and having fun while you do it. I haven’t actually been to any conferences in the past, but what I will say from what I’ve seen on YouTube and what from other friends have told me is this isn’t like a motivational kind of thing such as, you know, hoo-hoo, rah-rah, it gets you motivated, but it’s like practical steps that if you do take them, which most people aren’t willing to do, then you will grow and you will achieve the specific things that you want. Well, for one thing, I would say that this isn’t necessarily for everyone. So if you’re not willing to work, this isn’t for you. But I would say that if you are willing to work and you’re just getting started but you have actually taken a step in that direction, then this will actually help you grow further exponentially than you could ever imagine. My name is Taylor Hall. I’m the general manager of the Tulsa Oilers professional hockey team. You know, our goal every night here at the BLK Center is to try to fill the seats with lots of people and create an exciting environment so when somebody comes to a game, they’ve really helped us in many, many ways. Website and graphic design and video production and a lot of things that go along. And a lot of businesses, including ours, doesn’t have a staff or a full-time videographer or graphic designer. But the biggest thing that we noticed was the needle mover. More sales, more attendance, more successes in business. We had a record year last season working with Clay for the first time. Our average attendance is higher than it’s ever been. So there was a lot of really cool things that we did and they worked. That’s the nice thing about working with Clay and the team over there. It’s just not one person, you get the entire team. If you need video design and editing and production, they’ve got that. If you need graphic design, if you need some coaching, your sales people and call scripts, PR, they offer all that. Clay was instrumental in helping guiding us and getting us on the right track so that we could really raise the bar and become ultra successful. So it’s been an amazing experience for us. My name is Caitlin. I own a tumbling gym called Justice Tumbling Company, we call it. Working with Clay is so helpful, it’s being diligent with everything and making sure we execute our goals and really make things happen. It’s fun and tight, it really gets you energized and going and it makes you really want to work to get the momentum going, to really just like get that buzz, to really give you the energy to get up and make it happen. I’m Bob Healy. I’m in the charcoal grilling industry. And the name of my business is Grillblazer. How will I apply what I’ve learned so far into my business? I’m actually a client that has a sub-private team. And I learned so much from what I’m learning at this conference and from my regular weekly attendance that it’s helping me establish the business and get it off the ground. Clay’s presentation style is just blatant disregard for what anybody wants. He just has fun. It’s him. Everything that you see is authentically Clay. It’s a great deal of fun. Everybody enjoys it. They know when you walk in they think they’re coming in to a carnival, and frankly they are. It’s just great fun. There’s not another conference like it. You just don’t go to a carnival atmosphere and learn what you do here at the Thrive Conference. It’s great. The reason people should attend at least one of these conferences is because it’s common sense. And everybody’s said an entire line about the way you should run a business, but until you actually experience running a business, which is, candidly, what you learn here, how to run a business. You don’t know what you’re doing. My name is Tyler Hastings, and this is my wife, Rachel. And our company is Delricht Research out of New Orleans. During our time working with Thrive, we’ve had numerous successes. When we first started, we were working with one physician. We had one research site. And we were seeing, on average, between 10 and 15 patients a week. Since working with Thrive in the last 18 months, we now have four research sites. We work with over five physicians, and on average, we’re now seeing over 60 patients per week. Recently, we’ve been the top enroller worldwide in seven studies, which is just incredible, considering where we were two years ago, 18 months ago. Thrive really differs from the other conferences that we’ve been to and the other kind of programs that we’ve been through because they actually really practice what they preach. And they implement the same systems and the processes that they teach you about. And they give you real life examples that really work for them and show you with the training how to implement that yourself. For example, Tyler and I actually got the opportunity to come out to Tulsa and we’re fortunate enough that the Thrive team took us out to some of the businesses that they own and we really got to see in real life, real time, some of the systems and processes and it was just incredible. A real life example of some of the businesses and the things that they’re implementing. Having a coach is important to us. They act as not only an accountability factor, but they’re someone we can talk to on a daily basis as we go through the problems of running a business that inevitably come up. They always understand what we’re going through and they’re always there to help us or guide us through the problems that we experience. The best part of our experience working with Thrive has just been seeing our relationship grow. So at each step as our business grows, they have something else to provide us with. They’ve got the resources, whether it be marketing, graphic design, website development, or even in accounting practices, maybe we need a new insurance policy. If they have someone they can connect us with, or they have the direct resource we need to speak with for any of the problems we face. Someone’s thinking about signing up for the coaching program, I would highly recommend that they call in for a free 30-minute coaching session and see exactly what the team can do for you. Just speak with someone, let them know what you’re going through, and I think you’ll find that regardless of what you need, there’s someone there that can help you. Clay’s presentation style is very real and raw. It just gets real down to the bone of it and the real purpose of it. There’s no like fluffy vagueness about it, you know. So, he really gets to the point. I’m always reminded about how important it is to be intentional and to really pay attention to how you schedule your time and really honor it. Because whatever gets scheduled gets done. That’s what he said from Lee Copperall. So, just constantly hearing that and getting reminded helps me to reinforce that in my own life. It always helps to get an outside perspective, and especially from a guy that’s grown so many multi-million dollar businesses, it doesn’t hurt. workshop through Andy Matherin he is my My Andy Matherin and Larry Montgomery They’re my bosses at restore home health. So I work with a home health company called restore home health and my role is Pretty much to bring in business. So I was hoping hoping to learn the sales process on top of just kind of the responsibilities and help understand what it looks like on the SEO side and just kind of an all around what it looks like to own a business because that’s something I want to do in the future for sure. How I would describe the atmosphere here at Thrive is high energy, great professionalism, great people. It’s just it’s a place you definitely want to visit. Play’s delivery style, humorous, professional, hilarious. Just he does it. I haven’t seen someone do it better. So he does a great job. Most valuable thing I’ve learned so far. A lot of it has been extremely valuable. So but one one thing that was really stuck out to me is the learning the SEO stuff. I mean that is I think things you don’t Really even think about and then you hear it and you think you know it, but you don’t know it So I feel like that was the most valuable. Well, they’re listening on they’re missing out on Just what comes down to just bait basic applications to be a business owner I mean, I feel like it’s like an absolute necessity, you know to come here once or twice if they take good notes, that kind of thing. Why? It’s the experience here and what you can learn. Like, absolutely. So, marketing and SEO seemed like something that would be very scary, but then in the way that Clay and his team described it, it became very clear and concise and something that’s very accessible to any business owner. I’ve learned a lot about marketing at this conference, a lot about business management, and HR, really everything, the key components of anybody’s business, they’re going to give you the best tools to be successful at it. So most workshops or conferences can be really boring, really one note, or they just seem so theatrical that it’s a joke and it’s not even giving you the tools that you need, or that you came there for. But here it’s still high energy, it’s still fun, everything’s to the point, but it’s very professional and yeah, you’re missing out on easy steps to use in your business that are very accessible and very clear. My name is Abigail McCarter. The best thing I’ve learned so far is definitely like organization schedule wise always keeping a to-do list keeping your calendar organized I’m kind of all over the place so that’s always good to know. So Clay’s presentation style and the atmosphere is electric it’s so energetic it’s so fun. Clay’s hilarious but also knows a ton so it’s just really great all around. This conference is much different than any other conference I’ve gone to. Again, because it’s fun. A lot of other conferences, it’s really quiet, really cold, and you just kind of get bored. But this one, you’re always engaged, you’re always learning something, and the staff is amazing. They’re always super helpful. So it’s just been really great. My name is Clint Howell. We’re a personal training and fitness training facility. Oh, wow. I’m learning a ton. So really just the importance of being at the top of Google, how Google works and why it’s so important to go out and get video reviews and testimonials and getting Google reviews. And so all those things we can take back and really apply that like immediately. So it’s really cool to see not only how to do it, but really the relevance and importance of it in your long-term strategy of your business. Now, it’s amazing actually the way in this morning and yesterday I was videoing as I was walking in the front entrance and actually me, I go to a lot of seminars, I go to a lot of conferences, massive ones. I’ve been doing that since I was like 22 years old, so gosh I’m almost 20 years now. And this is by far the most entertaining, not only the content, the content is amazing, but Clay and you guys do a great job of mixing in edu-tainment, entertainment where it’s fun, it’s fresh, it’s lively, you never get bored. And I heard a study one time that the reason that children learn so much quicker is because it’s fun, learning is fun. And so obviously Clay is nailed that, where it’s very fun to be here and keeps you awake, keeps you energized. So I’m having a blast. Yeah, I think any business owner or someone that wants to own a business or considering owning and starting a business should definitely come. I know that I was referred here by friends of mine and clients of mine, and I’ve referred other people. Again, just to understand what it takes to make a business successful, to have a good time, obviously, like I was just saying, have fun, and network. There’s a lot of people here you can learn from, and there’s a lot of breaks you can talk to other people. I think this is a must-do team treaty by the health of business and what it wants to start with. My name’s Jamie Fagel. I’m with Jameson Fine Cabinetry. I heard about the conference through Andrew. He’s the coach that I deal with here at Thrive. The most valuable piece I found, even working with Andrew, but it’s been solidified when it came here, was you’ve got to actually do the things that they’re telling you. With no action, you’re not going to get anything from it. I would highly recommend this to almost anybody in business today. I have recommended it to some of my other business partners. It’s phenomenal. It’s really something that if you want to start a business, the old way of doing things is gone. This is what you got to do. It’s the only way it’ll work. Hey, this is Charles and Amber Kola. We’re the owners of Kola Fitness. The way we’re able to do that is working with Clay for the last three years. He has really readjusted our thinking and taught us that our business is here to serve us. And by doing that we’re able to live the lifestyle we want and take off on a random vacation last minute. We had totally planned on being at the conference. So wish we could be there and meet all of you. We know you’re having a great time. Yes, Clay in the last three years has helped us build all the necessary systems, checklists, workflows, task lists, time blocks, audits that are always running and the right capable lieutenants to keep track of all that so that you too can get time freedom, financial freedom. And that’s what we have done and Clay has helped us do. We’ve got multiple companies in multiple states and they’re all doing very well, getting ready to go to more locations in this next year and Co-op Fitness is a really big future. We’re teaming up with a couple other groups and we should scale the company here shortly. Hopefully we’ll open like 50 locations in the next 10 years. So but yeah, we’re on the way. We’re going to probably more than double our company, maybe triple our company in the next 8 to 9 months. And it’s just awesome. God is working in our business and we’re making Jesus and changing lives. We’re a strong Christian company that focuses on making Jesus famous and changing lives in the fitness field and this is Charles and Hammer Cola thank you thrive hit your action items we love you guys we wish we were there you guys have a wonderful day bye-bye I’ll be able to apply a lot of the things that I’ve learned in our business because this is not my first conference. And so a lot of the things that we learned we’ve put into place and now we’re doing the next level of refining the processes for just a different concept. And so it’s getting better and better. Things that were just big processes before, we have the foundation laid and now we’re able to make it better and better. I’m hearing different things now that we’ve implemented things, and so we can just make it even better, implement it into our open sets. Clay’s presentation and the atmosphere is very exciting and fun. It keeps you awake. It makes it interesting. You have a lot of information, but if it’s not going to be entertaining, your brain is going to do it out. But Clay makes it just entertaining enough that you retain what you learn. Lots of rhyming and catchy things so that you remember stuff. What makes you unique? Something that makes this conference different than other workshops or conferences that I’ve been to is that there’s a lot of people here in my safe situation. Most of us are pretty small businesses wanting to improve and we want real life information and something that will work and that’s attainable and not just some crazy magic formula but actual action items that we can implement in our business and actually see a difference. Everyone should attend a drive type business conference whether you’re a business owner or not. A, if you’re a business owner it has practical applications that you can apply to so many different parts of your business and then you need to come back for more, so that you can keep doing more of the wonderful things that you learned. But secondly, I am also a mom of three kids, and a lot of the concepts can actually be applied to home, like getting routines and getting, setting systems at home has just seriously made a huge difference in my life at home. So I’ve been able to improve our business, but I’ve also been able to improve things at home. And so that’s why everyone should come, no matter what your station is in life. My name is Nolan Q. I’m originally from San Francisco, California. The industry that I’m in is financial services. I’ve learned a ton so far, but what I can best apply from this conference is the opportunity, that hunger to go out there and make a big difference in my industry. Clay’s presentation style is amazing. He’s got an endless amount of energy. It’s contagious. And yeah, by being here, I really do want to go back and be able to face all the adversity that the industry has. Yeah, this conference, the thing that makes it different is it’s special because it has a unique set of individuals that all share that same energy. I think he picked it as dragon energy, but yeah, that’s what we need. Everyone should come to multiple, but their first would be very special. Yeah, you’re welcome with a lot of enthusiasm. That’ll last for a long time. My name is Gabriella Cruz. Our business is PCS Electric. My husband’s the owner, but I’m involved with that, and so we’re an electric company. Well, here at the conference, they talk a lot about consistency, and so just staying consistent with different things from the business. I feel like applying that to our business model will really help us grow. The atmosphere is very positive, uplifting, and it’s very fun and energetic. It gets you pumped and it gets you excited, and it encourages you to do big things. I probably how real they are. They tell you up front what you need to do and what’s like a no-go. And so conferences are, they kind of trigger code things. So I like how real they are here. I think it’ll definitely, if you want your business to grow, I think this will be a great experience. And then not only that, it’ll encourage you and inform you on so many things you don’t think about on a daily basis. Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I’ve definitely learned a lot about life design and making sure the business serves you. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place. Having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Play is hilarious. I literally laughed so hard that I started having tears yesterday. And we’ve been learning a lot, which, you know, we’ve been sitting here, we’ve been learning a lot, and so the humor definitely helps. It breaks it up. But the content is awesome, off the charts, and it’s very interactive. You can raise your hand. It’s not like you’re just listening to the professor speak. You know, the wizard teaches, but the wizard interacts and he takes questions, so that’s awesome. If you’re not attending the conference, you’re missing about three quarters to half of your life. You’re definitely, it’s probably worth a couple thousand dollars, so you’re missing the thought process of someone that’s already started like nine profitable businesses. So not only is it a lot of good information but just getting in the thought process of Blake Clark or Dr. Zellner or any of the other coaches, getting in the thought process of how they’re starting all these businesses, to me just that is priceless. That’s money. Well we’re definitely not getting up sold here. My wife and I have attended conferences where they, where it was great information and then they up sold us like half the conference and I don’t want to like bang my head into a wall and she’s like banging her head into the chair in front of her. Like it’s good information but we’re like, oh my gosh, I want to strangle you. Shut up and go with the presentation that we paid for and that’s not here. There’s no upsells or anything so that’s awesome. I hate that. Oh, it makes me angry. So glad that’s not happening. So the cost of this conference is quite a bit cheaper than business college. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school. And I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. I would definitely recommend that people would check out the Thrive 15 conference. The information that you’re going to get is just very, very beneficial and the mindset that you’re going to get, that you’re going to leave with, is just absolutely worth the price of a little bit of money and a few days worth of your time. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you, and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house, right? This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing and this is our old team and by team I mean it’s being another guy This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team We went from 4 to 14 and I took this beautiful photo We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and Just teaching sales, which is awesome. But Ryan is a really great salesman. So we didn’t need that We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out Into systems into manuals and scripts and actually build a team So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to ten locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month, and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship, and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you times a thousand. So we really just want to thank you Clay and thank you Vanessa for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. And Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crocker, or Head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours. On the day-to-day, he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly, he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks, he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks, he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up, and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires, helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires, teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. One of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. Amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that we became friends. My most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out I knew that he could make millions on the deal and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. And the guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like I remember we got closed down for three months he helped us navigate on how to stay open how to how to get back open how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns lockdowns because our clubs were all closed for three months and you have three hundred fifty thousand dollars of bills you’ve got to pay and we have no accounts receivable he helped us navigate that and of course we were conservative enough that we could afford to take that on for a period of time. But he was a great man. I’m very impressed with him. So Clay, thank you for everything you’re doing. And I encourage you, if you haven’t ever worked with Clay, work with Clay. He’s going to help magnify you. And there’s nobody I have ever met that has the ability to work as hard as he does. He probably sleeps four, maybe six hours a day and literally the rest of the time he’s working and he can outwork everybody in the room every single day and and he loves it. So anyways this is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness. Thank you Clay and anybody out there that’s wanting to work with Clay it’s a great great opportunity to ever work with him. So you guys have a blessed one. This is Charles Kola. We’ll see you guys. Bye bye. Hi I’m Aaron Antus with Shaw Homes. I first heard about Clay through a mortgage lender here in town who had told me what a great job he had been doing for them. And I actually noticed he was driving a Lamborghini all of a sudden, so I was willing to listen. In my career, I’ve sold a little over $800 million in real estate. So honestly, I thought I kind of knew everything about marketing and homes. And then I met Clay and my perception of what I knew and what I could do definitely changed. After doing $800 million in sales over a 15 year career, I really thought I knew what I was doing. I’ve been managing a large team of sales people for the last 10 years here with Shaw Homes. And I mean, we’ve been a company that’s been in business for 35 years. We’ve become one of the largest builders in the Tulsa area, and that was without Clay. So when I came to know Clay, I really thought, man, there’s not much more I need to know, but I’m willing to listen. The interesting thing is our internet leads from our website has actually in a four month period of time has gone from somewhere around 10 to 15 leads in a month to 180 internet leads in a month. Just from the few things that he’s shown us how to implement that I honestly probably never would have come up with on my own. So I got a lot of good things to say about the system that Clay put in place with us. And it’s just been an incredible experience. I am very glad that we met and had the opportunity to work with Clay. So the interaction with the team and with Clay on a weekly basis is honestly very enlightening. One of the things that I love about Clay’s perspective on things is that he doesn’t come from my industry. He’s not somebody who’s in the home building industry. I’ve listened to all the experts in my field. Our company has paid for me to go to seminars, international builder shows, all kinds of places where I’ve had the opportunity to learn from the experts in my industry. But the thing that I found working with Clay is that he comes from such a broad spectrum of working with so many different types of businesses, that he has a perspective that’s difficult for me to gain because I get so entrenched in what I do, I’m not paying attention to what other leading industry experts are doing, and Clay really brings that perspective for me. It is very valuable time every week when I get that hour with him. From my perspective, the reason that any business owner who’s thinking about hooking up with Thrive needs to definitely consider it is because the results that we’ve gotten in a very short period of time are honestly monumental. It has really exceeded my wildest expectation of what he might be able to do. I came in skeptical because I’m very pragmatic and as I’ve gone through the process over just a few months, I’ve realized it’s probably one of the best moves we’ve ever made. I think a lot of people probably feel like they don’t need a business or marketing consultant because they maybe are a little bit prideful and like to think they know everything. I know that’s how I felt coming in. I mean, we’re a big company that’s definitely one of the largest in town. And so we kind of felt like we knew what we were doing. And I think for a lot of people, they let their ego get in the way of listening to somebody that might have a better or different perspective than theirs. I would just really encourage you, if you’re thinking about working with Clay, I mean, the thing is, it’s month to month. Go give it a try and see what happens. I think in the 35-year history of Shaw Homes, this is probably the best thing that’s happened to us and I know if you give them a shot I think you’ll feel the same way. I know for me the thing I would have missed out on if I didn’t work with Clay is I would have missed out on literally an 1800 percent increase in our internet leads. Going from 10 a month to 180 a month, that would have been a huge financial decision to just decide not to give it a shot. I would absolutely recommend Clay Clark to anybody who’s thinking about working with somebody in marketing. I would skip over anybody else you were thinking about and I would go straight to Clay and his team. I guarantee you’re not going to regret it, because we sure haven’t. My name is Danielle Sprick, and I am the founder of D. Sprick Realty Group here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. After being a stay-at-home mom for 12 years, and my three kids started school, and they were in school full time, I was at a crossroads and trying to decide, what do I want to do. My degree and my background is in education, but after being a mom and staying home and all of that, I just didn’t have a passion for it like I once did. My husband suggested real estate. He’s a home builder, so real estate and home building go hand in hand, and we just rolled with it. I love people. I love working with people, I love building relationships, but one thing that was really difficult for me was the business side of things. The processes and the advertising and marketing, I knew that I did not have what I needed to make that what it should be. that time. And he and his team have been extremely instrumental in helping us build our brand, help market our business, our agents, the homes that we represent. Everything that we do is a direct line from Clay and his team and all that they’ve done for us. We launched our brokerage, our real estate brokerage, eight months ago. And in that time, we’ve gone from myself and one other agent to just this week, we signed on our 16th agent. We have been blessed with the fact that we right now have just over 10 million in pending transactions. Three years ago, I never would have even imagined that I would be in this role that I’m in today, building a business, having 16 agents, but I have to give credit where credit’s due. And Clay and his team and the business coaching that they’ve offered us has been huge. It’s been instrumental in what we’re doing. Don’t ever limit your vision. When you dream big, big things happen. I started a business because I couldn’t work for anyone else. I do things my way. I do what I think is in the best interest of the patient. I don’t answer insurance companies. I don’t answer to large corporate organizations. I answer to my patient and that’s it. My thought when I opened my clinic was I can do this all myself. I don’t need additional outside help in many ways. I mean, I went to medical school. I can figure this out. But it was a very, very steep learning curve. Within the first six months of opening my clinic, I had a $63,000 embezzlement. I lost multiple employees. Clay helped us weather the storm of some of the things that are just a lot of people experience, especially in the medical world. He was instrumental in helping with the specific written business plan. in hiring good quality employees, using the processes that he outlines for getting in good talent, which is extremely difficult. He helped me in securing the business loans. He helped me with web development and search engine optimization. We’ve been able to really keep a steady stream of clients coming in because they found us on the web. With everything that I encountered, everything that I experienced, I quickly learned it is worth every penny to have someone in your team that can walk you through and even avoid some of the pitfalls that are almost invariable in starting your own business. I’m Dr. Chad Edwards and I own Revolution Health and Wellness Clinic. JT, do you know what time it is? 4.10. It’s TiVo time in Tulsa, Russia, baby! Tim T-Bo is coming to Tulsa, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. We’ve been doing business conferences here since 2005. I’ve been hosting business conferences since 2005. What year were you born? 1995. Dude, I’ve been hosting business conferences since you were 10 years old, but I’ve never had the two-time Heisman Award-winning Tim T-Bo come present and a lot of people you know have followed Tim Tebow’s football career on the field and off the field and off the field the guy has been just as successful as he has been on the field. Now the big question is JT how does he do it? Hmm well they’re gonna have to come and find out because I don’t know. Well I’m just saying Tim Tebow is gonna teach us how he organizes his day, how he organizes his life, how he’s proactive with his faith, his family, his finances. He’s going to walk us through his mindset that he brings into the gym, into business. It is going to be a blasty blast in Tulsa, Russia. Also, this is the first Thrive Time Show event that we’ve had where we’re going to have a man who has built a $100 million net worth. Wow. Who’ll be presenting. Now, we’ve had a couple of presenters that have had a billion dollar net worth in some real estate sort of things. But this is the first time we’ve had a guy who’s built a service business, and he’s built over $100 million net worth in the service business. It’s the yacht driving, multi-state living guru of franchising. Peter Taunton will be in the house. This is the founder of Snap Fitness, the guy behind nine round boxing. He’s going to be here in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma, June 27th and 28th. JT, why should everybody want to hear what Peter Tauton has to say? Oh, because he’s incredible. He’s just a fountain of knowledge. He is awesome. He has inspired me listening to him talk. Not only that, he also has, he practices what he teaches, so he’s a real teacher. He’s not a fake teacher like business school teachers. So you’ve got to come learn from him. Also let me tell you this, folks. I don’t want to get this wrong, because if I get it wrong, someone’s going to say, you screwed that up, buddy. So Michael Levine, this is Michael Levine. He’s going to be coming. And you say, who’s Michael Levine? I don’t get this wrong. This is the PR consultant of choice for Michael Jackson, for Prince, for Nike, for Charlton Heston, for Nancy Kerrigan. 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times Best Selling Authors he’s represented, including pretty much everybody you know who’s been a super celebrity. This is Michael Levine, a good friend of mine. He’s going to come and talk to you about personal branding and the mindset needed to be super successful. The lineup will continue to grow. We have hit Christian reporting artist Colton Dixon in the house. Now people say Colton Dixon’s in the house? Yes! Colton Dixon’s in the house. So if you like Top 40 Christian music, Colton Dixon’s going to be in the house performing. The lineup will continue to grow each and every day. We’re going to add more and more speakers to this all-star lineup, but I encourage everybody out there today, get those tickets today. Go to thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s thrivetimeshow.com. And some people might be saying, well, how do I do it? What do I do? How does it work? You just go to thrivetimeshow.com. Let’s go there now. We’re feeling the flow. We’re going to thrivetimeshow.com. Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, you just go to thrivetimeshow.com. You click on the Business Conferences button, and you click on the Request Tickets button right there. The way I do our conferences is we tell people it’s $250 to get a ticket or whatever price that you can afford. And the reason why I do that is I grew up without money. JT, you’re in the process of building a super successful company. Did you start out with a million dollars in the bank account? No, I did not. Nope, did not get any loans, nothing like that. Did not get an inheritance from parents or anything like that. I had to work for it. And I am super grateful I came to a business conference. That’s actually how I met you, met Peter Taunton. I met all these people. So if you’re out there today and you want to come to our workshop, again, you just got to go to thrivetimeshow.com. You might say, well, when’s it going to be? June 27 and 28. You might say, well, who’s speaking? We already covered that. You might say, where is it going to be? It’s going to be in Tulsa, Russia, Oklahoma. I suppose it’s Tulsa, Russia. I’m really trying to rebrand Tulsa as Tulsa Ruslim, sort of like the Jerusalem of America. But if you type in Thrive Time Show and Jinx, you can get a sneak peek or a look at our office facility. This is what it looks like. This is where you’re headed. It’s going to be a blasty blast. You can look inside, see the facility. We’re going to have hundreds of entrepreneurs here. It is going to be packed. Now, for this particular event, folks, the seating is always limited because my facility isn’t a limitless convention center. You’re coming to my actual home office. And so it’s going to be packed. So when? June 27th and 28th. Who? You. You’re going to come. Who? I’m talking to you. You can get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com. And again, you can name your price. We tell people it’s $250 or whatever price you can afford. And we do have some select VIP tickets, which gives you an access to meet some of the speakers and those sorts of things. And those tickets are $500. It’s a two-day interactive business workshop, over 20 hours of business training. We’re going to give you a copy of my newest book, The Millionaire’s Guide to Becoming Sustainably Rich. You’re going to leave with a workbook. You’re going to leave with everything you need to know to start and grow a super successful company. It’s practical, it’s actionable, and it’s TiVo time right here in Tulsa, Russia. Get those tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Again, that’s Thrivetimeshow.com. I’m Michael Levine and I’m talking to you right now from the center of Hollywood, California, where I have represented over the last 35 years 58 Academy Award winners, 34 Grammy Award winners, 43 New York Times bestsellers. I’ve represented a lot of major stars and I’ve worked with a lot of major companies and I think I’ve learned a few things about what makes them work and what makes them not work. Now why would a man living in Hollywood California in the beautiful sunny weather of LA come to Tulsa? Because last year I did it and it was damn exciting. Clay Clark has put together an exceptional presentation, really life-changing, and I’m looking forward to seeing you then. I’m Michael Levine. I’ll see you in Tulsa. James, did I tell you my good friend John Lee Dumas is also joining us at the in-person two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop. That Tim Tebow and that Michael Levine will be on. Have I told you this? You have not told me that. He’s coming all the way from Puerto Rico. This is John Lee Dumas, the host of the chart-topping EOFire.com podcast. He’s absolutely a living legend. This guy started a podcast after wrapping up his service in the United States military. And he started recording this podcast daily in his home to the point where he started interviewing big-time folks like Gary Vaynerchuk, like Tony Robbins. And he just kept interviewing bigger and bigger names, putting up shows day after day. And now he is the legendary host of the EO Fire podcast. And he’s traveling all the way from Puerto Rico to Tulsa, Oklahoma to attend the in-person June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show two-day interactive business workshop. If you’re out there today, folks, if you’ve ever wanted to grow a podcast, a broadcast, you want to get in, you want to improve your marketing, if you’ve ever wanted to improve your marketing, your branding, if you’ve ever wanted to increase your sales, you want to come to the two-day interactive June 27th and 28th Thrive Time Show Business Workshop featuring Tim Tebow, Michael Levine, John Lee Dumas, and countless big-time, super successful entrepreneurs. It’s going to be life-changing. Get your tickets right now at thrivetimeshow.com. James, what website is that? Thrivetimeshow.com. James, one more time for the four enthusiasts. Thrivetimeshow.com. James, what website is that? Thrivetimeshow.com. James, one more time for the 4th TVS ThriveTimesShow.com Everything rides on tonight Even if I got three strikes I’ma go for it This moment, we own it I’m not to be played with Because it could get dangerous See these people I ride with this moment. Thrive Time Show two day interactive business workshops are the world’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshops because we teach you what you need to know to grow. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get small business loans? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, and they would never teach me anything It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter Bunny, but inside of it It was a hollow nothingness, and I wanted the knowledge They’re like oh But we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop and the great thing is we have nothing to upsell at every workshop We teach you what you need to know there’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on hot coals product. It’s literally, we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, but I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses? Or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s gonna be the best business workshop ever, and we’re gonna give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. And now you may be thinking, what does it actually cost to attend an in-person, two-day interactive Thrive Time Show business workshop? Well, good news, the tickets are $250 or whatever price that you can afford. What? Yes, they’re $250 or whatever price you can afford. I grew up without money and I know what it’s like to live without money, so if you’re out there today and you want to attend our in-person, two-day interactive business workshop, all you’ve got to do is go to thrivetimeshow.com to request those tickets. And if you can’t afford $250, we have scholarship pricing available to make it affordable for you. I learned at the Academy in Kings Point, New York, octa non verba. Watch what a person does, not what they say. Good morning, good morning, good morning. Today I’m broadcasting from Phoenix, Arizona, not Scottsdale, Arizona. They’re closed, but they’re completely different worlds. And I have a special guest today. The definition of intelligence is if you agree with me, you’re intelligent. And so this gentleman is very intelligent. I’ve done this show before also, but very seldom do you find somebody who lines up on all counts as Mr. Clay Clark, a friend of a good friend, Eric Trump. But we’re also talking about money, bricks, and how screwed up the world can get in a few and a half hours. So Clay Clark is a very intelligent man, and there’s so many ways we could take this thing. Eric are close, Trump. What were you saying about what Trump can’t, what Donald, who’s my age, and I can say or cannot say. Well, I have to, first of all, I have to honor you, sir. I want to show you what I did to one of your books here. There’s a guy named Jeremy Thorn, who was my boss at the time. I was 19 years old working at Faith Highway. I had a job at Applebee’s, Target, and DirecTV. And he said, have you read this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad? And I said, no. And my father, may he rest in peace, he didn’t know these financial principles. So I started reading all of your books and really devouring your books. And I went from being an employee to self-employed to the business owner, to the investor. And I owe a lot of that to you. And I just wanted to take a moment to tell you, thank you so much for allowing me to achieve success. And I’ll tell you all about Eric Trump. I just want to tell you, thank you, sir, for changing my life. Well, not only that, Clay, thank you, but you’ve become an influencer. More than anything else, you’ve evolved into an influencer where your word has more and more power. So that’s why I congratulate you on becoming. Because as you know, there’s a lot of fake influencers out there, or bad influencers. Yeah. Anyway, I’m glad you and I agree so much, and thanks for reading my books. Yeah. That’s the greatest thrill for me today not thrill but Recognition is when people young men especially come up and say I read your book change my life. I’m doing this. I’m doing this I’m doing this. I learned at the Academy Kings Point in New York Octa nonverba Watch what a person does Not what they say Hey, I’m Ryan wimpy. I’m originally from Tulsa, born and raised here. I went to a small private liberal arts college and got a degree in business, and I didn’t learn anything like they’re teaching here. I didn’t learn linear workflows. I learned stuff that I’m not using, and I haven’t been using for the last nine years. So what they’re teaching here is actually way better than what I got at business school, and I went what was actually ranked as a very good business school. The linear workflow, the linear workflow for us in getting everything out on paper and documented is really important. We have workflows that are kind of all over the place, so having linear workflow and seeing that mapped out on multiple different boards is pretty awesome. That’s really helpful for me. The atmosphere here is awesome. I definitely just stared at the walls figuring out how to make my facility look like this place. This place rocks. It’s invigorating. The walls are super, it’s just very cool. The atmosphere is cool. The people are nice. It’s a pretty cool place to be. Very good learning atmosphere. I literally want to model it and steal everything that’s here at this facility and basically create it just on our business side. Once I saw what they were doing, I knew I had to get here at the conference. This is probably the best conference or seminar I’ve ever been to in over 30 years of business. You’re not bored. You’re awake and alive the whole time. It’s not pushy. They don’t try to sell you a bunch of things. I was looking to learn how to just get control of my life, my schedule, and just get in control of the business. Planning your time, breaking it all down, making time for the F6 in your life, and just really implementing it and sticking with the program. It’s really lively, they’re pretty friendly, helpful, very welcoming. I attended a conference a couple months back, and it was really the best business conference I’ve ever attended. At the workshop, I learned a lot about time management, really prioritizing what’s the most important. Biggest takeaways are, you know, you want to take a step-by-step approach to your business. Whether it’s marketing, you know, what are those three marketing tools that you want to use, to human resources. Some of the most successful people and successful businesses in this town, their owners were here today because they wanted to know more from Clay, and I found that to be kind of fascinating. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned is diligence, that businesses don’t change overnight. It takes time and effort and you got to go through the ups and downs of getting it to where you want to go. He actually gives you the road map out. I was stuck, didn’t know what to do and he gave me the road map out step by step. He’s set up systems in the business that make my life much easier, allow me some time freedom. Here you can ask any question you want, they guarantee it’ll be answered. This conference motivates me and also give me a lot of knowledge and tools. It’s up to you to do it. Everybody can do these things. They’re stuff that everybody knows, but if you don’t do it, nobody else can do it for you. I can see the marketing working, and it’s just an approach that makes sense. Probably the most notable thing is just the income increase that we’ve had. It’s super fun, it’s super motivating. I’ve been here before, but I’m back again because it motivates me. Your competition’s going to come eventually or try to pick up these tactics. So you better, if you don’t, somebody else will. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9 and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. Right. This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See. It’s nice. Right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team, I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen. And I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd, we’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. So we really just want to thank you, Clay, and thank you, Vanessa, for everything you’ve done, everything you’ve helped us with. We love you guys. If you decide to not attend the DriveTime workshop, you’re missing out on a great opportunity. The atmosphere at Clay’s office is very lively. You can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door, and it really got me and my team very excited. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. I’m excited to be here. It’s very lively, you can feel the energy as soon as you walk through the door. And it really got me and my team very excited. If you decide not to come, you’re missing out on an opportunity to grow your business. Bottom line. Love the environment. I love the way that Clay presents and teaches. It’s a way that not only allows me to comprehend what’s going on, but he explains it in a way to where it just makes sense. The SEO optimization, branding, marketing, I’ve learned more in the last two days than I have the entire four years of college. The most valuable thing that I’ve learned, marketing is key, marketing is everything. Making sure that you’re branded accurately and clearly. How to grow a business using Google reviews and just how to optimize our name through our website also. Helpful with a lot of marketing, search engine optimization, helping us really rank high in Google. The biggest thing I needed to learn was how to build my foundation, how to systemize everything and optimize everything, build my SEO. How to become more organized, more efficient. How to make sure the business is really there to serve me as opposed to me constantly being there for the business. New ways of advertising my business as well as recruiting new employees. Group interviews, number one. Before we felt like we were held hostage by our employees. Group interviews completely eliminates that because you’re able to really find the people that would really be the best fit. Hands-on how to hire people, how to deal with human resources, a lot about marketing and overall just how to structure the business, how it works for me and also then how that can translate into working better for my clients. The most valuable thing I’ve learned here is time management. I like the one hour of doing your business is real critical if I’m gonna grow and change. It’s probably really teaching you how to navigate through those things and not only find freedom, but find a purpose in your business and find a purpose for all those other people that directly affect your business as well. Everybody. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone needs to attend the conference because you get an opportunity to see that it’s real. you